Joan Rivers’ Upper East Side apartment went on the market Monday, and for $28 million, you can own the place where she threw lavish parties, honed her jokes and even evicted a ghost.
The legendary comic, who died in September at age 81 after a botched throat procedure, had called the East 62nd Street penthouse home for 25 years and shared all 5,000 square feet of it with family and friends.
The four-bedroom, 4½-bathroom pad with five fireplaces and a 23-foot-high, sky-blue ceiling painted with clouds and doves was every bit as grand as she was.
“It’s what Marie Antoinette would have done if she had money,” Rivers once joked.
It wasn’t always that way.
When she bolted the West Coast looking for a New York City haven after her husband’s suicide and the cancellation of her late-night talk show, the apartment she found was a “wreck,” according to a source close to Rivers.
“There were pigeons flying around,” the source recalled. “This was a true project of love. She took this apartment to another level.”
“When you walk through the apartment, you really experience the grand nature of the rooms,” said Corcoran broker Leighton Candler. “This is a very grown-up apartment. It’s for someone who wants to entertain lavishly.”
It didn’t help that her new home was “haunted.”
In a 2009 episode of the TV show “Celebrity Ghost Stories,” Rivers said she hired a voodoo priestess from New Orleans to evict a pesky spirit — J.P. Morgan’s niece.
“It was just very strange,” Rivers said on the show. “The apartment was cold. I could never get any of my electrical things to work correctly.”
She complained to the building’s doorman.
“And he said to me, ‘I guess Mrs. Spencer is back,’ ” Rivers recalled.
Eventually, Rivers made peace with the presence, hanging Spencer’s portrait in the building lobby and leaving flowers for her in the home’s ballroom.
After that, the “Fashion Police” host threw plenty of parties in the ballroom, making a grand entrance from the mezzanine that overlooked the music room.
Party guests included Susan Lucci, Nancy Reagan, Steve Forbes, Martha Stewart and Regis Philbin.