Though it no longer spices the real estate imaginations of the superrich (or the wannabe superrich) as it once did, or commands the stratospheric prices of the pencil-thin skyscrapers that nowadays sway over Midtown Manhattan, River House is still one of New York City’s most illustrious and difficult to get in to co-operative apartment houses.
Designed by the architecture firm Bottomley, Wagner & White, completed in 1931, and situated at the quiet, cul-de-sac end of East 52nd Street with sweeping views up, down and across the East River, the iconic and often gossiped about Art Deco-style edifice has two 15-story wings that flank a 26-story central tower aptly topped by a crown-like flourish. The building’s 70-some units are serviced by a uniformed army of discreet and solicitous staff, and residents are granted automatic membership — if they pay the annual fees — to the onsite River Club, a private and posh athletics and dining establishment that caters to the city’s elite.
Some of the building’s earliest residents include Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Marshall Field and Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P supermarket fortune, while later residents include heiress/actress Dina Merrill, 20th U.S. Secretary of Commerce Pete Peterson and late and infamously profligate banker John Gutfreund and his equally spendthrift surviving wife Susan.
Current residents are no less notable and include the 39th U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, former Condé Nast chairman Jonathan Newhouse, and actress Uma Thurman, who picked up her 13-room spread in late 2013 for exactly $10 million from romance novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford.
Still, for all the high-net-worth residents, it’s the laundry list of rich and famous folk who were denied residency by the building’s powerful and choosy board that really gets the tongues wagging. Richard Nixon, Diane Keaton and Gloria Vanderbilt were all denied, but one of the more legendary rejections was that of Tinseltown diva Joan Crawford. So the story goes, Crawford was so pissed at then board president Robert Woodruff, a former CEO of Coca-Cola, that she arranged with Pepsi-Cola, on whose board she became a member when her fourth (and final) husband, Pepsi-Cola Company CEO Alfred Steele, died in 1959, to install their gigantic and now famous neon sign directly across the East River so that whenever Woodruff and other board members looked out their windows they’d be reminded of the error of their ways. Alas, the less thrilling truth of the matter is that the Pepsi-Cola sign was installed long before Crawford made her failed bid to reside at River House.
One of the fortunate and extraordinarily well-financed few to gain approval from the notoriously persnickety board, however, was now 66-year-old British-American businesswoman Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, wife of now 89-year-old British banking scion Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, who has heaved her Michael S. Smith-decorated duplex on the market at $20 million, a good bit less than the $22.5 million price tag it was saddled with when it was first listed more than two years ago and, curiously, substantially more than the $15.75 million it was listed at earlier this year.
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Image Credit: Google Property records suggest Lady Rothschild acquired the high-floor tower duplex unit for an unrecorded sum in the early 2000s, shortly after her and Sir Rothschild’s 2000 wedding. Coincidentally enough, the couple was introduced in 1998, at the high-powered Bilderberg Group conference, by controversial statesman and long-time River House resident Henry Kissinger.
Now available through Kathleen Sloane and Curtis Sloane of Brown Harris Stevens, and by far the most expensive unit available in the building, Rothschild’s 17-room duplex spans nearly 7,600 square feet with five principal bedrooms plus a three-room homeowner’s suite and two staff bedrooms. Marketing materials reveal the sprawling unit’s heavy-duty maintenance fees tally up to a sweat-inducing $20,196 per month.
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Image Credit: StreetEasy The elevator opens to a private vestibule and foyer that showcases a salmon-colored inlaid marble floor, an elegantly curved staircase and intricate architectural detailing.
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Image Credit: StreetEasy At more than 30-feet-long, the living room accommodates multiple seating areas, a fireplace and three huge windows that hoover up light reflected off the East River and frame cross-river views of the rapidly changing skyline of the Hunters Point and Long Island City neighborhoods in Queens.
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Image Credit: StreetEasy Occupying a prime corner with 18th-century wall coverings and a handful of windows that provide a cinematic view of the Queensboro Bridge, the dining room comfortably seats sixteen.
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Image Credit: StreetEasy A more intimately scaled mahogany-trimmed library is flooded with light thanks to south and east exposures, and floor plans show two additional sitting rooms, one that opens to a U-shaped terrace with jaw-dropping city and river views.
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Image Credit: StreetEasy A breakfast room less than ideally faces west instead of east to capture the morning light, while the kitchen is expensively up-to-date with premium-quality commercial-style appliances and an industrial-sized pot rack dripping with shiny copper pots. The service wing additionally includes a huge butler’s pantry, a windowed laundry room and two staff bedrooms, one repurposed as a home office, that share a single bath.
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Image Credit: StreetEasy As per the floor plan, each of the four guest bedrooms on the upper floor has a private and windowed bath, while the primary suite is a sprawling affair that comprises a bridge-view corner bedroom, two ample dressing rooms — one of them easily converted to a fifth en-suite guest bedroom — and a pair of bathrooms that both benefit from the same light and views as the rest of the apartment.
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Image Credit: StreetEasy The floor plan reveals there are four fireplaces, two of them in the homeowner’s suite, a second “midnight” kitchen on the second floor, almost two dozen closets, more than six of them in the homeowner’s suite, and more than 50 windows that ensure light throughout the apartment all day long.
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Image Credit: StreetEasy The Rothschilds split their time between New York City and Martha’s Vineyard, as well Ascott House, the Rothschild family’s 3,200-acre country estate about an hour outside of London, where the couple maintain yet another luxury home.