Perhaps it should not be a surprise that Erica Jong has long made her home in a full-service tower on, ahem, 69th Street. However, after more than three decades in residence, the writer and sociocultural commentator is flying the coop, putting her book-filled apartment on New York’s Upper East Side up for sale with Maria Daou of Coldwell Banker Warburg at $4.25 million. Building fees run up to just over $6,000 per month. The listing was first reported in the New York Post.
The novelist, poet, and cultural icon, whose 1973 debut novel “Fear of Flying” caused a kerfuffle over its candid (and for the time scandalous) portrayal of female sexuality, purchased the city-view spread with her fourth husband, attorney Kenneth David Burrows, in 1990 for $1.494 million. The couple, now both in their early 80s, share the apartment with a pair of appropriately named standard poodles, Simone and Colette.
The urban aerie, on the 27th floor of The Imperial, a 30-story high-rise built in 1959 and designed by the architecture firm Emery Roth & Sons, offers three bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms in roughly 3,000 square feet. Floors are well-maintained if dated parquet; views are open to the north, south, and west; a glass-enclosed terrace punctuated with potted geraniums boasts panoramic skyline views.
Off the 34-foot-long statement-making entrance gallery, there’s a book-filled living room, a teal-carpeted and book-lined office (a second smaller office between the foyer and kitchen is perfect for an assistant), a mirror-walled dining room with gilded moldings and curved walls, and an updated galley kitchen with stainless counters and backsplashes.
The two principal bedrooms include the primary suite, which has five closets, two of them enviably sized walk-ins. A third bedroom that’s tucked behind the kitchen is quite small, with a stacked washer and dryer in the pint-sized attached bath. But, this being New York, where even some of the finest apartments do not have in-unit laundry, it’s better to have the machines squeezed into a tiny bathroom than not have then at all.
For more than forty years, Jong and Burrows maintained a secluded weekend getaway in Weston, Connecticut, which they unloaded in 2020 for $850,000.
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Image Credit: Coldwell Banker Warburg -
Image Credit: Coldwell Banker Warburg -
Image Credit: Coldwell Banker Warburg -
Image Credit: Coldwell Banker Warburg -
Image Credit: Coldwell Banker Warburg -
Image Credit: Coldwell Banker Warburg -
Image Credit: Coldwell Banker Warburg -
Image Credit: Coldwell Banker Warburg -
Image Credit: Coldwell Banker Warburg -
Image Credit: Coldwell Banker Warburg