Some apartments come onto the market. Others come back, the way an old flame turns up at a benefit: a little older, a little cheaper, and very sure you remember them.
The triplex penthouse at the Marquand, 11 East 68th Street, is back. Its owners are Ziel Feldman, the developer who founded HFZ Capital Group, and his wife, Helene. They have listed it for $27.5 million, Curbed’s Kim Velsey reported on October 21. Two days later The Real Deal’s Holden Walter-Warner did the arithmetic: about $4,435 a square foot.
That would be a perfectly respectable number for a perfectly respectable apartment off Madison Avenue. What makes it interesting is the trail of numbers behind it.
The Arithmetic of Patience
The Feldmans first asked $39 million in November 2020. In March 2022 CityRealty reported a cut to $33.5 million, part of a round of discounts on the developer’s personal real estate. The Real Deal says the penthouse made its debut in 2013 at $46 million. That was the year HFZ converted the building into 40 condominiums.
So the new price is $11.5 million below the 2020 ask. Measured against the 2013 debut, it is a discount of roughly 40 percent, which in the condo business is less a price cut than a change of heart. According to The Real Deal, an entity tied to Feldman took title to the unit in 2018 and took out a $19.8 million mortgage from Bank of America in 2019.
What $27.5 Million Buys
Even the size depends on whom you ask. Curbed puts it at about 6,100 square feet, The Real Deal at 6,200, and the 2022 listing that CityRealty described at 6,189. We print all three. The brokers can settle it.
On the essentials everyone agrees: 21 rooms, five bedrooms, four full baths and about 2,600 square feet of terraces. The biggest terrace runs about 700 square feet and comes with a fireplace, a summer kitchen and a fire pit. A smaller one, 256 square feet, sits on the third level. Curbed says the dining room seats 22. The 2022 listing, by CityRealty’s account, said 20. Two guests either way is a rounding error on the Upper East Side, but it is the sort of thing a hostess notices.
The decor is what the Feldmans’ friends will remember. Black marble and dark wood run throughout, and the walls have been hung with a serious collection. Curbed counted works by Tracey Emin, Sanford Biggers, John Chamberlain, George Condo and Maurizio Cattelan. None of it conveys. Perhaps for that reason, the listing includes renderings of the rooms redone in soothing neutrals, the real estate equivalent of a buyer’s imagination on loan.
The listing brokers are Madeline Hult Elghanayan and Sabrina Saltiel of Douglas Elliman.
The Backstory Does Convey
Nobody in New York real estate can say Ziel Feldman’s name without a footnote, and the footnote here is long.
HFZ was one of the defining condo developers of the last cycle. Its most ambitious project was the XI, a pair of twisting towers by Bjarke Ingels along the High Line, on a site HFZ bought for $870 million. The project ended in foreclosure in 2021, and Witkoff took it over. For a firm that had been outbidding everyone in West Chelsea, it was a hard landing.
The case that made the headlines involved Nir Meir, a former HFZ executive. He was charged in an alleged fraud involving about $86 million. He awaits trial and, like any defendant, is presumed innocent. CityRealty and The Real Deal have reported that a 2022 appellate ruling in related civil litigation found Feldman had been aware of certain of the transactions at issue. The trades have spent years on the question of what Feldman knew and when. The listing adds nothing to that question, apart from a price.
Feldman has since moved on to a quieter line of work. The Real Deal reports he now runs GoodHomes, an affordable and workforce housing firm he co-founded with his daughter. It is a long way, at least on paper, from penthouses with summer kitchens.
A Portfolio, Pared
The Marquand listing fits a pattern. The Feldmans sold their mansion in Englewood, New Jersey, in 2020. In 2021 they sold their Bridgehampton house for $50 million, a figure that at the time served as a reminder that the family’s fortunes and the firm’s were not the same thing. The Upper East Side triplex is the last of the big houses still on the board.
The question is whether $27.5 million is the number that finally sells it. An apartment that has been on and off the market since 2013 has a long paper trail, and buyers with eight figures to spend can read it. They will see a price that has come down three times. A seller who has waited this long may be done waiting, and some of them will take that as an invitation.
The address does part of the selling. East 68th Street between Fifth and Madison is about as close to the park as a side street gets, and the triplex sits on top of the building.
The Room Where It Happened
There is a certain poetry in the dining room for 22 (or 20). In the years when HFZ was building towers by Bjarke Ingels and outbidding everyone for West Chelsea, that table was where deals were dreamed up. In those days, when a developer gave a dinner, the lenders came.
The lenders are gone and the artwork is going. What remains is the apartment: a lot of marble, a lot of terrace and a price that, at last, reads as if the sellers mean it. Somebody will buy it, paint it the color of oatmeal, and host a dinner for 22. The terrace fireplace will not ask who owned it before.
Featured image: The XI, HFZ Capital Group’s twin-tower project beside the High Line, under construction in March 2019. The project went into foreclosure in 2021. Photo by MainlyTwelve via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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