When hedge fund manager David Berkowitz, now of RiverPark Capital Management, and his wife Nancy began to house-hunt in 1999, they didn’t look hard for a real estate agent.
“Bill Ackman’s mother-in-law was my broker,” he says. Ackman, currently the chief executive officer of Pershing Square Capital Management, co-founded the fund Gotham Partners with Berkowitz in the early 1990s.
Keeping it in the extended corporate family paid off: “When this house came on the market, she was super-aggressive in getting us in.” Once Berkowitz walked into the Upper West Side townhouse’s second-floor dining room, with its 14-foot-high coffered ceilings, he says he had an “Oh, my God” moment.
The couple immediately put in a full-price offer, but were told that the seller was considering an offer that was already on the table. “I did some investigating and found out who the seller was,” Berkowitz says. “It turned out he was a guy in my business, working at Bear Stearns, and like me, Jewish and philanthropic,” he continues. “So I increased my price a little bit, but I offered to make a $100,000 contribution to a Jewish charity in his name if he sold the place to us, and I think that was what carried the day.”
Berkowitz and his wife paid what he says was a little more than $5.5 million for the building, steps from Central Park West. “The house had just been renovated, so we bought it on a Tuesday—and a month later, we were living in it.”
Exactly 20 years later, the couple has put the house on the market, listing it with Cathy Taub of Sotheby’s International Realty for $23 million.
This $23 million Manhattan mansion comes with its own elevator https://t.co/6qe1f7vRMN
— Bloomberg Pursuits (@luxury) January 17, 2019
“The house has been a great place to raise children, but we’re not in the business of raising children anymore,” Berkowitz says. “We’re looking forward to—I guess the contemporary term is downsizing.”
Dinner for 70
The house is 25 feet wide, with a little more than 10,000 square feet spread across six floors. After Berkowitz bought the house, he and his family lived there for six years and then, in 2005, embarked on a more than two-years-long, nearly $3 million renovation. They installed an elevator, redid the entire kitchen and all the bathrooms and back garden, and finished most of the basement, installing a home theater, gym, and wine cellar.
Today, the garden floor has a massive eat-in kitchen and family room, while the parlor floor has a formal living room and an ornate dining room. “We’ve accommodated 70 people in the dining room,” he says. “And we had a string quartet in the music room next door, playing Beethoven.”