Where Is a Celebrity to Live in This Town?

Intelligencer The Cut Vulture The Strategist Curbed Grub Street Subscribe It’s never been easier for a famous person to have an L.A. life in New York City. By , features writer at New York Magazine She is the author of ‘Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America.’ Illustration: Emma Erickson; Photo Courtesy of Compass Illustration: Emma Erickson; Photo Courtesy of Compass On a recent swampy day in July, a lone tourist was posing for a photo in front of one of the historic townhouses along Columbia Heights, the most picturesque street in Brooklyn’s most picturesque neighborhood. Her presence was the only hint that we were standing just a hundred feet or so away from some of the world’s most famous people—or at least their apartments. Columbia Heights is home to a celebrity real-estate cluster that is becoming ever more concentrated in just one building: the Standish, a 12-story limestone-and-brick Beaux-Arts apartment building at the south end of the tree-lined street. Built in 1903 as a hotel, it was converted in 2016 to a luxury residential building with unusually intact prewar character, plus the latest post-postwar amenities, including a 24-hour doorman, a private rooftop with Manhattan views, and a gym. “Boldface names,” the real-estate euphemism for famous people, have flocked to its four- and five-bedroom units. Matt Damon spent more than $16 million on the penthouse in 2017. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski swapped their Park Slope home the following year for two units below him. Just this summer, Adam Driver bought three units for $11.5 million after selling his old three-bedroom condo on Henry Street a few blocks away. Celebrities have always lived among us in New York in a way they don’t have to pretty much anywhere else. Certainly not in Los Angeles, where they can hide in mansions with manicured grounds behind enormous, security-prowled hedges. The city’s limited square footage means that even the most famous and beautiful people are humbled by a relative lack of privacy. It was once a right of passage for New Yorkers to see Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick strolling by their Greenwich Village townhouse or Yoko Ono walking near the Dakota on the Upper West Side. This, I learned while touring — or attempting to tour — the latest celebrity-real-estate hot spots, is rapidly becoming a bygone experience. An explosion of residential development geared toward the ultrawealthy has led to more options for famous buyers that are becoming increasingly attuned to the specifications of their West Coast lifestyles: big spreads, tall gates, constant security, and, most unnervingly, driving everywhere. In other words, these parts of New York are starting to feel like miniature L.A.s. “The city is developing these gated communities,” says Clayton Orrigo, a Manhattan broker who sells apartments in many of them. And when one celebrity buys somewhere, more follow. “There is a herd mentality. Once they feel safe in a building, their friends come.” I began my journey at the Standish because it seemed, from the street, the most approachable of the current celebrity-real-estate destinations. That wasn’t the case; when I walked up to the doorman on duty, standing in the pristine white lobby entryway, to ask if I could take a peek inside, he solemnly shook his head “no.” Instead I had to find out what made it so appealing from afar. “First of all, it’s a condo — not a co-op,” Deborah Rieders, a broker who represents a unit in contract in the Standish, tells me over the phone. New York’s famous once clamored for co-ops, where tenants are shareholders with equity rather than individual owners of their apartments outright. To get in, applicants submit to exhaustive financial reviews, provide references, and sit for interviews. The most iconic midcentury buildings in Manhattan, like the Dakota, the San Remo, and the Beresford, all co-ops and all uptown, had an air of exclusivity and social arrival that celebrities once craved. Barbra Streisand was rejected by two Upper East Side co-ops in the 1960s, and 30 years later, in 1999, when she was trying to unload her apartment in the one co-op she did get into, the Ardsley, the board rejected her prospective buyer, Mariah Carey. (Carey apparently wore a short skirt to the interview.) “This level of scrutiny is anathema to what celebrities want now,” Rieders says. People forced to duck TikTokers and TMZ don’t want to expose every aspect of their incomes and daily lives to strangers, then live somewhere where everyone knows everyone’s business. In the Dakota, the whole building was alerted when Ono and John Lennon wanted to buy another co-op, which Delia Ephron wrote about for this magazine. In 2018, Madonna lost a three-year battle with her co-op board after it told her she had to be home when her children or staff were staying in her apartment, every beat chronicled in the New York Post. It’s no wonder that residential construction, especially at the highest end, is now overwhelmingly dominated by condo development. As condo owners, the Damon, Blunt-Krasinski, and Driver families can enjoy considerably more discretion. They can buy their apartments under LLCs, which most co-ops discourage. They can renovate them with little interference by their neighbors (many co-ops enacted so-called Seinfeld laws in the late 1990s and early aughts, fining tenants if their projects take too long, after Jerry Seinfeld took years to renovate his apartment in the Beresford). Some condos, if you can get into a building small enough, barely even have neighbors at all: Evan Shaffer, a Douglas Elliman broker with a listing in 111 Wooster Street in Soho, recently toured by Chris Rock and Doja Cat, says that celebrities like that the building only has 15 units — and no staff to speak of. “There isn’t even a doorman to see you go in and out,” he says. There are plenty of boutique, private condos to choose from now in Brooklyn, of course, with all sorts of amenities. The Pierhouse (where Ed Sheeran and Kendrick Lamar have owned) has a meditation room; the Olympia in Dumbo (former home of Joe Jonas) has a private tennis court. But those are new builds, glass and concrete. Living on historically preserved Columbia Heights, in one of the only prewar condos in Brooklyn Heights, telegraphs both exclusivity and a veneer of normalcy. The Standish sits on a quiet but very public street. Neighbors watched the Damons use a crane to load their furniture into the penthouse, news of which was quickly spread on the Brooklyn Heights blog and “Page Six.” “Celebrities in Brooklyn tend to be a little less precious anyway about people on the street seeing them,” Rieders says. The Standish owners have to be okay with mingling with normal people on some level. You live in Brooklyn Heights so you can walk to the pharmacy and the ice-cream cart at least a few times a year. Rieders says her current seller wouldn’t show me her apartment, as she was very private, but public records indicate it is Julie Burns, wife of documentarian Ken Burns, who worked for years as a social worker. She bought the two-bed in 2018 for $2.8 million. It’s now going for $3.75 million. After I left the Standish, I made my way to 443 Greenwich, another condo conversion of the mid 2010s, this time in North Tribeca. Like the Standish, the building, a red-brick former bookbinding factory that takes up an entire block, was painstakingly restored in 2014 to keep its 1885 historic facade. The apartments inside are expansive, with high ceilings and period details like curved stone arches and exposed beams. Owners have included Jennifer Lawrence, Harry Styles, Mike Myers, Justin Timberlake, and Lewis Hamilton. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’s current unit was the famous site where Justin Baldoni was supposedly ambushed by Taylor Swift during their battle over their movie It Ends With Us. As I walked toward the entrance, a dozen window washers hung from the landmarked exterior. This time the doorman didn’t even look up when he told me I couldn’t enter. 443 Greenwich still looks like classic New York, especially with the cobblestone streets. Just like I felt standing in front of the Standish, I could imagine some period-specific show like The Gilded Age filming outside without having to change much, even as three Amazon Prime vans and a cybertruck idled on the block. But this building has something that the Standish definitely does not: a private underground garage accessed via two massive sets of wrought-iron gates on either side of the building. After I was rebuffed by the doorman, I watched a blacked-out SUV enter one of the swinging gates. Whoever was inside, once they disembarked, would ride up one of four private elevator banks with keyed access to specific apartments. Residents almost never have to ascend with their neighbors. These amenities, geared explicitly toward privacy and security, coupled with the building’s sheer size, are why 443 remains one of the most popular celebrity residences of the last decade. While famous people have superior security needs, they mostly don’t have the budgets of their hedge-fund, private-equity, and tech competitors in the market. Most of them can’t afford to outfit their own individual townhouses like armed fortresses as Swift has. “For someone who isn’t spending $50 million on an apartment, you can drop into one of those buildings for $10 million to $25 million and you can get an exceptional experience,” says Orrigo, the Compass broker, whom I called to discuss the building, where he represents several clients. 443 not only has a 24-hour doorman along with its wrought-iron gates; it also has a 24-hour concierge service, a lap pool, a Turkish bath, a sauna, a wine cellar, and a leafy internal courtyard, like its own little Gramercy Park. Even though, as Elliman broker Shaffer noted, “most celebrities don’t use a full-service building’s amenities. They care about the doorman and the fact that they don’t have to get out of their car.” You probably won’t see Lively in the gym or the pool. But the driveway means she can enter and exit totally unseen by paparazzi. The building is part of a boom of condo construction, including 70 Vestry and 150 Charles Street, that has turned this downtown zone along the West Side Highway into another celebrity cluster. Proximity to the highway, in fact, is an amenity. A 443 owner can zip to Teterboro in an hour. The former commercial and retail district also means the opportunity for bigger square footage. “It’s away from the bustle of the West Village and tourists,” Orrigo says. “You’re not going to see a celebrity buy an apartment in the middle of 14th Street. And I’m not seeing them in Soho anymore at all.” At the same time, they are close enough to restaurants and private clubs like Zero Bond and Casa Cipriani that they can feel as in the mix as they might want to be. The only drawback to 443 seems to be that the penthouse is “literally falling apart,” according to an ongoing $376 million lawsuit by the residents against the developer, MetroLoft, which claims that the ceilings leak and some of the façade is crumbling. MetroLoft happens to be the same company whose midtown conversion project was recently found to be collapsing. Just north and farther west of 443 Greenwich, in the no-man’s-land turned real-estate marketing concept called Hudson Square, just a block up from Google’s New York headquarters, is 160 Leroy, where Hailey and Justin Bieber just bought an apartment for $12 million. Michael Rubin lives in the building as well — he bought Ryan Seacrest’s old place and combined it with another unit, worth over $40 million in total. It’s a ten-minute walk from 443, even closer to the highway, and just past the David bar protein-ice-cream store. Trying to figure out who the other famous people are inside means combing through corporate entities like “Lone Ranch Leroy LLC” and “160 Leroy Propco LLC.” As a totally new build, the “character” of the project is in its ultra-high-end credentials — it was designed by Herzog & de Meuron and developed by Ian Schrager. Its undulating glass exterior includes a covered courtyard for cars coming right off the highway, so residents don’t even have to go underground when they drive in. “There is a fundamentally different experience of pulling into a porte cochere or a courtyard than the street,” Orrigo tells me. Not only does his company have its offices in 160 Leroy, but Orrigo himself bought a $7 million three-bedroom condo there in 2025: “You pull in and the gate shuts behind you and the doorman comes out and asks for your help with your bags.” He just purchased a parking spot — for exactly how much he wouldn’t say, but he spent a fortune. The spot originally sold for $650,000 eight years ago. Without a car, the entrance to the lobby feels nearly inaccessible from the street. There is no intuitive path to take. With the massive willow tree I could see filling the courtyard, the building seemed almost like a mirage, as though I were hallucinating a spa or a hotel. Knowing there was a 75-foot saltwater pool inside added to its otherworldly aura. There will always be celebrities, I think, who want to live in a recognizable version of the city, like Emrata in Fort Greene or influencer Livvy Dunne, who tried to buy Babe Ruth’s Upper East Side co-op. (She was rejected.) Amy Schumer recently bought a $6.25 million condo in a modernist 1988 building on Central Park West. Bob Odenkirk paid 10 percent over asking last year for a two-bedroom in Clinton Hill, where his neighbor Adrian Grenier famously renovated a brownstone for his mother. But 160 Leroy portends a future that stretches the definition of what constitutes New York living into hitherto-unknown territory. The newest project to come on the market (though all its listings are private), 80 Clarkson, is just a block away, and it sounds more like Singapore or Dubai than even Los Angeles. I walked over from Leroy Street to crane my neck up at its two towers, which are still under construction. The building will have an 82-foot pool, plus a squash court, plus a winter garden that is “palm tree enhanced.” It will have a motor court as well as a “driver’s lounge,” a room for chauffeurs to wait around in so that they don’t crowd the lobby. The only way a celebrity owner might know that they are in New York is if they step onto their private terrace, look across the blue water, and spot New Jersey. Where Did the Italians of Carroll Gardens Go? Where Is a Celebrity to Live in This Town? Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. 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