Plaza Penthouse Buyer Gets Out of Contract

Apparently some buyers at the Plaza were unaware (or claim that they were unaware) that some top-floor space was servants' quarters. A little knowledge of architectural history is not a bad thing . .

ali r.
{downtown broker}

amazing that vavilov spent that money without even looking a the place, now they are laughing material. andrei put $10M as downpayment, but like a good russian oligarch, he might have used borrowed money.

ali, about servants' quarters, the plaza was built in 1909. do you know to which period (when were they built) the buildings that include those quarters at the top belong to?

I know the Dakota (1880s?) had that arrangement. I'm surprised to hear that a hotel (vs. apartment building) would have servants quarters. And I'm pretty sure the Plaza wasn't built as a residential hotel (an odd arrangement that was common at that time, and sometimes meant 8-room apartments with just a kitchenette).

The servants quarters were at the top because, in those days of no air conditioning, that was the hottest part of the building. I looked at an apartment in a building on the Upper West Side that had a lot of apartments at the penthouse level, all former servants quarters. I am sure it was hot as hell up there in the summer.

407PAS, I don't know about the summer heat, but it also continued the townhouse tradition of servants' quarters at the top, which was a long climb in the days before elevators.

Actually, I should have said roof level. The servants quarters were on the roof in that building I visited. I have no doubt that it was a long climb back to your hot room, if you were a servant. Heat rises, attics trap heat and are hot. Even rich people cannot change the laws of physics.

I was so sure that I was right and now I can't find a printed source -- so I'm going to go, Alan Hart, with the fact that the Dakota had the same arrangement and the two buildings are by the same architect.

Admin, I see in my researches that the Plaza is called Edwardian (which makes sense for 1909, because my "rulers of Britain" says he showed up in 1901), French Renaissance, and Beaux-Arts. I'm going to beg off defining the architecture and bow to others -- but as a beginning Francophile I'd say it looks like a "hotel particulier" -- a term that seems to mean both private mansion and fancy hotel.

ali r.
{downtown broker}

Ali, allow me to backpedal a bit:

1. those miserable little garret rooms are also a by-product of mansard roofs and the like -- function follows form.

2. the logical explanation for the Plaza -- which escaped me before -- is that the servants' quarters were not for hotel employees, but for the valets & lady's maids accompanying the hotel guests on their travels.

Alan,
Yes, certainly the roof structure had a lot to do with creating those terrible little rooms.

I guess all of this shows that you should always take a walk around the property you're going to buy before putting in your bid.

Talk about buying a pig in a poke, which translates to buying a cat in a sack, in Russian:

Russian купить кота в мешке to buy a cat in a sack

the old trick of making people think they were buying a pig for meat but selling them a cat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke

Thanx for all the info. Nice to have smart pals. ;)

Looks like he bought a unit after all:

http://www.observer.com/2009/real-estate/vavilov-settles-eloise-buys-disputed-plaza-unit-discount

Sounds like he ends up paying less than half the original promised amount... I guess both sides get some of what they want...