The recent sale of the apartment occupied by
Huguette M. Clark
at 907 Fifth reads like a Balzac novel. Clark who actually spent the last years
of her life in a special suite of rooms at Beth Israel Medical Center was the inheritor
of a copper fortune and left according to
the Times “a $400 million estate, two
contested wills and no direct heirs.”
(“Big Ticket/ Sold for $25.5 Million," NYT, 7/20/12) The apartment 12W was bought by Boaz
Weinstein, the Hedge fund trader who held the other side of the now infamous London
Whale in which JP Morgan’s lost its shirt. In the light of the continued
problems with the trade (on which Weinstein undoubtedly profited handsomely) and the Libor
scandal (in which JP Morgan was also implicated)
the Times ran a front page
picture of the once highly touted and now beleaguered JP Morgan chairman Jamie
Dimon. Fortunes come and go as do major Manhattan residences. Recently the 15 CPW
penthouse of former Citibank honcho Sandy Weill was sold to another heiress
Ekaterina Rybolovlev, the daughter of the Russian potash billionaire, Dimitry Rybolovlev (whose
mines have created
sinkholes in the town of Berezniki) for a record breaking
$88 million—which makes the $25.5 million Weinstein paid for his place at 907
Fifth seem like a pittance. Actually
Huguette Clark owned two other apartments in 907, 8E and 8W. As
the Times also
reported Quatar’s Sheik Hamad bin Jaber
al-Thani's $31 million offer for these “was turned down by the co-op board because he wished to combine them.” Could the
co op board’s fear about the residual effects of Arab spring have had an effect on
the rejection? Balzac would have undoubtedly been fascinated by the lineage of
acquisition with respect to all three of
Clark’s apartments and how they came to reflect the politics and economics of
their time. But he would also have been interested in the mysterious inhabitant
of these auspicious residences and how and why she recused herself from
history.
