Joan Rivers' New York apartment goes on sale for $28m
Late actress's home city's Upper East Side has views over Central Park
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Your support makes all the difference.Yours for just $28m – the luxury apartment where Joan Rivers lived, laughed and even placated a ghost.
The 11-room New York home, with views over the city’s Central Park, has been put of for sale by Ms Rivers’ daughter, after the actress and comedienne died last September at the age of 81.
“It’s what Marie Antoinette would have done if she had money,” Ms Rivers once joked of the decor at the apartment on East 62nd Street in New York’s Upper East Side neighbourhood.
The sale of the property, which featured four bedrooms, four bathrooms and its own Louis XIV-inspired ballroom, is being handled by the Corcoran estate agents.
“One of New York’s most legendary apartments, this coveted Penthouse is changing ownership for the first time in 25 years,” purrs the entry on the company’s website. “The triplex residence is in a fully staffed limestone mansion, originally built at the turn of the century as one of the opulent mansions of the Gilded Age.”
Reports say that Ms Rivers was a celebrated hostess who loved to throw lavish parties and dinners at the apartment, which has 23ft high ceilings. Her guests reportedly included Nancy Reagan, Steve Forbes and Martha Stewart. Ms Rivers’ Thansksgiving Day parties were especially famous.
Ms Rivers, left her $150m fortune to her daughter Melissa after she died following complications during a minor throat procedure in a New York clinic.
Her daughter is suing Yorkville Endoscopy for alleged “medical mismanagement and incompetency”. It also emerged that staff at the clinic took photos of Rivers while she was unconscious.
Ms Rivers bought the property, originally built in 1903, in 1988 and carried out an exhaustive renovation, determined to ensure many of its original period details were retained. It spreads over 5,100 square-feet and is big enough to accommodate up to 125 people.
In a 2009 episode of the TV show Celebrity Ghost Stories Ms Rivers said she hired a voodoo priestess from New Orleans to evict a spirit. She claimed the spirit was that of the niece of John Pierpont “JP” Morgan.
“It was just very strange,” Rivers said on the show. “The apartment was cold. I could never get any of my electrical things to work correctly.”
She complained to the building’s doorman, the New York Post reported, who told her that “Miss Spencer” is back. The newspaper said Ms Rivers eventually made peace with the presence by hanging Miss Spencer’s portrait in the building lobby and leaving flowers for her in the home’s ballroom.
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