If you’re a fan of Stephen Sondheim (& have $7 million) I’ve got just the place for you!
Sondheim’s townhouse in Turtle Bay Gardens just came on the market through The Michael J. Franco Group at Compass.
For fans of the composer, the most captivating part of the listing is probably the second-floor music studio, where Sondheim wrote many of his celebrated works, including A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Into the Woods, and Passion.
A media room with custom bookshelves displays a wall of framed lobby-card posters of his works, including those for Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, and revues like Side by Side by Sondheim and Putting It Together.
Above one of the many mantels is a Seurat-style painting of audiences watching Sunday in the Park With George, Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize–winning musical based on the painter’s life and work.
Built in 1889, the five-story house has;
- 5,690-square-feet
- 7 bedrooms
- 3 1/2 bathrooms
- solarium paneled in stained glass
- 32-foot-long living room
- wood-burning fireplaces throughout
- gym
- library
- studio apartment with a full kitchen with a rain shower
- a private 30-foot terrace overlooking the gardens
- plus, a basement (about which there have been wild sex-dungeon rumors, which Sondheim denied
Sondheim bought this townhouse, one of 20 surrounding a shared private garden, in 1960. He told the author of a 2008 book, Manhattan’s Turtle Bay,
After a friend gave me an economics lesson in real estate.
I realized that with the royalties from the recent success of Gypsy, I could afford a down payment. And then I rented out the top three floors of the townhouse to help me pay the mortgage.”
But as private as an entire townhouse is, noises carry. One night at 3AM, as he finished writing (and singing) the now iconic The Ladies Who Lunch, suddenly his next-door neighbor was glaring at him through his back door. That neighbor was Katherine Hepburn.
The Turtle Bay townhouses are coveted and rarely on the market; in addition to Hepburn, E.B. White, Garson Kanin, Robert Gottlieb, and Mary-Kate Olsen have lived there.
The building was updated and repaired in the 1990s, after a fire severe fire that was documented in The New York Times.
Sondheim lived in the townhouse up until his death in November of 2021.
(Photos, Compass; via Curbed)
