Lena Horne's UES Co-op for Sale!

The living room has a painting, I see now, that looks like Jackie Onassis. It's probably daughter Gail Lumet Buckley, definitely NOT Lena.

"Rooftop terrace, laundry room, and additional storage. Washer/dryers, central & thru-wall AC's have been approved by the Board"

I don't see the second bedroom....

There is no second bedroom - it's a one bedroom and studio combined.

maintenance is too high!

kitchen is huge. too big in my opinion. space could be better utilized in other ways, my 2 cents

How very meh 🙄

Wall air conditioners for these NYC summers. Oh, how Harlem.

she was a lesbian, you know

[quote]oversize windows with treetop views

My absolute favorite type of view.

I would never leave that kitchen. Its stunning for a pretty basic (but large) NY co-op

@r8, "she was a lesbian, you know "

Didn't she have any Gay decorator friends to help with that awful apartment?

That home was designed for entertaining. It could hold 75-100, easily. It really flows well. I wonder what people do with coats in winter? Hire someone to valet them in the hall?

^ Even rich people throw their coats on the bed

R12, you can ask the building to hang racks in the lobby, my mother used to do that in her fancy co-op.

Didn't Lena live here with gf Kitty D'Alessio of Chanel USA? They were oh so close, and Kitty was in the front line with Lena's relatives at her funeral.

It's lovely but I only see one picture of a tiny bathroom. Where is the dressing parlour/salon? How would a legendarily glamorous entertainer properly groom herself for an evening without a huge, well-illuminated bathroom with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and a parlour?!?

Lena Horne: "I'm sorry, but I don't have room for any overnight guests who want to stay in the City."

That's my kind of gal!

She had a co-op a block from me in DC, the best building in town,though hers was if intermediate size and quality of the three typical plans (the same tier as this one currently for sale.)

The front block of the building has spectacular apartments with great plans and every detail well executed (around 5800sf, up from the rest wing apartments of 3300sf like Horne's and 2200sf, the smallest of which are just okay.).

I lived a few blocks away in a much more desirable building. But, of course, Ms. Horne wasn't a princess.

Not only the kitchen R5, but the dining room as well. I’d turn it into an office or a second bedroom. The kitchen has a table for 2 already.

Its pretty meh as R6 says. Not much period detail left, and extremely inefficient use of space. Too much white and grey. And almost $70K a year maintenance - hard pass.

Funnily enough the listing OP posted has no mention of maintenance, and it is listed as zero in monthly costs?? Has to be a mistake in the listing

R16, LH owned TWO additional apts in the building (previously sold), which were used as guest rooms. I wish I could do that.

The Volney was once a residential hotel and had the most modest of kitchens.

[quote]That home was designed for entertaining.

It's an apartment, not a "home," R12. Like a house is a building you buy, move in and make it your home. One cannot buy a "home."

I don't dislike it with much intensity, but there's little I much like about other than the fact that it makes a rather good one-bedroom apartment so far as the plan and circulation are concerned. I only have need for one-bedroom for two people and have only occasional need of a short-term guest bedroom, so I'm always imaging 2- and 3- and 4-bedroom apartments put to use as one-bedrooms, and the result of those extra bedrooms put to other purchase always improves a place considerably. This one has a certain luxury of space as a one-bedroom; I shouldn't like to share it with a roommate or have Mother with her trays of ointments and lotions in the next room.

I understand why the two rooms were combined as one, but I dislike the ugly way it turns out, with the unequal fenestration type and spacing and, less bothersome, the beam bisecting the ceiling where the room was opened as one. The rooms overall are nice and big, though the ceilings are disappointing low. And it's reasonably bright.

I might put a wall of floor to ceiling metal casement windows the full length of that divide in the bedroom; without sacrificing any light, it makes a better zoned use of the space and fits the ceiling treatment better. The dining room I would probably put to use as office/library. The kitchen is really quite nice; some new paint on the cabinets and I would be happy with it as it is. It's a very nice space, practical plan, especially with the small pantry. The fact that it'ß larger and more luxurious bathroom is en suite to the living room and that the bedroom's en suite bath is tight will weigh on potential buyers but it wouldn't bother someone like me who needs just one bedroom and doesn't mind walking a few extra feet if I want a bath tub. The built-in bar in the living room isn't very attractive or useful for me, but I would probably leave it as is to see what I thought of it a year later.

The work I would want done is minimal, but again that's because I see it as it has been used for some time - as a one-bedroom apartment. Good furniture and good rugs and good art and it would be a nice space.

Looks like Blanche Deveraux decorated the living room.

How do you get from the front door to the living room?

Ethel Waters would have decorated it better.

@r25, There are two front doors, take your pick

[quote] Lena Horne: "I'm sorry, but I don't have room for any overnight guests who want to stay in the City."

[quote] That's my kind of gal!

LOL!!! Tell it!!!

2,100 square feet and she'd be like "I'm sorry, baby, this place is almost too small for me. But call the Carlyle, they may still have a room." Delicious!

Is that a window until? For that price?!!! I'm aghast and clutching these pearls.

Lena lived here in her late 70s through 92, her eyesight was failing and she was long past the glamourous nightclub diva. Bet she had no idea what the apt looked like. Her daughter's lived there for 12 years and should have re-decorated. She's 85 now, perhaps her vision has failed too.

[quote]2,100 square feet and she'd be like "I'm sorry, baby, this place is almost too small for me.

Off stage, Lena didn't talk in that faux black dialect.

^^^ That wasn't 'Black' dialect but whatever, and it was not just an onstage persona.

I presume you know about "code-switching"? Lena spent her formative years in the Black south. For most of her life, she spoke like it unless she was talking to white people or in celebrity settings. She wasn't Caribbean so all that "darling, this, darling that" talk was the put-on, it was cultivated. It may have been natural for Geoffrey Holder or Hazel Scott or Josephine Premice but it was NOT natural for Lena.

Later in life she dropped the artifice, I think that rubbed some of her "friends" the wrong way. They felt like they'd been tricked.

You knew her, R31? Lena spent a few years in the South (and was ridiculed for being "yaller" and for her NE accent), but she was a New Yorker through and through. In the 1960s when she got all "radical" with activist gf Jeanne Noble, she got all Southern in public. Most of Lena's friends were white and they were confused by her using "baby" and "honey child," because these words were not natural to her - they were for effect.

So in NYC, $2-3 million dollars gets you a lovely view of the living rooms in the next building?

And vice versa?

R33, you were expecting the spread of Central Park? Corn fields and combines? Quaint squares fenced in by iron railings? Rolling sweeps of cross-cut lawns hemmed in by split rail fences,ball very Horse & Hound?

Of course you get a view of neighboring buildings across the street and, 8f your Lucky, neighbors, not hospital patients or corporate hives teeming with offices in the full swing of "all asses back in Aerons."

[quote] So in NYC, $2-3 million dollars gets you a lovely view of the living rooms in the next building?

Yes, when that living room is 1/2 block from Central Park.

That living room looks like the rec room of a YWCA.

[quote]"I'm sorry, but I don't have room for any overnight guests who want to stay in the City."

"I also don't want you spitting your HAHD, UGLEH TAHTUH into mah bathroom sink."

From The NY Times story about the apartment on Friday:

[quote] Ms. Horne ended up buying five units on the fifth floor of the 16-story building, at 23 East 74th Street and Madison Avenue, using one as her primary residence, and the others for storage, office space and guests. Since her death in 2010, a month shy of 93, all the units had been sold, except for Ms. Horne’s sprawling, one-bedroom, two-bathroom home.

[quote] Lena spent a few years in the South (and was ridiculed for being "yaller" and for her NE accent),

I am so exhausted by all you Lena-haters masquerading as Lena-philes. Shades of that biography by the gay white guy. When he recently distorted the facts of George Michael's life no one swallowed it whole, they could discern the fictions and sensationalism.

For the record, Lena lived in the segregated South for the entire time she was schooled until she reached her high school years when she moved back to Brooklyn -- those are "formative years."

^ And she was able to cultivate the accent and used it when necessary. I don’t see anything wrong with that, R39, even if you do.

"This was a good neighborhood (in Georgia) and I was less often called 'yaller' than I was in small towns. And I ran into the first really inspirational teachers I had in the South. "

"The other good thing was the railroad. I could see the trains going by...my immediate thought was going to New York and the life I had known back there. Whenever I saw a movie in which the country people are wistfully looking at a train, I understood their emotions. The train is your link to the outer world, the train reminded me that I could go to New York if only I could get away."

This is from Lena's autobiography

Those two green sofas are fabulous as far as the styling. I'd have to rip that tacky fabric off and reupholster them.

[quote] ^ And she was able to cultivate the accent and used it when necessary. I don’t see anything wrong with that, [R39], even if you do.

I don't see anything wrong with it as long as we keep it straight. "Baby", "y'all" and "honeychile" were natural to her, the high society affect was not.

U E Esch!

R43, never met Lena Horne. He only knows her from books and that fictitious Broadway show based on her "life."

I have a black friend high up in academia, cultured and reasonably refined who constantly speaks in a blaccent for some sort of ironic effect and I guess because he feels he can. Because it is so entirely inauthentic and constant it is really annoying.

I keep thinking, are you doing that to revel in some sort of "real blackness" you don't feel you possess, are you mocking other black people, or is it just a dopey habit you've affected?