January 10, 2006
The Ultimate American Dream: From Cabbie to Fifth Avenue Millionaire
The big real estate news of the day is that the Duke Semans Mansion, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and on the market for $50 million, was sold for $40 million (a 20% savings!), and but bigger human interest angle news is that the buyer is a Russian immigrant who used to drive a cab! Tamir Sapir has the most incredible American Dream story ever - or at least this week. From the NY Times:
After three years as a cabdriver, he opened an electronics store at 200 Fifth Avenue near Madison Square Park where he often sold products to visiting Russian diplomats. His relationship with one customer, a Soviet oil minister, he said, enabled him to begin selling fertilizer, and eventually, oil contracts, in Europe.Including the building the MTA uses as its downtown headquarters! Sapir plans to use five of the seven floors in the mansion for gallery space - he has an extensive ivory collection and friends with Faberge eggs (makes sense, he is Russian, after all).In the early 1990's, Mr. Sapir decided to invest in New York real estate, buying a building downtown, on John Street, for $2.2 million and selling it a year later for nearly three times that. Since then, he has bought several other buildings in Manhattan.
Here's the Brown Harris Stevens listing for 1009 Fifth Avenue, "simply the finest residence ever to come on the market in New York." And Lenny Kravitz was interested in the mansion, but maybe the Duke family was worried about his history of plumbing problems.
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Sapir's story is hardly what one thinks of as the proverbial rags-to-riches story - see below and the URL for more. Basically, IT'S OUR F---ING MONEY! I think we should all consider ourselves owners, and constantly knock on the doors asking to be let in.
The story begins with a former cab driver from Soviet Georgia, Tamir Sapir. In the mid-1990s Sapir bought a distressed 1.6-million-square-foot clunker from the bankrupt Olympia & York empire for what amounted to pennies in mogul money--$20 million. Then Sapir offered to lease it to the MTA. But the building wasn't exactly in move-in condition. The MTA insisted it be fixed up, which the cash-strapped Sapir couldn't afford. He couldn't start remodeling without a loan, and he couldn't get a loan until reluctant MTA staff professionals approved the project. To smooth out the hitch, Sapir turned to The Fonz. Former Senator D'Amato called the head of the MTA--Kalikow's predecessor, who was also a Pataki appointee and who also rents space in Kalikow's 101 Park Avenue Tower--and got the approval. This is the famous half-million-dollar phone call D'Amato made in 1999. For just having the guts to make a cold call, D'Amato earned $100,000. Because the deal went down, he got an extra $400,000. Eventually Sapir was able to shift the cost of the call to the riding public.
http://www.solidarityforsale.com/
i guess lenny didn't get his way?
har har.
RE: Sapir's story, well, then, it's clearly the NYC Dream - "It's Who You Know."
I believe that Sapir bought his Faberge egg collection from the Forbes Museum which is located on lower 5th Avenue.
Will Sapir's gallery be open to the general public? (I don't really care about the ivory collection, but the Faberge eggs are exquisite.)
The idea of an ivory collection sounds suspicious. Was the ivory (art?) from illegal poaching? I wish the nytimes would have pursued that in the article as opposed to a feel good article about a record breaking sell of a building in the UES.
Very similiar to The Sims(a computer game)