By Gus Saltonstall
The owners of an Upper West Side building with some controversial history are looking to sell more than 300 apartments at the address for nearly $400 million, as reported by The Real Deal.
Ogden CAP Properties will attempt to sell its 324 condo units within the Dorchester Towers at 155 West 68th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, for $375 million. The owners of the building will give current tenants the first shot at buying their apartments. Those tenants will have until May 6 to purchase their units.
People already in the building will then have an additional 30 days to purchase any other unit in the building for sale. Tenants renting with leases about to expire will also be given the chance to renew.
On June 6, the apartments will hit the open market and new buyers can come into the building, with Brown Harris Stevens overseeing the sales.
Dorchester Towers is a huge piece of property. It spans more than 600,000 square feet and has nearly 700 total units. It was built in the 1960s and converted into a condominium building in 1984. The address was the first major real estate development from Paul and Seymour Milstein, whose family now owns Ogden CAP Properties, according to the Real Deal.
In the past, Dorchester Towers made headlines for some wrong reasons.
In 2009, Shele Danishefsky was found dead in a bathtub within her apartment in the 68th Street building. Her death was originally determined to be an accident, and she was buried within days without an autopsy due to wishes from her Orthodox Jewish family.
Nine years later in 2018, a jury found her husband, Roderick Covlin, who had been estranged from his wife at the time of her death and living across the hall in Dorchester Towers, guilty of her murder.
Prosecutors at the time said that Covlin killed his wife because he wanted to inherit her fortune. Danishefsky was a successful finance executive, and she had plans to cut him out of her will that day, prosecutors said. He then staged the death to look like an accidental drowning, prosecutors added.
You can read more about the story — HERE.
Four years after Covlin was found guilty, another high-profile court case centered around Dorchester Towers.
In 2022, a gay couple living in the building filed a $2.1 million lawsuit against the building alleging that they “were systematically and aggressively discriminated against and made the subject of harassment tactics by employees of the building,” because of their sexual orientation, according to the New York Post.
The suit alleged that building management removed pride flags from the couple’s door and told them that they “did not fit in with the building.”
At the time, an Ogden Cap Properties rep told the Post that it “doesn’t tolerate discrimination in any form,” and that “the allegations contained in the lawsuit are baseless and totally without legal or factual merit.”
The case is still making its way through the court system.
You can read more about it — HERE.
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There is a very good episode on the murder on “New York Homicide.”
Truly horrifying. Shele Danishefsky was a beautiful, smart successful woman and it is all the more tragic because children were involved. They lost their mother, and since their father is in prison , he is lost to them as well. Very sad, I hope they are doing well.
I knew a couple who lived in that building. Both are deceased now. I never heard complaints from them except that there were too many lobby renovations (?!).
At market rate? Did this used to be Mitchell-Lama? Are the current residents getting a good deal if they buy?
I don’t think there have been many condo conversions in the last two or three decades. The housing market now is much more difficult than it used to be for young families.
As the article said the building went condo in 1984. Any insider pricing for tenants would have happened at that time.
If you’re a rent stabilized tenant in a building that went coop or condo your unit is held by the “holder of unsold shares (or units)” who can resell at a deep discount and who can always sell to you, usually for a discount off market.
I have a hunch the massive building is due for major maintenance needs, such as new roof, brick work (a lotta bricks), heating, or building amenities upgrades. All on new owners’ dime.
Wrong. I’ve lived there 21 years and practicing real estate law for 31 years.
That was my thought. Otherwise, why would the sponsor (?) be ditching the sponsor units (?)?
There are many reasons investors sell assets. Landlords deal with major expenses all the time and don’t sell just because of maintenance & repair needs. They make the repairs and pass them on to the end users through either higher rents or sales prices.
Are they rent stabilized?
That is a very good point. People need to read the prospectus very carefully before buying to see what big ticket items need to be worked on. That could make maintenance/common charges astronomical.
I doubt there’s going to be a prospectus as this is not a condo conversion. That happened a long time ago. One would gather information about the apartment and building just like for any other real estate purchase.
Some buildings do not allow anything to be attached to doors.
There is always another side to the story.
No, not always.
And sometimes those rules exist but aren’t enforced evenly. Not saying that was the case here, but there’s plenty of precedent for it elsewhere.
Why aren’t they just selling the whole building?
Because they don’t own it. The building went from rental to condo in 1984 and the sponsor kept 350+ units themselves to rent out. Now they’re selling them all at once. Pretty simple
Ogden is selling their sponsor apartments in Riverdale also-using Brown Hrris Stevens- wondered why?
How can a building combine condominiums and rental units? Explain.
This was evidently a non-eviction conversion in 1984, which means that many tenants remained as rent-stabilized renters. The building consists of both condominium owners and renters (whose landlord is “the holder of unsold shares”, a legal entity that generally pays the condominium the comparable common charges on its apartments). The building will continue to have condo owners and renters. Apparently anyone in the building is being given the opportunity to purchase additional units before the public can. I don’t believe anyone could physically combine a condo unit with an adjacent rental unit, however, if that were their intent.
A building combines apartment units. Some owners of those units choose to live there and other owners rent them to tenants.
As someone who actually lives here, the “discriminated against” gay couple story is anything but what is presented here. They were in no way sane or unfairly discriminated against. I’d post more details but the post would not get approved.
As another someone who has lived in the building for 29 years and who happens to be one half of a gay couple, I can promise your readers that these two were appalling tenants who terrorized the building during their tenancy. Their leaving had nothing to do with descrîmination and everything to do with their appalling behavior.
The gay couple harassed so many residents by blaring music for hours, posted gay pornography on their windows (I took a picture of their window in late 2018), and trashed the apartment they were renting. They had to be legally evicted. One of them wore a witch’s hat standing across the street with a loud boombox for weeks with a sign.
the guy in the witch’s hat was a neighborhood menace. He would toss food out a low floor window at me when I was walking my dog at 630 in the morning
When judicial decisions become increasingly unfavorable for landlords, they cash out and look elsewhere to deploy their capital.
Is there a mortgage underlying the rent stabilized apartments that has to be renegotiated at much higher interest rates? What about existing condo owners with outstanding loans?