Joan Didion apostles are more interested in bidding on the novelist's trademark Céline sunglasses (which sold at auction for $27,000) than on her eat-in kitchen off of Central Park ($6.5 million). The late writer's Upper East Side pre-war apartment, which she shared with her husband, brash American novelist and journalist John Gregory Dunne, has been languishing on the market, resulting in a recent price slash from the original $7.5 million dollar price tag.
The sprawling 11-room co-op is located at 30 East 71st Street at the corner of Manhattan’s Madison Avenue and has a lot going for it, including four bedrooms, four-and-a-half baths, a dining room, den, powder room, and gallery, plus ample closet space that would make Carrie Bradshaw lose her mind.
Herringbone hardwood floors, immaculately preserved? Check. Wood-burning fireplace in the grand Library? Check. Interested buyer? No dice.
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Curbed reports that the likely cause of the stall is the cost of a gut renovation, citing the closed kitchen as the primary culprit. "At $7.5 million, the numbers are not there with the cost of renovation, but at $6.5 million, they might be able to push it through," one source said. But we think there might be some lingering ennui in the apartment as well.
Didion and Dunne originally purchased the home at the corner of Madison Avenue in 1988, securing a deal after negotiating several price reductions. Still, Didion's meticulous nature seems to have left her uncertain about the place, as she expressed in an interview with the LA Times. In that piece, while she raves about the place she left behind, gushing, "We adored the house in Brentwood. " She didn't spare any praise for the new NYC spot. "You have no idea,” she said, “how much smaller a 10-room apartment in New York is than a 10-room house in Los Angeles.”
While the same article reports that "a doorman named Larry radiates dignity and pronounces, 'This is the best building in all of New York,'" the luxury high rise just isn't getting much love from apartment seekers. You could chalk it up to the work needed or the high price tag. Or, perhaps to the emotional toll that the Didion-Dunne's self-described "coastal ambivalence" took; after moving in, she told the L.A. Times, "We're going to be moving around a lot."
Evidently, the late writer’s early ambivalence haunts.
