jazz great in great loft

shares a birthday with my mom
While Manhattan Loft Guy is a bit of a jazz fan, I am a huge loft fan, so my interest in the NY Times City Room blog post last night commemorating Ornette Coleman’s 80th birthday was focused more on his garment district loft than on his art. (My buddy Andy is chagrined.) I am not going to out Mr. Coleman by giving his address, but I was able to find the old listing from when his loft had been offered for sale a while back.

I was disappointed that the Times blog post did not feature more photos, and the single photo gave me a very different impression of the loft than one gets from looking at the floor plan and the 4 or 5 old listing photos. He’s got a full floor loft with a largely open floor plan (one "bedroom", plus the requisite recording studio). You can’t tell from the Times photo that the ceilings are 11 feet high, or that the kitchen in which Coleman sits is top notch and minimalist, nor that it is arranged with other plumbing elements into an almost (pre-Jade Jagger) "pod" (without the shiny doors).

being on the market, only in a sense
He was asking in the low $800s/ft for very large ‘done’ space a year after The Peak in the overall Manhattan real estate market, in a building in which the last sales were at $623/ft at The Peak (for a smaller, buy-it-and-build-it loft), $714/ft for a highly renovated "International Style" loft that sold just short of The Peak, and at $922/ft for a "stunning" higher floor loft with great light that also closed just short of The Peak.

He overlapped on the market with an higher floor neighbor with another full-floor loft, a neighbor who was unsuccessful in selling one of those "published" over-the-top lofts at a price that ended up being 25% under where he was. In other words, Mr. Coleman probably did not really want to sell (he held to his price for the nearly 8 months he was "on" the market). No harm in that, as it is a free country.

musical trivia
One small irony: Mr. Coleman lives in a building the given name for which matches the adopted name of another musical giant (different genre). I wonder if he’s a fan of That Guy….

Many more birthdays, Mr. Coleman, many more!
 

© Sandy Mattingly 2010