Carnegie Hall is hoping the apartment purchased for its top executive will strike a chord with a buyer.
The venerable Midtown music performance space has listed a 3,300-square-foot condo on East 63rd Street for $5.5 million, according to an ad that appeared Thursday.
The unit, which is located in the landmarked former Barbizon Hotel at Lexington Avenue, has four bedrooms, four and a half baths and two terraces, based on the ad from the Corcoran Group. Monthly fees include $5,421 for taxes and $8,024 for common charges, it says.
Carnegie Hall, which is located 12 blocks away at West 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, bought the unit in 2008 for $8.4 million for artistic director Sir Clive Gillinson, according to the city register and news clips. The spacious home was to be an ideal environment in which Gillinson could entertain artists and donors, according to reporting from the time in the New York Observer.
The deal went into contract in late August 2008, according to the city register, a couple of weeks before the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Bros., a financial shock that accelerated the Great Recession. The real estate transaction closed afterward, in December 2008, and in early 2009, as businesses were shuttering and the city’s unemployment rate was escalating, Gillinson called the idea of his accepting a multimillion-dollar luxury perk “totally inappropriate,” the Observer said.
The unit, which once contained a custom-designed aquarium, would be leased out instead, Carnegie Hall announced in response.
But Gillison did end up relocating to the condo in 2010 and made it his home for more than a decade before decamping in 2021, spokeswoman Synneve Carlino said.
After Gillinson left, the apartment functioned as a rental, Carlino added. A StreetEasy listing from 2022 shows it asking $32,500 a month. The home’s rooms are currently empty, though Corcoran has virtually staged some of them for the ad. A piano graces the living room.
It’s unknown why the unit, which is in a building that served as a women-only hotel from 1927 to 1981 and transformed into a 70-unit condo in 2007, is being marketed for so much less than Carnegie Hall paid. The difference between the purchase price and the listing price is about 35%.
Carlino declined to comment on pricing and sales strategy. And an email sent to Corcoran agent Inez Gomez was not returned by press time.
A longtime cellist and former head of the London Symphony Orchestra, Gillinson scored the top job at Carnegie Hall in 2005. In 2023 his pay package was $2.2 million, according to Carnegie Hall’s Form 990 tax return for that year, the most recent available. The same filing showed the hall to have struggled like other ticket-dependent venues during the pandemic by running an operational deficit of about $38 million that year.
But the net assets of the heavily-donor-backed nonprofit were $466 million in 2023, a largely unchanged amount from 2022.
Free or discounted housing was once a regular feature of compensation packages for the heads of major nonprofit city institutions. But the valuable perk has come under fire in recent years amid concerns about income inequality.
Last year the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold a Fifth Avenue apartment that had housed its director free of charge. And in December the American Museum of Natural History unloaded an East 79th Street unit for about $6 million. The apartment had been the rent- and tax-free home of its director for three decades.
