HIGHEST SF PRICES FIRST HALF OF '08

Wanting an excuse to walk around on a sunny day, we snapped the three buildings in the city that sold for more than $1000 a foot in the first half of this year. Of course, CB helped the Macklowes sell the GM building to Boston Properties and Goldman for $2.8 billion,which meant $1,433/foot.
650 Madison Avenue came in at #2: Carlyle bought it for $680M with 36-year old entrepreneur Ben Ashkenazy from the Hiro brothers (who had purchased it in the Japanese buying boom of the 80s but then cross-collateralized so they had to sell a building to make pay debt). Several floors are the super-luxurious worldwide headquarters of Ralph Lauren, who supposedly has two saunas in his penthouse office at the top (although some say after 9/11 he moved to a lower floor and that mothballed mannequins now have the best views in the building). But he was not moving from the Apple: after all, he was born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx. As for Ashkenazy, the story is that he lives in the Sherry Netherland and looked out the window one day and decided he wanted to find the owner and buy it. And so he did: at $1,133 a foot.
Cushman repped Macklowe in selling Park Avenue Tower(technically 65 E 55th) for $665M ($1,080/ft.) to Shorenstein at the end of June. Sorry, our camera couldn't get the whole thing.

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