Most Expensive Ever!

Beating out the last most expensive apartment ever, here’s the newest most expensive apartment ever:

A brash hedge-fund manager is putting his money where his mouth is — agreeing to pay a record $45 million for a Manhattan residence.

Daniel Loeb, the outspoken founder of New York-based Third Point LLC, has signed a contract to buy a more than 10,000-square-foot penthouse condominium under construction at 15 Central Park West at the site of the old Mayflower Hotel.

The hard-charging investment mogul, who manages a $3.6 billion fund, is known for his publicly circulated poison-pen letters to executives he claims are pretentious or lazy. The New Yorker magazine described him as an investor’s version of the late political columnist H. L. Mencken, but added that his manner could be “self-interest disguised as moralistic bombast.”

Loeb had no comment about his purchase.

Plans for the 10,700-square-foot, full-floor pad include eight bedrooms, 10 full bathrooms, two powder rooms, a large screening room, his-and-hers offices, a library and terraces measuring nearly 800 square feet. The 39th-floor apartment features 14-foot ceilings. It is to be completed by spring 2007.

The towering sales figure beats the previous record held by News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, who paid $44 million earlier this year for the late Laurance Rockefeller’s triplex co-op penthouse on Fifth Avenue. News Corp. owns The Post.

It also bests the previous record condo price of $42.25 million that Mexican financier David Martinez paid at the nearby Time Warner Center. Martinez combined a full-floor apartment on the 76th floor with a half-floor residence above. He then recently purchased the other half of the 77th floor for about $12 million, giving him almost 17,000 square feet total after spending nearly $53 million.

Loeb’s purchase comes seven months after he bought a sprawling eight-bedroom West Village town house for $11.2 million.

Life Imitates Curb Your Enthusiasm

The Daily News reports on reports that rich and powerful people connected to the Department of Homeland Security knew about last week’s supposed terrorist plot days in advance, in effect imitating Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 3, Episode 25: “The Terrorist Attack”):

At least two E-mails revealing the purported plot were sent to a select crowd of business and arts executives early last week by New Yorkers who claimed to have close connections to Homeland Security and other federal officials, authorities said.

The NYPD confirmed that it learned of the E-mails on Oct. 3 – three days before Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and the FBI went public with the threat.

“I have just received a most disturbing call from one of my oldest friends from growing up in Washington,” one E-mail began. “He called with a very specific caution to not enter or use the New York City subway system from Oct. 7 through 10th.”

A second E-mail sounded a similar ominous tone: “As some of you know my father works for Homeland Security, at a very high position and receives security briefings on a daily basis.

“The only information that I can pass on is that everyone should at all costs not ride the subway for the next two weeks in major areas of NYC.”

One of the E-mails was dated Oct. 3 with a 6:05 p.m. time stamp, about 90 minutes before Bloomberg was fully briefed on the threat, a police source said.

Well at least it was a hoax!

Bonus Points: If you don’t believe the Daily News, ask Snopes.

How Much Are You Under/Overpaid?

New York Magazine investigates what we all make, with data. Included, a hedge fund dude pulling in over a billion dollars (no wonder there’s such income disparity!) and a panhandler making more than most editorial assistants.

My own subjective view: Channel 7 weatherman Sam Champion is well worth his $1.5 million salary, while Anderson Cooper is overpaid at $2 million. The guy selling knock-off accessories on the corner gets over $30,000 while New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz makes $90,000? Hmmm . . .

Those Outer Boroughs Are Looking Pretty Good Right Now

The Times studied the situation and determined that Manhattan has the widest income gap of any county in the nation, confirming that the borough is for the very rich or, I guess just the very rich:

Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue is only about 60 blocks from the Wagner Houses in East Harlem, but they might as well be light years apart. They epitomize the highest- and lowest-earning census tracts in Manhattan, where the disparity between rich and poor is now greater than in any other county in the country.

That finding, in an analysis conducted for The New York Times, dovetails with other new regional economic research, which identifies the Bronx as the poorest urban county in the country and suggests that the middle class in New York State is being depleted.

The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now make 52 times what the lowest fifth make – $365,826 compared with $7,047 – which is roughly comparable to the income disparity in Namibia, according to the Times analysis of 2000 census data. Put another way, for every dollar made by households in the top fifth of Manhattan earners, households in the bottom fifth made about 2 cents.

That represents a substantial widening of the income gap from previous years. In 1980, the top fifth of earners made 21 times what the bottom fifth made in Manhattan, which ranked 17th among the nation’s counties in income disparity.

Of course you can’t mention Trump Tower in the first paragraph without setting up something special in the last paragraph (see Chekhov’s gun). Something special like a quote from The Donald himself (!), who is put in the untenable position of having to defend the income gap:

“The income gap, while supposedly increasing, seems to be a natural phenomenon,” said the developer Donald J. Trump, who lives in Trump Tower. “Times have been good, but times have been good for many people and many classes of people. I think there is a very large middle class – but not in this section, by the way.”

John McEnroe, Midtown Needs You!

Somehow the “Core Club” succeeds in coming off as even more pretentious sounding than Soho House. And the Times is refreshingly merciless in profiling them:

It’s a funny time to start a club in New York. Socially, the city seems as wide open and meritocratic as ever. The influence of old wood-paneled clubs of the Upper East Side, with their aging memberships and lobster nights, is at an ebb, in part because of their remoteness from the powerful and vigorous global nomads who fuel the city’s energy.

But on East 55th Street, a team of construction workers is laboring furiously to put the finishing touches on an ambitious act of social exclusion called the Core Club, set to open its doors, for a few people anyway, in mid-September.

While traditional clubs serve to promote homogeneity and to preserve the social order by keeping new and different people away, the Core Club’s pitch – and as a for-profit corporation, it has a pitch – is that it will serve as a place for a geographically and socially diverse set of wealthy people to gather and meet others of the same disparate tribe. As a result, its membership list resembles a kind of Noah’s ark manifest of overachievers from various professional species – politics (Vernon Jordan); finance (John Schneider, a managing director of Allen & Company); real estate (Aby Rosen, the developer, and Steven Roth, the chairman and chief executive of Vornado Realty Trust); the arts (Marianne Boesky, the gallery owner, and Richard Meier, the architect); entertainment (Ari Emanuel, a partner in the Endeavor Agency, and Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony BMG Music); music (Roger Waters and Patty Smyth); sports (Dan Marino and John McEnroe); and so on.

Exactly what such a socially disconnected group of people will talk about and do when they gather at the club – what the club is in general – remains a kind of mystery, one that Jennie Saunders, the president and chief executive of the Core Group, the club’s parent company, seems content to perpetuate. For Ms. Saunders the thing is so ambitious as to be almost indescribable.

“Try to get off the idea of a reimagined private club concept, because it’s so much more than that,” Ms. Saunders said. “Our vision and our goal as an organization is to provide the conditions for transformation.” The club, Ms. Saunders added, would be “a hyper-edited collection of people, art, books and ideas – a compelling collage.”

A reporter confessed he still didn’t understand: “Is it a club or a hotel or a spa, a cult or what?”

“It’s all of those things,” Ms. Saunders said.

So, you ask, What does the privilege of breaking up a fascinating tete-a-tete between, say, Richard Meier and Dan Marino (or Roger Waters and Vernon Jordan!) cost one? Sadly, being put in one’s place by the semi-famous does not come cheap:

At a minimum, the club may appeal to wealthy people who’ve run out of novel ways to spend their money. The first 100 members, among them Millard S. Drexler, the chairman and chief executive of J. Crew, and Terry Semel, a former chairman of Warner Brothers Studios and now the chief executive of Yahoo, paid $100,000 each to get the club going. (If it works out, they’ll be paid back their investment, with interest, over five years.) Two hundred additional members have joined by paying $55,000 entrance fees, refundable should they decide to cancel their memberships.