Julie Satow

In 1956, Judith Leiber, the designer who would become famous for her whimsical handbags, and her husband, Gerson Leiber, who later achieved renown as an American modernist painter, bought a 6-acre property in Springs, New York, a hamlet of East Hampton, for $10,000.

Together they began a decadeslong construction effort that would eventually include a home, an art studio, a series of formal gardens and a museum. Now, much of this creation, including the couple’s four-bedroom house, Leiber’s studio, and several landscaped gardens, is up for sale.

The property, at 464 Old Stone Highway, sits on 2.16 acres and is being offered at $3.9 million. A portion of the land is adjacent to the Leiber Collection, a brick museum that opened in 2008 to house the couple’s work. The Leibers, who had no children, were married for 72 years. They died within hours of each other from heart attacks last April. He was 96; she, 97.

While the estate is selling the house, much of the Leibers’ personal effects have yet to be removed. Felt hats with jaunty feathers hang from hooks in the coat closet, bedroom shelves overflow with books, and several personal pieces, including a signed portrait of opera star Beverly Sills, decorate the walls. The art studio, an airy, 860-square-foot space with soaring windows, appears poised for Leiber’s imminent return, with paintbrushes standing in cans and lithography stones piled in a corner.

The grounds that surround the house and art studio, designed by Gerson Leiber — known as Gus — over many years, feature brick pathways that snake around an in-ground pool, a vegetable garden, a rose garden and a now-empty aviary. Brass pineapples decorate the gates, while sculptures and wooden structures dot the landscape.

“Gus would go out every weekend and work to clear the land since it was very wooded,” said Jeffrey Sussman, a friend of the couple and author of “No Mere Bagatelles,” a biography of the Leibers published in 2009. “Because of his artistic training, he became, in effect, a landscape architect.”

Leiber turned part of the land into a museum, spending $5 million on the effort, according to Sussman. “Gus had seen the works of so many fashion designers dispersed after their death, with no one place to see their body of work,” he said. “He wanted one place where people could go and see what Judy had accomplished. It was a tribute to her.”

A gate separates the Leibers’ home from the museum grounds. “They would often open the gate to let people visiting the museum walk through their personal gardens,” said Leslie T. Hillel, an associate real estate broker with Halstead. She is representing the property with Robert A. Brody and Judith E. Mendoza, licensed real estate agents also with Halstead.

As for the couple’s shingled home, it was renovated in the 1990s. Among its features are an open kitchen, a master bedroom, three guest rooms with en-suite baths, and a conservatory. The Leibers spent every weekend there and hosted regular Saturday dinner parties.

“They had a full-time cook who would prepare these stupendous dinners, and the conversation around the table was always about art or fashion,” said Sussman. The Leibers sold their apartment in New York City, a triplex on Park Avenue and 34th Street, several years before they died, and moved full time to the Hamptons.

The couple met in Budapest, Hungary, just after the end of World War II. The future Mrs. Leiber, then Judith Peto, was Jewish and had escaped death by sewing army uniforms; she began a small handbag business, selling them to American soldiers stationed in Hungary. Gus Leiber, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Titusville, Pennsylvania, was stationed in Budapest while serving as an Army Signal Corps sergeant.

Judith Leiber was best known for her fanciful evening bags, often made in the shapes of animals or flowers and bedecked with intricate beading. Her fans ranged from society matrons to First Ladies, including Mamie Eisenhower and Barbara Bush.

In addition to the Leiber Collection, her handbags are also in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution. Gus Leiber’s paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Whitney Museum of Art, among others.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/realestate/judith-leiber-east-hampton-home.html" id="b9b6279c-9a7d-374d-ad73-e26bf7f89078">The New York Times</a>.

(Exclusive)

A Creative Couple's East Hampton Home Is Up for Sale

“It feels like the amount of people from Brooklyn who are buying second homes here is growing exponentially by the day,” said Sandell, 43, who lives in a brownstone in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn with her husband, Rob Schlederer, 47. She is a founder of Red Lantern Strategy, a market research company in Dumbo, and her husband is a broker at Compass.

The couple recently bought a small cottage with a wraparound porch, on property with a creek, in Stone Ridge, New York.

“We were up at our house recently at the grocery store, and we ran into people we know from the dog park in Brooklyn,” Sandell said. “Often it feels like we are even more social up there with our friends than we are at home.”

For generations, New Yorkers have flocked to the Hudson Valley to escape the pace of city life, often choosing it over the Hamptons for its affordability, as well as its relative lack of traffic, pretense and SoulCycle studios. But as more city residents buy homes upstate, that distinction is becoming less obvious.

Even in places like the Catskills, once known as the borscht belt. Recently, some have given it a new name: The Camptons. And the once-sleepy hamlet of Kerhonkson, New York, where a number of ultramodern million-dollar homes have been built in recent years, has been dubbed Kerhampton.

More alarming, for some, is the arrival this spring of a Hudson Valley version of the Hampton Jitney, the upscale bus that is a quintessential symbol of the eastern Long Island getaway. Line, a business-class bus service run by Trailways of New York, will ferry weekenders upstate for upward of $50 one way, offering them high-speed Wi-Fi, cappuccinos and locally sourced snacks.

Destinations on the eastern shore of the Hudson, like Rhinebeck in Dutchess County and Hudson in Columbia County, have long been in the cross hairs of New Yorkers on the hunt for second homes. But now lesser-known areas on the west side of the river, including the Rondout Valley in Ulster County, are entering the fray.

A sliver of land between the Shawangunk Ridge and the Catskill Mountains, the Rondout Valley is made up of hamlets like Kerhonkson, High Falls, Stone Ridge and Accord (pronounced AK-ord). Helping drive the area’s popularity are the many activities on offer, from hiking at the nearby Mohonk Preserve to drinking microbrews at Arrowood Farms and shopping for pricey antiques at Field and Barn.

While some might find the spreading Hampton-ification of the Hudson Valley irksome, it has helped buoy the real estate market. In Ulster County, for example, home prices have been rising steadily in the past five years, although like those in many other regions, they were relatively soft in 2018 compared with the year before.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, the median home value in Ulster County was $221,500, compared with $192,000 in the fourth quarter of 2013, an increase of more than 15 percent, according to data from the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. And in 2018, sales of homes valued at $900,000 or more nearly doubled, to 39, from just 21 the year before, according to data from the Hudson Valley Catskill Region multiple listing service.

“Homebuyers have discovered that their dollars go much further here than in other areas that are a similar distance from New York City,” said Jeff Serouya, an associate real estate broker at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Hudson Valley Properties. “The Rondout Valley has become a destination for a lot of creatives, because there are all these charming towns, but no throngs of day trippers, and there is a very young, organic agricultural movement that has taken hold.”

Real estate developers have taken notice, and several new projects are in the works. “Over the past few years, we have seen a large uptick in the number of applicants coming to the planning board for approvals for subdivisions or development,” said Timothy Sweeney, a broker at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Nutshell Realty, who is on the town board of Marbletown, which includes the hamlets of Stone Ridge and High Falls. Among the projects under consideration there are one 18-home parcel and another 14-home parcel, he said.

The area’s many attractions are partly what drove Jeff Park and his wife, Leslie Kim, to consider the Rondout Valley. The couple, both 32, live in a one-bedroom in Hell’s Kitchen, and were considering upgrading to a larger apartment. “We went to open houses for two-bedrooms, and it just felt like nothing was enough space,” said Kim, who works in education.

Instead, the couple began researching real estate upstate, specifically Hudson Woods, an Instagram-friendly development in Kerhonkson with 26 stylish homes featuring Scandinavian design and materials such as local bluestone and white oak. The development, which opened in 2014 and is sold out, recently had its first resale. That home, a three-bedroom cabin on 6 acres with an in-ground pool, sold for $695,000 when it was brand-new in 2014. It was listed at $1.2 million late last year and closed in December for $975,000.

“It was a distressed scenario, because the owners had to move to London and were subject to tax penalties if they did not sell very quickly,” said Drew Lang, developer of Hudson Woods.

In the end, Park and Kim chose not to buy at Hudson Woods, in part because of the proximity of the homes and their similarities in design. The couple chose Waterfall Properties, a nearby development that was begun in 2012 and has five homes set off a private road, surrounded by woods.

Every house in the development has a name: Cat Hill has a glass fitness studio that appears to float against the tree line; TinkerBox Guest House has an oversized garage, a wine cellar and a furniture workshop. The couple settled on Creek House, a three-bedroom home on 7 acres, set on a cliff overlooking Mombaccus Creek.

“We decided to make the creek the focus of the house, because the site is very dynamic, set within the woods, and with the creek situated 100 feet below,” said Marica McKeel, 41, the architect and developer of Waterfall Properties.

“The house has all these interesting plays on facades and an open layout, with full floor-to-ceiling windows that cantilever out,” said Park, a financial analyst. “If it wasn’t for this house, we may not have pulled the trigger, but we loved the design, and it was within that two-hour radius from New York.”

The listing price was $1.2 million, and Park and Kim closed on the home in late 2018 for $1.05 million.

Buying Creek House also made sense from a financial perspective. “One of our other thoughts was that the tax code change meant a lot of deductions were going away, but not for maintenance against rental income,” Park said. “So at some level, it raised the possibility of what an investment could look like, if we ever made this a rental property.”

In fact, Creek House was a rental property before Park and Kim bought it. The original owners moved to California and had listed it on Airbnb, which gave Park and Kim the opportunity to stay there for a weekend.

“We actually slept in it before we bought it,” Kim said. “We just wanted to experience it before we committed.”

The advent of Airbnb in the area is another factor pushing demand in the Rondout Valley, brokers said. “Airbnb is the biggest economic driver I’ve seen in 23 years in business,” Sweeney said. “It is huge.”

There are few laws in the area prohibiting short-term rentals — unlike in the Hamptons, which has imposed several rental restrictions — although some towns have begun considering it.

Weekenders renting homes through Airbnb is one reason Trailways of New York decided to introduce its new Jitney-like service.

“We saw a change in the type of traveler that was using our buses, with more New Yorkers coming up from the city for the weekend than people who were in the Hudson Valley traveling down to New York for work,” said Alexander Berardi, the company’s director of marketing and business development. And that created an opening for “a higher-class bus service, like the Jitney, in that it is synonymous with the same type of traveler and destination.”

As part of its marketing, Line, which began running in fall, has partnered with local businesses like Harney &amp; Sons teas in Millerton and Cold Spring Apothecary in Cold Spring. And the service eschews typical bus stops, dropping passengers instead at hot spots like Sweet Sue’s in Phoenicia and Scribner’s Catskill Lodge in Hunter.

“We are stopping at places where people are connected culturally,” Berardi said. “It is more about the experience and the journey.”

For Sandell and Schlederer, Stone Ridge proved an ideal place to put down roots. “We have friends who bought in Accord, so we got to know the area through them,” Sandell said. “We looked for nine months before we found it, since the market is competitive.”

The couple paid $275,000 for their 700-square-foot cottage, which sits on 5 acres and includes a 7-acre plot nearby. They won out over three competing bids, made within 36 hours of the home going on the market.

The area’s popularity might be growing, but Sandell insisted that the spirit of the place and its affordability remain intact: “It is so relaxed, and the focus is on nature and calm.”

As far as she is concerned, she added, “the Hudson Valley is still the anti-Hamptons.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/realestate/second-homes-hudson-valley-catskills.html" id="c93fbc10-5e6e-3d04-a2b6-2561625d6d4c">The New York Times</a>.

Is the Hudson Valley Turning Into the Hamptons?

NEW YORK — For Amelia Sandell, the Hudson Valley was appealing because it was nothing like the Hamptons. Although now, she admits, that argument is getting harder to make.

A spokesman for Douglas Elliman confirmed the death but did not specify the cause.

A mainstay in the clubby world of New York real estate, Consolo was responsible for luring numerous luxury retailers to Manhattan. Among her clients were Cartier, Versace, Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent; she also represented some of New York’s best-known landlords, including Donald Trump and Larry Silverstein.

The properties she handled included the Cartier mansion, on Fifth Avenue between 51st and 52nd streets, and the nearby Zara flagship store.

“Faith was a driving and iconic force in New York City’s retail sector,” Steven James, president of Douglas Elliman’s New York City region, said in a statement. “Her contribution to the real estate world was immense.” Consolo was on the board of the Association of Real Estate Women and founded the AREW Charitable Fund.

Consolo, who called herself the “Queen of Retail,” was known for her outsize personality and her love of publicity. Her name was splashed across vacant shop windows from Madison Avenue to SoHo. Her ubiquitous tagline, “You Need Faith,” was imprinted on everything from her business cards to the pink nail files she sent clients for the holidays.

But despite her larger-than-life persona, Consolo was exceedingly private, and many details about her personal life remain unknown — even to those closest to her.

An only child, she was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, on July 25, 1945, and moved to Westport, Connecticut, as a young girl. Her father, John, who ran a real estate business, died when she was 2; her mother, Jill, a child psychiatrist, died when she was 12; and she was raised mostly by her grandmother, according to Joseph Aquino, who was her business partner for 26 years.

No immediate family members survive.

Consolo studied art history at New York University and Parsons School of Design. In the late 1970s, she married and moved to Malibu, California. While there, she opened an interior design business in Beverly Hills, decorating movie studios and homes of film stars, according to an interview she gave in 2005. But the marriage was short-lived, and after her divorce Consolo returned to New York.

“I had a failed marriage behind me,” she said. “I had been good in design, but not good enough to be in the top tier. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do.”

Aquino said: “She was a world-class shopper, she knew all the stores in Europe, and she wanted to go into real estate. So a friend suggested that she work with retailers.”

In 1985, Consolo met the owner of a firm called 2001 Real Estate and took a part-time job there cold-calling landlords and retailers, hoping to find vacant stores and shopkeepers who wanted to lease them. So great was her knack for deal-making that she was soon recruited by retail powerhouse Garrick-Aug Worldwide. She remained there for nearly two decades, eventually becoming vice chairwoman. She joined Douglas Elliman in 2005.

Early in her career, Consolo met Jerome Sidel, a Wall Street broker and financial consultant, when she showed him a rental property and then offered to walk his dog. They were together for decades, although Consolo rarely discussed their relationship.

“She was relentless in her pursuit of her brand; that was her world, her brand in real estate,” said Adam Sidel, Jerome’s son from a previous marriage, referring to Consolo’s constant efforts to publicize her business. “Aside from that, it was my father. They were deeply committed for more than 30 years.”

Adam Sidel said he did not know much about Consolo, “as surprising as that may be, considering she was effectively my stepmother.” He said that he did not even know if his father had ever married Consolo, although she was known as Mrs. Sidel in her personal life.

Consolo could be brash and outspoken, which sometimes led to conflict. In 2015, her partnership with Aquino dissolved over a dispute regarding commissions. Adam Sidel became estranged from her after his father died in 2011.

“She was smart and complicated and challenging,” Sidel said. “She didn’t embarrass easily. She did what she wanted to do, maybe regardless of the outcome.”

When she died, Consolo was in the midst of several deals. “We were actually in negotiations right now for a Madison Avenue property,” said Norman Sturner, chairman of MHP Real Estate Services. “She was a force — a retailing force. If you wanted to get a store, you had to have Faith.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/obituaries/faith-hope-consolo-dead.html" id="1206872c-36a4-3569-a7a8-54f19bf07a68">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Faith Hope Consolo, who as chairwoman of Douglas Elliman’s retail group was one of New York City’s most prolific retail real estate brokers, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 73.

Faith Hope Consolo, a Force in Retail Real Estate, Is Dead at 73

Consolo studied art history at New York University and also attended Parsons School of Design. In the late 1970s, she married and moved to Malibu, California. While there, she opened an interior design business in Beverly Hills, decorating movie studios and homes of film stars, according to an interview she gave in 2005. But the marriage was short-lived, and after her divorce Consolo returned to New York.

Early in her career, Consolo met Jerome Sidel, a Wall Street broker and financial consultant, when she showed him a rental property and then offered to walk his dog. The pair were together for decades, although Consolo rarely discussed their relationship.

There was a Russian princess who kept a lion in her bathtub; a Southern belle credited with inventing the cocktail party; a recluse who called for her chauffeur and car at 10 a.m. every day, although she hadn’t left her room in years; and a fastidious older woman who spent her days patrolling the Plaza’s perimeter, clearing sidewalks of cigarette butts by stabbing them with her umbrella tip.

They were an eccentric bunch: single, mostly older and all wealthy. From Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy, the Russian princess who moved into the largest suite at the Plaza in 1909, to Fannie Lowenstein, who became Donald Trump’s most difficult tenant when he owned the hotel in the late 1980s, these dowagers lived extravagantly, surrounded by their dogs, diamonds and private nurses. Over the decades, they became known as the “39 widows of the Plaza,” and while the origin of the phrase remains murky, as there were more than 39 of them over time, the name stuck.

When Princess Vilma, or Her Serene Highness, as she preferred to be called, moved into the Plaza, 90% of the hotel’s guests lived there full-time. At the turn of the last century, in fact, the words “hotel” and “apartment” were often used interchangeably.

Since then, those terms have become quite distinct. Although recently their meanings have again begun to overlap, as high-end condominiums become increasingly like hotels, advertising hotel-like amenities and perks such as private lounges, state-of-the-art gyms and luxury catering services. At 432 Park Ave., for instance, a concierge will secure a celebrity guest for a birthday party or house-train a pet, while at 30 Park Place, in Tribeca, residents have access to a clairvoyant or a crystal healer, depending on their needs.

But in many ways, the modern version of hotel or luxury condo living is very different from the one that Vilma knew. Today’s high-end buildings have sleek and modern — but often cookie-cutter — finishes intended to have wide appeal. When the Plaza opened, its builders spared no expense to ensure that the hotel was unique, buying Baccarat glassware in France, spending lavishly on Irish linen and Swiss embroidery, and acquiring 4,000 pieces of flat silver for today’s equivalent of $8 million, to use in the hotel’s restaurants.

And while many current buyers of high-end condominiums choose to keep their identities hidden behind shell companies, the opposite was true in the past, when the legends of the widows grew and became closely identified with the hotel itself. Many of the women (and a few men) were tourist attractions in their own right, with visitors flocking to the hotel as much to glimpse a quirky widow as to see the Pulitzer Fountain or to have a drink in the Oak Room.

The Plaza staff grew accustomed to the widows’ peculiarities. One hotel manager began walking outside to get from one end of the building to the other, to avoid passing through the lobby, where persnickety widows would invariably be positioned on the divans, ready to greet him with a barrage of complaints.

The concierges created a secret signal — a repeated tugging of the ear — to indicate that they needed widow assistance, preferably in the form of an interruption from a fellow staff member. But while the widows were a constant thorn in the side of many, they were also the financial backbone of the hotel. During the Great Depression, when the Plaza was desperate for paying guests, it was the wealthy widows, with their regular stream of rental income, that helped keep the hotel afloat.

Among the most steadfast of the widows was Clara Bell Walsh, a broad-shouldered horsewoman who claimed to have arrived when the hotel opened in 1907 and who remained until her death a half-century later. “Clara Bell Walsh is almost entirely known for her residence in the Plaza, as though one’s address were a dominant personal characteristic,” wrote Lucius Beebe, a syndicated columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, who often chronicled her activities.

Walsh was the only child of one of Kentucky’s wealthiest families; her grandfather Henry Bell had been an associate of multimillionaire merchant A.T. Stewart. As well known for her entertaining skills as for her riding ability, she was credited in the press for holding the first society cocktail party. One notorious soiree featured a kindergarten theme: Guests, dressed as poor little rich girls and sailor boys, had to navigate an obstacle course to reach the bar, where drinks were served in baby bottles.

At the Plaza, Walsh held court in her suite, swathed in ermine wraps, her nails painted to match the color of her dress. Her guests, who included theater stars and singers, sat on brocade Edwardian sofas, among tables crammed with Chinese lamps and tiny animal figurines. As drinks flowed, Walsh’s food consumption — or lack thereof — was a source of constant speculation. “Clara Bell Walsh would like to live on a diet of Kentucky products but finds a lack of necessary vitamins in ham and bourbon exclusively,” Beebe quipped.

When she wasn’t entertaining celebrities, Walsh frequented the Persian Room, the Plaza’s nightclub, where she was such a notable presence in the front row that Kay Thompson, the performer who later wrote the “Eloise” books, co-opted several of her idiosyncrasies. When Thompson’s 6-year-old alter ego had her hair done in one book, it was at the men’s barbershop in the Plaza’s lobby, where Walsh had hers done. Thompson also liked to go out with two red dots on her eyelids that would flash when she blinked, a nod to Walsh’s habit of attending dinner parties with fake eyes painted on her eyelids.

But while Walsh was undoubtedly a grande dame of the widows, she is not the best remembered. That dubious honor is reserved for Fannie Lowenstein, the most cantankerous of the widows, who arrived at the Plaza in 1958 as a young divorcée and soon met a fellow hotel resident who became her second husband. Not only did her new husband have a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, but even better, he also had one of the few rent-controlled Plaza apartments.

When her husband died, Lowenstein continued to live in splendor in their three-room suite, paying just $800 a month for rooms that might have rented for more than $1,250 a night. She couldn’t be evicted, so the Plaza staff treated her with extreme deference, fearful of provoking one of her tantrums.

When she arrived for dinner in the evening, a waiter would take her regular order of asparagus soup and Hennessy cognac, while the musicians would stop whatever they were playing and the violinist would serenade her with the theme song from the Broadway musical “Fanny.”

Stories about Lowenstein are plentiful, but one of the most frequently recounted is about the time she came down to the Palm Court during Sunday brunch and, in a fit of pique at the management over some perceived slight, relieved herself on the rug in front of a shocked crowd.

When Trump bought the Plaza in 1988, Lowenstein was still alive, one of a handful of widows who remained. The future 45th president of the United States paid more than $400 million for the hotel — a record-shattering $495,000 per hotel room — before losing it in a bankruptcy three years later. In the beginning, Trump’s most difficult tenant seemed content. But the honeymoon was short-lived, and it wasn’t long before the new owner had run afoul of the demanding doyenne.

Months into his tenure as owner, Lowenstein began complaining of what she called “indoor air pollution” in her rooms. She insisted that it was causing her curtains to shrink and her Steinway grand piano to grow mold. She mounted an assault on the ownership, repeatedly calling the city to register complaints. Soon, inspectors were writing increasingly urgent missives to management.

At the time, Trump was involved in a messy divorce from his first wife, Ivana, amid rumors that he was having an affair with Marla Maples, who would become his second wife. “Ivana and Marla have been a lot to handle,” Trump told The National Enquirer at the time, “but my relationships with them have been smooth as silk in comparison to my contacts with Fannie Lowenstein. When she’s done with me, I’m soaked in sweat!”

If Lowenstein managed to lock horns with a future president, Vilma did not show similar gumption in her day. The future princess was a noted portrait painter as a young woman in Berlin, where she had her own studio and did a brisk business capturing the likenesses of a stream of European aristocracy, most notably the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Her relationship with him spurred much gossip, The New York Times reported in a profile published when she was not yet 30, noting that “sneers were cast at her work and at her personally,” although the same article also called her “a talent decidedly above the commonplace.”

When Vilma arrived at the Plaza in 1909, she came with a retinue that included three French maids; a first, second and third attaché; a marshal; a courier; a butler; and a chef. But that wasn’t all. A private bodyguard — dressed in a tall hat with a plume of feathers and a ceremonial sword — led a menagerie that included one white, yapping dog, two guinea pigs, an ibis, a falcon, several owls and a family of alligators. Eventually, a pet lion joined the veritable zoo.

By then, she had been divorced twice, most recently from a minor Russian prince, from whom she received her title. She began advertising her portraiture services in New York, and one of her first clients was Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles. A 92-year-old veteran of the Civil War, Sickles had lost a leg fighting at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. (He saved the limb and later sent it to Washington, where it was displayed as part of a museum exhibition.)

One day soon after Vilma finished painting Sickles’ portrait, the pair attended the Ringling Bros. Circus at Madison Square Garden. There, she fell in love with a baby lion, and the general promptly bought the lion for her. Named General Sickles, in honor of his patron, the lion lived in the bathtub of her Plaza suite until he outgrew it and the hotel’s patience. The lion was then sent to the Bronx Zoo and, after he died, Vilma had him buried at a pet cemetery in Westchester.

No one knew where the princess’s money came from, but in 1914, when World War I broke out in Europe, her once-abundant wealth suddenly vanished. Soon after, she was dogged by her lawyer, banker and the stables where she boarded her horses, for nonpayment. She fled, leaving her Plaza suite, an unpaid bill for $12,000 and numerous belongings behind. In 1923, she died in a cramped room on East 39th Street, surrounded by her unsold artwork and a single maid for a companion, with a line of creditors waiting outside her door.

But while the once glamorous Vilma came to a sad end, the tales of the widows of the Plaza, like the hotel itself, have endured.

NEW YORK — The Plaza Hotel’s best known resident may be a fictional 6-year-old named Eloise, but from the moment the imposing French chateau-style structure opened in New York City in 1907 until well into the 1980s, it was known for a series of real-life wealthy dowagers who made it their home.

The widows of the Plaza Hotel

<h1>But every day across the five boroughs, tens of thousands of New Yorkers play the odds, and a lucky few check their inboxes to discover they have won an affordable new home. </h1>

For some, the welcome news may have come just months after they first applied, while for others, it may have taken years.

“I was like, ‘Are you being serious?’ For a minute I thought it was a joke," Josh Boscarino, 28, a former actor, said after hearing that he had won a large rent-stabilized studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with an oversized window facing the waterfront, months after submitting his first application.

Winners include older adults who rely on Social Security as their sole income and 30-something singles with graduate degrees earning six figures. The vast majority of the units awarded are rent-stabilized apartments that range in price from a few hundred dollars a month to nearly market-rate amounts, although the lotteries also offer some below-market-rate condominiums and cooperatives, and even a few coveted single-family houses.

The lotteries are run by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Housing Development Corp., and are open to New Yorkers who earn no more than $120,615 for a single person or $199,650 for a family of six. And the demand is so high that it is not unheard-of for the city to receive as many as 58,000 applicants for 58 apartments.

The housing stock available is built and owned by private developers who typically receive subsidies, tax abatements or zoning benefits in exchange for creating below-market-rate units. The units can be found in buildings that are entirely affordable housing, as well as those that include a mix of affordable and market-rate apartments, depending on the type of subsidy the developer received.

Applicants chosen in the agency’s random drawings are screened by the developers, who verify income and interview candidates (a process that is separate from the city’s public housing, which is owned and operated by the New York City Housing Authority).

Mayor Bill de Blasio has made affordable housing a priority, promising to build or preserve a total of 300,000 units by 2026. As part of that effort, the number of apartments made available through the lotteries has increased in recent years. In 2018, some 7,857 apartments were awarded by lottery, compared with 2,741 in 2012, before de Blasio took office. The administration has also streamlined the application process, expanding NYC Housing Connect, a website translated into seven languages, where applicants can fill out a profile and enter multiple lotteries with the click of a button.

But the increase in the number of units available has been accompanied by a surge in the number of people applying. In 2018, there were more than 4.6 million applicants, with the odds of winning just 1 in 592. In 2012, there were fewer units available, but the odds were far better, at 1 in 80; in 2011, they were 1 in 63.

Despite those daunting statistics, chances of winning are better than it may seem. That is because many of those who apply are disqualified, either because their earnings exceed or are below the requirements for a specific development, or because they fail to provide the necessary paperwork, including work history and tax records.

And depending on the housing project, preference may be given to those who meet certain criteria, like municipal workers, the homeless or residents of the neighborhood where the development is being built. (The latter, known as community preference, has come under attack for perpetuating racial segregation in some neighborhoods, and in the wake of a growing homeless population, some have also criticized the lottery program for not giving enough preference to the homeless.)

Those who have won housing lotteries are a diverse group, from a variety of socioeconomic, racial and geographic backgrounds. Despite their differences, however, they tend to have something in common: Many have faced challenging life events, and nearly all insist that the key to winning the lottery is determination.

“You have to know how to hustle and be on it,” said Erika Lindsey, an urban planner who spent nearly a decade applying to lotteries before winning a one-bedroom in Brooklyn, near Barclays Center. “My main advice is to be persistent.”

LIZZIE VILLAS BOAS

Mott Haven, Bronx | $251 for a one-bedroom

Lizzie Villas Boas suffers from hip dysplasia and has had 25 surgeries and four hip replacements. “I’ve had to learn to respect my pain,” said Villas Boas, 57, who is from Brazil. “I cannot change my life, and so I always try and find the happiness.”

Her first purchase for her new home reflects that. In October, when she moved into her new one-bedroom in the South Bronx, Villas Boas went to Target to fill her empty refrigerator. As she wandered the aisles, her eyes alighted on a wooden sign that read, “Give Thanks Always.”

Villas Boas, who gets around on a scooter, depends on Supplemental Security Income, and she couldn’t afford what amounted to a luxury, but she splurged on it anyway.

“I just had to have it,” she said of the sign, which hangs over her kitchen sink. It is one of her few furnishings: The television set in her living room sits on a stack of empty moving boxes, and another pile of boxes serves as a coffee table.

The mother of two adult sons, Villas Boas is twice divorced; her second husband, she said, had been abusive since they married in 2007. In 2015, a nurse assisting her helped her leave her husband and get a place in a shelter for domestic abuse victims in the East Village. After spending nearly three years there and applying to several housing lotteries, she finally won a place of her own.

“This apartment is a physical space where I can exercise my love with my family,” she said. “I would like to eventually buy a table, maybe even a recliner, but I’m not in a hurry. For now, I have all I need.”

Greenpoint, Brooklyn | $802 for a studio

In 2015, Josh Boscarino was renting a room in a four-bedroom apartment in Hamilton Heights, in Manhattan, trying to make it as an actor while working at the Apple store on Fifth Avenue.

“I was just fed up,” said Boscarino, 28. “I had three roommates, but it was a constant revolving door of people.”

In desperation, he began searching for “affordable housing” and “NYC” online, and stumbled onto a link to the city’s housing lotteries. “I had heard about the lottery before,” he said, but dismissed the idea. “I mean, nobody wins the lottery. But I wasn’t making a lot of money and there just weren’t a lot of other options.”

That fall, he filled out a housing lottery profile, and whenever there was a development that fit his income level — $35,000 to $45,000 — he applied. Six months later, he received an email notifying him that he had qualified for an interview at an affordable building at Greenpoint Landing, a 22-acre mega project on the Brooklyn waterfront.

After the interview, he heard nothing for five months. Then, in August 2016, less than a year after he first applied, he found out he had been accepted into the building.

“There’s this misconception that I would never qualify for the lottery, that I make too much money,” said Boscarino, who has given up acting and now works as a finance associate for a theater merchandising company. “But that’s not true. The lottery is for everyone — well, not rich people obviously — and anyone who is considering it should apply.”

Lower East Side, Manhattan | $177 for a one-bedroom

Elsie Rivera had to do some sleuthing to win her apartment at Essex Crossing, a new 1.9-million-square-foot project on the lower East Side that includes retail and office space, restaurants and more than 1,000 units of housing. About half the apartments there are designated as permanently affordable, some of them set aside for people who lived in the neighborhood when it was cleared for redevelopment in the late 1960s. But in order to qualify, applicants must show documentation proving their prior residency.

Rivera, 60, whose niece is City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, used to live in the area, on Suffolk Street, but left years ago.

“I was there as a child,” she said. “But the building burned down and we had to move away.”

After living in Brooklyn, she returned to the neighborhood, moving to a place on Montgomery Street, near her old home. One day, her childhood friend Tito Delgado, a community activist, handed her an application for Essex Crossing and urged her to apply.

But how would she prove she had once lived on Suffolk Street? Rivera had an idea. “I went to my old school, PS 42, and asked them if they had anything with my name and address on it. And, thank God, they did! They were able to prove it.”

Now she lives in a brand-new one-bedroom with stainless-steel appliances and a view of Delancey Street. “It is so beautiful,” she said. “My neighbor down the hall used to know my mom. It’s beautiful that they kept us together.”

Prospect Heights, Brooklyn | $2,170 for a one-bedroom

Erika Lindsey is nothing if not persistent. Lindsey, 36, spent eight years applying to housing lotteries before she won her dream home.

In 2010, she was working as a senior policy adviser and urban planner for the city and living in a fourth-floor walk-up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “My neighbors in Bed-Stuy were leaving for East New York because the rent was going up,” she said. “And it was stressful always having to sign a new lease.”

So Lindsey, who is now a design research fellow at the Public Policy Lab, a job that puts her in an income range of $85,000 to $95,000, looked into the housing lottery. She was hopeful about her prospects, as she was a municipal employee and would also benefit from the preference for community residents when she applied for buildings in Brooklyn. Even so, it was tough going.

Seven years into her lottery odyssey, in June 2017, Lindsey finally received a notice that she had made it to the interview phase at 250 Ashland Place, a 52-story rental tower just off Fulton Street. The following month she was put on a waitlist for a unit, but “then it was radio silence,” she said. “I never got a response. I had to keep calling and asking, ‘Any word? Any update?'”

Then she heard from another lottery, for a rent-stabilized building on Carlton Avenue, where she interviewed for an apartment. As in all fully regulated buildings, the 297 units there were being offered to a wide range of incomes, from a single person earning $20,126 annually to a family of six with an income of $173,415. In January 2018, she moved into a sizable one-bedroom with a large bathroom.

Because Lindsey’s income is at the upper end of the range for one person, she faced less competition than others in the housing lottery. In fact, the building struggled to find people who qualified for the rent-stabilized apartments with higher income requirements. The developer eventually listed some of the units on the website StreetEasy, where most homes are market rate, in a bid to attract tenants.

The rents on apartments like Lindsey’s can be nearly as expensive as those found on the open market, if not more so. But as the city sees it, having a mix of incomes helps create a more diverse building, and higher-income units also help landlords offset the cost of providing apartments to lower-income tenants.

Lindsey concedes that her apartment isn’t exactly “affordable,” and that she pays more now than she did in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where her rent was $1,450 a month. But her new building has more amenities — and it isn’t a walk-up.

“I did the math: I spent $200 a month on Lyfts, because I often had to take a car home at night, so I’m saving on that,” she said. And because you cannot be evicted based on income increases once you win a housing lottery, she added, “I told myself that at some point, because it is rent-stabilized, the apartment will feel like a deal.”

Far Rockaway, Queens | $186 for a one-bedroom

For Benito Gonzalez, winning the housing lottery was like, well, winning the lottery.

“I fell on my knees crying,” he said. “I was so happy that I was finally going to have a place to call my own. At my age, it is the greatest blessing I could receive.”

Gonzalez, 68, who relocated from Puerto Rico in 1966, had been living for years with a girlfriend in the Bronx. But his name wasn’t on the lease, and when she died he was evicted. He ended up in a homeless shelter, and then rented a room in the basement of his sister’s house in Queens.

“It was like living in a box,” said Gonzalez, who depends on Supplemental Security Income. “There were only small windows, and you couldn’t see the street, and it was cold like crazy.”

In 2009, he began applying to every housing lottery for which he qualified. Last year, he finally received notice that he had been approved for a building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But when he went to the developer’s office for his interview, he saw a rendering of a building he preferred, on Channel Drive in Far Rockaway, Queens.

“So what did I do?” he said. “I told the person interviewing me, ‘Listen, I don’t want this building. I want that building.'”

And Gonzalez got his wish. In November, he signed a lease on a one-bedroom in the new tower, with unimpeded views of the water and the Manhattan skyline. “I was coming out here on the train, and tears were coming out,” he said. “I’ve lived in a lot of bad neighborhoods, and this place, it is so quiet.”

Still, his new home didn’t have everything he wanted. “They gave me the apartment, but it was empty,” he said. “They told me I don’t qualify for the furnished apartments, because they are reserved for people who are homeless.”

He has applied to the city’s Human Resources Administration for help buying furniture. But for now, he sleeps on a bed from his sister’s house, and there is a single table in his otherwise empty living room.

Even so, he said, “Not since I was young have I had an apartment of my own — this is a dream.”

Harlem, Manhattan | $929 for a one-bedroom

For Rachel Kambury, an editorial assistant at a publishing house, the best part of winning a housing lottery is being able to see her books. “Most of these books have never been on a shelf,” she said. “My lifelong dream was to have a personal library.”

Kambury, 27, went through several years of real estate hell before moving into her light-filled one-bedroom in Harlem. After coming to New York for college from her native Oregon, she lived in a ground-floor apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. But the construction was shoddy, with numerous leaks, she said, and the landlord was unresponsive, so four years later, in 2014, she moved to East Harlem.

She loved the neighborhood and her apartment, but when she lost her job she had to leave. “I was left with no options,” she said, “so I found the first place I could afford” — a room in Central Harlem, advertised without photos on Craigslist, for $750 a month.

The kitchen consisted of only a mini-fridge; Kambury eventually added a toaster oven and microwave. There was a shared bathroom down the hall that was infested with cockroaches. She spent most of her time sitting on the bed in her room, a former studio apartment that had been cut in half twice, and now measured 8 by 16 feet.

“It was basically a brick box with no air-conditioning, and because I couldn’t feed myself properly without a kitchen, any extra money went to pay my phone bill and eat takeout.”

Kambury earns less than $38,000 a year, toward the lower end of the range for low-income individuals in New York City, according to 2018 median income figures. And at the time, she was working three jobs, but still had trouble paying her rent.

Nevertheless, she said, “I’m stubborn. I was determined to find a way to make it work, even if it meant living in a cockroach-infested firetrap.”

In 2016, a friend told her about the housing lottery, so she applied. But it wasn’t until last summer that she heard she had made it to the interview stage for a building on West 114th Street.

That was two weeks after her stepmother, who raised her, had passed away, and several months after her grandfather died. For a devastated Kambury, it was a welcome respite from a string of bad news.

“When I first got the email I was in such a bad place that it washed over me, and I didn’t even register it,” she recalled. “I told myself to come back in two days and look again. When I did, I couldn’t believe it.”

In September, Kambury was approved for a one-bedroom apartment. “I could afford the security deposit because my stepmom and grandfather had left me money,” she said. “It was bittersweet that the people who would have reveled in this success most weren’t there to see it.”

Upper East Side, Manhattan | $1,511 for a two-bedroom

Natia Mosahvili began applying to various housing lotteries in 2008, but for years she heard nothing. Then out of the blue, in 2017, Mosahvili received a letter forwarded from an old address. It informed her that she had been awarded an interview for a one-bedroom apartment on West 28th Street in Chelsea.

“It had my old income, my old information; I updated all my information, but they told me I was overqualified,” said Mosahvili, 44, a real estate broker and single mother who is originally from the Republic of Georgia. At the time, she was living with her teenage son in a cramped alcove studio on York Avenue, on the Upper East Side, and was desperate for more space.

Mosahvili appealed the decision, arguing that much of her income was in commissions that could not be counted upon, and that not only was she a single mother, but she was also caring for her own mother, who suffered from Parkinson’s. She also began applying to new lotteries.

In June 2017, she received an official rejection letter. Two weeks later, she got an email saying that she had been chosen to interview for another building, on East 60th Street. The building was within her income bracket of $51,000 to $60,000, and because of its location, she was eligible for the community inclusion bonus.

“I thought it was a joke,” she said. “I had already been rejected once. I didn’t bother replying. But then I got a letter in the mail with all my updated information, and thought, ‘Maybe this is for real.'”

By the time Mosahvili realized she should take the notice seriously, she had only a few days left to submit an application. But she had already compiled her financial documents for the one-bedroom in Chelsea, so she was able to apply quickly.

Mosahvili and her son moved into a roomy two-bedroom in the building that December — not long after receiving a notice that she had been chosen to interview for a third project, on West 52nd Street.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “For 10 years I hear nothing, then I get three in row!”

DREW PHAM, MOLLY PEARL

Boerum Hill, Brooklyn | $1,769 for a two-bedroom

Drew Pham and Molly Pearl needed a win. In 2013, Pham had finished his tour of duty in the Army, after serving in Afghanistan, and was trying to figure out what to do next. Pearl had been accepted to the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. Neither was earning much money.

The couple, who met as undergraduates at New York University, found an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, that they could afford if they had a roommate. But the heat, water and electricity in the building were unreliable, with frequent brownouts and no smoke detectors. “It was like 50 degrees half the time inside, and in the summer you couldn’t run the A/C and microwave at the same time without blowing a fuse,” said Pham, 31.

Then Pham came down with what they thought was the flu. When it grew worse, Pearl took him to the emergency room, where he received a devastating diagnosis: He had leukemia.

Pham, who was 26 at the time, began chemotherapy and received a bone-marrow transplant. It soon became obvious that because he now had a compromised immune system, they couldn’t stay in the apartment.

The couple managed to find an apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, after a prolonged search. But the rent was $2,200 a month, far more than they could afford on an income that consisted of disability pay from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Social Security benefits.

“We had to take it,” said Pearl, 30, who now works as an adviser to student veterans at Baruch College. “But I was like, ‘I’m going to apply to every single housing lottery that we are eligible for.'”

They quickly got a call about a building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and another about one in midtown Manhattan. But their income was too low for those apartments, and they were rejected. Eventually they were notified that they had been accepted into a renovated three-unit building on St. Marks Place in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

“Look, we don’t have a laundry in the building, we don’t have a dishwasher. But everything works,” said Pham, a writer who is earning an MFA at Brooklyn College. “If it wasn’t for Molly’s salary, we would be below the poverty line.”

While he is grateful for the housing lottery, he said, “For the vast majority of us in the millennial age bracket, there’s no expectation that we will get that basic human right that we all deserve — a place to live.”

Pearl added: “It is dystopian, if you think about it, that the housing lottery even has to exist.”

Julie Satow

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