Brown Harris Stevens
The view from Huguette Clark's apartment 8W, which still could be yours. The asking price is $19 million.
By Bill Dedman, Investigative Reporter, msnbc.com
NEW YORK — One of the three mysterious apartments of copper heiress Huguette M. Clark has sold for an undisclosed price. Her top-floor apartment, with 5,000 square feet of space overlooking Central Park, was on the market for $24 million, the most expensive of the three.
The signing of a contract for apartment 12W was confirmed Monday by broker Mary Rutherfurd of Brown Harris Stevens, an exclusive affiliate of Christie's International Real Estate. The apartments have been on the market for less than a month.
Still available: apartment 8W, also with a park view, at $19 million, and 8E, listed at $12 million.
You can see the floor plans and descriptions of the apartments in our earlier story.
The three apartments cost the reclusive heiress to a Montana copper fortune $28,500 a month in co-op fees, or $342,000 a year, while she lived for two decades in New York hospital rooms. Huguette Marcelle Clark has been the subject of a series of reports on msnbc.com about her vacant properties and the management of her fortune. When she died last May at age 104, she owned three apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue, at 72nd Street, in addition to an oceanfront estate in Santa Barbara, Calif., with an estimated value of $100 million, and a country house in New Canaan, Conn., recently put back on the market by the same broker at $19.8 million.
The auction of the Clark jewelry collection, at Christie's New York, is scheduled for April 17. A slideshow of the Clark jewels is available at the home page for our Clark mystery series.
When the apartments and jewelry sell, some of the money will be used to pay estate expenses, with the rest will be held for the eventual winner of the legal battle. On one side are members of the Clark family, grandchildren of her father from his first marriage, whom she included in one will and then cut out of her last. On the other side are her attorney, accountant, nurse and favorite museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, which were all named in the second will, which left the largest portion of her estate to create an art museum in her California home, with the next largest piece going to her nurse.
