21-time Tony Award winner for directing and producing famous Broadway musicals, Hal Prince (Harold Smith Prince) is also deep into real estate, having sold or bought seven properties in Manhattan in the last ten years. In 2009 Hal and his wife Judy purchased the luxury townhouse, for $12.5 million, in November 2012 they tried to sell it for $22 million, and now that they have dropped the asking price by $1 million.
The neo-Georgian façade is rather simple for the style neighboring estates, but the interior is quite the opposite. The building has a four-story skylit atrium with elevator and almost hidden staircase in the ground floor entrance hall and covers an amazing 7,375 square feet above the ground plus the 2,000 square feet of the fully equipped basement where there are equipment and laundry rooms, staff suite with bathroom, a leisure room and a skylit gym. The 20-foot wide pad features a 44-foot long living room with fireplace, red wall-to-wall carpet, a small terrace and 20-foot high ceilings. The eat-in kitchen opening towards the back garden is on the ground floor behind the formal dining room. On the third floor there is a single bedroom without a bathroom; the two other bedrooms have attached private bathrooms.
Even with the asking price dropped the couple are going to strike it lucky if they manage to get what they ask. It is perhaps the unhappy theatrical decorating that the lush Upper East Side townhouse has undergone that makes it difficult to find an owner with similar tastes!
