By Serach Nissim
A rare Gilded Age mansion, with an unusual history, has sold for exactly $50 million in an all-cash deal.
As reported by Gimme Shelter, a six-story limestone Beaux-Arts mansion located at 854 Fifth Avenue, located between 66th and 67th streets, was sold. The home was once owned by the former Yugoslavian government until the war began in 1992. According to listing broker Tristan Harper of Douglas Elliman, the home is complete with bulletproof windows facing Central Park and Cold War-era spy gear, including a metal-padded room with a Faraday cage to block electromagnetic fields. The home served as a hideout for Josip Broz Tito, the late head of Yugoslavia, following an assassination attempt against him in 1963 at the Waldorf Astoria.
The 30-foot-wide mansion had its own difficulties selling. It could not even be listed for sale until each of the former Yugoslavia’s five successor states — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, North Macedonia and Slovenia — agreed to the listing price and the amount they would each get from the sale, with some states receiving a higher percentage.
The home lives up to its hype, as one of the last remaining Gilded Age mansions in Manhattan. It boasts 17 fireplaces, 34-foot-high ceilings, a copper mansard roof, and an original oven still in working condition. An impressive, oversized dining room includes a table for 16, dual chandeliers, painted ceilings, decorated wood paneled walls, and intricate gold moldings around the walls and ceilings. The marble and iron wrought staircase has an oversized skylight above it. There are four lavish laboratories, with delicate carvings throughout.
The 20,000-square-foot mansion will undergo a gut renovation, which is slated to last at least a few years. The upgrades should cost more than $20 million, based on a minimum cost estimate of $1,000 per square foot, Harper told the Post.
The mansion was built in about 1905 by the same architects who designed Grand Central Terminal. Originally it was owned by Robert Livingston Beeckman, a New York stockbroker who became the 52nd governor of Rhode Island. It was later sold to heiress and philanthropist Emily Vanderbilt White, the granddaughter of railroad legend Cornelius Vanderbilt. She sold the home to Yugoslavia in 1946, a year after the end of the second World War.
The home was listed with Harper in 2017, some six years after he first asked to represent it. An electrical fire in 2018 and the pandemic in 2020 slowed down the process, but the home did receive other close offers. “We received offers that were close, but we couldn’t accept. The price had to be exactly $50 million,” Harper said. The sale was initially reported by the Wall Street Journal. The closing was unusual in that representatives from all five Balkan nations had to be present in the room to sign the closing papers together. The buyer, whose identity remains anonymous, is said to be a foreign national based in London who owns “hotels, land and property” around the world, as per a source for the Post.
“It closed for exactly $50 million because that’s what the countries agreed to,” Harper said, adding that the mystery buyer also paid roughly another $5 million in broker fees and taxes.
