Clock it in!
A penthouse apartment in Dumbo made infamous when a certain Brookly Paper editor filmed a “real estate porn” there nearly seven years ago has finally been sold for a record price — but one that fell $10 million short of the original ask.
It will never be known if Gersh Kuntman’s viral video inside the three-story apartment atop 1 Main St. had anything to do with the amount of time it took to sell — or caused its price to drop from $25 million — but it didn’t stop a Columbian-born art galley owner form Manhattan to snatch it up for the most anyone has ever paid for a condo in the County of Kings — $15 million.
The massive 16th floor apartment, which features four working clocks on the windows and a glass elevator, originally hit the market in 2010, but was re-listed at $18 million in 2013 when a new realtor took it on.
The fancy digs had been in contract since June as the new owner worked with developer Two Trees to modify the apartment to his liking, according to a New York Times report.
But the story behind the video is just as interesting as the sale.
Kuntzman posted the video for a short time one day in 2010 before thinking better of it and removing it from The Brooklyn Paper’s website.
But he didn’t get it down before an enterprising young reporter from Gothamist with a nose for news — Ben Muessig — spotted it, grabbed a screen shot, and link to a YouTube version of the video, revealing it to the world.
The publicity landed Kuntzman in some hot water when management at The Paper — then owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — took the editor to task for his decisions about the story — decisions Kuntzman later said he sorely regretted.
“The first mistake I made was putting it up,” he said recently. “The second was taking it down.”
Kuntzman left The Brooklyn Paper in 2012 and now works as a “columnist” for the Daily News — and is also co-host of the Brooklyn Paper Radio podcast, on which he will certainly talk about this story.
It is unclear what became of Ben Muessig.
The $15 million sale beats the record set by a condo inside Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pierhouse development, which sold for $10.67 million earlier this month, according to the New York Post. That sale topped the $8.1 million paid for a condo at One John St., also in Dumbo.
