Lawyerly Lairs: What $500K Buys You In The East Village (Hint: Not Much)

This apartment isn't fancy, but its owner seems quite happy.

Welcome to the East Village.

The East Village still has the old-school charm of outdoor fire escapes.

Welcome to the latest edition of Lawyerly Lairs, our sneak peak inside the fabulous (and not so fabulous) homes of American lawyers and judges. It has been way too long since our last installment, and we don’t want so much time to pass before our next one. If you have a residence you’d like to see featured in this space — perhaps your own, if it’s on the market and you’re looking for maximum publicity — please email us (subject line: “Lawyerly Lairs”).

Today’s lair comes to us from Joyce Cohen’s popular New York Times column, The Hunt. Her latest story features Keith Peterson, an Amherst and Columbia Law grad who now works as a trusts and estates lawyer in Manhattan. (UPDATE (9:30 p.m.): Actually, Peterson didn’t graduate from CLS; we connected on Facebook, and he passed along this correction: “In point of fact, I flunked out of Columbia and later apprenticed myself to a lawyer and passed the bar that way. Still possible to do in New York, at least in the 1980s.”)

The Times story starts off with some sadness:

[A]fter living in the [Columbia Law School] dorms, Mr. Peterson moved to a large one-bedroom in Brooklyn. When he married, his wife, who was from Warsaw, joined him there.

By 1992, they had a baby girl, and they moved into “the nicest place I could afford,” said Mr. Peterson, who is now 61 and works as a trusts and estates lawyer in the financial district. The three-story rowhouse in the historic Hamilton Park neighborhood of Jersey City was $155,000.

A few years later, his wife received a diagnosis of late-stage cancer. Although they tried an experimental stem-cell treatment, she died 18 months later. And because the treatment wasn’t covered by insurance, it took years for Mr. Peterson to dig himself out of the ensuing debt.

Death and debt — not a happy tale. And then add the other “d,” divorce. Peterson remarried in 2008, but that marriage didn’t last. To pay for his divorce, he had to sell the Jersey City rowhouse.

On the bright side, he made a nice profit on it; the house sold for $1.125 million. And it allowed him to “finally do what he had been wanting to do for as long as he could remember: move to Manhattan.”

Sponsored

Alas, New York real estate prices have increased dramatically since Peterson’s days at Columbia Law. He wasn’t asking for too much; he was willing to settle for “a small, spartan co-op with few amenities — no elevator, no doorman, no dishwasher.” But the first few places he saw had various issues:

On West 22nd Street, [he and real estate agent Dawn McCloud] climbed five flights of stairs — all the way to the top floor — to see a one-bedroom for $595,000, with a maintenance of just over $800. The space was charming, Mr. Peterson said, but “once I got to be 90, I wouldn’t be able to climb those stairs, so I would be housebound and that really was impractical.” The apartment sold for $575,000.

On West 20th Street, in another beautiful six-story co-op building, there was a one-bedroom available on the second floor. It was $615,000, with maintenance of a little more than $1,000. The layout was narrow, but it had “a clever design,” Ms. McCloud recalled. “The seller did some smart things with custom cabinets.” The price, however, was too high, so Mr. Peterson passed on that one as well. It sold for $585,000.

Peterson finally found a place that he liked — a one-bedroom on the ground floor of an East Village co-op building. It was listed at $525,000, with monthly maintenance of $570; he offered $490,000 before ultimately paying $510,000.

What did Keith Peterson get for his money? Let’s have a look….

Sponsored