VOX POPULI, VOX DEI:High-life's haunting echoes of the '20s
Imagine you are a Wall Street investment banker and you have just moved into the penthouse on the 42nd and 43rd floors of a brick and limestone condominium at 515 Park Avenue.
Arriving home from work in the evening, your chauffeur drops you at the entrance to the building. Several doormen greet you as you walk into a marble and limestone hall and take the elevator to your apartment, which has four bedrooms, a library and a kitchen complete with cabinets made from a 200-year-old cherry tree cut from the Fontainebleau forest outside Paris. The floors are oak strips and the upper and lower floors are connected by a private elevator.
Around 8 p.m. the butler serves dinner accompanied by a bottle of vintage wine from the wine cellar where your collection is stored. With the glass in hand, you enjoy a 360-degree night view of Manhattan--Central Park, the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center. The butler retires to his suite on a lower floor.
This is from a USA Today report on New York's real estate boom. According to the daily, an apartment sells for up to $15 million (1.65 billion yen), plus $450,000 (49 million yen) for servants' suites, $25,000 (2.7 million yen) to store 1,000 bottles of wine, and other expenses.
"This is a period in residential real estate with demand for luxury we haven't seen since the 1920s," an expert was quoted as saying.
More than 700 apartments priced above $1 million (110 million yen) were sold last year in Manhattan, where the average two-bedroom apartment sells for $610,000 (67 million yen). Many of the buyers are those who made a killing in the stock market.
Still, the superdeluxe apartments at 515 Park Avenue are said to be unprecedented. "There's an amazing shortage of apartments at the high end because so much wealth has been created," said the developer that sold them.
The bull run on Wall Street continues. But the Park Avenue condominium may signal the "peak" for stocks and real estate. In the 1920s, America experienced a great boom in the property and stock markets. That boom ended in a bust--the Great Depression. (Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 4)
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