Limitless

Walking up Madison, I had been thinking in the region of $300,000 for a place – $500,000 tops – but it occurred to me now that given my standing with Van Loon and my prospects with Hank Atwood there was no reason why I shouldn’t be thinking bigger – $2 million, $3 million, maybe even more. As I stood in the plush reception area of Sullivan, Draskell, thumbing through glossy brochures for luxury condos in new buildings called things like the Mercury and the Celestial, and listening to Alison Botnick’s pitch, with its urgent lexical hammer-blows – high-end, liquid, snapped-up, close, close, close – I felt my expectations rising by the second. I could also see Alison Botnick, for her part – as she morphed fifteen years off my frame and mentally dressed me in a UCLA T-shirt and baseball cap – convincing herself that I was a dot-com billionaire. The flames were stoked further when I casually shrugged off her suggestion that, given the storm of paperwork required these days to pass the average co-op board’s screening procedure, I would probably want to avoid a co-op apartment.

‘The boards are getting very picky,’ she said, ‘not that—’

‘Of course not, but who wants to be excluded without a fight?’

She assessed this.

‘OK.’

Our manipulation of each other into these respective states of acquisitive and professional arousal could only have led to one thing: viewings. She took me first to see a four-bedroom prewar co-op in the East Seventies between Lexington and Park. We went by cab, and as we chatted about the market and where it was ‘at’ right now, I had that pleasant sensation of being in control – and of being at the controls, as though I had designed the software for this little interlude myself and everything was running smoothly.

The apartment we went to view on Seventy-fourth was nothing special. It had low ceilings and didn’t have much natural light. It was also cramped and quite fussy.

‘A lot of these prewar co-ops are like this, you know,’ Alison said, as we made our way back down to the lobby. ‘They’ve got leaks and need to be rewired, and unless you’re prepared to just gut them and start over, they’re not worth the money.’

Which in this case was $1.8 million.

Next we went to see a 3,200-square-foot converted loft space in the Flatiron District. It had been a textile factory of some kind up until the’50s, had lain vacant for most of the’60s and from the way the place was decorated it didn’t look as if its present owner had made it much past the’70s. Alison said he was a civil engineer who’d probably paid very little for it, but was now asking $2.3 million. I liked it, and it certainly had potential, but it was huddled a little too anonymously in a part of town that was still relatively dull and unexciting.

The last place Alison took me to see was on the sixty-eighth floor of a condominium skyscraper that had just been built on the site of the old West Side rail yards. The Celestial, along with other luxury residential developments, was – in theory – to be the centrepiece of a new urban rejuvenation project. This would roughly cover the area between West Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen.

‘If you take a look at it, there’s a ton of empty lots there,’ Alison said, sounding like a latter-day Robert Moses, ‘from Twenty-sixth Street up to Forty-second Street, west of Ninth Avenue – it’s ripe for redevelopment. And with the new Penn Station you’ll have a huge increase in traffic – thousands more people pouring in every day.’

She was right, and as our cab cruised west along Thirty-fourth Street, down towards the Hudson River, I could see what she was talking about, I could see the great potential there was for gentrification, for a huge bourgeois-boho makeover of the entire neighbourhood.

‘Believe me,’ she went on, ‘it’s going to be the biggest land grab this city has seen in fifty years.’

Rising up out of the wasteland of disused and neglected warehouse buildings, the Celestial itself was a dazzling steel-frame monolith in a seamless casing of reflective bronze-tinted glass. As the cab pulled up alongside a huge plaza at the foot of the building, Alison started reeling off stuff that she obviously felt I should know. The Celestial was 715 feet tall, had 70 storeys and 185 apartments – also several restaurants, a health club, a private screening room, dog-walking facilities, a ‘smart garbage’ recycling system … wine-cellar, walk-in humidor, titanium-sided roofdeck …

I nodded at all of this, as though mentally jotting it down for later scrutiny.

‘The guy who designed this place,’ she said, ‘is even thinking of moving in himself.’