With Wall Street bonus season upon us, it’s time start spending. Maybe you loosen up, blow some at the craps table, score everyone in your family one of those great chairs at the Sharper Image, have some nice dinners and spring for the dwarf-toss at your best buddy’s bachelor party. Now what? Real estate. In that spirit, DealBreaker.com and Curbed.com have joined forces to create Penthouse Forum, a new weekly series that reviews properties suitable for blowing even the biggest of bonuses. (Curbed picks the properties, and Dealbreaker reviews ‘em.) Let’s begin.
Today’s property is a penthouse found at 213 West 23rd Street. In Chelsea, obviously. Chelsea’s not really our jam but it does have the distinction of being above the riffraff that run around below 14th street and below the abomination that is midtown. If you work on Wall Street it’s a bit of a hike, but be honest now-you’re getting home most nights in the towncar anyway.
The duplex is equipped with, as the broker puts it, “drama through-out.” Oh yes. May sound odd at first, but say it a couple of times and you’ll realize that this is pretty fantastic-you know how when you’re hosting a dinner party and it’s always more fun if a couple of your guests get into a brawl of some sort? Now you don’t have to worry that everyone will just tritely “get along,” because this space itself is guaranteed to provoke problems.

The drama spreads out across 12,000 square feet, and upwards to the 26 foot ceilings, through five bedrooms (there’s got to be something you can think of to do with all those), 5.5 baths (ditto), five
private terraces, and views of the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Hudson River, Chelsea Hotel, City Hall, New Jersey and the new Frank Gehry building.
There’s also 1,900 square feet of outdoor space on the roof, good for a pool or “whatever you can imagine.” (And imagine we have, but printing such thoughts would compromise the sanctity of the internet and that’s one thing we always promised ourselves we’d never do-but if you really want to know, we suppose IMing our proposals wouldn’t hurt: ohbabyitsbess). We’re also to note that the condo includes “central air,” which is good, because if a place that costs $7.4 million, with common charges of $1499 and annual taxes of $3874 didn’t come with central air, you’d have our permission to say, “Excuse me, but what the fuck?”