'Law & Order: SVU' actress is selling lovingly restored old Harlem townhouse
About 20 years ago, this brick townhouse was sitting boarded-up and unloved in Harlem, the victim of time and vandals.
Actress Tamara Tunie, then best known for her role as a lawyer on the soap opera "As the World Turns" -- and now also for playing the medical examiner on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" -- saw something in it.
It was a century old but had had only two owners: the people who built it, and the people who bought it from them. "There's a lot of good vibes in this house," she says.
So she and Gregory Generet (whom she later married) bought the place for about a quarter-million dollars. They've spent the last two decades and perhaps half a million dollars more on bringing it back to life.
But they want to downsize from the five-story, nearly 5,000-square-foot townhouse to an attended building -- still in Harlem, but with a superintendent or a doorman -- because both of them have been traveling so much over the past couple of years. They've listed it at $3.75 million.
Coincidentally, Tunie's colleague B.D. Wong -- forensic psychiatrist George Huang on "SVU" -- just recently sold his Manhattan apartment. It's a stunning space: Sam Spade meets Adrian Monk meets "Hoarders" (but in a good way!).
So we're holding a face-off: Tunie's Harlem renaissance vs. Wong's noir fantasia. Click here or on an image to see the photos, then let us know in the comments: Whose apartment wins the day?
