Lauren Bacall's Manhattan apartment, listed at $26 million, is one class act
Lauren Bacall -- the Hollywood legend with the lexicon of a longshoreman and a gravelly voice to match -- lived more than half her life in this apartment at the Dakota on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
And as you might have expected, the apartment is one class act. It was filled with her art collection, to be auctioned by Bonhams in March 2015 at a projected $3 million. Much of her aesthetic was developed when she accompanied husband Humphrey Bogart on location for the shooting of "The African Queen," Bonhams said.
Bacall was 37 when she bought the apartment in 1961, for a mere $48,000. It just hit the market at $26 million -- though any prospective buyers will have to get past the notoriously difficult co-op board, even if they can pony up that much money.
Click here or on a photo for a slideshow of Lauren Bacall's apartment at the Dakota.
Bacall raised her three children there: a son and daughter by Humphrey Bogart, to whom she was married from 1945 until his death in 1957; and a son by Jason Robards, whom she wed in 1961 and divorced in 1969.
Bacall died in the apartment of a massive stroke three months ago at age 89.
Many news outlets have reported that the home was appraised just before her death at $9 million. But the Real Deal, a New York real estate blog, says that figure was widely disputed among industry sources -- perhaps helping to explain why the apartment has just hit the market at nearly triple that: $26 million.
The apartment has three bedrooms and four bathrooms, plus an office and a library.
The square footage isn't provided by Warburg Realty, and that information had been kept private by the co-op board at the Dakota, which is considered Manhattan's most exclusive building. (The building is the site of John Lennon's slaying, and his widow, Yoko Ono, still lives there; Roberta Flack is Yoko Ono's next-door neighbor. Other current and former residents include the piano-making Steinways, composer Leonard Bernstein, journalists Connie Chung and Maury Povich, actress Judy Garland, actor Boris Karloff, dancer Rudolf Nureyev, author Harlan Coben and actress Lillian Gish. Prospective neighbors who have been rejected include Cher, Madonna, Alex Rodriguez, Billy Joel, and Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas. The building also served as the exterior setting in "Rosemary's Baby," and it's said to be haunted by the so-called Crying Lady Ghost as well as by a little boy and a little girl.)
But Yahoo Homes' back-of-the-envelope calculations based on the floor plan suggest that the apartment is between 3,000 and 4,000 square feet, depending how you count it.
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