The Duke family has sold its palatial eight-story mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City for $40 million to Tamir Sapir, a Georgian refugee turned real estate mogul whose first job in the city was driving a taxi.
The historic sale represents the highest price ever paid for a townhouse in New York City.
The 20,000-square-foot property-which sits across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan's tony Upper East Side-was originally listed for $50 million when it went on the market last May, but the price was lowered when prospective buyers balked at the cost.
Musician Lenny Kravitz was among a series of millionaires who toured the home, built in 1901, before the billionaire oil trader and commercial real estate titan Sapir signed the purchase contract Monday.
The Duke family has not lived in the mansion at 1009 Fifth Ave. for years, choosing instead to subdivide it into a series of luxury apartments. A 1995 story in The New York Times reported that one quadruplex in the building rented for $50,000 per month.
"None of the family was in or around New York anymore, and there was no reason to hold on to it," Shirley Mueller, a broker at Brown Harris Stevens and one of the property's three listing agents, said of the sale.
Mueller confirmed reports that Sapir plans to convert the bottom five floors of the Duke mansion into a showcase for his collection of European ivory.
Another Brown Harris Stevens broker, Paula Del Nunzio, told The New York Times that the Duke family was happy the mansion would be used this way.
"They were very pleased with the idea that it would be devoted to an artistic purpose," Del Nunzio said. "They thought that was quite a wonderful use for it."
Sapir mortgaged his cab in 1979 to start an electronics store. The shop led him to cultivate relationships with a client base that included Soviet diplomats.
In the 1980s, Sapir used these friendships to arrange the trade of electronics for oil contracts in the Soviet Union, Forbes.com reported. He then sold the contracts for millions of dollars to European corporations, parlaying these earnings into corporate real estate.
Since then Sapir has amassed an estimated 7 million square feet of office space in Manhattan.
In addition to those like Sapir who were interested in the mansion's mixed-use possibilities, Mueller said prospective buyers ranged from families who considered using the property as a private home to foundations looking for office space.
"We did a tremendous amount of marketing to high-end customers all over the world," Mueller added. "We tried to make anyone who we think can afford [the mansion] aware of it. It's a concerted marketing effort to reach the right group of people who could handle it financially."
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