I know the realtor who sold the Montgomery Place property. She says that EVERYONE is WRONG WRONG WRONG about the buyer. It’s not the Bell you think it is. "Nobody knows these people. You can’t even google them," she said.
She didn’t tell me the name of the buyer because she was asked to keep it on the down low. Of course that’s pretty hard in these bloggy times. But a girl can try to keep her word.
My friend has been trying to sell this property since last November. The person who bought it saw the house then and was interested. He waited. He snared it. She is, obviously, thrilled to have sold the place. And she made a nice piece of change. She’s sharing the commission with another realtor. We’re proud of you, girlfriend.
The Safran-Foer-Krauss household must be SO relieved to not have the priciest residence in the SLOPE.
Yesterday, Brownstoner broke the exhilarating news
that the 31-foot beauty at 45 Montgomery Place had been sold for more
than $6 million. (Oval rooms! Fireplaces! It’s all there.)According to the website, $6m would be the highest price ever paid for a 1-family townhouse in Park Slope. New Yorkers everywhere asked: who is the lucky, oval-loving owner?
According to our calculations (i.e. according to city records), that
would be Gregory Bell, who bought the place for a clean $6,050,000.But is it the mathematician Greg Bell, who studied the Asymptotic Dimension of Groups? Or is it TV’s Gregory Bell? (He played Shakespeare in Dennis Hopper’s "Witch Hunt.") Or is it NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Defense Investment, Mr. Robert Gregory Bell?
Number 45 is not my personal favorite on Montgomery, but it’s a great house. From Francis Morrone’s wonderful “An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn”: Built 1898-99 by Babb, Cook, and Willard, the same architects who went on to build the Carnegie Mansion on Fifth Avenue and 91st St in the City. 45 Montgomery is French Renaissance style, with rusticated granite base, a broad porch, limestone parlor floor, and limestone-trimmed red brick above. “The most beautiful thing here is the entrance with its elaborate consoles and superb central cartouche.”