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Edgar Bronfman, Jr. just sold his 1040 Fifth Avenue co-op apartment for $21 million to Gerson Lehrman and Marjorie Lehrman.


The enormous 5 bedroom, 5 bathroom cooperative was originally listed by Bronfman for $24 million on January 26, 2008, just a week after he bought it for $19.5 million from J.B. Martin textiles executive Loic De Kertanguy and Rebecca De Kertanguy.

Bronfman, the Chairman and CEO of the Warner Music Group, former executive at media and entertainment conglomerate Vivendi Universal, and the former President and CEO of Seagram’s, the Canadian liquor dynasty and founded by his grandfather Samuel Bronfman and subsequently run by his father Edgar Bronfman, Sr. before passing on control to his second-oldest son.

Thomas Lehrman a Board member, co-founder and former CEO of the Gerson Lehrman Group, a well-respected Wall Street research firm boasting contacts with 200,000+ industry experts.  The Yale Law School graduate was recently served under the Bush Administration as Director of the Office of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Terrorism at the State Department, and before that, on the professional staff at the President’s WMD Commission.

Brown Harris Stevens power broker Alina Pedroso had the exclusive.

The 11-room apartment has 2 woodburning fireplaces, a library overlooking Central Park, and stunning views of Central Park that sweep from the Reservoir to Central Park South, with a fantastic view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur, and storied buildings along Central Park West.

Monthly maintenance charges are a whopping $8,614. The apartment includes a huge maid’s room or servant’s quarters, and a legal washer and dryer, something that many coop boards are loathe to allow.

The cooperative apartments at 944 Fifth Avenue offer something that few other New York City apartment buildings can boast about: full-floor apartments for their owners overlooking Central Park.


Barbara Walters and her dog Cha Cha Walters own the entire sixth floor apartment.

In February 2008, the 10th floor apartment sold for $26 million in a sale by the Adrienne H. Malvin Living Trust to Morgan Stanley Managing Director Jay Mantz (inset) and his wife Jennifer Mantz. Mantz is Global Co-Head of Morgan Stanley’s Merchant Banking Division, responsible for the investment bank’s real estate, infrastructure and private equity investing businesses.

Mantz appears to have parlayed his expertise as a real estate investment professional when buying and selling co-op apartments at 944 Fifth for his family.

In May 2007, the couple bought the fifth floor apartment (inset, below) in the building for just over $16.5 million from the estate of Lilyan S. Lindemann.

Lindemann and her late husband Joseph, a cosmetics and pharmaceuticals manufacturer and philanthropist, lived in the apartment.

Less than a year later, the Mantz’s flipped their fifth floor apartment for $20 million, for a $3.9 million profit, getting a huge 21% return on their initial investment.

The buyers were Robert Mnuchin and Adriana Mnuchin. He spent more than 30 years trading stocks at Goldman Sachs, and she created the Tennis Lady and Cashmere-Cashmere boutiques for women before the couple opted to open an art gallery on the Upper East Side, and a Connecticut spa retreat called the Mayflower Inn.

Within a month of selling the fifth floor unit to the Mnuchins, the Mantz’s bought the 10th floor apartment for $26 million.

Photo credit: Pension Real Estate Association