House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address

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**In real estateobsessed New York, no new building has captured the citys imaginationor as many of its richest residentsas Fifteen Central Park West.**
In *House of Outrageous Fortune*, Americas foremost chronicler of the upper crust, journalist and bestselling author Michael Gross, turns his gimlet eye on the new-money wonderland thats sprung up on the southwest rim of Central Park. Mixing an absorbing business epic with hilarious social comedy, Gross creates a dishy expos of todays wealthiest and most famous. This colorful story recounts the recordsetting buildings inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially dclass Manhattan neighborhood.
With two concierge-staffed lobbies, a walnut-lined library, a lavish screening room, a private sixty-seat restaurant offering residents room service, a health club complete with a seventy-foot swimming pool, and penthouses that cost almost $100 million, Fifteen is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century. And any building thats home to such unimaginable wealth and heavyweight egosits cast of characters includes Denzel Washington, Sting, Alex Rodriguez, Norman Lear, NASCARs Jeff Gordon, hedge fund heads Daniel Loeb and Daniel Och, Russian and Chinese oligarchs, and top executives of Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, AIG, Disney, Google, and Yahoo!, among many morewill be chock-full of jaw-dropping excess.
Gross won unprecedented access to the people behind this instantly legendary building, including the scions of the fabled Zeckendorf real estate dynasty; their financial backers, Goldman Sachs and Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer; and their starchitect, Robert A. M. Stern. Then he drilled past its limestone faade to ferret out the stories Fifteens fathers and its residents dont want told.
More than just an apartment building, 15CPW represents a massive paradigm shift in the lifestyle of New Yorks rich and famousand is a bellwether of the citys changing social and financial landscape. With its dazzling detail, *House of Outrageous Fortune* is a sweeping history of those changes, and it pulls open wide the gilded walls of Fifteen to reveal the private lives of that .01 percent.