[Photo via Flickr/Emilio Guerra.]
Though filmmaker Spike Lee is best known for his Brooklyn presence—the house where Crooklyn was shot sold for $400,000 over ask and the Fort Greene brownstone he inhabited in the 90s sold to that controversial dung artist—he actually owns an even more significant property on the Upper East Side. He just put the 8,292-square-foot, 2BR/2BA at 153 East 63rd Street on the market for $32 million, the Post reports, which he originally bought from artist Jasper Johns in 1998 for $16,624,999. (Though the formal deed lists the transaction as being worth nothing, and the rest of public records for the plot are hazy.)
Daytonian in Manhattan has chronicled the long history of the so-called Hatch House, named for the husband of Barbara Rutherford, who married Cyril Hatch in the nineteen-teens. Rutherford’s mother bought the property (formerly two horse stables) as a wedding gift for the Hatches.
Architect Frederick Sterner, who at one point had converted or designed essentially all of 63rd Street, is behind the “three-story Spanish renaissance fancy” with “a stucco facade and red-tile roof.” Though many of the residences he worked on are no longer in their original condition, notes the Times‘ Christopher Gray, Lee’s is
http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2013/11/13/spike_lee_wants_32m_for_ues_home_with_celebstudded_past.php