Central park biography of michael gross

Reading the cumbersomely titled House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address is a lot like watching an episode of VH1’s The Fabulous Life Of… Should we feel envious? Disgusted? Or should we just let ourselves be hypnotized by its shmoozy, clubby charm?

For those unfamiliar, Fifteen Central Park West is a very expensive Manhattan apartment building built in 2012. Thanks to a high-profile team of architects and developers, 15CPW was also a media darling long before it rose from the Upper West Side, and it continues to attract attention as an emblem of excess. Last year, a hedge fund manager reportedly sold his three-bedroom condominium in the building for $29 million. The New York real estate blog Curbed refers to it simply as the Limestone Jesus.

Author Michael Gross has a bottomless appetite for real-estate gossip. In 2005, he wrote 740 Park, a 600-page history of an Upper East Side co-op (“the world’s richest apartment building”), which the director Alex Gibney later adapted for a documentary. Gross then decamped to Beverly Hills to write Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles. Gross’s House of Outrageous Fortune finds him back in New York, just blocks from his own co-op on the Upper West Side.

Gross is a fastidious researcher, offering a well-considered history of the Upper West Side’s development over the last century and of the co-operative housing system in general. Co-ops, which began as artists’ enclaves, make tenants shareholders of the building rather than owners of their own space. In New York, they’ve become synonymous with the old-money establishment and known for their unspoken codes of discrimination. As Gross tells it, 15CPW marks a turning point. Its fortress-like design by Robert A.M. Stern and those limestone walls (not to mention its evasive sales office) suggest the privacy and prestige of an Upper East Side c

American author, journalist and editor (born 1952)

Michael Robert Gross is an American author, journalist and editor whose work focuses on the American upper class.

Early life

Gross has an A.B. in History from Vassar College.

Career

Early in his career, Michael Gross wrote about rock music for magazines. From 1973, his work appeared primarily in Crawdaddy!, the New Musical Express, Zoo World, Rock, Club, Circus and Swank. In addition to writing features for Circus magazine's sister publication, Circus Raves, during the mid 1970s, he served as editor-in-chief of Rock in 1976 and 1977. Gross was the editor of the Fire Island News, a weekly newspaper in a New York summer colony, in 1978. He then began covering fashion photography for Photo District News and subsequently wrote the column "Fashion Statements" for Manhattan, Inc., a short-lived business magazine. In 1985, he went to work for The New York Times, writing about fashion in feature stories and a weekly column, "Notes on Fashion". In 1988, he became a contributing editor of New York magazine, covering fashion and the world of the rich and famous.

In 2000, he was briefly a senior editor of George, a political magazine. In 2002, he wrote a gossip column, "The Word", for the New York Daily News. From 2002 until 2010, he edited the written content of Bergdorf Goodman Magazine. He worked for Crain's New York Business as a columnist from 2010 to 2012.

Gross was also the real estate editor and a monthly columnist for Avenue magazine, its editor-in-chief from October 2016 until March 2019, and a contributing editor of Travel and Leisure magazine from 1997 until 2014. In 2015, he was named a contributing editor of Departures. In addition to The New York Times and New York, he has written for Esquire, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Town