![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/c330364fc5095ef12a38b2ff846d7d2671-neighborhood-mysteries-celebs-01.rhorizontal.w1100.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Around Town<\/a><\/p>\n \n A series on hyperlocal questions and curiosities.\n <\/p>\n \n Illustration: Emma Erickson; Photo Courtesy of Compass\n <\/p>\n<\/p>\n On a recent swampy day in July, a lone tourist was posing for a photo in front of one of the historic townhouses along Columbia Heights, the most picturesque street in Brooklyn\u2019s most picturesque neighborhood. Her presence was the only hint that we were standing just a hundred feet or so away from some of the world\u2019s most famous people\u2014or at least their apartments. Columbia Heights is home to a celebrity real-estate cluster that is becoming ever more concentrated in just one building: the Standish, a 12-story limestone-and-brick Beaux-Arts apartment building at the south end of the tree-lined street. Built in 1903 as a hotel, it was converted in 2016 to a luxury residential building with unusually intact prewar character, plus the latest post-postwar amenities, including a 24-hour doorman, a private rooftop with Manhattan views, and a gym. \u201cBoldface names,\u201d the real-estate euphemism for famous people, have flocked to its four- and five-bedroom units. Matt Damon spent more than $16 million on the penthouse in 2017. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski swapped their Park Slope home the following year for two units below him. Just this summer, Adam Driver bought three units for $11.5 million after selling his old three-bedroom condo on Henry Street a few blocks away.<\/p>\n Celebrities have always lived among us in New York in a way they don\u2019t have to pretty much anywhere else. Certainly not in Los Angeles, where they can hide in mansions with manicured grounds behind enormous, security-prowled hedges. The city\u2019s limited square footage means that even the most famous and beautiful people are humbled by a relative lack of privacy. It was once a rite of passage for New Yorkers to see Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick strolling by their Greenwich Village townhouse or Yoko Ono walking near the Dakota on the Upper West Side. This, I learned while touring \u2014 or attempting to tour \u2014 the latest celebrity-real-estate hot spots, is rapidly becoming a bygone experience. An explosion of residential development geared toward the ultrawealthy has led to more options for famous buyers that are becoming increasingly attuned to the specifications of their West Coast lifestyles: big spreads, tall gates, constant security, and, most unnervingly, driving everywhere. In other words, these parts of New York are starting to feel like miniature L.A.\u2019s. \u201cThe city is developing these gated communities,\u201d says Clayton Orrigo, a Manhattan broker who sells apartments in many of them. And when one celebrity buys somewhere, more follow. \u201cThere is a herd mentality. Once they feel safe in a building, their friends come.\u201d<\/p>\n I began my journey at the Standish because it seemed, from the street, the most approachable of the current celebrity-real-estate destinations. That wasn\u2019t the case; when I walked up to the doorman on duty, standing in the pristine white lobby entryway, to ask if I could take a peek inside, he solemnly shook his head \u201cno.\u201d Instead I had to find out what made it so appealing from afar. \u201cFirst of all, it\u2019s a condo \u2014 not a co-op,\u201d Deborah Rieders, a broker who represents a unit in contract in the Standish, tells me over the phone. New York\u2019s famous once clamored for co-ops, where tenants are shareholders with equity rather than individual owners of their apartments outright. To get in, applicants submit to exhaustive financial reviews, provide references, and sit for interviews. The most iconic midcentury buildings in Manhattan, like the Dakota, the San Remo, and the Beresford, all co-ops and all uptown, had an air of exclusivity and social arrival that celebrities once craved. Barbra Streisand was rejected by two Upper East Side co-ops in the 1960s, and 30 years later, in 1999, when she was trying to unload her apartment in the one co-op she did get into, the Ardsley, the board rejected her prospective buyer, Mariah Carey. (Carey apparently wore a short skirt to the interview.)<\/p>\n \u201cThis level of scrutiny is anathema to what celebrities want now,\u201d Rieders says. People forced to duck TikTokers and TMZ don\u2019t want to expose every aspect of their incomes and daily lives to strangers, then live somewhere where everyone knows everyone\u2019s business. In the Dakota, the whole building was alerted when Ono and John Lennon wanted to buy another co-op, which Delia Ephron wrote about for this magazine. In 2018, Madonna lost a three-year battle with her co-op board after it told her she had to be home when her children or staff were staying in her apartment, every beat chronicled in the New York Post. It\u2019s no wonder that residential construction, especially at the highest end, is now overwhelmingly dominated by condo development. As condo owners, the Damon, Blunt-Krasinski, and Driver families can enjoy considerably more discretion. They can buy their apartments under LLCs, which most co-ops discourage. They can renovate them with little interference by their neighbors (many co-ops enacted so-called Seinfeld laws in the late 1990s and early aughts, fining tenants if their projects take too long, after Jerry Seinfeld took years to renovate his apartment in the Beresford). Some condos, if you can get into a building small enough, barely even have neighbors at all: Evan Shaffer, a Douglas Elliman broker with a listing in 111 Wooster Street in Soho, recently toured<\/a> by Chris Rock and Doja Cat, says that celebrities like that the building only has 15 units \u2014 and no staff to speak of. \u201cThere isn\u2019t even a doorman to see you go in and out,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n There are plenty of boutique, private condos to choose from now in Brooklyn, of course, with all sorts of amenities. The Pierhouse (where Ed Sheeran and Kendrick Lamar have owned) has a meditation room; the Olympia in Dumbo (former home of Joe Jonas) has a private tennis court. But those are new builds, glass and concrete. Living on historically preserved Columbia Heights, in one of the only prewar condos in Brooklyn Heights, telegraphs both exclusivity and a veneer of normalcy. The Standish sits on a quiet but very public street. Neighbors watched the Damons use a crane to load their furniture into the penthouse, news of which was quickly spread on the Brooklyn Heights blog and \u201cPage Six.\u201d \u201cCelebrities in Brooklyn tend to be a little less precious anyway about people on the street seeing them,\u201d Rieders says. The Standish owners have to be okay with mingling with normal people on some level. You live in Brooklyn Heights so you can walk to the pharmacy and the ice-cream cart at least a few times a year. Rieders says her current seller wouldn\u2019t show me her apartment, as she was very private, but public records indicate it is Julie Burns, wife of documentarian Ken Burns, who worked for years as a social worker. She bought the two-bed in 2018 for $2.8 million. It\u2019s now going for $3.75 million.<\/p>\n After I left the Standish, I made my way to 443 Greenwich, another condo conversion of the mid 2010s, this time in North Tribeca. Like the Standish, the building, a redbrick former bookbinding factory that takes up an entire block, was painstakingly restored in 2014 to keep its 1885 historic facade. The apartments inside are expansive, with high ceilings and period details like curved stone arches and exposed beams. Owners have included Jennifer Lawrence, Harry Styles, Mike Myers, Justin Timberlake, and Lewis Hamilton. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds\u2019s current unit was the famous site where Justin Baldoni was supposedly ambushed by Taylor Swift during their battle over their movie It Ends With Us. As I walked toward the entrance, a dozen window washers hung from the landmarked exterior. This time the doorman didn\u2019t even look up when he told me I couldn\u2019t enter.<\/p>\n 443 Greenwich still looks like classic New York, especially with the cobblestone streets. Just like I felt standing in front of the Standish, I could imagine some period-specific show like The Gilded Age filming outside without having to change much, even as three Amazon Prime vans and a cybertruck idled on the block. But this building has something that the Standish definitely does not: a private underground garage accessed via two massive sets of wrought-iron gates on either side of the building. After I was rebuffed by the doorman, I watched a blacked-out SUV enter one of the swinging gates. Whoever was inside, once they disembarked, would ride up one of four private elevator banks with keyed access to specific apartments. Residents almost never have to ascend with their neighbors.<\/p>\n These amenities, geared explicitly toward privacy and security, coupled with the building\u2019s sheer size, are why 443 remains one of the most popular celebrity residences of the last decade. While famous people have superior security needs, they mostly don\u2019t have the budgets of their hedge-fund, private-equity, and tech competitors in the market. Most of them can\u2019t afford to outfit their own individual townhouses like armed fortresses as Swift has. \u201cFor someone who isn\u2019t spending $50 million on an apartment, you can drop into one of those buildings for $10 million to $25 million and you can get an exceptional experience,\u201d says Orrigo, the Compass broker, whom I called to discuss the building, where he represents several clients. 443 not only has a 24-hour doorman along with its wrought-iron gates; it also has a 24-hour concierge service, a lap pool, a Turkish bath, a sauna, a wine cellar, and a leafy internal courtyard, like its own little Gramercy Park. Even though, as Elliman broker Shaffer noted, \u201cmost celebrities don\u2019t use a full-service building\u2019s amenities. They care about the doorman and the fact that they don\u2019t have to get out of their car.\u201d You probably won\u2019t see Lively in the gym or the pool. But the driveway means she can enter and exit totally unseen by paparazzi.<\/p>\n The building is part of a boom of condo construction, including 70 Vestry and 150 Charles Street, that has turned this downtown zone along the West Side Highway into another celebrity cluster. Proximity to the highway, in fact, is an amenity. A 443 owner can zip to Teterboro in an hour. The former commercial and retail district also means the opportunity for bigger square footage. \u201cIt\u2019s away from the bustle of the West Village and tourists,\u201d Orrigo says. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to see a celebrity buy an apartment in the middle of 14th Street. And I\u2019m not seeing them in Soho anymore at all.\u201d At the same time, they are close enough to restaurants and private clubs like Zero Bond and Casa Cipriani that they can feel as in the mix as they might want to be. The only drawback to 443 seems to be that the penthouse is \u201cliterally falling apart,\u201d according to an ongoing $376 million lawsuit by the residents against the developer, MetroLoft, which claims that the ceilings leak and some of the fa\u00e7ade is crumbling. MetroLoft happens to be the same company whose midtown conversion project was recently found to be collapsing.<\/p>\n Just north and farther west of 443 Greenwich, in the no-man\u2019s-land turned real-estate marketing concept called Hudson Square, just a block up from Google\u2019s New York headquarters, is 160 Leroy, where Hailey and Justin Bieber just bought an apartment for $12 million. Michael Rubin lives in the building as well \u2014\u00a0he bought Ryan Seacrest\u2019s old place and combined it with another unit, worth over $40 million in total. It\u2019s a ten-minute walk from 443, even closer to the highway, and just past the David bar protein-ice-cream store. Trying to figure out who the other famous people are inside means combing through corporate entities like \u201cLone Ranch Leroy LLC\u201d and \u201c160 Leroy Propco LLC.\u201d As a totally new build, the \u201ccharacter\u201d of the project is in its ultra-high-end credentials \u2014\u00a0it was designed by Herzog & de Meuron and developed by Ian Schrager. Its undulating glass exterior includes a covered courtyard for cars coming right off the highway, so residents don\u2019t even have to go underground when they drive in. \u201cThere is a fundamentally different experience of pulling into a porte cochere or a courtyard than the street,\u201d Orrigo tells me. Not only does his company have its offices in 160 Leroy, but Orrigo himself bought a $7 million three-bedroom condo there in 2025: \u201cYou pull in and the gate shuts behind you and the doorman comes out and asks for your help with your bags.\u201d He just purchased a parking spot \u2014 for exactly how much he wouldn\u2019t say, but he spent a fortune. The spot originally sold for $650,000 eight years ago.<\/p>\n Without a car, the entrance to the lobby feels nearly inaccessible from the street. There is no intuitive path to take. With the massive willow tree I could see filling the courtyard, the building seemed almost like a mirage, as though I were hallucinating a spa or a hotel. Knowing there was a 75-foot saltwater pool inside added to its otherworldly aura. There will always be celebrities, I think, who want to live in a recognizable version of the city, like Emrata in Fort Greene or influencer Livvy Dunne, who tried to buy Babe Ruth\u2019s Upper East Side co-op. (She was rejected.) Amy Schumer recently bought a $6.25 million condo in a modernist 1988 building on Central Park West. Bob Odenkirk paid 10 percent over asking last year for a two-bedroom in Clinton Hill, where his neighbor Adrian Grenier famously renovated a brownstone for his mother. But 160 Leroy portends a future that stretches the definition of what constitutes New York living into hitherto-unknown territory. The newest project to come on the market (though all its listings are private), 80 Clarkson, is just a block away, and it sounds more like Singapore or Dubai than even Los Angeles. I walked over from Leroy Street to crane my neck up at its two towers, which are still under construction. The building will have an 82-foot pool, plus a squash court, plus a winter garden that is \u201cpalm tree enhanced.\u201d It will have a motor court as well as a \u201cdriver\u2019s lounge,\u201d a room for chauffeurs to wait around in so that they don\u2019t crowd the lobby. The only way a celebrity owner might know that they are in New York is if they step onto their private terrace, look across the blue water, and spot New Jersey.<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Curbed Newsletter<\/p>\n A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n