The anonymous new owner of an Upper East Side mansion built for the Vanderbilt family wants to convert it back to a single-family residence after it spent decades as an embassy and school building, according to plans filed with New York City this month.
The 18,000-square-foot home at 60 East 93rd St., between Madison and Park avenues, was built in 1930 to house the family and servants of Virginia Graham Fair Vanderbilt. After 1957, the limestone home became the Romanian Permanent Mission to the United Nations, then was purchased in the 1970s by the Lycée Français de New York, which used the top floor as an apartment for the school’s director.
The school sold the home for $10.6 million in 2002 to the antiques dealer Carlton Hobbs, who lived in the top-floor apartment and used the rest of the extravagant space to showcase his wares to moneyed clients. One decorator described a visit to the home as “breathtaking” in a 2008 New York Times article.
Hobbs sold the home for $52.5 million in July 2022 to a buyer listed under an anonymous LLC. That buyer is now asking the city for a special permit to renovate the home and restore “its original use as a single- family residence,” the application reads.
As part of the project, the unidentified owner pledged to bring the now-vacant home back “to a sound first-class condition.”
The owner needs no permission for the residential expansion, since it is already zoned as a home. But since the building is both an individual landmark and sits in a historic district, the City Planning Commission must sign off on aspects of the 93-year-old building that do not comply with current zoning for single-family homes, like its shallow rear yard.
The mansion was designed by the architect John Russell Pope, known for the Jefferson Memorial and main entrance hall to the American Museum of Natural History. Its street frontage measures 57 feet, an unusually large width for a residence in the middle of Manhattan.
Its $52.5 million sale last year was among New York City’s biggest in 2022, trailing only two other Upper East Side townhomes and a handful of high-rise apartments and penthouses.