Supermodel Evangelista lists penthouse for about $9.5 million

Supermodel Linda Evangelista — who was the face of high-profile brands including Versace, Armani and Ferragamo over a high-wattage, seemingly-everywhere-at-once career — is marketing something of her own.

Evangelista has listed her four-bedroom penthouse in West Chelsea near the High Line for just under $9.5 million, according to a listing that appeared Wednesday.

The 4,000-square-foot condo at 525 W. 22nd St., a SIX-story converted furniture warehouse near 10th Avenue, features two baths, exposed brick walls in the pass-through kitchen and a dressing room packed with six custom-built closets. There’s also a peek of a High Line view from the primary suite.

Evangelista — who like Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell was a ubiquitous sight in the 1980s and 1990s at fashion shows, on billboards and in glossy magazines such as Vogue — bought the apartment in 2001 for $8.4 million, a price that included a storage space, according to a deed in the city register.

It’s unclear whether the current listing includes the storage area. Carlos Garcia, the Compass broker representing the property, did not respond to a request for comment.

Evangelista seems to be just the second-ever owner of the penthouse, which is part of a 30-unit, 1893 building with a roof deck and lined with 160,000 square feet of art galleries that was developed by the firm Savanna in 1996.

Evangelista — who retired from modeling years ago but made a splashy appearance at this month’s Met Gala, her first time at the celebrity-studded Manhattan charity event in nine years, according to Vogue, — was a bit of a trailblazer on West 22nd.

Though the block’s prewar former industrial buildings hummed with popular art galleries by 2001 — the Dia Art Foundation opened at No. 548 in 1987, ushering in a parade of similar places to appreciate paintings and sculpture — the High Line then was little more than a weedy and desolate former train track. And apartments, not to mention luxury developers, were few and far between, though the neighborhood teems with flashy high-rises today. The first leg of the High Line park, meanwhile, opened in 2009.

Greenery, glitz and popularity weren’t enough to prevent the area from struggling a bit in the pandemic, however. Indeed, COVID, and the shutdowns that it prompted, caused a drop-off in visitors to the area and led to some of No. 525’s galleries becoming vacant.

Savanna, which has owned the spaces since redeveloping No. 525 in the 1990s, apparently responded to the problem by slashing retail rents to attract replacements.

But cutting the rental income undermined Savanna’s ability to pay back a $14 million mortgage, according to the ratings service Moody’s, and a special servicer assumed control of the foreclosure-threatened loan last fall.