Ninety Feet Deep: An Ode to a Composer’s Upper East Side Townhouse

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Corcoran / The James Weiss Team

Begin in the library at the front of 163 East 64th Street, with your back to the street. The eye keeps going, ninety feet, past the bar and the music room to the far end of the dining room in one unbroken line. No other house on the block lets you do this. The rest stop at fifty feet. This one runs nearly twice as deep, drawn by the architect John G. Prague in 1872, before the zoning that would forbid it ever existed.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Corcoran / The James Weiss Team

It has been the home of Kenneth Laub, who spent a career in commercial real estate and now gives his days to composing. He is selling, at $17 million through the James Weiss Team at Corcoran, to live smaller and write.

The room people remember is the bar: a floor of original Pusey woodwork, a counter of Belle Epoque American walnut, and two stories overhead, a Lalique glass ceiling figured as the universe, so that on a bright afternoon the whole room fills with broken color. Beside it is the music room Laub built for himself, a grand piano at its center and the Fragonard panels from the Frick copied onto the walls. A note struck here travels the full ninety feet.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Corcoran / The James Weiss Team

The dining room keeps an eighteenth-century Provencal tapestry, woven in the 1750s and restored thread by thread by conservators from the Met. The library wears the pine paneling milled for it when the house was new. The chandeliers on this floor alone come to more than a million dollars, and four more hang above, French and Venetian and Russian. All told, some $3.5 million in antiques, beneath twelve-and-a-half-foot ceilings, across eight thousand square feet.

The raked limestone and brick of the facade were restored by a craftsman who had worked on the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. R.D. Graham reshaped Prague’s structure into its Neo-Georgian form, and the designer Ronald Bricke shaped the interiors.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Corcoran / The James Weiss Team

If the parlor floor is the house’s memory, the second floor is its voice. Laub ran sound through the entire level and built it to hold a hundred and fifty people, microphones and recording ready, so an evening could become a performance and be kept. Bob Hope came through. So did Liza Minnelli, who held her engagement party here, along with Alan Thicke, Clint Holmes, Mayor David Dinkins, and others from real estate, theatre, and the arts.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Corcoran / The James Weiss Team

Above sit five bedrooms, eight fireplaces, and a private elevator to every floor. But the room to love most may be the one with no roof. The fourth-floor terrace is paved in bluestone and green marble, with an electric blanket beneath the stone that melts the snow where it lands, so Laub can grill in the dead of winter while the city goes white around him. From there the house looks out over its neighbors on 64th and 65th, the late David Rockefeller’s among them.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Corcoran / The James Weiss Team

And then there is the thing the house cannot hide, because it stands beside it. 165 East 64th is for sale too, at $18.5 million, so a single buyer could take both and make them one. Madonna did a version of it nearby. So did Michael Bloomberg. But two neighbors like these, free at the same moment, on a street like this, is luck that visits a buyer perhaps once.

Laub is trading all of it for a smaller life and a piano. What goes on the market is not really a property. It is decades of warmth someone built on purpose. Somewhere is the buyer who will walk in, feel its length open before them, and know at once they will not leave.

Disclaimer: Written in partnership with APG.