One of Manhattan’s last Gilded Age mansions relists for $50M after fire
A Gilded Age mansion owned by the five successor states of the former Yugoslavia is back on the market following a devastating 2018 fire.
The six-story Beaux Arts house at 854 Fifth Ave. is now priced at $50 million, the same amount it listed for in fall 2018, just two months before the fire broke out.
In 2017, it first hit the market for that same $50 million sum.
The building has served as the office for Serbia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations.
The property, located between East 66th and East 67th streets, features bulletproof windows that face Central Park. It’s where Josip Broz Tito, the late head of Yugoslavia’s socialist federal republic, hid out following an assassination attempt against him at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in 1963.
The 30-foot-wide building was inspired by the Palace of Versailles in France, says listing broker Tristan Harper, of Douglas Elliman.
Unlike other Fifth Avenue mansions, this one comes with a metal-padded room with a Faraday cage — an enclosure that blocks electromagnetic fields — where diplomats met during the Cold War to evade wire taps.
Yugoslavia’s five successor states — Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia — still fight over the mansion, sources say.
854 Fifth Ave. was built in 1905 for R. Livingston Beeckman, a New York stockbroker who later became governor of Rhode Island. It was later owned by the granddaughter of railroad titan Cornelius Vanderbilt — Emily Thorn Vanderbilt Sloane White — who added angel frescoes to the ceilings and gilded cherubs to the ceiling moldings.
The property features details like hand-carved balustrades made of white marble, 17 fireplaces and an original oven that still works.
While the mansion has been renovated since the fire, it is still without modern-day features like central air conditioning. The fire only impacted the third floor, so that’s where the renovation occurred, Harper says.
“The rest was thoroughly cleaned, restored and painted — and brought back to its original glory,” says Harper, adding that the parts of the facade damaged during the fire are being restored with matching stone and carvings, per approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission.