Our hopeful link to chic New York landmark

OPINION:Nationalised Anglo Irish Bank loaned $385 million to the owners of the Apthorp building in Manhattan, ANN MARIE HOURIHANE.

JUST WHEN you think you’ve got the recession covered it jumps out at you from round another corner. There is a row going on in New York about the Apthorp building. You may not have heard of the Apthorp building – and I have never been there myself – but, as receptionists and taoisigh say, bear with me. We will learn more, going forward.

The Apthorp building is a huge and very chic block of apartments on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was built by the Astor family in 1908 and modelled on the Pitti Palace in Florence. The Apthorp, in these troubled times, seems like exactly the type of place that makes New York so romantic and glamorous. According to the New York Times, Apthorp residents have included Al Pacino, Conan O'Brien, Rosie O'Donnell and Nora Ephron.

The greatest of these is Nora Ephron, the woman who wrote the book and the film Heartburn, and also the film Silkwood. Also the film When Harry Met Sally.

Personally, I love the film Heartburn, which tells the story of the break-up of Ephron's marriage to the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, played in the film by Jack Nicholson (Ephron was played by Meryl Streep).

If you’ve seen this movie then you have seen the Apthorp building, because its lovely courtyard is in one of the scenes later in the film, when the heartbroken heroine moves back to New York with her small children.

Ephron has described how, when she saw the Apthorp, in February 1980, she fell in love with it. In her latest collection of journalism, I Feel Bad About My Neck, she devotes an entire essay to her history at the Apthorp.

She took a five-bedroomed apartment on the fifth floor. Her sister moved into the Apthorp. Her friend Rosie O’Donnell, the actress and talk show host, also moved to the building, and had the Apthorp’s doorman as a guest on her TV show.

Ephron lived there for 10 years. During that time, she says, the real estate boom had begun in New York and: “There were one-room apartments in Manhattan renting for $2,000 a month. I was paying the same amount for eight rooms. I felt like a genius.”

The Apthorp was so lovely that it inspired envy in everyone. Ephron describes how a New York cop was called in to settle a physical dispute between two Apthorp residents, a professor and an accountant.

The New York cop shook his head in disbelief and said: “Why can’t you people get along? I would kill to live in this building.”

Ephron knew she was lucky. “Just living there made me feel virtuous and brainy,” she says, adding that she lived there “in a state of giddy delirium”. And indeed it seems that the Apthorp embodied a golden way of life in New York, the type of life that we only get to see at the movies. But the sharks were circling. New owners were determined to tart up the Apthorp. Movie stars moved in. Ephron and her sister and, presumably, Rosie O’Donnell, the professor and the accountant, moved out.

Now about half of the apartments in the Apthorp are lying empty, according to the New York Times. Here is the second paragraph of that newspaper's report on the current dispute:

“But today, the Apthorp on the Upper West Side stands as a cautionary tale in messy condo conversions, with ambitious plans that have soured, a bitter dispute among owners and the looming threat of foreclosure.

“At the moment, the owners cannot even agree on whether, if the case comes to arbitration, to use Orthodox or Conservative rabbis.” (New York Times, January 13th, 2009).

The Apthorp was bought by investors in 2006. There appear to be two mortgages on the property and, at the time the New York Timesreport was written, one lender, Apollo Real Estate Advisors, was pushing to settle the internal dispute which has arisen between the owners.

You may wonder what on earth any of this has to do with people who do not love Ephron, or New York.

The thing is that the other lender, the provider of the first mortgage to buy the Apthorp, is Anglo Irish Bank. Anglo Irish loaned the owners of the Apthorp $385 million. So it says in the New York Times.

I call that interesting, on a whole lot of levels. Although there is no implication that the owners of the Apthorp have ever missed a payment on their mortgage, in these times anything could happen.

Anglo Irish Bank has been nationalised. Which means we, the people of Ireland, now own Anglo Irish Bank. And if we own Anglo Irish it means that one day, conceivably, we could have dibs on the Apthorp. Maybe we could go to the Apthorp, and hang out. We could take it in turns. This is the most exciting thing to have emerged from the recession so far.

As Randolph Churchill remarked on reading the Bible, “Why did no one tell me about this before?” But actually they did tell me; all this happened a month ago.

There’s so much recession out there it’s hard to keep up.