House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World's Most Powerful Address

America€s foremost chronicler of the .01 % and bestselling author of 740 Park reveals the social drama and absorbing business saga of Manhattan€s record-setting address.

In real estate€“obsessed New York, no new building has captured the city€s imagination€"or as many of its richest residents€"as Fifteen Central Park West.

In House of Outrageous Fortune, America€s foremost chronicler of the upper crust, journalist and bestselling author Michael Gross, turns his gimlet eye on the new-money wonderland that€s sprung up on the southwest rim of Central Park. Mixing an absorbing business epic with hilarious social comedy, Gross creates a dishy expos© of today€s wealthiest and most famous. This colorful story recounts the recordsetting building€s inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially d©class© Manhattan neighborhood.

With two concierge-staffed lobbies, a walnut-lined library, a lavish screening room, a private sixty-seat restaurant offering residents room service, a health club complete with a seventy-foot swimming pool, and penthouses that cost almost $100 million, Fifteen is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century. And any building that€s home to such unimaginable wealth and heavyweight egos€"its cast of characters includes Denzel Washington, Sting, Alex Rodriguez, Norman Lear, NASCAR€s Jeff Gordon, hedge fund heads Daniel Loeb and Daniel Och, Russian and Chinese oligarchs, and top executives of Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, AIG, Disney, Google, and Yahoo!, among many more€"will be chock-full of jaw-dropping excess.

Gross won unprecedented access to the people behind this instantly legendary building, including the scions of the fabled Zeckendorf real estate dynasty; their financial backers, Goldman Sachs and Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer; and their €œstarchitect,€ Robert A. M. Stern. Then he drilled past its limestone fa§ade to ferret out the stories Fifteen€s fathers and its residents don€t want told.

More than just an apartment building, 15CPW represents a massive paradigm shift in the lifestyle of New York€s rich and famous€"and is a bellwether of the city€s changing social and financial landscape. With its dazzling detail, House of Outrageous Fortune is a sweeping history of those changes, and it pulls open wide the gilded walls of Fifteen to reveal the private lives of that .01 percent.