A co-op once owned by the late socialite Lee Radziwill hit the market asking just under $17 million.
The duplex at 969 Fifth Avenue last traded more than two decades ago, when Suzanne von Liebig, the wife of the late inventor and philanthropist William von Liebig, purchased it for $7.6 million, according to the listing broker, Adam Modlin of the Modlin Group.
Von Liebig renovated the apartment, which spans the fifth and sixth floors of the building between East 77th and East 78th streets, before moving in in early 2004. Modlin said she has “maintained it at a high level,” including painting the property and redoing the floors before listing it.
Modlin called the co-op a “rare gem,” with every room in the apartment overlooking Fifth Avenue, Central Park or the James B. Duke Mansion, a townhouse commissioned by the tobacco heir for his wife in the early 20th century.
The 4,600-square-foot home, which was featured in Architectural Digest in 1975, has three bedrooms and four bathrooms and features a wood-paneled library, eat-in kitchen and a private elevator. It’s one of 12 units in the pre-war building, which includes private storage and full-time doormen.
Born Caroline Lee Radziwill, the younger sister of Jackie Onassis was an interior designer, socialite and public relations executive known for her friendships with artist Andy Warhol, writer Truman Capote, members of the Rolling Stones and designer Giorgio Armani. She was married three times, to publishing executive Michael Temple Canfield, the Polish Prince Stanislaw Radziwill and filmmaker Herbert Ross.
Radziwill owned homes across Manhattan, London and Paris, including another Upper East Side apartment. In 2019, about eight months after her death, her 15th-floor co-op on East 72nd Street sold for $4.25 million.
Other units in the building have traded for more modest sums, at least in the years since the city began recording deals in its online database. One co-op on the 11th and 12th floors broke with the norm in 2008, when it sold for more than $16 million. The apartment hit the market four years later with an asking price of roughly $26 million, where it endured multiple price cuts and languished for more than a decade. It finally sold last year for $6.5 million.
A duplex on the first and second floors sold last year for $3 million. The three-bedroom apartment belonged to the late architect Henry Cobb, known for designing the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Battery Park City, who lived there with his late wife, sculptor Joan Cobb, starting in the 1960s until their deaths in 2020 and 2022, respectively.
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