Her nickname now is “The Queen of New York Real Estate,” but Barbara Corcoran was still on a pauper’s budget the day she saw the penthouse that would become her home.
It was 1992, and Ms. Corcoran, the founder of Corcoran Realty, was pinching pennies. To make ends meet, she had picked up a side hustle delivering letters for a messenger service. On one errand, she took an envelope to the top floor of a building at Fifth Avenue and 97th Street. Stepping off the elevator into the apartment, she glimpsed past a pair of French doors to see a lush terrace with sweeping views of Central Park.
“I thought, my god, I’ve never seen anything as beautiful in my life,” said Ms. Corcoran, 76.
Ms. Corcoran, an avid gardener, has filled her rooftop terrace with plants.
In a story she’s now retold enough to make it real estate lore (including in The New York Times), Ms. Corcoran handed the envelope to the home’s owner and asked her to please call her should she ever put the home on the market.
More than 20 years later, her phone rang.
When Ms. Corcoran moved in, she opted to flip the upstairs and downstairs floor plans, bringing a chef’s kitchen to the roof, adjacent to her terrace and greenhouse.
In 2015, Ms. Corcoran, a star investor on the reality TV show “Shark Tank” and now in a much more comfortable financial position, paid $10 million for the unit. It was a price she was happy to pay, she said in an interview, because of its two best features: its location and its views.
