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Hitmaker Roberta Flack Asks $9.5M For Her Dakota Apartment

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Grammy-winning singer Roberta Flack is the latest bold-faced name to leave the storied (and scandal-ridden, and haunted) Dakota building. Flack, who has lived in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with 72nd Street views for some four decades, just tossed it on the market with a $9.5 million price tag. First reported by the Daily News, the listing sadly lacks interior photos, but does have some colorful descriptions of the decor. Think two wood-burning fireplaces, arched windows, original moldings, and tons of closets. As the brokerbabble proclaims, "A rare chance to acquire a historic residence, in a legendary building, from an Iconic Star. Apartment 78—granduer with 40 years of musical genius having filled these rooms."

Flack is one of many celebrities who have called the Dakota home; John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Leonard Bernstein, and Lauren Bacall are others. Flack apparently lived across the hall from Lennon and Ono, and she released a Beatles cover album in 2012.

"This building is chockablock full of famous people," Roberta Flack told the Times in 2010. "Most artists like myself tend to keep to themselves."

The late Lauren Bacall's apartment is also on the market, asking $23.5 million. Unlike with Flack's enigmatic place, there are copious photos of Bacall's apartment filled with her eclectic, artsy possessions.

Flack's decades at the Dakota weren't without a bit of drama. In 2011, hedge funder Alphonse "Buddy" Fletcher Jr. sued the co-op board for racism, which included charges that members were "[c]ontinually forbidding black singer Roberta Flack from installing a new bathtub and forcing her to take her dog up to her apartment in a service elevator, which no-one else has to do." (Other tenants disputed these claims.)

It's really a bummer that there are no interior photos, especially because then we could confirm or dispel the veracity of these comments by a Curbed reader in 2012: "Over the decades too many units were 'modernized' and these units, while attractive in their day, quickly became dated and proved hard to sell. Roberta Flack most notoriously ripped out every piece of original woodwork, dropped all the ceilings to like 8-feet, and painted everything white. The unit was cool... for about ten minutes, and Flack later stated that she must have been out of her mind to destroy such beauty."

It's unclear how much Flack paid for the apartment; the earliest city real estate records for the unit are from 2003 and don't indicate any dollar value for a transaction.
· Listing: 1 West 72nd Street #78 [Town via StreetEasy]
· Legendary singer Roberta Flack wants to sell her apartment at the famous Dakota building for $9.5M [Curbed]
· Dakota Co-op Board Accused of Being a Bunch of Racists [Curbed]
· All Dakota coverage [Curbed]

The Dakota

629 U.S. 190, , LA 70433 Visit Website