Troubled Upper East Side building that sought demolition returns for $39M

One of the Upper East Side’s most troubled buildings is trying its luck again, and this time around developers are marketing it as a massive, 12-story, single family mansion. The sales saga of 807 Park Avenue has been going on for over a decade now.

Sean Combs a.k.a. Diddy purchased this building, located between East 74th and 75th Streets on Park Avenue in 1999 for $12 million—that was a year after he’d lived in one of the apartments there. Diddy too had megamansion aspirations for the building, but decided to abandon them, and put the 12-story structure on the market the following year.

It wasn’t until 2004 however that Diddy managed to unload the building—it sold to Aion Partners for $14.3 million. Aion reconfigured the building into three four-story condos asking between $12 million and $16 million. That didn’t really work out, so Aion tried to renovate the building yet again—by demolishing the entire structure, and building from scratch. The city’s Landmarks Commission however did not sign off on the proposal, and the saga continued to drag on.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2015 that Landmarks finally okayed Aion’s revised proposal, which agreed to keep parts of this 1899 structure intact. Plans called for the building to be reconfigured into two triplex units and three duplex units.

You’d think that would be the last of it for 807 Park Avenue, but it doesn’t end there. After all of that back and forth, Aion decided to put the entire building on the market for $30 million last March. A year later, the building has now returned, and it has upped its ask to $39 million. Will someone finally take the bait on this property?

• Listing: 807 Park Avenue [Stribling]
• Makeover Planned, Yet Again, for Cursed Park Avenue Building [Curbed]
• Diddy's Old Upper East Side Mansion Will Hit the Market For $30M [Curbed]