Lena Horne’s onetime Upper East Side apartment lists for $825K

Multi-hyphenate performer Lena Horne—a singer, actress, and longtime activist—lived in a few different places in New York City, including an Upper West Side co-op owned by Harry Belafonte, and a stately home in St. Albans, Queens.

But during the later part of her life, she called the Upper East Side’s former Volney Hotel home; Horne assembled five apartments into one sprawling home base, and held onto the properties until her death in 2010.

Now, one of those apartments—an approximately 900-square-foot one-bedroom pad, which Horne used as an office—has hit the market, asking $825,000 (it’s listed with Douglas Elliman’s Tamer Howard). Her daughter, Gail Buckley, gave the Wall Street Journal a peek inside the space, which has stayed within the family since Horne’s death. Buckley still lives in the unit that was Horne’s main residence; two other apartments sold in 2014 for just over $1 million, according to the WSJ.

The fifth-floor unit has some nice features, including beamed ceilings, built-in bookshelves, and hardwood floors. But the listing does note that the apartment “needs some TLC,” and indeed, there are some drawbacks—the biggest being the lack of a real kitchen, though there’s some room to work with if a buyer wanted to add one in.

Whether or not that will deter someone who’d want to live in the home of a musical icon remains to be seen—and hey, it’s still an Upper East Side pad less than a block from Central Park for under $1 million.

• Listing: 23 East 74th Street #5G [Elliman]
• New York Apartment Owned by Lena Horne Hits Market for $825,000 [WSJ]