...from a well-connected New York City snitch—let's call her Anna F. Laxis—that recently retired chat show queen turned struggling television network owner Oprah Winfrey has been peeping posh apartments and pricey penthouses on the Upper West Side for possible purchase as a pied-a-terre.
Miss Fabrique, who has many times provided Your Mama with dead-on accurate celebrity real estate scuttlebutt, wasn't specific as to Miz Winfrey's price range or list of desirable features but did whisper that the self-made multi-media billionairess went for a look-see at at least one expensive apartment at the storied Apthorp building on West End Avenue.
Anyone who cares an eeny-weeny whit about New York City real estate knows the Apthorp is a hulking and imposing, Renaissance Revival-style pre-war pile that occupies an entire city block and has a long history of celebrity residents including Al Pacino, Conan O'Brien, Cyndi Lauper, Rosie O'Donnell, 60 Minutes journalist Steve Kroft and Nora Ephron who wrote a long, bleating paean to her real estate love affair with the building published in The New Yorker.
The full-service building, built around a massive, landscaped courtyard/motor court with a stately, three-floor high rusticated limestone base, was a luxurious but somewhat bedraggled rental property until 2008 when—much to the angry tirades of many–the building went condo, super high-end condo where current asking prices for the largest apartments hovers around $2,400 per square foot.
A couple weeks ago Your Mama discussed some of Miz Winfrey's most recent real estate activities that include (re-)listing a co-operative in a dignified Beaux-Arts building in Chicago—it's now in escrow or contract or whatever they do in Chicago—and continuing to spend tens of millions buying up of property around her secluded and sprawling, multi-residence ranch-compound on the Hawaiian island of Maui. We've also heard she might like a place to rest her head in Los Angeles where her OWN offices are located but we don't have any current intel on that situation.