242 East 49th is one of the nicest homes on one of the world’s loveliest blocks of townhouses, and for that reason — and its proximity to Broadway — it’s been home to reams of celebrities. The actor Ruth Gordon, now best known for playing the elder matron with a macabre edge in Harold and Maude and Rosemary’s Baby, bought the place thanks to her friend Katharine Hepburn, whose best roles Gordon wrote with her husband, Garson Kanin. Later, they’d rent the place out to Mike Nichols, who installed the home’s intercom; Mary Tyler Moore, who adapted one room to use as a dance studio; and Franco Zeffirelli, who turned a bedroom into a study to work on operas at the Met. But their longest tenant would be Bob Dylan, who lived there when he had young kids and must have liked the place, as he eventually bought it for himself.
The five-story townhouse sits on one of two rows that make up Turtle Bay Gardens, a 1920s project built by an eccentric female developer around a shared private garden wedged between Second and Third Avenues, on 48th and 49th Streets. By chance, its nicest homes are on the 49th Street side: Developer Charlotte Sorchan turned the two homes at the western end of that row into a double-wide mansion with a double-high ballroom and a private garage. (That one eventually sold to Mary-Kate Olsen, who staged her cigarette-bowl-filled wedding there, then resold to an entrepreneur, who is in the middle of a major renovation.) Two doors down, Stephen Sondheim’s former house preserves some of the garden’s best details — arched entries and stained-glass windows. But 242 East 49th is a real contender for the third-nicest home in the gardens, thanks to a living area that backs onto the garden with three French doors that lead onto a second-floor terrace that spans the width of the home — the only terrace like it in the gardens, and the ideal breakfast spot.
Details:
Price: $7.25 million ($6,197 in monthly taxes)
Specs: 5 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms
Extras: Walled yard accessible only to the owners, plus access to the larger, shared private garden; 19-foot-wide terrace on the parlor level and off the fifth-floor primary bedroom suite; cellar with laundry and storage
Ten-minute walking radius: P.J. Clarke’s, Katharine Hepburn Garden, Japan Society
Listed by: Lisa Larson, Sotheby’s International Realty
Neighbors remember seeing Dylan and his wife Sara Lowndes spending time back there and in the garden in the 1980s, when they rented from Kanin. He bought in 1990 under his manager’s name. The family appreciated the place as a hideout, remembered Dylan’s local fix-it-man at the time, Michael Leshner. “It was a time when Bob was being very private and the kids were young,” he said. “He didn’t want anyone messing with his kids, and he lived a little bit like a hermit for a number of years. He wasn’t performing.” Leshner remembered driving Dylan around in a beat-up car he liked because the press didn’t know about it. The garden’s handyman of four decades, Jesus Rodriguez, recalled being asked to install a screen door off the kitchen, because Dylan liked to be able to hear people on the street.
The house rarely traded hands: After Gordon died, Kanin owned it until 1990, when he sold to Dylan, who then sold to a property group in 2005. That group might be affiliated with the property group that took over in 2016, meaning it could have had only three owners in 70 years. It’s now on the market for $7.25 million — which might be a stretch. The Sondheim house, at 246, is grander and closed earlier this year at $7 million. Still, it has what seem to be the original arched entrances from room to room and what looks to be the original flooring, plus some nice updates: endless built-in bookshelves on the parlor-level study and a kitchen and bathrooms that appear to date after the Dylan era.
Plus, there’s one major improvement — an elevator — which would have charmed the author Kati Marton, who rented from the Gordon-Kanins in 1983 when her husband, Peter Jennings, got the news anchor job at ABC. “My most vivid memory is endlessly going up and down stairs,” she said, remembering bedrooms on the higher levels, a kitchen on the ground floor, and the exhaustion of rushing to the doorbell at parties. “I would spend the whole evening running up and down.”