I'll Take Fifth Avenue, Too

By Wei Min Tan of Castle Avenue Partners

Take advantage of the recession, and snap up a Fifth Avenue apartment in New York. That's a common goal among many of our high net-worth clients, especially during the past year. So what is Fifth Avenue and why is it so coveted?

Fifth Avenue in Manhattan stretches from Washington Square Park to 142nd Street. The high-end retail stores -- Prada, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Saks(SKS) -- line Fifth Avenue between 49th and 60th Streets. At 60th Street, there's a flagship Apple(AAPL) store, an FAO Schwarz toy store, and across from it, on the west side of Fifth Avenue, The Plaza hotel.

The Trump Tower, made famous in The Apprentice on NBC, is on this stretch as well.

CB Richard Ellis, in a report released Friday, says that New York remains the most expensive retail space in the world, at $1,725 a square foot. The Big Apple is followed by Sydney, Hong Kong and London.

Fifth Avenue combines the best of city, country (Central Park) and culture. It can feel like Paris at night because of how quiet it becomes. The most prestigious section of Fifth Avenue is the stretch facing Central Park on the Upper East Side. Within this section, the ones facing the Central Park reservoir are perhaps the most expensive.

In the late 19th and 20th centuries, mansions were built for the Astors, Vanderbilts, Post, Hutton and Carnegie. The Andrew Carnegie house at 2 East 91 St. was converted to the Cooper Hewitt Museum.

Apartment-living only became acceptable for the wealthy after 1910. That was when architects like Roasario Candela, Emery Roth and James Carpenter built grand apartments on Fifth Avenue. Those apartments feature high ceilings, fireplaces, grand stairways and huge rooms.

820 Fifth Ave. in New York

Most apartments on Fifth Avenue are pre-war co-ops. The most notable is perhaps 820 Fifth Ave., which has only 12 floors with one apartment per floor --probably one of the grandest addresses in the world. The most recent transaction was the 12th floor, which sold for $40 million in 2009. To be a resident at one of these ultra prestigious buildings often requires an all-cash purchase, social and business references, and even liquid assets upwards of $100 million.

Within the past few years, new condo buildings were built on Fifth Avenue in the 1930s and 1940s, including 425 Fifth Ave. Designed by Michael Graves, 425 Fifth currently starts at $700,000 for a studio and goes up to $2.5 million for a high-floor, two-bedroom apartment.