Where Erin Burnett Lives: An Upper West Side Rental Tower and Its Block

Erin Burnett has anchored CNN's 7 p.m. hour since October 3, 2011, the night Erin Burnett OutFront first aired. People who search for her house usually picture something she bought. The public record points somewhere else. The apartment on our file sits in a 30-story rental tower on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and nobody in that building owns their home. One company owns all of it, and that company's name ran through the Albany corruption trials of Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos.

A word on what this page is. We have not been inside her apartment, and we know of no published photographs of it, so we do not describe the unit. What follows is what the city's own records say about the building, the landlord, and the ground under both.

The exact address is the part we keep behind the ropes. For the property record and the map pin, see Erin Burnett's New York home profile on Velvet Ropes.

She has been an Upper West Sider since at least 2007. A trade profile from that June, written when she was still co-hosting Squawk on the Street at CNBC, noted that she unwinds "in her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side." Whether that was this apartment, the record does not say.

A tower from the rental boom

The city's land-use file dates the building to 2005 and counts 30 stories and 229 apartments. It also classes the whole tower as an elevator rental building with stores, carried as a single tax lot with no condominium units. In plain terms, there is no apartment here for a resident to buy. One owner holds the building and leases every unit, which is why no deed anywhere carries a tenant's name, hers included. Glenwood Management, the landlord, lists the tower among its properties, and the owner of record on the city's tax roll is a limited liability company.

The Department of Buildings file shows how it got there. A new-building application went in on January 17, 2002, for a 30-story tower of 229 apartments, 339 feet tall, and the city approved it on February 6, 2003. Demolition filings from the same winter took down the two buildings that had stood on the site, one six stories tall and its neighbor five. Both had outlived the great clearance of the 1950s by more than four decades. The tower replaced them.

The developer's architect

The architect of record on that 2002 filing is David West, who at the time was a partner at Costas Kondylis and Partners. The firm's project list credits it with this Glenwood tower.

The New York Times called Kondylis the go-to architect in a high-rise town, the man developers phoned when a residential tower had to pencil out. The paper counted 65 buildings from his office between 2000 and 2007, about one every six weeks, including Trump World Tower and the Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle, a short walk south of the tower. He never pretended to be chasing prizes. "My concern is to create value for the developer, because they're my clients," he once said, and the Times noted that his buildings won few critical plaudits and caused few headaches for the people who paid for them. He died on August 17, 2018, at 78.

That is the building in a sentence: a no-surprises rental tower from one of the busiest residential architects of the 2000s boom, put up for a landlord that knew Albany well.

The landlord in the Albany trials

Glenwood started in 1933 as a tree nursery on Long Island, run by the father of Leonard Litwin, who later built the company into a Manhattan landlord with more than two dozen buildings. Its business leaned on state law. The federal appeals court that heard Sheldon Silver's first appeal described Glenwood as a developer that "depended heavily on favorable state legislation, including rent regulation and tax abatement legislation."

It also gave generously to the people who wrote that legislation. A Common Cause study found $12.8M in Glenwood political donations from 2005 to 2014, and about 90 percent of those dollars came through limited liability companies registered to Glenwood or using its office address. That was the LLC loophole. New York treated each LLC as if it were a separate person, so one company controlling dozens of them could give the legal maximum to the same candidate over and over.

Then came the trials. In 1997, according to the appeals court, Assembly Speaker Silver steered Glenwood to Goldberg & Iryami, a small law firm that fought property-tax assessments, and took a quarter of what the firm earned from Glenwood's work. His first conviction was vacated in 2017, he was convicted again at retrial, and on July 20, 2020, he was resentenced to six and a half years. The New York Daily News reported that the roughly $800,000 in fees at the heart of the scheme came mainly from Glenwood. In the separate trial of Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, NY1 reported that Glenwood had gotten his son a job. Skelos was convicted too. No one at Glenwood was criminally charged.

In 2019 the legislature closed the loophole. The law signed that year makes every LLC that gives to a campaign name its owners, and counts its gifts against their personal limits.

One detail from our own pull of the city's assessment rolls belongs here. The tax break NY1 tied most closely to Glenwood's lobbying, known as 421-a, lets a new rental building pay reduced property tax for years after it opens. This tower's final rolls for the 2017 to 2018 and 2018 to 2019 tax years show no exemption on the building at all.

The neighborhood Lincoln Center replaced

Before Lincoln Center, this stretch of the West Side had another name. San Juan Hill ran from roughly 57th Street to 72nd, a crowded, working-class neighborhood of Black families from across the country and the Caribbean, Puerto Rican families, and European immigrants. Lincoln Center's own history of the place counts Thelonious Monk and James P. Johnson among its musicians.

In the 1950s the city marked it for urban renewal. The Lincoln Square plan displaced more than 7,000 families and 800 businesses, demolished hundreds of buildings, and replaced them with the superblocks that hold Lincoln Center, Fordham University, and the Lincoln Towers apartments. On May 14, 1959, President Eisenhower broke ground for Lincoln Center and called it an approach to "one of the Nation's pressing problems: urban blight."

The rubble had one more use. In August 1960, the demolition site served as an outdoor soundstage for the film of West Side Story, a musical set in the same neighborhood that was being knocked down around the dancers.

The commute

When OutFront launched, CNN's New York newsroom sat in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, a few blocks from the tower. The network began broadcasting from Hudson Yards on May 6, 2019. As of September 2026 the show still airs weeknights at 7 p.m., and we have found no reputable report that Burnett has moved.

More New York front doors

Another cable anchor's New York story runs through a West Village co-op; read it in the Rachel Maddow house piece. For how we decide which addresses to publish and which to keep behind the ropes, see celebrity addresses.