Joan Rivers's House (former)

Joan Rivers was a Brooklyn-born comedian who broke through on The Tonight Show in 1965 and became Johnny Carson’s first permanent guest host. Her career ran more than 5 decades, until her death in 2014 at 81.

The limestone house went up from 1903 to 1905 to a neo-French Classic design by Horace Trumbauer. City landmark records name Alice Drexel, not her husband John, as its developer.

A 1938 conversion turned the 40-room mansion into apartments and swapped its mansard roof for a 3-story modernist addition, according to Daytonian in Manhattan. The French oak paneling moved upstairs, into what became the penthouse.

Rivers took title in February 1988, about a year after the building’s condominium declaration was filed. City deed records show 2 purchases that month from separate sellers: the penthouse and a lower-floor unit.

On Celebrity Ghost Stories, Rivers said a former resident haunted the apartment. She said New York University’s parapsychology department sent her to a Louisiana voodoo priestess, who told her to keep flowers in the ballroom.

Long before Rivers, Ernest Hemingway leased an apartment in the building in fall 1959, according to Daytonian in Manhattan. He struggled to write there, left New York, and died in Idaho in 1961.

Melissa Rivers and a co-trustee sold both units to one LLC in June 2015, and the press’s single price is the sum of 2 deeds. The New York Post named the buyer as Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Fahd, per 6sqft.