The library, as seen in listing photos, has views of Central Park from its picture windows, as do many of the other entertaining rooms in the grand apartment.
Photo: Donna Dotan/Compass
Anne Hendricks Bass, the philanthropist and arts patron who died in 2020, was known for being rigorous and exacting in all that she did: from the thrice-weekly ballet classes she took until the end of her life to the extensive knowledge of horticulture she deployed at her Litchfield estate, where she could identify all 140 varieties of roses in her garden by their Latin names. Her longtime apartment, a 16-room spread on the 12th floor of 960 Fifth, was characteristically impeccable, with paintings by Rothko and a Little Dancer sculpture by Degas (which sold at auction after her death for a record $41.6 million), ceiling lights in the dining room arranged to look like a starry-night sky, and sweeping views of Central Park from the 36-foot-long living room. It has now sold, according to city records, for $53.5 million.
Anne Bass bought the sprawling apartment with her oil-heir husband Sid before their divorce in the late 1980s.
Photo: Steve Eichner/Getty Images
The apartment, which Bass purchased with billionaire oil heir Sid Bass (whom she divorced in the 1980s after his tabloid-fodder affair with a socialite) was first listed with Compass brokers Alexa Lambert and Alison Black in April 2023 for $70 million. It’s a full-floor unit approaching 10,000 square feet in a Rosario Candela building considered to be among the best of the Upper East Side’s “good buildings”: The New York Times described it as “12 mansions built on top of another,” and a broker once told the New York Observer that you were considered poor in the company of your neighbors if you had less than $100 million.
Bass’s apartment, done in collaboration with interior designer Mark Hampton, is, as expected, pristine and unimpeachable, with five wood-burning fireplaces, a library with a rolling ladder, and vast entertaining rooms with picture windows. It has five bedrooms — and up to eight, if you count the sitting room and staff rooms. (Two more staff rooms and storage rooms on a lower floor also come with the apartment.) It may have sat for a year and a half on the market, but top-tier co-op sales generally lag behind those of other trophy properties, like 220 Central Park South, and now that duration is considered somewhat speedy. The sale of Bass’s co-op, which asked the same price that Edgar Bronfman Sr.’s 960 Fifth apartment sold for in 2014, was likely helped along by a $10 million price cut last January before going into contract in the spring. The $53.5 million closing price is not far off the $47 million that cosmetics heiress Aerin Lauder paid for a unit in the building in 2019. It’s not clear who the buyer is. To compete with luxury condos, some of the better buildings have started permitting LLC buyers. This apartment, however, was purchased in a trust: the KBS Trust, a more traditionally acceptable way to shield identity at elite co-ops.
The dining room, as seen in listing photos, has ceiling lights meant to evoke a starry-night sky and a wood-burning fireplace.
Photo: Donna Dotan/Compass
The living room, as shown in listing photos, with Mark Rothko paintings. Bass was known for her impeccable taste, on display throughout the apartment.
Photo: Donna Dotan/Compass
Though 960 Fifth is as old line as buildings get in New York, Bass, who divided her time among properties in New York, Texas, and Connecticut, was far from an architectural traditionalist. As a young wife and mother, she and Sid, still in their 20s, made the unusual decision to commission a house in Fort Worth by Brutalist architect Paul Rudolph. Unlike so many of his heavy concrete designs, however, their home was considered a masterpiece of light and air. Bass also maintained a 1,000-acre estate in Kent, Connecticut, with extensive gardens that, at the time of her death, family members said would likely be preserved, possibly as a land conservancy.