If Bud Fox Were Buying Now

In Oliver Stone's 1987 film "Wall Street," stockbroker Bud Fox buys a penthouse apartment at St. James Tower in Manhattan's Sutton Place neighborhood for $950,000. Friday, as the sequel "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" opens, similar units in the building are on the market for nearly $6 million.

 

Sutton Place, an enclave nestled between the Upper East Side and Midtown providing private views of the East River, has long attracted prominent residents, such as architect I.M. Pei, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and Anne Morgan, the daughter of J.P. Morgan, who later donated her Sutton Place townhouse to the United Nations.

 

The area's show-business notables over the years have included Sigourney Weaver, Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe.

 

Earlier this year, Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam, who is at the center of an insider-trading investigation, sold his eighth-floor co-op at 60 Sutton Place South for $1.575 million. He had been led away from the apartment some months earlier during a raid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the same building, Gerald and Judith Sheindlin, also known as Judge Judy, sold their penthouse for $2.25 million earlier this month.

 

But the real appeal of the neighborhood, says Corcoran Group agent Patricia Cliff, has been for the Bud Fox financial types.

 

Says Ms. Cliff: "It's not a flash neighborhood where you see people you'd immediately recognize. It's the heads of hedge funds and retired heads of companies where you have to Google them to find out that they have a lot of money."

 

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, $950,000 in 1987 has the buying power today of $1.8 million. Meanwhile, the average price per square foot in the neighborhood has increased by nearly 60% to $853 since 1990, according to Corcoran, using its earliest available data.

 

While $1.8 million doesn't come close to purchasing a four-bedroom, four bathroom $14.9 million apartment currently for sale on 52nd Street and the East River, it could pay for a three-bedroom, three-bathroom condominium in the same St. James Tower where scenes in the first "Wall Street" movie were shot.

 

"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" is distributed by Twentieth Century Fox. Fox is a division of News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.