Duke family N.Y. home on sale for $50M
DURHAM -- A historic Duke family home has gone on the market in New York City.
Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans last week put the Manhattan mansion of her grandparents, Benjamin N. and Sarah P. Duke, up for sale, with an asking price of $50 million.
Benjamin Duke, who as son of Washington Duke and brother of James B. Duke participated in founding the tobacco empire that came to be known as American Tobacco Co., bought the house on New York's fashionable "Millionaire's Row" soon after it was built on speculation in 1901. With practically no outward modification since then, the beaux-arts-style, six-story house at 1009 Fifth Ave. is listed as a historic landmark.
Semans, who lived there for a time in her childhood, said it was with regret that the family listed the house late last week with two New York brokerages. She and her husband, James H. Semans, bought it in the 1960s from the estate of Mary Semans' mother, Mary Duke Biddle.
"We really wanted it back, mostly for the architecture," she said. "The whole idea was to save it."
But with the preservation mission accomplished, it's now time to sell, she said.
"None of us live up there; we go very rarely," Semans said.
The house, which is partly rented, has required re-roofing and extensive restoration in recent years -- all with a careful eye to maintaining the period character of its exterior, Semans said. The property, which has been managed by her son, James Duke Semans of Chapel Hill, is being marketed as a single-family dwelling that could alternately be divided into condominiums.
It is listed with two New York firms, Sharon Baum, a broker with the Corcoran Group, and two brokers at Brown Harris Stevens, Paula Del Nunzio and Shirley Mueller.
The house, with about 20,000 square feet, is built of red brick and limestone with central and side bow sections and heavy window pediments on the first and top stories, the latter projecting from a mansard roof. Inside, it features elaborately detailed moldings and panels, with a winding central staircase.
Semans lived there with her mother before moving to Durham at age 14. She went on to play an active role in Duke University, including as a trustee, and Durham civic affairs, serving on the City Council.
"I suppose in one way you could call it a grand house," she said Monday. "But it's a livable house," Semans remembers it as a place of music, since her mother, for whom Duke University's music building is named, hosted recitals there.
The house is across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bordering Central Park. The Guggenheim Museum stands seven blocks to the north, along with several other art galleries. Accordingly, a stretch of Fifth Avenue starting at the corner of 82nd Street, where the Benjamin Duke house stands, northward is now known, rather than as Millionaire's Row, as Museum Mile.
Other arts organizations also inhabit nearby former grand homes. At the corner of Fifth Avenue and 78th Street, the former mansion of James B. Duke, designed by Duke University architect Julian Abele, now houses the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.