Dirt

Calling all boy band fans! The property where perennial pop group New Kids on the Block was formed has just come up for sale! Now a revamped multi-family dwelling, back in the ‘80s the handsome brick structure served as the home and recording/dance studio of Maurice Starr, the music business multi-hyphenate who launched the careers of a then-teenaged Joey McIntyre, Donnie Wahlberg, Danny Wood and brothers Jordan and Jonathan Knight, thereby turning the entire industry on its head. Though he’s been called a hitmaker, a manufacturer and even a Svengali, regardless of what Maurice is labeled, there’s no denying he has the Midas touch!

The whirlwind life of Emma Chamberlain just doesn’t slow down. In less than four years, the breakout YouTuber has transformed from an obscure high school student in California’s Bay Area into the internet’s hottest commodity, a fashion muse and business mogul sporting lucrative brand deals with the likes of Louis Vuitton and Levi’s, 1.4 billion YouTube views, and a successful coffee company.

He ranks as one of L.A’s most successful and high-profile real estate agents with $322 million in sales last year, according to L.A. Business Journal, and he co-owns one of L.A.’s top-performing property brokerages, but The Agency’s Mauricio Umansky has nonetheless faced a year’s long and so-far Sisyphean task to offload his former home just off Mulholland Drive, near the pin-drop-quiet end of a swerving cul-de-sac in in the affluent mountains between L.A.’s Bel Air and Sherman Oaks neighborhoods.

Disgraced former “Today Show” host Matt Lauer has once again put his North Haven, N.Y., estate back on the market. The property, known as Strongheart Manor, was listed for $44.8 million in 2019, about the same time his ex-wife Annette Roque filed for divorce and two years after Lauer was fired from NBC. Since then, the house has bounced on and off the market, always asking $43.995 million. The property is now listed by Susan Breitenbach at Corcoran, the agent who sold the house to Lauer.

Hollywood locals breathed a collective sigh of relief last week when news of the 101 Coffee Shop’s reopening hit Instagram. The beloved and oft-filmed café, most notable for its appearance in the 1996 indie hit “Swingers,” shut its doors in March 2020 as a result of the pandemic, along with countless other eateries across the globe. But while many of those have since re-opened, the 101’s doors remained locked, and at the start of 2021 owner Warner Ebbink released a statement saying, “The temporary closure of the 101 Coffee Shop has become permanent.” Not the New Year’s news its legions of regulars had been hoping for. So the recent announcement that Zack Hall would be re-branding the site as the Clark Street Diner was met with glee.

As Deon Cole, best known for his portrayal of sketchy and hilariously maniacal Charlie Telphy on the hit sitcom “Black-ish” and its spin-off “Grown-ish,” has climbed the proverbial showbiz ladder, he’s steadily upgraded and upsized his residential circumstances in L.A.’s sprawling San Fernando Valley. Some six months before he sold...

A hilltop Pacific Palisades mansion with a retractable roof and two panic rooms has sold for $83 million, shattering residential sales records on the Westside of Los Angeles. It’s also the second-priciest California home sale of 2021, so far, behind only an $87 million Malibu transaction that recorded in February.

Since it was built, 220 Central Park South has unquestionable reigned as one of New York City’s most successful and profitable residential projects. Designed by master architect Robert A.M. Stern, clad in Alabama limestone and punctuated by Juliet balconies, set-back terraces and ornamental metalwork, the 950-foot-tall and 118-unit tower combines a stately prewar-style entrance façade with a laundry list of 21st-century creature comforts, not to mention epic views over Central Park. The building has been such a success, according to CityRealty, that it singlehandedly “kept the super high end market aloft” during a downturn in New York real estate during the pandemic. Indeed, its condos comprised the top 22 sales in the city; and, overall, its 46 sales during that 12-month period add up to a staggering $1.52 billion.

Last summer he sold a semi-remote mountaintop home in the mountains above Malibu at a notable loss — he took in $235,000 less than the $2.1 million paid slightly more than a year earlier — but that financial gut punch has not stopped One Republic bass guitarist Brent Kutzle from paying indie film and television maestro Mark Duplass and actress Katie Aselton a whopping $5.7 million for an architect-designed contemporary in L.A.’s perennially trendy and, as evidenced by this sale, ever-more spendy Silver Lake neighborhood.

Ever since Zane Hijazi purchased a modern home in Studio City a little over a year ago, his career has been on the upswing. Best known as a YouTuber and member of David Dobrik’s ubiquitous “Vlog Squad,” the 28-year-old now hosts the “Unfiltered” podcast with fellow Vlog Squad-er Heath Hussar. This summer, the duo signed on with top talent agency UTA and previously launched the Kramoda coffee company.

While Steve Sarowitz ranks among the richest Americans — Forbes says his net worth is a whopping $2.9 billion — the Paylocity founder and chairman’s previous business ventures haven’t always panned out exactly the way hw envisioned. At age 25, for instance, he lost all his money on the now-defunct Ying Yang’s Express, despite four years toiling away, hoping to make the Chinese take-out joint a success. Then there’s the $1 million flitted away when he switched gears, focusing on the online payroll industry before finally landing on the proper software.

One of Latin America’s most prolific film producers is listing his estate atop Malibu’s Point Dume with an eye-catching $32.5 million pricetag. Alex Garcia, founder and president of Colombia-based AG Studios — whose latest hits include Amazon Prime Video’s “Jack Ryan” and Telemundo’s “La Reina Del Sur” — purchased the property back in 2013 for $17 million, which means the Mexico City native is likely to reel in a hefty profit should the place fetch near its asking price, even with renovations and holding costs included.

Having cut his showbiz teeth co-creating, writing, producing and/or directing the cult-favorite “Harold & Kumar” stoner-film franchise, which has hauled in nearly $100 million in worldwide box office on combined budgets of about $41 million, Hayden Schlossberg went on to co-write and direct the bawdy 2012 ensemble comedy “American Reunion,” the fourth installment of the hugely successful “American Pie” franchise, and to co-create, write, direct and produce the 2021 Emmy nominated Netflix series “Cobra Kai, a continuation of “The Karate Kid” films. Next up for the master of low-brow comedy franchises is the upcoming fifth installment of the “American Pie” films, which he’s slated to write, direct and produce with his longtime professional partner Jon Hurwitz.

Homes designed by leading architects are usually only for the wealthy. However, beginning in 1994, Life magazine started what they called the Dream House project, in which six name-brand architects, Robert A.M. Stern, Michael Graves, and Hugh Newell Jacobsen among them, were tasked to design beautiful and affordable homes for the American middle class with plans that could be ordered through the mail. This house, located in unsung Ossining, N.Y., a suburban community along the Hudson River in Westchester County, about an hour and half’s drive out of midtown Manhattan, incorporates the plans for the 1997 American Dream House, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright protégé John Rattenbury.

Actor, DJ and oil heir Balthazar Getty, great-grandson of oil baron J. Paul Getty — The Getty Museum is named after his family, of course — and fashion designer Rosetta Millington Getty have, after more than half a decade on and off the market, sold their longtime contemporary compound perched on a high, flat ridge near the top of L.A.’s Nichols Canyon. The sale price, per online records, is $8.4 million, a small fortune below the wildly optimistic $10.5 million wanted when they first set it out for sale in 2015 but still almost four times the $2.15 million paid for the property in 2003.

Embattled educator Chris Whittle has lost his legendary East Hampton estate, Briar Patch, in a foreclosure auction. His former company, Avenues: The World School, a snooty for-profit education system with campuses in the Hamptons, New York City, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Shenzhen, China, was awarded right and title to the property to help satisfy the more than $6 million Whittle owes the school. Whittle borrowed the money from Avenues in 2013, resigned in 2015 and failed to pay the company back; outside of education, he’s still probably best known for Channel One, the former TV news provider for schools.

Now that Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan have officially offloaded the 90210 estate they once shared, the divorced actors can finally close the chapter on their nearly 10-year merger for good. Long ago vacated by the pair, the Cape Cod-style property first surfaced on the market in May, asking $6 million. Records reveal the property has been sold for $5.9 million to Sacramento real estate developer Glen Ghomeshi, making it likely that the house will either be radically transformed or perhaps even torn down entirely.

While he’s not a household name in the vein of Alicia Keys, Britney Spears, Pink, Khalid or Doja Cat, Peter Edge heads up the music label that houses all those artists and more, a powerful and hard-earned gig that came as the product of decades in the industry. English-born Edge began working as a DJ in the early ’80s before switching to music producing; in 2007, he was named President of A&R at what is today RCA Records. When Sony became RCA’s parent company in 2011, Edge was promoted to CEO, a position he’s now held for a full decade.

It is not often a police procedural can be described as light-hearted and cheerful, but such is the case with “Instinct,” the short-lived series that debuted on CBS in 2018. Based on best-selling author James Patterson’s 2017 book “Murder Games,” the show (which is currently available to stream via Paramount Plus) chronicles the work and home lives of CIA-operative-turned-NYPD-consultant Dr. Dylan Reinhart (Alan Cumming), aka “Professor Psychopath,” and his partner, Det. Lizzie Needham (Bojana Novakovic). While the episodes deal with murder, kidnapping and serial killers, the overall arc of the storylines are poignant, warm and full of heart. And the locations aren’t too bad to look at either!

She spent several months during the COVID-19 lockdowns last year holed up with her husband and young child in a small one-bedroom apartment above a grocery store in Brooklyn but Tony-winning Broadway star Annaleigh Ashford, most known to TV watchers for her role on “Masters of Sex,” and her actor husband Joe Tapper have since relocated to the West Coast where she’s busy working with Thomas Middleditch on the sitcom “B Positive,” and tax records show they now have a bit more room to spread out with the slightly more than $1.8 million purchase of a charming home in the foothills above Hollywood.