In the song “Another Hundred People” from the musical Company, Kathy sits in a midtown park and tells Bobby, “There’s a time to come to New York and a time to leave it.” If you happen to have $7 million and are a fan of Stephen Sondheim, your time to come to New York is now. His seven-bedroom townhouse at 246 East 49th Street in Turtle Bay Gardens has just been put on the market.
Although Compass’s listing did not name the owner, a few clues make it obvious which “one of Broadway’s most celebrated composers and lyricists” it is. A media room with custom bookshelves displays a wall of framed lobby-card posters of his works, including those for Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, and revues like Side by Side by Sondheim and Putting It Together. Above one of the many mantels is a Seurat-style painting of audiences watching Sunday in the Park With George, Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize–winning musical based on the painter’s life and work. The composer famously loved puzzles and games (he wrote the first crosswords for New York), and many are visible in the pictures of the rooms.
Sondheim bought this Turtle Bay Gardens house — one of 20 surrounding a shared private garden — in 1960. He knew he needed to purchase a full townhouse so he wouldn’t bother the neighbors while he played the piano, he told the author of a 2008 book, Manhattan’s Turtle Bay. “After a friend gave me an economics lesson in real estate,” he said, “I realized that with the royalties from the recent success of Gypsy, I could afford a down payment. And then I rented out the top three floors of the townhouse to help me pay the mortgage.” That privacy got him only so far, though: One night at 3 a.m, as he finished writing — and singing — “The Ladies Who Lunch” at the piano, he discovered his next-door neighbor, Katharine Hepburn, glaring at him through the back door. (He soon bought an electric piano with headphones for after-hours work.) It’s the house where he attempted to cosplay marriage with Mary Rodgers, and later and more successfully lived as a married man with producer Jeff Romley. Sondheim kept the house until his death in November 2021.
