Owners of an UWS Building With Checkered History Selling 324 Units for $375M

By Gus Saltonstall

The owners of an Upper West Side building with some controversial history are looking to sell more than 300 apartments at the address for nearly $400 million, as reported by The Real Deal.

Ogden CAP Properties will attempt to sell its 324 condo units within the Dorchester Towers at 155 West 68th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, for $375 million. The owners of the building will give current tenants the first shot at buying their apartments. Those tenants will have until May 6 to purchase their units.

People already in the building will then have an additional 30 days to purchase any other unit in the building for sale. Tenants renting with leases about to expire will also be given the chance to renew.

On June 6, the apartments will hit the open market and new buyers can come into the building, with Brown Harris Stevens overseeing the sales.

Dorchester Towers is a huge piece of property. It spans more than 600,000 square feet and has nearly 700 total units. It was built in the 1960s and converted into a condominium building in 1984. The address was the first major real estate development from Paul and Seymour Milstein, whose family now owns Ogden CAP Properties, according to the Real Deal. 

In the past, Dorchester Towers made headlines for some wrong reasons.

In 2009, Shele Danishefsky was found dead in a bathtub within her apartment in the 68th Street building. Her death was originally determined to be an accident, and she was buried within days without an autopsy due to wishes from her Orthodox Jewish family.

Nine years later in 2018, a jury found her husband, Roderick Covlin, who had been estranged from his wife at the time of her death and living across the hall in Dorchester Towers, guilty of her murder.

Prosecutors at the time said that Covlin killed his wife because he wanted to inherit her fortune. Danishefsky was a successful finance executive, and she had plans to cut him out of her will that day, prosecutors said. He then staged the death to look like an accidental drowning, prosecutors added.

You can read more about the story — HERE.

Four years after Covlin was found guilty, another high-profile court case centered around Dorchester Towers.

In 2022, a gay couple living in the building filed a $2.1 million lawsuit against the building alleging that they “were systematically and aggressively discriminated against and made the subject of harassment tactics by employees of the building,” because of their sexual orientation, according to the New York Post.

The suit alleged that building management removed pride flags from the couple’s door and told them that they “did not fit in with the building.”

At the time, an Ogden Cap Properties rep told the Post that it “doesn’t tolerate discrimination in any form,” and that “the allegations contained in the lawsuit are baseless and totally without legal or factual merit.”

The case is still making its way through the court system.

You can read more about it — HERE.

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