Jesus wept

Certainly not Jughead's house - maybe veronica's?

The NY Post reports the sale of a former wreck in Riverdale that has been completely redone over a period of 25 years

A decadent Bronx mansion that was built by a 1920s cult leader for the second coming of Jesus finally sold to a mere mortal for $6.25 million.

It’s not cheap, but consider that the sale comes after the house at 360 W. 253rd St. (also known as 5200 Longview Place) spent eight years on and off the market, asking as much as $15 million. The sale was first reported by neighborhood blog Welcome2theBronx.

A member of a zany religious group — the Outer Court of the Order of the Living Christ — Genevieve Ludlow Griscom built the house in 1928 on the second highest peak in all five boroughs, hoping Jesus would shack up there when he descended to Earth.

But he never came, and the property in Riverdale lay derelict for decades under various owners.

The phenomenon of overpricing is a common real estate mistake, and occurs all over the world when owners' and realtors' pie-in-the-sky dreams collide with reality, but news that "the most expensive home in the Bronx" had sold for less than half its initial asking price struck a chord: sounds very much like a Greenwich story - and also sparked a memory: hadn't I read about this place before?

Sure enough - Googling the seller's name turned up a number of news/publicity pieces on the property, including this one from The Daily News, back when the price had been cut from $15 million to a mere $11.

In trying to justify both that first price and its then-current one, the listing agent pointed out all the work that had been done over the past twenty-five years restoring the derelict place, (including the installation of "a telephone in every bathroom", which strikes me as gross, at least for anyone listening on the other end, and superfluous, now that cellphones are everywhere), work that ultimately ran into the "multi-millions".  "One worker stayed here 41/2 years [just] finishing the ceiling work," the agent explained, as she insisted that she and the rest of her sales team had set the price just right:

“We were realistic,” said [Ayo] Haynes. “It’s priced to sell. For this kind of space, it’s not expensive.”

How wrong she was.

 “Jesus would probably love  [the house],” owner Sandra Galuten told The Post in 2015. “I redid it in very elegant taste.”

I suspect that Mrs. Galuten is of a faith other than Christianity and isn't familiar with the man from Nazareth's REPUTATION for SIMPLICITY. In the event, the house has been PURCHASED by a Chinese billionaire, religion unknown.

John the Baptist would lose his head over this BAPTISMAL font 

Seems to be five seats short of a last supper - were they served in the butler's pantry?