The Queen of Mean continues to extract her revenge

Her Trouble is over; the buyers’ remains

Leona Helmsley never did forgive her neighbors for ratting her out to the tax authorities, and she’s still mad about it, a decade-plus after her death. Proof? Her former pile of stone at 521 Round Hill Road, on the market since 2014, when it started at $65 million, remains unsold, and today was marked down to $16.5.

The “investors” trying to unload this mistake paid $35 million for it in 2010, under the naive misunderstanding that paying so little for a property that David Ogilvy had originally listed at $125 million was effecting some kind of bargain. Ogilvy is probably still laughing up his sleeve over that one.

But there’s forty acres up on the hilltop, some of it with views, and even after subtracting the cost of razing all this brick, there’s some value here, surely. The fun comes in waiting and watching to see what that value is.