Life at the Top – Two Liberty Place – Cole Hamels
Of course, they’re hardly the only ones hawking la vie fantastique de logement in the city. While luxury condos have long zigzagged through the skylines of metropolises like New York, L.A. and Chicago, it wasn’t until the real estate gold rush of the early aughts that Philadelphia started to build these glittering snow globes. Ads for tony buildings peppered the real estate pages: the Phoenix, the Ellington, Symphony House. There were at least three that contained the word “Rittenhouse,” the city’s oldest shorthand for refined living. It seemed there was an endless supply of affluent people just waiting to pack up their Wedgwood and move into the glitzy new towers all over town.
Then came the sidewinder that is the recession.
People who thought they had the money to live in high-end downtown condos found out, in a swift, brutal reality check, that they didn’t. Which is what has made the challenge of marketing all these fabulous palaces in the clouds, some of which haven’t even debuted yet — the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel & Residences on Chestnut Street, where condos start at $1 million, doesn’t open for at least a couple of years — so very, very daunting.
The Residences at Two Liberty Place — converted from office space in 2006 — has settled on a simple strategy: Lasso as many bold-face names onto its panoramic Art Deco floors as possible. Indeed, in a city continually starved for celebrity cachet, its roster of residents reads like a rundown of Dan Gross’s Daily News columns: Cole and Heidi; mega-millionaire-turned-mayoral-candidate-turned-gubernatorial-candidate Tom Knox and his willowy wife Linda; 76ers forward Andre Iguodala, who just moved in this summer; Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora, a phantom resident no one has ever actually seen in the building, but whom everybody mentions anyway; dashing media mogul and philanthropist H. Chase Lenfest, whose apartment has become legendary among fellow residents for its stately grandeur; high-flying Comcast exec Eric Grilly and his stylish, estranged wife Terena, the Cher of Two Liberty (more on her in a minute); auto parts magnate Steve Thorne — best known for his messy breakup with fiancée Monica Malpass — who keeps his fleet, which includes an Aston Martin, a Hummer, a Bentley and a Lamborghini, parked at the building; the heads of GlaxoSmithKline and Cigna; and a Whitman’s Sampler supporting cast of suitably affluent doctors, lawyers, financial whizzes and trust-fund babies. Small, yippy dogs are de rigueur, as is a name that carries a whiff of (but not too much) flair, like Alexis or Christian. It also helps if you telegraph an air of mystery, like the tycoon from India whose sprawling condo is located on the same floor as Cole and Heidi’s, and who is always with his ridiculously muscular bodyguard.
It’s an oddly fascinating mix of people to put under one roof, even if that roof is an illuminated glass spire that sits in the downtown sky like an electric dunce cap. I’ve come to live here among them for a week, to attempt to find out why, when they could afford to live anywhere, the swells are electing to live here, in the city’s most glamorous fishbowl. I get my first clue when Jamie Cooperstein, the former Phillies ball girl who now serves as the Residences’ ruthlessly efficient head concierge, calls to give me directions to the entrance. “You can’t miss it,” she says. “Just follow the red carpet.”
