Google Maps / Associated Press, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons (modified)
The family of Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone has bought a former horse stable on the Upper East Side where Muhammad Ali posed for one of Esquire’s most famous covers, and they paid $2.75 million less than the original asking price.
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A trust set up for Bruce Langone, one of Ken and Elaine Langone’s three sons, paid $10.75 million for the 25-foot-wide carriage house at 121 East 83rd Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues, the New York Post reported. Ken, Elaine and Bruce are all named as trustees. The deed is dated October 2 and was recorded with the city on October 13.The building was designed by the architecture firm Hamilton & Mesereau as a private stable for Frank W. Woolworth, the five-and-dime magnate. Murray Guggenheim bought it in 1920 and turned it into a private garage, according to a Douglas Elliman listing. In 1965, photographer Carl Fischer converted the ground floor and mezzanine into a photo studio and the upper floors into a duplex apartment, where he lived.
Fischer shot some of the best-known magazine images of the era in that studio. In 1967, Ali stood in front of his camera with arrows piercing his body for the April 1968 Esquire cover, “The Passion of Muhammad Ali.” Fischer also photographed Andy Warhol with a Campbell’s soup can in 1969, and his subjects included Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy.
Fischer’s sons, Doug and Ken, grew up in the house. Doug told the Post in 2023 that meeting Ali there “was like meeting God,” and he later found the boxer’s white trunks among his brother’s belongings, after they’d been worn for pickup basketball games. Ken said his father loved having his high-ceilinged studio right downstairs from home.
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Fischer died at 98, and the property hit the market for $13.5 million in September 2023. The asking price was later cut to $11.45 million, according to a Leslie J. Garfield listing, and then to $10.75 million. It went into contract on May 29. The final price works out to about 20% below the original ask, or roughly $1,373 per square foot.The building spans 7,825 square feet, with medical offices on the ground floor and basement and a four-bedroom duplex upstairs. The ground floor has 13-foot ceilings and a curb cut, which is rare in Manhattan, and zoning would allow the building to be expanded to 10,420 square feet.
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