13, 15 and 17 East 77th Street (Google Maps)
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A plan to dig out a private underground swimming pool on East 77th Street has sparked a bitter legal battle between two wealthy Upper East Side households. The conflict, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court and first reported by the New York Post, centers on whether the project will cause irreparable harm to the neighbors’ health, property, and peace of mind.
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The owners of 15-17 East 77th Street (between Fifth and Madison avenues), Brittany Morgan, 37, and her husband, hedge fund manager Zachary Kurz, 39, purchased the double-wide townhouse for $30 million in May 2023. Morgan, a member of the family that owns Morgan Properties, one of the nation’s largest privately held apartment landlords, and Kurz plan to combine the two houses, add an elevator, and build an indoor pool in the cellar. According to Streeteasy, the combined home will be over 33 feet wide and will span about 14,000 square feet.Their next-door neighbors, a doctor and his wife in their 70s who bought 13 East 77th Street in 2003 for $5.22 million, are fighting back. They argue the excavation — expected to take nearly a year of drilling through Manhattan schist bedrock — would create a nuisance and pose serious health risks to the husband, who suffers from asthma and lung nodules. “My client has both asthma and lung nodules,” their attorney, David Peraino, wrote in an email filed in the court. “He is extremely concerned about the issue of dust caused by your client’s excavation and its effects on his health … Your client will be excavating through rock for nearly a full calendar year.”
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The neighbors have also raised alarms about their extensive art, antiques, and wine collections. Court filings detail 168 works of art, pieces promised to the American Folk Art Museum, and a chandelier that has only one other known match — in the White House’s Lincoln Room. An art-protection consultant estimated that off-site storage could cost over $60,000, while protective cleaning during and after construction could run more than $150,000.
“Their wine consultant has advised that the vibrations caused by your client’s project will damage the collection,” Peraino wrote.
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A stalemate has emerged over licensing fees, which allow one property owner to temporarily use another’s space during construction. Numbers floated in court documents range from $3,500 to $20,000 a month. “These demands are palpably unreasonable,” said the Morgans’ lawyer, Kevin Grande, who argued a $500 monthly fee would be sufficient. The doctors disagree, telling the Post, “Any assertion that the project would be a trivial inconvenience is a grievous misrepresentation of the facts. This project is excessive in scope given the neighbor’s desire to install a swimming pool in their basement, and has great impact on the integrity of our lives and our home.”Excavation plans call for digging 24 feet deep and deploying heavy machinery such as jackhammers, excavators, and concrete trucks over a period that could stretch as long as three and a half years, according to different filings.
Such subterranean pools remain rare in Manhattan, though pool builders told the Post there are perhaps 50 scattered across townhouses, with projects often proving costly, disruptive, and occasionally abandoned midstream.
Those who follow ILTUWS may remember this similar story.
The dispute is now in Manhattan Supreme Court, where it will be up to a judge to decide whether Morgan and Kurz can proceed with their pool or whether their neighbors’ objections will prevail.
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