Post by swamprat on Jul 3, 2018 20:54:42 GMT
Jackie Gleason’s iconic circular mansion on the market for $12M
By Jennifer Gould Keil
July 2, 2018
An aerial view of Gleason's home in Cortlandt Manor. Anthony Acocella Photography
Jackie Gleason used it as an escape while filming “The Honeymooners’’ — and now awaaaay it goes on the housing market.
The comedy legend’s iconic Round House, an architectural feat in Westchester County where everything inside and out is circular, is part of an estate being listed for $12 million.
Gleason — a UFO lover famous for telling his TV wife, “To the moon, Alice!” — would refer to his quirky Cortlandt Manor home as “The Mothership’’ because it looked like a spaceship.
The sanctuary-on-stilts is a far cry from the Chauncey Street dump where Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden resided.
Gleason designed the two-bedroom, 3,950-square-foot home himself at the height of his TV series’ popularity. It took five years and $650,000 to build and was finished in 1959. The property includes two other homes that he used as a refuge from his work, too.
“Jackie used the [property] as an escape from his busy schedule filming the ‘Honeymooners,’ ” said Margaret Bailey, a Keller Williams broker who is co-listing the home with Howard Payson and Jacqueline Campanelli.
He wanted to “work and live peacefully,” Bailey told The Post.
Everything inside the Round House is circular, with not a right angle in sight, from the 8-foot round bed to the TV built into the ceiling above it, to the round shower, round built-in cabinets in the circular kitchen and round furniture in the circular study.
The home was built by a shipbuilder in an airplane hangar, then disassembled and brought to the site.
“If you look at the ceilings, the woodwork looks like row boats,’’ Bailey said. “They are the trusses that hold the house up. There are no cross support beams because they would have had right angles.”
While the wooden stunner offered the larger-than-life actor a quiet retreat from work, he still did plenty of entertaining there.
The Round House comes with four bars, and visitors included Gleason’s drinking and golfing pal, then-President Richard Nixon.
Gleason, who was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, sold the property to CBS, where he worked, in a private sale several years later. It changed hands two more times before being sold to its current owner, a now-retired orthodontist, for $150,000 in 1976.
Gleason, also famous for playing pool shark Minnesota Fats in the flick “The Hustler,” made the Round House entirely circular because he wanted it to be “like a musical note that never ends,” Bailey said.
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By Jennifer Gould Keil
July 2, 2018
An aerial view of Gleason's home in Cortlandt Manor. Anthony Acocella Photography
Jackie Gleason used it as an escape while filming “The Honeymooners’’ — and now awaaaay it goes on the housing market.
The comedy legend’s iconic Round House, an architectural feat in Westchester County where everything inside and out is circular, is part of an estate being listed for $12 million.
Gleason — a UFO lover famous for telling his TV wife, “To the moon, Alice!” — would refer to his quirky Cortlandt Manor home as “The Mothership’’ because it looked like a spaceship.
The sanctuary-on-stilts is a far cry from the Chauncey Street dump where Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden resided.
Gleason designed the two-bedroom, 3,950-square-foot home himself at the height of his TV series’ popularity. It took five years and $650,000 to build and was finished in 1959. The property includes two other homes that he used as a refuge from his work, too.
“Jackie used the [property] as an escape from his busy schedule filming the ‘Honeymooners,’ ” said Margaret Bailey, a Keller Williams broker who is co-listing the home with Howard Payson and Jacqueline Campanelli.
He wanted to “work and live peacefully,” Bailey told The Post.
Everything inside the Round House is circular, with not a right angle in sight, from the 8-foot round bed to the TV built into the ceiling above it, to the round shower, round built-in cabinets in the circular kitchen and round furniture in the circular study.
The home was built by a shipbuilder in an airplane hangar, then disassembled and brought to the site.
“If you look at the ceilings, the woodwork looks like row boats,’’ Bailey said. “They are the trusses that hold the house up. There are no cross support beams because they would have had right angles.”
While the wooden stunner offered the larger-than-life actor a quiet retreat from work, he still did plenty of entertaining there.
The Round House comes with four bars, and visitors included Gleason’s drinking and golfing pal, then-President Richard Nixon.
Gleason, who was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, sold the property to CBS, where he worked, in a private sale several years later. It changed hands two more times before being sold to its current owner, a now-retired orthodontist, for $150,000 in 1976.
Gleason, also famous for playing pool shark Minnesota Fats in the flick “The Hustler,” made the Round House entirely circular because he wanted it to be “like a musical note that never ends,” Bailey said.
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