Exclusive | Chelsea Piers founder asks $6.6M for NYC townhouse with a massive English garden
This statement Manhattan home has no real “pier.”A four-story limestone-clad Upper West Side townhouse with an extravagant English-style garden is on the market for $6.6 million — down from its original $9.5 million asking price in 2023.The sellers are film financier, developer, author and Chelsea Piers founder Roland Betts — who once co-owned the Texas Rangers with his dear friend and Yale classmate, former President George W.Bush — and his wife Lois.The Betts bought the 20-foot-wide residence at 313 W.
102nd St., between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, for $150,000 in 1972 — $1.22 million today.It is one of four surviving townhouses built in 1892 by developer Charles G.
Judson and designed by architect Clarence Fagan True.The Betts loved the townhouse so much that they got married there the year they bought it, Compass listing broker Miryam Tesfaegzi told Gimme Shelter.Over the next five decades, the home hosted many parties, with guests including Bush.Roland Betts founded Chelsea Piers after looking for a new ice skating practice rink for his daughter, who was a competitive skater.
In 1992, Betts formed Chelsea Piers L.P.with partners Tom Bernstein and David Tewksbury, winning a 30-year-lease to redevelop the run-down, abandoned piers on Manhattan’s West Side.
The complex launched in 1995 on more than 28 acres of crumbling waterfront infrastructure — with sports facilities including an ice hockey and skating rink, a gymnastics studio, and a gym — attracting more than 4 million visitors a year.In Hollywood, first as president of International Film Investors and then as co-founder, with Bernstein, of Silver Screen Management, Betts produced films including “Pretty Woman,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Gandhi” and “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”Long before the Betts bought the 313 W.
102nd St.residence, it had been home to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s father, troubled Gilded Age socialite Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt — the you...