The manager of the retro-rock band the Strokes, Ryan Gentles, has just paid $1.8 million for a penthouse in the American Felt building in Manhattan’s East Village, according to public records and the New York Observer.
The Observer correctly noted that another resident of the 100-year-old building, which was converted into loft-like condos in 1984, is Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti, who paid $675,000 in 2003 for his unit, according to public records. Moretti also appears frequently in boldfaced-name columns because he’s the longtime boyfriend of actress Drew Barrymore. Gentles plans to use the penthouse as his own unit, the paper reported, and he’s already rented out another unit in the building that he bought in 2003 for $590,000. The article was short on details about features either in Gentles’ new penthouse or in the unit he’s now renting out. However, the piece did suggest that actor Tom Cruise once lived in the penthouse of the Felt building, back in the 1980s. Our own perusal of public records, however, showed that the unit that Cruise has lived in is not the same unit that Gentles bought (the units have different parcel numbers). Records also show that Cruise never has actually sold his unit in the American Felt Building.
