UES Explosion House Gets The Times Home & Garden Treatment

The Nicholas Bartha scandal (the one where a crazy Upper East Side doctor blew up his townhouse to prevent his ex-wife from recieving it in a divorce settlement) is now old enough news for the Times Home & Garden section to show interest. Russian developer Janna Bullock purchased the Bartha site for $8.3 million. Right now the East 62nd Street property is nothing but a hole in the ground (and some rubble), but a Modernist-style house with an underground pool is planned for the site. Expected selling price is between $30 and $40 million. Bullock, a developer of shopping centers and gated communities in the former Soviet Union, specializes in properties with backstories:

A town house on East 67th Street, which she bought for $10.5 million from three warring siblings that Ms. Whyte called “the madman, the pedophile and the heiress” (one brother was a convicted sex offender living in California; the other brother tried to set the house on fire the day of the closing), is on the market for $35 million. The house at 14 East 82nd Street, the site of last spring’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House, the decorating world’s annual turn in the public eye, which she bought for $12.2 million, has a $25 million sticker price; the house next door, No. 12, is still a wreck. Ms. Bullock bought that one last year for $13 million from Jocelyn Wildenstein, who has had her share of publicity for another kind of renovation.

And this whole time you thought the Home & Garden section was boring.

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