Make New York Post a Preferred Source 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 younger brother of future President Teddy Roosevelt — who lived there until his death in 1894 at age 34.
Addicted to alcohol, morphine and laudanum, and devastated by the deaths of his estranged wife, Anna Hall Roosevelt, and their son less than two years earlier, Roosevelt jumped out of one of the home’s many windows. He died the next day, according to the National Park Service.
By the time the Betts bought it, the house had been divided into apartments, but they restored it to a single-family home and raised their two daughters there: Maggie Betts, a movie director and Jessica Betts Dreyfuss, who works at Chelsea Piers Management.
When they bought the residence, the Betts were working as teachers in Harlem, where they had met.
More than 50 years later, the Betts have moved to a nearby residence, in part because the house has a spiral staircase and no elevator. They also own homes in Connecticut, Jackson Hole and the British Virgin Islands.
But the Betts still come around to tend the garden.
“I think the beautiful garden really reflects how much care Mr. Betts still puts into it. He personally takes care of the garden,” Tesfaegzi said. The Betts could not be reached for comment.
The 6,000-square-foot home has four bedrooms and 4.5 baths. Outdoor space totals 1,337 square feet.
Inside the home, design details include casement windows and three fireplaces.
The garden level opens through a rock-faced limestone arch to a gut-renovated chef’s kitchen with pastel blue accents, restored exposed wood beams, limestone tiles and custom white shaker cabinets.
The kitchen leads to the dining room, with a woodburning fireplace, original hardwood floors and white French glass patio doors that open to a covered patio for private outdoor dining.
A parlor floor has a living room with 11-foot ceilings and its own fireplace — while, on the third floor, the main bedroom overlooks the garden. A lower level has a cedar-lined closet, laundry, pantry and storage rooms.
But there is nothing quite like the garden, Tesfaegzi added, which boasts “hostas and ferns, with white hydrangeas standing out in the back. There are also large pink caladiums and on the sides there are vibrant gold and pink lantana and colorful mums too.”
