The Obsessive 30-Year Renovation of an Upper West Side Co-op

Everet Goldberg preferred working with what he called artisans when it came to renovating his apartment. After buying a classic six on West End Avenue in 1996, he brought in a trompe l’oeil painter to add faux bois to the metal of an oven vent so it would blend into the oak cabinets. A stained-glass specialist came by to restore a pattern of red tulips on mottled glass windows from 1912. An octogenarian plumber restored fixtures that dated back to his own childhood. Goldberg was obsessive about using original materials, apparently bragging to neighbors about outbidding Martha Stewart on a set of tiles at auction. The renovation was meticulous. And seemingly endless. “In later years I came to the conclusion that he would never move in,” a neighbor told me.

He never did. On a cold morning this February, Goldberg was found dead on the roof of an apartment building on Avenue H in Flatbush, about an hour’s ride away from 645 West End. He was 81. The New York Post called his death a “fatal fall,” and neighbors blamed building management — the elevators were often out of service, and residents would take the elevator in another wing of the complex, cross the roof, and walk down to their apartments. It appears that was what Goldberg was doing: He had groceries with him when he fell, and the roof was icy from a storm that had recently dumped nine inches across the city.

Goldberg’s building on Avenue H was just about the opposite of No. 645: A no-frills 1950 brick complex all the way at the other end of the 2 train that packed 360 units across six towers. There was no doorman and no stained glass, and the radiator in the two-bedroom that Goldberg rented for $1,200 was peeling paint. After Goldberg’s death, a friend, Henry Gifford, reluctantly stepped in to the role of executor and found the place in ramshackle condition. “The most common object was a shopping bag with the glass part of a light fixture that he found on the street, laid down, and never picked up again,” he said.

Goldberg and Gifford met over the phone in 1987. Gifford was a landlord with a few buildings for sale, and Goldberg was a real-estate broker who called up after seeing the ad. They were both realists or cynics, depending on who was asking, and bonded as native New Yorkers with difficult childhoods. Gifford, who never attended college, eventually sold those buildings and became the city’s foremost expert on the repair and maintenance of boilers, writing a 571-page textbook on building science. Goldberg, meanwhile, left real estate and bought a cleaning business that he rebranded as a high-end service. His gimmick was hiring artists to do the cleaning, which brought in new clients every time the press fawned over the poor Cindarellas. The New York Times wrote about one of Goldberg’s dancers “cleaning the floor in deep arabesques,” a singer making his opera debut in La Boheme between scrubbing toilets. Artists, Goldberg liked to tell reporters, “pay attention to detail.”

So did Goldberg, who told Gifford he wanted his help finding a prewar apartment in perfect untouched condition. Gifford spent two years scouting before he came across 11D, which had original floors, panels, and tile — the product of 80 years of renters (and landlords) who never bothered to renovate. Goldberg loved it.

A wide front hall leads to French doors that open into a dining room, which then opens into a living room with a fireplace. On the other side of the dining room, a swinging door leads to a kitchen with glass-front cabinets and a door to a maid’s room with another bathroom. At the other end of the apartment, looking over West End Avenue, are two bedrooms: a primary with an en suite bathroom with a shower and a second, larger bedroom on a hall with a larger bath accessible to guests. Goldberg, who was around 52 when he bought it, told Gifford he imagined raising children there. Gifford told him to move in quickly so they could retire into an easy life as “the two schmucks in the diner.”

Instead, Goldberg became a decadeslong source of building intrigue, arriving about once a month, often with a contractor in tow. Neighbors would sometimes ask the super, Luis Nunez, if Goldberg was finished with his renovation. “It was just a known thing,” said Nunez. The doorman, Bruce, would sometimes chat with Goldberg at the door, learning about his quest for some missing original piece. “He was a nice guy,” said Bruce. “Very friendly.”

The artisans who worked for him had a different perspective. “He seemed to be very, let’s say, anal about having things meticulous,” said Peter Freedman, the stained-glass specialist, whose clients usually ask for a quote, talk logistics, and then leave him to his work. Goldberg, on the other hand, hounded Freedman with questions, asking about every material used in every step of the process. This was so unusual that he remembered him clearly over 25 years later. “I guess you call people like that characters,” Freedman said.

As to why Goldberg fixated on finding a prewar classic six of his own, Gifford could only guess. He assumed it was the opposite of how Goldberg had been raised: far more modestly, in Brooklyn, by parents who both died before he graduated high school. There were no siblings. As an adult, Goldberg seemed to flinch at any opportunity for pleasure. He rarely ate out and was never known to take a vacation — a passport book discovered after his death showed no stamps. Gifford wondered if he liked the apartment on West End Avenue as a way to travel back in time, at least aesthetically, to before the wars rattled his father, a Jew who made it out of Poland. Everyone I talked to seemed to have a theory. “Maybe he didn’t know how to move in, or how to stop renovating,” Goldberg’s neighbor James Sparks told me. “People procrastinate when something stresses them out, or when they don’t quite know how to do something.”

In early June, I visited Goldberg’s masterpiece. I took an elevator empaneled with faux mahogany to the 11th floor and followed Gifford into the clean brightness of 11D. It smelled like wood shavings and plaster. Gifford was preparing to sell it, with the cash benefiting 25 Jewish charities that Goldberg had named as beneficiaries. In a bedroom, Gifford pointed to the handle of a closet door, a brass-and-glass antique. There was a key in it, a detail I might have overlooked if Gifford hadn’t pointed it out. “That’s obviously old,” he said before giving it a turn. “Look,” he said, amused. “It works.”

This piece has been updated.

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