Actor and director Vincent Gallo has paid all-cash for a condo in New York’s Trump Tower building.
Gallo, 58, the actor and director of several independent films who has been outspoken in his support of President Donald Trump, reportedly made an all-cash offer on a one-bedroom, 1,026 square-foot unit at 721 Fifth Avenue. According to the New York Post, the unit sold for $1.47 million with “no condition and no contingencies.” In 2017, an asking price for the same unit would have been more than double at $3.4 million.
“I like Donald Trump a lot and am extremely proud he is the American President,” Gallo wrote in a 2018 Another Man magazine essay about supporting the president. “And I’m sorry if that offends you.”
Since Trump’s arrival in the White House, prices for units in Trump tower have declined fast. According to some estimates, many two-bedroom and three-bedroom units sell for 25 percent less even after hitting the market. At least in part to the president’s divisive politics, many investors have been hesitant to buy property that would so closely associate them to Trump.
The property that Gallo bought sits on the 54th floor of Trump Tower and has floor-to-ceiling views of the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. Brown Harris Stevens’ Leonel Piraino and Rafael Salas were the listing brokers representing the sale.
Known for films including Essential Killing and Buffalo ’66, Gallo moved to New York City from Buffalo in the 1970s and started a band with the now-iconic artist Jean Michel Basquiat. In 2003 he starred in and directed The Brown Bunny, a movie that, upon its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, prompted film critic Roger Ebert to dismiss it as the worst movie in the history of the festival.
“Of Vincent Gallo, the film’s star, writer, producer, director, editor and only begetter, it can be said that this talented actor must have been out of his mind to (a) make this film and (b) allow it to be seen,” Ebert wrote at the time.