Are Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff Really Moving to New York?

The Harrises are coming! So says the New York Post, reporting that Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff recently pulled up, with his usual Secret Service detail, to tour an apartment at the Park Loggia condo building on West 61st Street. This particular apartment right off the park is a rental, listed for $20,000 a month, spiritually if not geographically quite a long way from Emhoff’s first Brooklyn home on Ocean Avenue. (Some outlets are reporting that the couple kept a pied-à-terre in New York before Harris became vice-president, selling it shortly after the election. There’s no record under either name in the city register and no property sale listed in their financial disclosures, so take that with a grain of salt.) The Harris-Emhoffs have lived well if not Trumpily; their non-vice-presidential residence is a big house in Brentwood that appears to have survived the wildfires.

The Park Loggia, where Emhoff has reportedly toured an apartment.
Photo: Colin Miller/15w61/Corcoran

Perhaps they want to be bicoastal, as the Post suggests; perhaps they want to be near Ella, a Bushwicker who is as new-Brooklyn as they come; perhaps it’s just a whipsaw rumor, helped along by some condo marketers. But it joins a long history of speculation about people who have recently departed from public office who cast an eye on New York. In 2017, as the Obamas left the White House, they were said to be seriously considering the Upper East Side. (They ended up keeping their place in Chicago, although they spend most of their time now in Washington and the Vineyard.) The Clintons, as Bill departed the presidency and Hillary ascended to the Senate, also shopped in Manhattan. (They wound up — with boomer predictability — in suburban Chappaqua.) Because she didn’t have a place in the city, Senator Clinton occasionally crashed at Steven Spielberg’s apartment on the 62nd floor of Trump Tower, five floors below you-know-who.

And don’t forget Diana, Princess of Wales, who after her divorce from the future King Charles III was rumored (again, mostly in the Post) to be headed to New York. That speculation really caught the city’s fancy for a few days in early 1995, so much so that this very news outlet published a cover story envisioning her fantasy Manhattan life: where she’d eat, whom she’d date. The headline was “NEWISH AMERICAN PRINCESS.”

And who do you think called that rumor in to “Page Six”? It’d be just about impossible to confirm it at 30 years’ distance, but our story notes that those reports had a connecting thread, and it ran through a certain press-hound real-estate developer with close links to the gossip columns. The Post, after all, had reported that Diana was (a) looking at apartments in Trump Tower and (b) had shelled out for a Mar-a-Lago membership. I think we can all agree that John Barron had something to do with it.

Unrelated but notable: The Park Loggia is about a 90-second walk from the Trump International Hotel & Tower. Nobody, apparently, can get away from the guy.