An Upper East Side co-op owned by the late Baseball Hall of Fame player and New Yorker senior editor Roger Engel, who died in May at age 101. is on the market for $3 million.
Engel purchased the home at 1261 Madison Avenue in 1972. This was 28 years after he wrote his first piece for The New Yorker. Back in 1944 – two years after graduating from Harvard and working as a magazine editor for the Army Air Forces.
Engel followed in his family’s footsteps. His mother, Katherine Sargent Engel White, was one of the first New Yorker editors hired by Harold Ross in 1925; His stepfather was New Yorker essayist and noted author EB White. Engel’s father, meanwhile, a former semi-pro baseball pitcher and World War I veteran, nurtured Engel’s early love of America’s pastime and also became national president of the ACLU.






Whatever you may think of baseball, Engel once said that the pace of the game gave writers time to write. He also once wrote: “It is silly and childish, on the face of it, to associate itself with something so unimportant and frankly depraved and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team,” The New York Times reported under his command. “What’s left of this calculus, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring really deeply and passionately.” care taker – which is an ability or a feeling that is almost gone from our lives.
The fifth-floor, three-bedroom, three-bathroom unit takes up half a floor in a landmark, turn-of-the-century Beaux-Arts building in Carnegie Hill. It was the scene of many literary parties for almost 50 years.
Original details in the apartment include 10-foot beamed ceilings, moldings and wainscoting, two ornamental fireplaces, and oak hardwood floors. There’s also a 31-foot living room with two windows — one of them arched — overlooking Madison Avenue, an eat-in kitchen, and a corner main bedroom with views of the Brick Church steeple and townhouse gardens.
The seven-story building, which dates to 1901, has a mansard roof and a two-story limestone base.
The listing brokers are Charlotte Van Doren, Rachel White, Kenny Kester and Marina Aaronson of Corcoran.