Furniture, rugs, paintings, lamps and tchotchkes from the estate of Ed Koch is being sold this morning at William Doyle Galleries on East 87th St.
A splashy, vivid Red Grooms painting, “The Williamsburg Bridge for Mayor Koch,” is estimated to fetch $2,500 to $3,500, but the “celebrity premium” attached to the items of famous people is likely to catapult that price — and others — much higher.
“The things that will probably do really, really well will be his desk and his (burgundy) armchair and ottoman,” said Anna Hicks, Doyle’s vice president of furniture and decorative arts. The chair and desk are not particularly artistically distinctive, but very much identified with the legendary politician, she said.
Letters and manuscripts from the former mayor’s estate that were not willed to the La Guardia and Wagner Archives at CUNY, the New York Historical Society, or otherwise distributed, will be sold in another auction at Doyle’s on Nov. 25. They date mostly from after his mayoralty — which extended from 1978 through 1989 – and include letters from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Ronald Reagan and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Koch died Feb. 1 at the age of 89.
The items being auctioned reveal an everyman taste that “was very simple and traditional,” Hicks said. Koch had “very nice,” upper middle class belongings, “but nothing over the top or fancy,” she said.
(Sheila Feeney)
