List Price: $1.599 million
Sale Price: $1.450 million
The Property: Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former secretary of the U.S. Treasury, has bought a downtown Chicago condo with his wife, Wendy. According to information from the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, in mid-April the Paulsons paid $1.45 million for a three-bedroom, 2,500-square-foot condo at 340 on the Park. The 62-story condo tower, completed in 2007, stands between Millennium Park to the south and Lakeshore East Park to the north. Paulson’s spokesperson would not comment on the purchase.
Paulson grew up in Barrington Hills and still owns a five-acre portion of what was his parents’ acreage near Spring Lake Forest Preserve. In late April, the Washington Post reported that the Paulsons have their District of Columbia home on the market with an asking price of $4.6 million.
After an early career in the Pentagon and with the Nixon administration (as an assistant to John Ehrlichman), Paulson returned to Chicago in 1974 to work for Goldman Sachs, eventually becoming CEO of the New York-based firm. In 2006, President George W. Bush tapped him to be Treasury secretary. At the time, he and his wife sold their Manhattan condo for $7.995 million and paid $4.3 million for the Washington house they now have on the market. According to the Wall Street Journal, Andrew Ross Sorkin, in his book Too Big to Fail,revealed that the Paulsons have assembled 7,500 acres on an island off Georgia, for a total cost of $32 million.
Wendy Paulson is a longtime conservationist who was on the board of the Nature Conservancy until 2001 and is now chairman of RARE, a conservation group based in Arlington, Virginia, to which she pledged $6 million last June. Since leaving the Treasury Department in January 2009, Henry Paulson has been a distinguished visiting fellow at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. His memoir, On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System,was published in February.
Price Points: The sellers of the Paulsons’ Chicago condo, Stephen and Ellen Taylor, paid $1.064 million for the place in 2007. They put it on the market in April 2009 with an asking price of $1.649 million. They dropped the price in July 2009 and again in December 2009, when it landed at $1.599 million. Also at 340 on the Park, a 4,100-square-foot condo on the 58th floor was sold last week for $3.65 million. The seller, Giancarlo Turano of the family-run Turano Baking in Berwyn, had bought that penthouse in 2008 for $3.065 million.
Listing Agent: N/A