NYC is one of the best cities in the world to Bro out with your friends. The food is delicious, the bars are open to 4AM, and there is zero shortage of gorgeous women everywhere. If you live here and have some sort of social life, it’s literally your own fault if you’re bored — There’s always *something* to do.
Over the weekend, the New York Times profiled three best friends who are living the Bro dream well into their 40s. They’re all rich and extremely successful — one is a veterinarian who co-owns a contracting company, one a senior managing director at the investment firm the Blackstone Group, and one an art collector and former partner of the fashion brand Baby Phat. It sounds like they do EVERYTHING together, as a group of best bros do:
The three men, who met through mutual friends, share an interest in music, art and cooking. They were already more or less inseparable during their time off, spending weekends in Miami, skiing in Aspen, going on European getaways, taking annual trips to New Orleans and camping at Burning Man in Nevada. Sometimes Mr. London’s girlfriend, Wendy Herrera, would join them, and they would joke that she had three boyfriends.
Wanting to Bro out as much as possible together, it only makes sense that the three men figure out how to live together. So they moved into the same building in Soho, each with the dough to buy multi-million dollar apartments, per the Times:
Luck was on their side, as a trio of apartments in a co-op building on Lafayette Street in SoHo serendipitously opened up around the same time. Mr. Zaroff bought his 1,900-square-foot unit first, in January 2013, for $2.65 million. Mr. London purchased a 2,100-square-foot unit on the floor above a few months later, for $3.1 million. And that summer, Mr. James bought the 1,700-square-foot unit directly below Mr. London’s apartment, for $2.7 million.
But don’t call their real estate investments a dorm!
“It’s not that we wanted to set up a dorm,” added Mr. London, 49, an art collector and former partner of the fashion brand Baby Phat. It’s simply that “we never break ranks.”
They even figured out how to make secret entrances to each other’s apartments, Bat cave-style:
The Gachots’ final touch was turning a rarely used back staircase into what amounts to a secret passage between two of the apartments, terminating on one end in a concealed door behind Mr. London’s bookcases and on the other in a panel in Mr. James’s fabric wall.
That makes it “easy to pop by,” Mr. James said. “Those ‘Seinfeld’ episodes where people just begin to hang out in each other’s apartments — that actually happens fairly often.”
And the best thing about being rich and one friend owning a construction company? They’re now thinking about ways to buy a fourth multi-million dollar apartment in the building that they can turn into their common area/man cave:
“We’re waiting for a fourth apartment to open up,” Mr. Zaroff said, “so we can build a rec room and common area to share.”
Being in your 40s and figuring out how to live near your friends so you can Bro out like it’s college all over again is the very definition of living the dream. Respect.