{"id":123608,"date":"2026-02-05T10:28:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T10:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/123608\/"},"modified":"2026-02-05T10:28:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T10:28:07","slug":"a-fathers-wish-becomes-a-daughters-fulfillment-on-the-upper-west-side","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/123608\/","title":{"rendered":"A Father\u2019s Wish Becomes a Daughter\u2019s Fulfillment on the Upper West Side"},"content":{"rendered":"

For nearly 20 years, Marisa Lalli bounced from one Manhattan rental to the next. She even tried a year in Philadelphia, which only convinced her that New York was where she wanted to be.<\/p>\n

The problem, she said, was that she \u201ccouldn\u2019t have bought a dream apartment without a winning Powerball ticket.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Did you recently buy a home? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com<\/a>. Sign up here<\/a> to have The Hunt delivered to your inbox every week.]<\/p>\n

In 2023, Ms. Lalli\u2019s father was diagnosed with cancer, and she spent the next year traveling between New York and her hometown of Hershey, Pa., to care for him. Michael Lalli had started out as a mechanic at the Hershey Chocolate factory and worked his way up to management, saving enough along the way to buy a house in Hershey and a townhouse on the Delmarva Peninsula.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dad was an old Italian gentleman and he didn\u2019t necessarily share a lot, so we didn\u2019t have a lot of talks about goals and life,\u201d said Ms. Lalli, 42, who works in public relations. \u201cAs the cancer took its toll, my dad made it clear that he wanted me to prioritize buying a place when he passed on. It was a really hard time, but it did give us opportunities to talk about the future in a really honest way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Lalli died in August 2024, leaving Ms. Lalli and her brother some money and the two properties, which they sold. By this time, she was renting a one-bedroom in a Lincoln Square high-rise for $4,600 a month, \u201ctrying to reestablish some kind of sense of normalcy after spending so much time in caretaking mode,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

With the inheritance plus savings, she could now afford a down payment on the Upper West Side, where she wanted to stay. She looked for a dog-friendly doorman building, preferably in the high West 60s or low West 70s and close to Central Park, for less than $1 million.<\/p>\n

Feeling unprepared to buy a place, she connected with Emily Yaffe, an associate broker at Serhant. \u201cNew York City is a different beast,\u201d Ms. Lalli said. \u201cGetting my paperwork together was overwhelming.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMarisa was specific in her criteria and we narrowed her hunt to a few-block radius,\u201d Ms. Yaffe said. \u201cThe inventory was very low. If you want to spend under a million and live in that neighborhood, you have only a few buildings to choose from.\u201d<\/p>\n

Condominium prices were out of reach, so they focused on co-ops.<\/p>\n

\"Graham Dickie for The New York Times<\/p>\n

This north-facing one-bedroom, one-bath unit had nearly 800 square feet, with an open living-dining area, five closets, an ugly bathroom, a dated kitchen with a pass-through and an 80-square-foot balcony accessible from the bedroom. The 32-story doorman building offered a landscaped roof deck, a laundry room, a gym and a courtyard, and was the closest to Central Park of the three options. Construction on a skyscraper down the street was getting underway and could continue for years. The unit, initially listed at almost $1.2 million, had lingered on the market. When Ms. Lalli saw it, the price was $985,000, with monthly maintenance between $2,300 and $2,400.<\/p>\n

\"Brown Harris Stevens<\/p>\n

Find out what happened next by answering these two questions:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For nearly 20 years, Marisa Lalli bounced from one Manhattan rental to the next. She even tried a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[8966,75,84,83,9,24,56,63,578,6672],"class_list":{"0":"post-123608","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-manhattan","8":"tag-cooperatives","9":"tag-manhattan","10":"tag-manhattan-headlines","11":"tag-manhattan-news","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-ny","15":"tag-nyc","16":"tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential","17":"tag-upper-west-side-manhattan"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}