A Gilded Age mansion filled with Cold War intrigue is back on the market for $50 million.
The six-story Beaux Arts mansion at 854 Fifth Ave., which comes with bullet-proof windows facing Central Park, is where Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito hid out following an assassination attempt against him in 1963, according to the mansion’s current listing broker, Douglas Elliman’s Tristan Harper.
The stately residence also comes with a top-floor, metal-padded room with a Faraday cage, where Cold War warriors would meet to evade wire taps. (The cage blocks electromagnetic fields.)
One of the last great mansions for sale on Fifth Avenue, it is currently owned by Yugoslavia’s five successor states, and getting them to agree on anything about the Beaux Arts beauty is no small diplomatic feat.
More:Trump Tower Records Second Sale of 2018
Last year, Joshua Harris, co-founder of investment firm Apollo Global Management, offered to buy the 20,000-square-foot mansion for $50 million, sources tell Gimme Shelter.
But five of the successor states — Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia — couldn’t agree. Harris ended up buying a 44-foot-wide mansion at 50 E. 69th St. for $45 million instead, records show. It was considered "a deal of the century" at the time, since the mansion was originally asking $72 million, as The Post exclusively reported.
854 Fifth Ave. is 30½ feet wide and 125 feet deep.
It was built in 1905, for $60,000, for New York stockbroker and future governor of Rhode Island, R. Livingston Beeckman — and it was designed by the same architects as Grand Central Terminal. It was later owned by railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt’s granddaughter, Emily Thorn Vanderbilt Sloane White, who added even more extravagant details to the home, like angel-laden frescoes on the ceiling and gilded cherubs in the elaborate ceiling moldings.
More:Priciest Pads at Central Park Tower Will Top $100 Million
The landmarked mansion remains remarkably intact, with hand-carved balustrades of white marble, 17 fireplaces and an original working stove.
"The original details are beautiful, but it needs a lot of work," a source says. "There isn’t even any central air conditioning."
The Republic of Yuvoslavia bought the residence for the bargain price of $300,000 in 1946, due to a depressed post-World War II real estate market. (The last owner had paid $450,000 for it.)
It is now owned by the five of Yugoslavia’s successor states in a percentage formula devised by the United Nations.
More:Aston Martin to Open Design and Brand Studios in Shanghai
Serbia owns the biggest chunk of the mansion, and currently bases its Permanent Mission to the United Nations there.
The home is part of a portfolio of more than 50 trophy properties worldwide that are still being sold off by the successor states.
Only four trophy properties in the collection are currently on the market: in New York, as well as in Tokyo, Bern, Switzerland, and Bonn, Germany.
Last year, the successor states sold a duplex penthouse at 730 Park Ave. for $12.1 million.