New York - An apartment straddling the top floor of a bijou Italianate/Greek Revival-style former abattoir is tipped to shelter the beleaguered ex-IMF CEO, a Manhattan source said today.
The plush co-op building is slap bang in the middle of the highly gentrified Meatpacking District residential area, voted New York's most fashionable neighborhood in 2004.
Once part of the city's burgeoning gay BDSM subculture and the scourge of the 1980s New York Vice squad it now commands sky-high rentals.
Realtors negotiating the $10K-a-week contract hinted today the former Gansevoort Market apartment block used to house one of the area's most notorious sex clubs.
"Well, it's definitely not The Anvil and probably not The Mineshaft," Gail Porkenheimer of Porkys Realtors Inc commented.
"So that just leaves The Hellfire Club and The Manhole - both stunning residential complexes catering to high-end rollers.
"Sorry we can't comment on the room service aspect of the lease."
The 20th-floor condo overlooks the High Line, a former elevated freight railroad now an aerial greenway resembling Paris' Promenade Plantée - close to the banker's own home in the French capital.
Early reports indicate the lease will be signed on Monday on completion of a security assessment by the NYPD.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn is 69.
