MoMA Trustee Barbara Jakobson's 'Squirrel House' Lists for $8.99 Million

The five-story Upper East Side townhouse where collector and MoMA trustee Barbara Jakobson lived for nearly six decades is on the market for $8.99 million. Christie's International Real Estate New York holds the listing, with agents Leslie Hirsch, Edward Joseph, Howard Morrel and Benjamin Anderson attached.

The property first asked $9.8 million when it came to market in April 2026, after Jakobson's death last summer. It has since taken a price cut of more than $800,000. Art world real estate, it turns out, obeys the same gravity as everything else.

Jakobson bought the 20-foot-wide house on East 74th Street in Lenox Hill in 1965. Built in 1910 and expanded by architect John Kingsland in 1956, the home had a cinematic résumé before she ever moved in: filmmaker Elia Kazan lived there while directing East of Eden (1955) and Splendor in the Grass (1961). James Dean, Natalie Wood and Marlon Brando reportedly visited during that era. Later, under Jakobson, the guest list shifted to Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg.

She saw the house as more than an address. "I see the house as a vessel for an ongoing autobiographical exercise," Jakobson told Curbed in 2021. "I keep the transformation as proof of life."

What does $8.99 million buy?

The nickname comes first. Locals call it "the Squirrel House" for the bronze squirrel sculptures at the entrance. Whimsical outside, disciplined within.

Red lacquered doors open onto roughly 6,000 square feet of interiors, with eight bedrooms and six full bathrooms. The house functions, in effect, as a private museum with plumbing.

The inventory:

• A grand entry hall with triple arches and custom wallpaper by artist Peter Halley
• A parlor floor holding a formal living room, a gallery and a salon with a wood-burning fireplace
• A spiral staircase — where Jakobson was once photographed for Vogue — descending to a double-height great room
• A private 350-square-foot garden reached through glass doors
• Guest quarters across two levels, including two junior suites with dressing rooms and en suites
• A primary suite occupying the entire top floor, with a light-filled lounge for reading or, as the listing implies, pondering art

Where did the Frank Stella go?

The great room holds a ghost. An outline remains where Frank Stella's 1971 Felsztyn III once hung; the painting was sold in 2005 at a Christie's auction of works from Jakobson's collection. The wall kept the memory. The market took the canvas.

For over 60 years, Jakobson was a monumental force in the New York art world — collector, fierce patron, longtime MoMA trustee, and a native New Yorker with a curatorial eye that the house made visible. From the mid-1960s until her death in 2025, the townhouse doubled as her ever-evolving personal gallery.

The sale closes that chapter. Whoever pays the reduced asking price inherits the arches, the squirrel bronzes, the Stella-shaped shadow on the wall — and the task of writing their own autobiography into 6,000 square feet of someone else's proof of life.