A New York City co-op board rejected influencer Livvy Dunne’s bid to buy Babe Ruth’s onetime apartment, turning aside her nearly $1.6 million offer of cash, the social media star and former college gymnast said Tuesday.
Dunne, one of the first major stars of college sports’ “name, image and likeness” marketing, said she was all set to close on 345 W. 88th St., Apartment 7B, when she got the bad news.
“Guys, I’m so upset,” the seemingly still cheerful Dunne told her 8 million TikTok followers. “So a few months ago, I decided I was going to make my first real estate purchase, which is so exciting. And I was going to get an apartment in New York City. But the gag was, it was Babe Ruth’s apartment.”
The Upper West Side three-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom unit was listed for $1.595 million.
Dunne said she and her boyfriend, Pittsburgh Pirates star pitcher Paul Skenes, were looking forward to the cash purchase.
“I got an interior designer because I didn’t want to bring my college furniture to Babe Ruth’s apartment,” she said. “That would be, like, criminal.”
The building board scuttled the purchase, Dunne said.
“Then the week that I’m supposed to get my keys to my brand new apartment, I get a call: The co-op board denied me, ” she said. “So pretty much the people in the building voted to not have me live there, which is fine. Like, honestly, it wasn’t financial. “
Dunne seemed to have a good attitude about the rejection and laughed it off, joking that she might have been victimized by a tide of University of Alabama fans.
“It could have been, for all I know, they could have been Alabama fans and I went to LSU. Like, I have no clue,” she said. “Maybe they didn’t want a public figure living there.”
Real estate agent Miryam Tesfaegzi, who represents the owner of 7B, declined to discuss specifics of aborted sale. But she did not dispute any of Dunne’s allegations.
“When a co-op does a rejection, they don’t have to share any information with us,” she said. “We never know why a co-op would reject any buyer.”
The unit was last sold for $1.585 million in 2016, according to real estate records that Tesfaegzi confirmed.
“Obviously, they wanted to sell it, so that’s the only thing that’s going to make them happy,” Tesfaegzi said of her clients.
Ruth lived in the unit from 1920 to 1940 before he moved to another Upper West Side unit.
Ruth was the Shohei Ohtani of early MLB, swatting 714 career home runs and excelling on the mound for several years.
His homers are third all-time, trailing only those of Barry Bonds and Henry Aaron.
As a pitcher, Ruth was 94-46 with a 2.28 ERA. His 35 complete games in 1917 with the Boston Red Sox were tops in baseball, while his nine shutouts and 1.75 ERA in 1916 were both No. 1 in the American League.