As if things weren’t tough enough on the streets of New York — Matt Damon has brought havoc to Brooklyn Heights by moving into his luxury penthouse.
The Oscar winner brought in quite the production — closing down an entire street on Tuesday — including an enormous crane, which reached over 14 stories, to lift his furniture and a host of trees onto his tony terrace.
Damon, who was stuck in Ireland until late May during the COVID-19 lockdown, bought the 6,000-plus-square-foot penthouse in the Standish, a Beaux Arts building, in 2018. It went for $16.5 million — making it Brooklyn’s most expensive apartment at the time.
One local resident said, “We call the building the Standoffish because it is a little bit of Hollywood dumped in the middle of the more low-key Brooklyn Heights. The lobby is all gold and marble, and the units have Austrian white oak flooring and Italian Carrara marble slab countertops. John Krasinski and Emily Blunt live there, and [Damon] has a triplex penthouse on the 11th and 12th floors and the roof. It is the highest building in the neighborhood, so it has unobstructed views of the Manhattan skyline, New York Harbor and the bridges.”
The resident said of Damon’s dramatic arrival, “He closed off the street all day and parked an enormous big red crane right in the middle of the street. There was no sign of Matt, but he had a huge team of contractors and there were shrubs, decking and huge crates filled with stuff going up in the air to the terrace. We were all waiting for the grand piano to be wheeled out.”
The building, designed by Frank S. Lowe and built in 1903, hit the market in 2016 as converted residential units with the original brick and limestone facade restored.
Damon, who has four kids with wife Luciana Barroso, reportedly also has an East Village apartment. His rep didn’t get back to us.