'Godfather' house hits market at $2.9 million
The well-wishers are long gone. Their cash-stuffed envelopes for the bride's purse have been dispensed; her father's favors have been warmly or grimly granted. The bulbous 1940s automobiles have crunched out of the gravel drive, their license numbers penciled into feds' notebooks.
The tomato plants, so lovingly tended, have returned to the earth, as has the patriarch who died among them.
But you? You can start your own chapter at this infamous house. All you need to do is make the owners a suitable offer.
One they can't refuse, of course.
The real-life house that played the Corleone residence in "The Godfather" is on the market again, not three years after its longtime owners sold it. The new owners, who paid about $1.7 million for it in March 2012, have fixed it up and listed it at about $2.9 million. (Click here or on a photo for a slideshow.)
It's not the only "Godfather"-related property to make real estate news. The jaw-dropping Beverly House -- which stood in as the estate of Jack Woltz, the benighted Hollywood mogul who wound up sharing his bed with a horse's head -- continues to be one of the nation's most expensive listings at $150 million. And a condo at the Lake Tahoe compound where Michael unceremoniously dispatched brother Fredo in "The Godfather: Part II" was the Wall Street Journal's House of the Year for 2013, listed at $6.5 million.
The house is in New York City's Staten Island, and it almost didn't get its moment in the spotlight. Location scouts had been looking for homes on Long Island. They couldn't find anything, though. Then Gianni Russo -- who played Carlo, Connie's vicious pretty-boy husband -- mentioned this 1930 Tudor near where he grew up. The producer "fell in love with it," Russo told the New York Post in 2010.
That hardly sealed the deal. Crew members knocked on the door to ask for permission to film there in 1971, and the man who owned the house closed the door in their faces. But his star-struck wife chased after them when she found out, said the couple's son, Edward Norton III. (The family owned the house from 1951 until Edward Norton II died and his son sold it in 2012.)
The movie crew gave the Nortons a new slate roof in exchange for filming exteriors there. They used its half-acre lot, along with surrounding properties, in some of director Francis Ford Coppola's most famous scenes, including the Carlo-Connie wedding and the fatal heart attack of Vito Corleone.
Inside, the house bears little resemblance to what you'd imagine for the Corleones -- unless you picture Sonny, Michael and Fredo growing up in bedrooms colored peach and lime and grape -- with one notable exception.
The new owners remodeled the office after Don Corleone's.
