Tom Clancy’s Four-Penthouse Condo Breaks Baltimore Listing Records
By Lisa Kaplan Gordon
Tom Clancy’s Baltimore penthouse, where the best-selling novelist gazed at Camden Yards and his beloved Orioles baseball team, has hit the market for $12 million, a record-breaking price for a Baltimore condo, said Tyler Garrison, vice president of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty, which is representing the property.
“It’s spectacular,” Garrison told Yahoo Real Estate. The modernist, virtually all-white condo combines four penthouses to take up the entire top floor of one wing of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
“It’s got six terraces and unparalleled views of the Inner Harbor, Camden Yards and M&T Bank stadium,” Garrison said. “You can practically watch an Orioles game from it.”
Clancy, who sold more than 100 million copies of his military potboilers, owned 24 percent of the baseball team. He died in 2013 at age 66 after a short illness. His widow, Alexandra Llewellyn Clancy, is selling the condo.
The 12,000-square-foot home has an open-plan design with “a master entertaining space that could hold a couple hundred people,” said Garrison. “It’s the top floor, so you don’t have to worry about neighbors.”
The condo also has five bedrooms and seven baths:
There’s a 700-square-foot private gym, too, as well as three private elevators, garage parking for three cars, a screening room, and access to a pool and harbor boat slips.
Garrison suspects the property will appeal to international buyers and to Baltimore pro athletes who want a short commute to work.
“We’re definitely interested in the Orioles and the Ravens,” he said.
The penthouse wasn’t Clancy’s only spectacular property. “The Hunt for Red October” writer also owned an 80-acre estate in Calvert County, Maryland. My husband, McClatchy News investigative reporter Greg Gordon, interviewed Clancy there in 1998.
My husband remembers a long, winding driveway, a full-size football field and a restored Sherman tank parked on the front lawn. “Clancy said the property used to be a camp for poor Jewish kids,” he said. (It was called Camp Kaufmann.) “I asked him what happened to the camp, and he said, ‘I guess they ran out of poor Jewish kids.’”
That estate, named Peregrine Cliff, reportedly was valued at $6.9 million in estate documents. It supposedly inspired the fictional waterfront house where Clancy’s most famous protagonist, Jack Ryan, lived. Ryan was featured in Clancy’s novels “The Hunt for Red October,” “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger.”
“The living room had a gigantic picture window over the Chesapeake Bay with waves crashing,” my husband said. “It felt like you were almost in the water.”
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Video remembering Clancy, shortly after his death in 2013:
