Hopefully, there’ll be an offer that the owners of the Godfather cannot refuse. The Tudor-style property that belonged to Michael Corleone in the legendary 1972 Francis Ford Coppola movie has hit the market for $1.375 million.
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The four-bedroom property, which is located at 120 Longfellow Avenue in New York City’s borough of Staten Island, has been used to film several scenes in the Godfather.
It was the home where main protagonist and mafia boss Michael Corleone lived with his family — just steps away, small-time gangster Carlo Rizzi gets strangled by a member of the Corleone family in the movie.
“Francis wanted me to go through the windshield of the car,” Gianni Russo, the actor who played Rizzi, told The New York Post.
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The property itself has changed little over the years. Built in 1940, it has four bedrooms and is built in the traditional brick Tudor style. It also comes with an iron gate, stained glass windows and a tiled front yard. It is, by all accounts, a stylish upper-class house —the movie connection mattered little to current owners Elaine and Peter Albert, who bought the house for $195,000 in 1977 and have raised their family in it for more than 40 years.
“It was peaceful,” Elaine, 73, told The Post. “The [school] bus came to the corner. It was nothing like the movie.”
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John A. Vernazza, of Vernazza Real Estate, told Inman that the listing has renewed interest in its film history – the connection has attracted more buyers, one of whom even started quoting lines from the film. In fact, the entire neighborhood will be familiar to true fans of the movie as the property used to film the family home of Vito Corleone is just down the block.
“It’s a upper-class neighborhood, so these houses normally don’t show as often,” Vernazza said.
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But, as Vernazza says, an agent can only take these movie connections and the increased publicity it brings so far — it is very unlikely that someone will buy the house just to walk in the patent leather shoes of Michael Corleone.
“When I brought [The Godfather connection] to the attention of the public, it did pick up some interest,” Vernazza said. “But anyone that has called me to see it, has had a real interest in buying the house.”