Inside the cage was a metal circular stairway to the penthouse.
The house is at 489 Minnieford Avenue, not Minneford, and it has a circular stairway, not a circular driveway.
The kitchen was by the door, and there was a living room beyond it with a circular stairway leading up.
It retains much of its original interior: 16-foot ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows, a cylindrical chambered circular stairway, elaborate woodwork and plasterwork with classical Greek and Roman motifs and Duncan Phyfe furniture.
Kapindra Swami, who presides over the temple, says he entered into an unwritten agreement last summer with his landlord, Howard Lifshitz, to install a new kitchen and a circular stairway to the basement in the second of the storefronts.
It is a studio in the old, romantic way — high-ceilinged, with serrated skylights, trees outside the windows, and a cast-iron circular stairway, painted muddy green, leading to the roof.
"Here is the most modern of modern houses I've ever seen and loved," she wrote, describing the turquoise mosaic tile, the compact state-of-the-art kitchen, the distant views of city lights, the proximity to her daughter's family and the circular stairway that she felt, sadly, too old to sail down.
$900,000 to $1.2 million Harrison $1.1 million577 Kenilworth Road Number of bedrooms: 6 Number of full bathrooms: 5 Number of half bathrooms: 1 Weeks on market: 8 months 36-year-old colonial; circular stairway, two-story entry, high ceilings, putting green in backyard, 1-acre lot; taxes $33,120; listed at $1.2 million.
If there's a silk lampshade in town that has done any time as a hat, chances are it is one in Mr. Mindel's much-photographed Chelsea penthouse loft, which comes with a circular stairway, views in three directions and enough midcentury bric-a-brac to fill a whole issue of Wallpaper.
