Part Two

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building
by Michael Gross

(Page 2 of 3)

A brief lesson in New York living arrangements is in order. Throughout the 1920s, developers began putting up buildings like 740 Park, full of grand apartments with the proportions of fine, freestanding homes - mansions stacked one atop the other, designed as suitable replacements for the private homes that had led society's march uptown and become obsolete within a single generation.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Manhattan's social elite, the Knickerbockers, who were descendants of the original Dutch settlers of New York, the English colonists who followed them, and, finally, the American revolutionaries who tossed the English out, went to bed at night exclusively in private houses. The location of those homes had moved inexorably uptown over the years. In the eighteenth century, the city's genteel residential district was a tiny enclave at the southern tip of Manhattan island: south of Chambers Street, clustered around Trinity Church and St. Paul's Chapel, lower Broadway, Bowling Green, and the Battery.

Driven north by fire and yellow fever epidemics, social life first alighted in what is now Tribeca, then, in the 1830s, skittered east to a new district surrounding the intersection of Lafayette Place and Bond Street in today's NoHo. John Jacob Astor, the richest man in America, lived there, as did his son William's future wife, Caroline Schermerhorn, who would become known as "The" Mrs. Astor. Their district's heyday was brief. By the middle of the century, the center of aristocratic gravity shifted again, to Washington Square, from whence society began a slow, steady progress up Fifth Avenue. That march was led by a Knickerbocker, Henry Brevoort, who built a house on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street in 1834, on what had previously been farm and grazing land, and gave a fancy dress ball there in 1840 that was considered the best party of its era. It was eighty more years before the town-house era ended, years in which new money poured into New York faster than derogatory names for the arrivistes could be coined. According to one historian, by 1929, 98 percent of "respectable New Yorkers" occupied apartments. The reasons for this sea change were as many as the multiple dwellings that had risen all over town. The American economy and New York's population boomed after the Civil War. Public life took on new allure, public spaces for entertaining replaced private ballrooms.

Then there were income taxes, introduced in 1913. Running a private house got expensive. And there was something called "the servant problem" - the inability to find good help. It was all compounded by the automobile, which got rich folks thinking they could split their time between sprawling country houses and smaller city residences.

"Apartments gave you choice," says Andrew Alpern, who has written extensively on the history of luxury apartments. "You could lock your door and go away and you had a great deal of security with doormen and elevator men and guards." Some of the new buildings even boasted service departments, "from which servants can be procured by the hour," The New York Times pointed out helpfully, "about as easily as taxicabs can be picked up on Broadway" so that "when Mr. Croesus contemplates returning to his city apartment for a brief sojourn ... when he arrives he finds his domicile adequately staffed."

Multiple dwellings weren't new. They'd been common in Europe for centuries; "the earliest were Roman tenements," says Alpern. They arrived in France in the eighteenth century, and grand, imperial apartment houses became fashionable when Paris was reconceived in the mid-nineteenth century by the urban planner Baron Georges Haussmann. But they remained a rarity in America.

Tenements had housed New York's lower classes since the 1830s, but the city's first luxury apartment house wasn't built until 1869, when Rutherfurd Stuyvesant, a descendant of New York's first governor, Peter, erected one at Eighteenth Street and Irving Place.

Stuyvesant was a member of New York's elite, the clans who formed the city's first capital-S Society. But his innovation - derided as risque "French flats" - was declared folly by his peers. They soon changed their tune. By the 1870s, John Jacob Astor and August Belmont (both relative upstarts who'd arrived on the social scene at the start of the nineteenth century) were investing in apartments, too, and buildings like the Dakota, erected in splendid isolation on the west side of Central Park in 1884, began making apartments chic. The Dakota was just as exuberantly ostentatious and lavishly tricked out as the single-family mansions on Fifth Avenue, but it was conceived to let the less wealthy live on a similar scale - even allowing tenants to enter their apartments directly from the (then-novel) elevators. They could imagine the show was theirs alone. But the Dakota was a rental; its tenants had no sense of ownership. And its West Side location was odd, almost antisocial, so it didn't attract the elite, who were sometimes called the bon ton.

Copyright © 2005 by Michael Gross.

About the Author

Michael Gross has written for Esquire, Vanity Fair, Town & Country, and countless other publications. Currently a contributing editor at Travel & Leisure, he is also the author of Genuine Authentic and the New York Times bestselling Model. He lives in New York City.