Part Three

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

(Page 3 of 3)

The first cooperative apartment building in New York, created to be owned by its occupants, was erected in 1880 by a French architect, Philip Gengembre Hubert, backed by a syndicate of artists. Soon, Hubert was building more and more luxurious co-ops, and other developers followed suit. When the huge Spanish Flats, which was built as a co-op on a block fronting on Central Park failed, its shareholders lost their investments, and the co-op movement stalled. But the conceptual foundation for co-ops had been laid. Ironically, it was their vaguely socialist intention that would prove enticing to the upper classes. Hubert's Home Clubs, as they were called, held out the promise that birds of a feather - "gentlemen of congenial tastes ... occupying the same social positions in life," as the Real Estate Record put it - truly would flock together.

First, though, came the age of the urban château. These Gilded Age monstrosities were erected by men who'd made fortunes in the post-Civil War era. They were symbols not just of success but of a new kind of social potency based on astonishing bucks instead of hoary old bloodlines. Until the Industrial Revolution, social status and wealth stemmed from ownership of land. Old money didn't need to be big money. But the expansion of urban mercantile wealth in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the creation of industrial fortunes in the second, changed all that - and old-line society threw up demarcation lines.

Between 1870 and 1880, more new money flooded New York and, at least at first, was greeted as a tidal wave of trash. Mere wealth didn't guarantee acceptance. Substance and ineffable qualities of culture and grace mattered as much. Initially rejected by reigning society, ambitious nouveau-riche families like the Vanderbilts (the Astors had squeaked under the wire and were considered old money; the Jewish-born Belmonts, who'd arrived from Germany in the 1830s, didn't quite measure up) redefined the terms of social engagement, making themselves celebrities with their showy chateaus and the huge parties they held in them. The press used the rich to entice the hoi polloi. The floodgates had opened.

In the face of this dire threat, the Old Guard closed ranks, inventing exclusionary groups such as the social arbiter Ward McAllister's Patriarchs (in 1872), lists like the social leader Mrs. Astor's Four Hundred and more expansive successors like the Social Register (in 1887), exclusive enclaves for the right people like New York's Tuxedo Park and Georgia's Jekyll Island, and hereditary societies like the Daughters of the American Revolution, Sons of the Revolution, Colonial Dames, and Society of Mayflower Descendants. They sought to exclude, but it was in vain.

New people with new money set a new standard. One's home was no longer one's castle but one's calling card. Fifth Avenue turned into Show-Off Row. Famously, the Vanderbilts, the newest richest family in the world, could not win Mrs. Astor's approval. "Railroad people!" she called them. But Willie Vanderbilt, grandson of the Commodore, and his wife, Alva, finally gained entry to an Astor ball in 1883, just after their limestone château rose on Fifth Avenue and they gave the latest party of the decade there. Railroad money might not be old money, but given time to mature, it proved acceptable. Mrs. Astor ended up moving to Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street in the 1860s, and then, in 1893, to Sixty-fifth and Fifth, where she lived in a sixteenth-century-style limestone château until her death in 1908.

New York absorbed its outer boroughs in 1898 and was inching toward a new role as a world-class city, second only to London, and beginning to reach for the sky. Nothing was permanent in this new New York, least of all living arrangements; the famous skyline was created as thousands of new apartment buildings and grand new office and public buildings rose in Manhattan and redefined fashionable life. The wealthy couldn't help but notice as entrepreneurs sought land on which to raise the new behemoths, and private homes fell victim to their ambition and the unquenchable demand for new housing.

The east side of Central Park was dubbed the city's emerging "aristocratic residential section" in 1906 by the Real Estate Record, which also pointed out that thanks to Park Avenue's width, it was well suited to large buildings. The first apartment house to gain favor with New York's elite (indeed, the first to rise among the mansions of Fifth Avenue) was 998 Fifth Avenue, at Eighty-first Street, designed by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1912. An Italian Renaissance palazzo based on Rome's Farnese Palace, incredibly luxurious yet restrained, with a subdued limestone, granite, and marble facade, an elaborate terra-cotta cornice, and a huge iron-and-glass marquee over its side-street entrance, it was billed as the most expensive and exclusive apartment house in the city. Its seventeen simplex and duplex apartments, including two full-floor units of ten thousand square feet apiece, featured every modern convenience - even jewelry safes for each bedroom, a large silver vault in each kitchen, an ice-making plant and individual refrigerated wine cellars, and private laundry rooms in the basement.

These were the first of the sorts of apartments that, eighty years later, inspired the fictional one created by Tom Wolfe for Sherman McCoy, the hapless lead character in the novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: "the sort of apartment the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York, and for that matter, all over the world."

The first renters at 998 - attracted by a lavish hardcover brochure - included a granddaughter of Commodore Vanderbilt; Levi Morton, U.S. vice president under Benjamin Harrison; the former secretary of state and war Elihu Root; John Jacob "Jack" Astor V, who moved in after surviving, in utero, the sinking of the Titanic; and Murray Guggenheim of the mining Guggenheims. Root, who had been a leader of society's move uptown when he built a private house for himself at Seventy-first Street and Park Avenue, was offered a cut rate to sign a lease at 998. Morton, who was the governor of New York from 1895 to 1897, followed.

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.