History
740 Park Avenue was constructed in 1929. It was designed by Rosario Candela and Arthur Loomis Harmon, the design partner of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon. It was built by James T. Lee, grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The building has 31 units, many being duplexes, with the highest ceilings on Park Avenue. Units often feature formal dining rooms, libraries, living rooms of 40 by 23 feet and spacious entrance halls known as "galleries." The building has an understated Art Deco limestone exterior.
Units in the building have regularly sold for some of the highest prices in New York City. In 2000, Stephen Schwarzman purchased Saul Steinberg's apartment for "slightly above or below $30 million," which was reportedly the highest price ever paid on Park Avenue. The apartment was previously owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who moved to the building in 1937.
Life in the building is amusingly described in the New York Social Diary. In 2005, author Michael Gross published a detailed book on the building and its history, 740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building. According to Gross, builder Lee's daughter Janet Lee Bouvier and son-in-law Jack Bouvier took the final open lease (according to one account, for free), and their daughter Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis grew up there.
Read more about this topic: 740 Park Avenue
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)