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.
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—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
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“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
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