House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address

by Gross, Michael

  So, too, the former Majestic theater. In 1922, the Minsky brothers turned it into a burlesque house, then it was renamed the Cosmopolitan and run in turn by Ziegfeld and the Shuberts. During the Depression, it would again become the Park, then be renamed the International before NBC took it over as a television studio in 1949.

  W. R. Hearst was the one man who stayed true to the circle; he dreamed of renaming it Hearst Plaza. In 1911, he’d bought the Durland’s block for about $2 million. The riding academy had moved a few blocks uptown in 1902 after its former home was condemned when blasting for the new subway weakened its foundations; it later burned to the ground in a fire that sent eight firemen to the hospital.II It was assumed Hearst was planning a new skyscraper for his American and Journal newspapers. But two years later, he announced he would build his newspaper offices just south of the circle and was planning a low Gothic building to the north, though its foundation would be strong enough to support a tower if and when he decided to add one. Hearst also spearheaded the public subscription campaign that paid for the massive Maine Monument, erected in 1913 at the southwest entrance to Central Park, commemorating the lives lost when the battleship Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor in 1898, setting off (to cheers from Hearst’s newspapers) the Spanish-American War.

  In 1921, another Hearst skyscraper south of the circle was announced but never built, although in 1923 he renovated a theater on Fifty-Eighth Street that fronted on the circle, for his mistress, the actress Marion Davies. In 1928, he finished an office building for his papers a few blocks to the south, and his building on the Durland’s lot remained until the mid-1960s, known primarily for a giant neon sign on its roof that gave the temperature and weather forecast and advertised Coca-Cola.

  Central Park West from Sixty-Second to Seventy-First Streets had been vacant in 1891, but by 1902, two owners and three buildings shared the strip across the street from the park now occupied by 15CPW. The half of the block nearer to Sixty-First Street belonged to the children of a businessman named George Poillon; in 1894, his son Winfield put up two near-identical seven-story apartment buildings there, and his wife, Winifred, later inherited them. The other two lots (on the Sixty-Second Street corner) held what had once been a private home, separated from the Poillon property by a forty-five-foot-wide driveway leading to a brick stable in the rear. Rented to a religious school for girls, it belonged to Marie Louise Morgan, granddaughter of a Matthew Morgan, who established the Morgan & Sons bank in New York in the 1830s and made a tidy but not large fortune.

  In 1883, Marie was married in what was then her father William R. Morgan’s house. A generation earlier, their family had resided in far more fashionable Murray Hill. William’s move to a lesser part of town may be explained by his checkered past. Thirty years earlier, he and his younger brother went on trial for the savage beating of a man in Newport, Rhode Island, where the family spent summers. The victim had accused William of beating and imprisoning his own wife, who separately filed for divorce and asked a judge to let her return to her maiden name. The wealthy brothers were released from jail ten days later and returned to New York. Fifty quiet years later, the Morgans were back in the public eye as speculation grew in real estate circles that those otherwise empty blocks just above Columbus Circle were “in play.”

  In 1910, ground was broken for Harperley Hall, the first cooperative apartment house on lower Central Park West. When completed, it occupied six previously empty lots at Sixty-Fourth Street. The building, which boasted its own guardhouse and an open entrance court facing the Ethical Culture Society’s new auditorium across the street, would gain fame many decades later when the pop star Madonna bought an apartment there. Harperley Hall was nearly finished when another cooperative syndicate bought the former Marie Morgan house.

  Plans were soon announced for a thirteen-story co-op on the Morgan site. But a year later, the family foreclosed on the syndicate’s loan and bought the property back at auction for $325,000, $35,000 less than the outstanding mortgage. A year after that, Marie Morgan’s estate was sued by one of her heirs, seeking to partition the property, which ended up in the hands of another family member, who built a taxpayer—a low building constructed to generate rents that cover taxes while the owner of land waits to decide what to do with the property. The Electric Vehicle Association, which sold, stored, and cared for cars that ran on electricity, rented it as a salesroom and garage.

  In 1919, the Morgan lots were optioned by an athletic club that planned an eighteen-story clubhouse complete with swimming pool and indoor track, but two years later, the district attorney revealed he was investigating the club’s promoter, who had disappeared after he lost his option to buy the land and was suspected of stealing the initiation fees paid by a thousand prospective members. He later surfaced in Syracuse, where he claimed he’d been forced out by a faction of those members—and disappeared again.

  Central Park West became the next frontier after the 1923 announcement that a new subway line would run up its length into northern Manhattan. Ground was broken for the new line in 1925, and a fresh wave of land speculation along its route accompanied its construction. At the same time, the city widened Central Park West from forty-eight to sixty-three feet.

  Back in the hands of the Morgan heir who’d sued his relatives for it, the Central Park West property, occupied by a two-story auto showroom, was leased in 1923 to one developer who planned an eighteen-story building, then sold to another who’d already purchased Winifred Poillon’s apartment houses and begun demolishing them, planning a hotel for the southern corner. With the Morgan lots in hand, he decided to build another on the opposite end of the block.

  Designed and built separately—but immediately if awkwardly joined together—the almost identical fifteen-story Mayflower and Plymouth Hotels (renamed the Mayflower-Plymouth) rose in 1926. By that August, model apartments were ready for inspection. Despite their two separate marquees and entrances, the buildings were connected on the lobby level. (Because the floor heights didn’t match, the corridors upstairs were never joined.) The hotels shared a five-hundred-seat dining room and smaller rooms for private parties.

  The architect of the Mayflower-Plymouth was more important than its developers to the creation of today’s Central Park West. Emery Roth came to America from his native Hungary in 1884, age thirteen, and was working in a New York drugstore when the owner’s brother, an architect, admired his artistic skills and made him an unpaid apprentice. A job as a draftsman on the architectural staff of the World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893, followed. There, he met Richard M. Hunt, the designer of what may have been New York’s first apartment house, who gave him a job. By 1898, Roth was able to buy into an architecture practice and shortly set out on his own.

  Roth’s second big job was a Broadway apartment hotel, the Belleclaire. A flamboyant structure, influenced by art nouveau and the Vienna Secession movement, it impressed Leo and Alexander Bing, brothers and lawyers who’d become developers after making a fortune forming syndicates to buy and sell land near Broadway subway stops. Roth went to work for them in 1905 and pushed them to make their buildings architectural statements. Initially, their buildings on West End Avenue were restrained and sober, as was Roth’s Hotel Alden, which he also built for the Bings; it opened at Central Park West and Eighty-Second Street just after the Mayflower-Plymouth and featured one of Roth’s signatures, a water tank hidden in masonry designed to be an architectural finishing touch to the building. Diverse rooflines would eventually give Central Park West its singular visual identity.

  Like his contemporary Rosario Candela, Roth worked on both sides of town, but where Candela and the slightly older J. E. R. Carpenter established the look of the East Side with their restrained designs, Roth indelibly stamped the West. The Mayflower-Plymouth, with its bands of terra-cotta ornamentation near the roof and at the third and fourth floors, was a handsome addition to the streetscape. Likely only because it was constructed as two hotels did Roth
put two differently shaped towers on its roof—one a classic, boxy penthouse, the other resembling a campanile with a pyramidal top—above the unified cornice line that linked the buildings. Nonetheless, that accident made the Mayflower (as it would soon be known) the first of the avenue’s visually defining twin-towered buildings. Roth, “the unquestioned master of the luxury residential skyscraper,” according to Robert A. M. Stern, would soon be responsible for several others.

  During the early 1920s, New York State and City governments decided to encourage building by granting tax exemptions to developers and allowing life insurance companies to invest in housing. At the same time, in Manhattan, apartment hotels enjoyed their second coming thanks, ironically, to the exigencies of zoning laws. First enacted in 1916 and then revised in 1929, the laws restricted the height and allowable lot coverage of apartment towers, but hotels, which were deemed commercial enterprises, were much less restricted. Because of rising land costs, developers needed to build higher to increase their returns, and in the roaring climate of the twenties, more people moved around and were more than happy to sacrifice kitchens for freedom from housekeeping and cooking.

  In 1924, Roth designed Park Avenue’s Ritz Tower, which, at forty-one stories, was, for a time, the world’s tallest residential building. It was also one of the first of the slender, imaginative, sky-piercing towers that would soon define the proudly vertical uptown skyline of the Jazz Age. “Manhattan became an island of glittering pinnacles,” Lloyd Morris wrote in Incredible New York. Roth called the Ritz Tower a “skyscratcher,” as it resembled a spear sticking up into the air. A number of equally awe-inspiring apartment hotels around the southeast corner of Central Park followed. The spire-topped Sherry-Netherland (1926), McKim, Mead & White’s Savoy-Plaza of 1927 (since demolished), Roth’s Hotel St. Moritz and the mansard-roofed Pierre in 1930 joined the Plaza Hotel, which had opened in 1907 and was designed by the Dakota’s architect, Henry Hardenbergh. Central Park South extended the new hotel zone to the west with the near-simultaneous addition of the towering, sign-topped Essex House and the Barbizon Plaza.

  The trend petered out the next year as the stock market crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression, which gripped the nation throughout the 1930s. Work on the thirty-seven-floor Hampshire House, begun in January 1931, stopped only six months later when the developer defaulted on its mortgage before the building had even been enclosed. It would sit unfinished for six years.

  After his triumph with the Ritz, Roth built another hotel, the Oliver Cromwell on Seventy-Second Street, just off Central Park West, across the street from the Dakota. Rising to thirty-two stories, it was the first West Side skyscraper. Towers were “not only possible, but also desirable,” both visually and commercially, wrote Steven Ruttenbaum in Mansions in the Clouds, his biography of Emery Roth, since they allowed for private apartments with dramatic views.

  Luxurious apartment houses—buildings with sixteen-room apartments, duplexes, triplexes, and ceilings up to twelve feet high—soon replaced what had by then come to seem stunted turn-of-the-century hotels. The first, by Roth, was a new Beresford, which opened in September 1929 and was the largest apartment house of its time. Though not quite a skyscraper at twenty-two stories, it has a “monumental presence,” according to Robert A. M. Stern, with its Italian Renaissance and baroque elements, three separate entrances detailed in marble and bronze, elevators serving just one or two apartments per floor, and three corner turrets. Fully rented from the moment it opened, its 172 apartments have, over the years, been home to Beverly Sills, Isaac Stern, Tony Randall, Helen Gurley and David Brown, Adam Clayton of U2, Diana Ross, Jerry Seinfeld, and John McEnroe.

  The next year, Roth’s Italian-baroque, twenty-seven-story San Remo opened, with two colonnade towers topped with copper finials above a U-shaped base around a large light court reminiscent of the Dakota, the Apthorp, and the Belnord. Its 122 apartments have been home to entertainers from Eddie Cantor to Dustin Hoffman and Diane Keaton. A year after its completion, Roth codesigned a replacement for the old Hotel Eldorado, a more modern take on the San Remo’s two-tower concept, though he concentrated on the floor plans while another architectural firm designed the art deco exterior of what became, again briefly, the tallest West Side apartment house. Sinclair Lewis once lived there, as did Faye Dunaway, Tuesday Weld, Mary Tyler Moore, Alec Baldwin, Michael J. Fox, and Apple’s Steve Jobs.

  It was also the home of the fictional actress Marjorie Morning-star, née Marjorie Morgenstern, Herman Wouk’s update of Undine Spragg, whose father, a Jewish-immigrant businessman, moved there from the Bronx in the 1930s in the hope that her new address would help her marry her way “up” in the world. “Marjorie loved everything about the El Dorado, even the name,” Wouk wrote. “It had a fine foreign sound to it . . . low foreign, like her parents. By moving to the El Dorado on Central Park West her parents had done much, Marjorie believed, to make up for their immigrant origin. She was grateful to them for this, and proud of them. The west side, her mother told her, was where the good families lived.”

  The two finest towers on Central Park West were also replacements for earlier buildings that bore the same names. They shared Emery Roth’s twin-tower motif, though neither was designed by him, but were more au courant, reflecting the latest European design trends. Both the Majestic, a streamlined art moderne building that replaced the apartment hotel at Seventy-Second Street in 1931, and the art deco Century, which replaced Carrère and Hastings’s star-crossed theater at Sixty-Second and opened early the next year, were designed by Jacques Delamarre for the builder Irwin S. Chanin. A steel frame for the former was already being erected when the market crashed, and Chanin quickly had the building redesigned to reflect the new legal and economic reality. So a forty-five-story hotel with a single tower became a twenty-nine-story apartment house with two towers offering more corners and more open views, though its eleven- to twenty-four-room apartments had shrunk to four to fourteen rooms. Among its most prominent residents over the years were the gangsters Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Frank Costello, who would be shot and wounded in the lobby in 1957, Milton Berle, Zero Mostel, the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, and more recently Conan O’Brien.

  In 1928, the Century Theater, still controlled by the Shuberts, and an adjacent midblock building they owned that ran from Sixty-Second to Sixty-Third Streets, were rumored to have been sold first as a new site for the Metropolitan Opera and then to Bing & Bing. Instead, Chanin acquired the old Century in exchange for his interest in a group of theaters near Times Square. He’d bought the entire ninety-thousand-square-foot block, including a second theater and several other buildings, in order to build a sixty-five-story office building. Two months before the stock market crashed, Chanin revealed that it would be called the Palais de France, a center to showcase French industry and art, and would include an apartment hotel, a restaurant, and something called the Académie des Beaux Arts. But on October 23, 1929, the day before Black Thursday, just as demolition of the Century began, Chanin’s plans changed, a circumstance he blamed on both French politics and the American economy. France had dropped out, but the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. had agreed to finance an apartment house half the size of the abandoned Palais de France and a separate office building on Broadway. Chanin framed his decision to proceed as an act of patriotism.

  Plans for a new Century, a thirty-story apartment house, emerged the following fall. It would be marketed to people who were downsizing from larger apartments; its sunken living rooms, one-room studio apartments with terraces, and one-bedroom duplexes were designed to cushion their fall from larger spaces. Like the Majestic, the Beresford, and the San Remo, it was to be topped with a pair of stunning towers and would eventually be home to Chanin, Lee Shubert, William Morris, Leo Lindemann, whose Lindy’s delicatessen was famous for its cheesecake, Fay Wray, Ray Bolger, Ethel Merman, and Robert Goulet.

  The Majestic and the Century were the last great buildings erected on Central Park West in
the twentieth century, both products of the frenzied economic atmosphere that led to the stock market crash and the Depression that followed, even though they didn’t open until well after the black days of October 1929. By mid-1932, with stock values down almost 90 percent, the romance, glamour, and optimism made manifest in their architecture had been pulverized.

  A year after it opened, the San Remo was still about one-third vacant, and the Bank of the United States, which had financed it and many of the other Central Park West buildings, collapsed,III while across the street a so-called Hooverville (named for President Herbert Hoover, who promised that recovery was “just around the corner”) brought shanties of paper and scrap metal back to Central Park. Rents at the San Remo were reduced, its large apartments were cut up into smaller ones, and the building became a financial sinkhole. In 1940, it and the Beresford, which had also had its troubles, were sold together for a mere $25,000 above their existing mortgages. Similarly, the Mayflower-Plymouth’s owners were sued in 1934 after they stopped paying their mortgage. The hotel was finally auctioned off in 1939 and bought by its lender, which took a $1.5 million loss and held it until it could be sold again in 1946 (when it was assessed at a mere $2.45 million, about half a million dollars less than it had cost to build).

  Emery Roth’s biographer, Steven Ruttenbaum, considers the buildings that Roth and others erected on Central Park West between 1925 and 1932 the architectural apex of the era’s Great Prosperity. Their unique, inspiring silhouettes, combined into a “spectacular linear skyline,” were an attempt by both Roth and the ultimate consumers of his Central Park West apartments (whom Ruttenbaum describes as “rich Jews and successful artists, musicians and performers”) to compensate for the street’s failure to attain “the social desirability of Fifth Avenue” by reflecting their own status on their own turf. Ironically, then, the palisade-like street wall is best viewed from the apartments of Fifth Avenue, while the view from Central Park West is of the comparatively dull apartment buildings on Fifth, which Ruttenbaum deems “the center of the city’s elite.”