From the author of "House of Outrageous Fortune"
For seventy-five years, it's been Manhattan's richest apartment
building, and one of the most lusted-after addresses in the world.
One apartment had 37 rooms, 14 bathrooms, 43 closets, 11 working
fireplaces, a private elevator, and his-and-hers saunas; another at
one time had a live-in service staff of 16. To this day, it is
steeped in the purest luxury, the kind most of us could only
imagine, until now.
The last great building to go up along New York's Gold Coast,
construction on 740 Park finished in 1930. Since then, 740 has been
home to an ever-evolving cadre of our wealthiest and most powerful
families, some of America's (and the world's) oldest money--the
kind attached to names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bouvier,
Chrysler, Niarchos, Houghton, and Harkness--and some whose names
evoke the excesses of today's monied elite: Kravis, Koch, Bronfman,
Perelman, Steinberg, and Schwarzman. All along, the building has
housed titans of industry, political power brokers, international
royalty, fabulous scam-artists, and even the lowest scoundrels.
The book begins with the tumultuous story of the building's
construction. Conceived in the bubbling financial, artistic, and
social cauldron of 1920's Manhattan, 740 Park rose to its dizzying
heights as the stock market plunged in 1929--the building was in
dire financial straits before the first apartments were sold. The
builders include the architectural genius Rosario Candela, the
scheming businessman James T. Lee (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's
grandfather), and a raft of financiers, many of whom were little
more than white-collar crooks and grand-scale hustlers.
Once finished, 740 became a magnet for the richest, oldest families
in the country: the Brewsters, descendents of the leader of the
Plymouth Colony; the socially-registered Bordens, Hoppins,
Scovilles, Thornes, and Schermerhorns; and top executives of the
Chase Bank, American Express, and U.S. Rubber. Outside the walls of
740 Park, these were the people shaping America culturally and
economically. Within those walls, they were indulging in all of the
Seven Deadly Sins.
As the social climate evolved throughout the last century, so did
740 Park: after World War II, the building's rulers eased their
more restrictive policies and began allowing Jews (though not to
this day African Americans) to reside within their hallowed walls.
Nowadays, it is full to bursting with new money, people whose
fortunes, though freshly-made, are large enough to buy their way
in.
At its core this book is a social history of the American rich, and
how the locus of power and influence has shifted haltingly from old
bloodlines to new money. But it's also much more than that: filled
with meaty, startling, often tragic stories of the people who lived
behind 740's walls, the book gives us an unprecedented access to
worlds of wealth, privilege, and extraordinary folly that are
usually hidden behind a scrim of money and influence. This is,
truly, how the other half--or at least the other one hundredth of
one percent--lives.
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