ONE SUTTON PLACE...NYC...NY
.jpg)
This is what a townhouse looks like...!
23 Gramercy Park South last year for $18.5 million. The buyers of the 27-foot-wide landmark were Colombian heir Andrés Santo Domingo and his wife, socialite and Vogue contributor Lauren Santo Domingo. Apparently they weren't completely satisfied with their purchase, because the house is about to undergo a serious renovation.
Comments
Cross & Cross is best known for its design of the former RCA Victor tower on Lexington Avenue at 51st Street overlooking St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church on Park Avenue. Candela also collaborated with Cross & Cross on the design of 720 Park Avenue.
Candela's buildings, "it is said, were the grandest of the decade that was itself the greatest," wrote Elizabeth Hawes in her book, "New York, New York, How The Apartment House Transformed The Life Of The City (1869-1930)", published by Henry Holt in 1993.
"He had a respect for privacy and an eye for significant detail. He was a complete thinker. He added duplicate water connections to street mains and multiple switches for ceiling lights as well as beautifully turned staircases and separate wine cellars. More significantly, he designed buildings from the inside out. He placed windows where they received light, balanced a room, or allowed a graceful arrangement of furniture. Candela also invested unusual energy in the entry hall. In a typical apartment, he made it a full-sized room with rich views into the interior because he thought it was important to greet a visitor with a full sense of a home. Candela liked puzzles. During the Depression, he took up cryptography, and during World War II, he broke the Japanese code," Hawes wrote.
1 Sutton Place South is the finest and most prestigious apartment building on Sutton Place and its only rivals along the East River in terms of grandeur are River House and 1 Beekman Place, a few blocks to the south.
Born in Sicily, Candela came to the United States in 1909 and graduated from the Columbia school of architecture in 1915. His other famous buildings include 834 Fifth Avenue (see The City Review article) and 960 Fifth Avenue (see The City Review article), 720, 740, 775 and 778 Park Avenue, and 19 East 72nd Street (see The City Review article), all considered among the most glamorous addresses in the city.
The building is topped by the penthouse in the city, a 17-room unit that has 5,000 square feet of interior space and 6,000 square feet of terraces that wrap entirely around it. The apartment is notable for having two very large "drawing rooms" with curved bay windows at their north and south end of the building. The spectacular rooms had very tall ceilings, one of which contains a skylight.
The building was built in 1927 by the Phipps family and the penthouse was created originally for Amy Phipps as a duplex. When her son, Winston Guest, the famous polo player and husband of C. Z. Guest, the garden columnist, took the apartment over, the lower floor was subdivided into three separate apartments, one of which was occupied by Bill Blass, the designer. The Guests lived on one side of the penthouse and one of their sons, Alexander, lived on the other side for several years and sold the apartment in 1963 about the time that their daughter, Cornelia Guest, was born.
The apartment was then acquired by Janet Annenberg Hooker, the philanthropist who died in late 1997 and was a sister of Walter Annenberg, the communications magnate and art collector. The legendary apartment was put on the market in early 1998 with an asking price of $15 million, then highest price for an apartment in the city.
Mrs. Hooker had lived formerly at 895 Park Avenue and had purchased a 60-inch dining table from French & Co., and ordered six 24-inch leaves for it. Robert Samuels Sr., the director of the famous antiques store asked why she got the leaves when she had no space. "One day I will," she was said, by her son, to have replied and indeed she used them all to create the 18-foot-long table in the penthouse's 28-foot dining room.
In May, 2007, the city informed the building that it intended to erect a fence and create a public park on the land behind the building facing the East River because the building's lease on that property expired in 1990. The city had acquired the land from the owners of the building in 1939 as part of its plan to create the FDR Drive and the city leased the decktop over the drive to the builidng for $1 a year.
The co-op board got a temporary injunction that blocked the city from proceeding, claiming that the city's plans indicates that the building did own most if not all of its backyard and that the board would seek $10 million from the city if it lost the case. The building's residents at the time include John Fairchild, the former publisher of Women's Wear Daily, Carl H. Tiedemann, a past president of Donaldson, Lukin & Jenrette, John L. Vogelstein, a past president of Warburg Pincus, and Sigourney Weaver, the actress. An article by Charles V. Bagli in the June 19, 2007 edition of The New York Times reported that "The question of ownership came to a head in 2003 when the state's Department of Transportation began a $147 million rehabilitation of F.D.R. Drive between 54th and 63rd Streets and hard to tear up to the garden to fix the deck." His article also indicated that the building had new buyers sign confidentiality agreements about the garden's lease.