Gross - 740 Park : the Story of the Worlds Richest Apartment Building

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FOR BARBARA

This is New York, skyscraper champion of the world,where the Slickers and Know-It-Allspeddle gold bricks to each other.

BENHECHT, Nothing Sacred

The real values of life are not purchasablewith money. You cant buy peace and good will.If you could, the problems that face us would be simple.All you can do, at most, is to help provide a setting,a scaffolding, an atmosphere, a soil perhaps,where these values can have at least some chanceto grow.

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER JR.

Architectural rendering of Candela and Harmons 740 Park Avenue (Drawing courtesy Steven Candela)

INTRODUCTION

SOMETHING DRAWS THE EYE TO THE COUPLE WALKING INTO AN ITALIAN restaurant on the fringe of Manhattans Gold Coastthe Upper East Side rectangle formed by Fifth and Park avenues between Fifty-ninth and Ninety-sixth streetsthe man is hunched, halting, and stout, and the woman, stately and sylphic-thin. Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall, says the Book of Proverbs. The former plutocrat Saul Philip Steinberg and his third wife, Gayfryd, seem to embody that adage.

It is clear as they maneuver their way to their table at Sette Mezzo that Saul Steinberg still suffers from the effects of a devastating stroke he had a decade earlier. So Gayfryd gently guides him, holding one of his arms, the left one, the one that seems partly paralyzed. And as they pass their fellow diners, many of them members of the same super-wealthy clique the Steinbergs once led, friendly greetings are murmured aloud, while silently prayers are saidand not necessarily for Steinbergs health. Rather, they tend toward sentiments like, There but for the grace of God go I.

Saul Steinbergs stroke was followed by catastrophic financial reverses that upended his life at the turn of the millennium. Steinberg hit bottom on May 11, 2000, when his troubles drove him from his home of twenty-eight years, a sumptuous duplex apartment, previously owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr., atop 740 Park Avenue. Steinberg bought the place for $225,000 after Rockefellers widow died in 1971, and sold it twenty-nine years later for approximately $30 million. It may have been the best investment in a life full of them. Yet it was not cause for celebration. Rather, it was a harrowing admission of defeat. Saul, friends say, is getting over the bouts of spontaneous sobbing he suffered after the stroke. But Gayfryd still cries over the hand fate has dealt them.

Once, Steinberg was the boy wonder of Wall Street. In 1961, fresh out of Wharton, the baby-faced business phenomenon opened a computer-leasing company that became one of the highest fliers in that decades go-go market. Trading on the inflated value of his flash-in-the-pan technology stock, Steinberg swooped in on unsuspecting companies and bought large positions in their stocks. The first time he did it, in 1968, he conquered Reliance, a 151-year-old Philadelphia insurance company. Not yet thirty, he used its millions in cash reserves to reinvent himself as a swashbuckling corporate pirate who would soon attempt more takeovers of such iconic American companies as Chemical Bank, Walt Disney, and the New York Times.

After Reliance, Steinberg rarely succeeded, but that may have been beside the point. He usually raked in a fortune, either by selling when his moves goosed stock prices or by getting paid what became known, post-Saul, as greenmail.1 Corporations paid greenmail to foil takeoversbuying back their shares at a substantial premium over market value to make the likes of Steinberg go away. Quaker State paid him $10 million, Penn Central, $8 million. Then he turned on Disney. The house that Walt built paid him $60 million to go away, but in the process they also replaced their chief executive with a new one, Michael Eisner, who turned the vulnerable studio into a media colossus. No one thanked Saul Steinberg.

In 1981, forty-two-year-old Steinberg and his family controlled a $100 million fortune, according to the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. By 1983, that stake had doubled. And in 1984, the magazine doubled its estimate again, to $400 million. His holding company, Reliance Group, was worth $3.7 billion. Steinbergs personal net worth peaked in September 1987 at about $660 million, then dropped by a third in a stock market crash. In the early 1990s, Reliance stock was still sinking and it owed $650 million in junk-bond debt, but Forbes pegged Sauls personal fortune at $330 million, plumped up by the sale of Reliances stakes in United Air Lines (for $100 million) and Days Inn ($765 million).

Steinberg always used his money as if trying to live up to a boast hed made after raiding Reliance. Like the Rockefellers, Ill own the world, hed said. Entertaining in imperial style, cultivating a fearsome public reputation, and a private one that blended charm with intelligence, while giving millionsboth his own and Reliancesto museums, libraries, and universities, he was deemed lordly. But that wasnt enough for him. A sign in his office read, in both English and Hebrew, On the eighth day, Saul rested.

Perhaps the hubris finally did him in. After his 1995 stroke, Steinberg fell off the Forbes 400 list of Americas richestand his life fell apart. He was even sued by his own mother. But the worst part was losing his home at 740 Park Avenue, for it was the apartment of his dreams. Hed bought it from the richest man in the world, the son of the greatest capitalist of the industrial age, the same son whod overcome the familys rotten, bloody, grasping reputation to become the reigning paragon of American wealth. Saul had planned to repeat the accomplishments of Rockefeller father and son in a single lifetime.

Instead, he was forced to abdicate their throne as well as their apartment.

THE HOME THAT LINKED STEINBERG TO THE ROCKEFELLERS, APARTMENT 15/16B at 740 Park, was the most extraordinary apartment in New York City. Its magnificence is hard to overstate. Writing about 740 in Town &Country, Steven M. L. Aronson waxed lyrical over its imperially vast, insolently self-contained apartments [that] embody what V. S. Pritchett called the glamour of wealth and respectable certainty. Unbudgingly supreme, they are not only New Yorks but the worlds best addresses. Steinbergs was the best of them all.

It was a Manhattan residence of unsurpassed elegance, tradition, location, and proportions, a real estate agent would later say. Boasting more than twenty thousand square feet in a city where seven-hundred-square-foot studio apartments were the norm for thirty-two-year-olds, it had, depending on who was counting, anywhere from twenty-three to thirty-seven rooms, the discrepancy caused by such questions as whether one included hallways and foyers the size of ballrooms, servants quarters, and the fourteen bathrooms.