In 1927, the socialite Amy Phipps Guest — whose father, Henry Phipps, was a partner of Andrew Carnegie — took over the crown-jewel penthouse at 1 Sutton Place South. The new 13-story residential building had its own private yacht landing on the East River, and the apartment’s original floor plan showed no fewer than two ballrooms and a 30-foot dining room, all of which poured out onto an expansive roof terrace.
Phipps Guest had resided at her brother’s five-story mansion off Fifth Avenue at 6 E. 87th St. But by the 1920s, a growing number of elite New Yorkers were making the transition from private homes to apartment buildings — and it was the architect Rosario Candela who set fashionable new standards for how they lived, including at 1 Sutton Place South, which he helped design.
“Candela defined an era,” said Donald Albrecht, curator of “Elegance in the Sky: The Architecture of Rosario Candela,” an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York that spotlights the architect’s contributions to luxury housing and the city skyline. “He defines the buildings of Jazz Age New York.”
In 1909, when he was barely 20 years old, Candela left his native Sicily for New York with $20 in his pocket and even fewer words in his English vocabulary. He would attend Columbia University, and it wasn’t long before he would begin working on some of Manhattan’s most coveted addresses.
Candela would design 82 apartment buildings in New York City, reaching his zenith in the dizzying construction boom of the 1920s, still considered one of the city’s greatest eras for high-end multifamily housing development.
Beyond 1 Sutton Place South, Candela’s celebrated reach expanded to tony buildings down Park and Fifth avenues — glamorous dwellings that command many millions of dollars today. In 2010, hedge-funder Richard Perry splashed out $10.9 million for Phipps Guest’s former home, which by that time boasted 18th-century gold-and-ivory door frames and white marble floors. C.Z. Guest, Phipps Guest’s daughter-in-law, who once occupied it, called it “the most magnificent in New York City.”
While Candela didn’t exactly pioneer the high-class Manhattan apartment, he fine-tuned the look of luxury dwellings and mass-produced them for the wealthy class — introducing new layouts that remain the benchmark for exclusive living.
In 1884, The Dakota on Central Park West debuted as America’s first-ever luxury apartment building, luring in aspirational upper-middle-class New Yorkers by offering them the amenities they had come to expect in their private homes, with lower costs.
There was only one problem: The layouts were terrible. Bedrooms were adjacent to kitchens; bathrooms were few and far between; and living rooms were stranded in Siberia.
“They hadn’t quite figured out how to arrange rooms that made for a gracious layout,” architecture critic Paul Goldberger, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, said of The Dakota’s builders.
Still, by the end of World War I, fueled by rising land values and a servant class fighting overseas, luxury-apartment construction reached a zenith.
“When [the servants] didn’t come back, it became increasingly difficult for the owners to run a private house,” said Andrew Alpern, author of “The New York Apartment Houses of Rosario Candela and James Carpenter.” “Selling a private house for continued use as a private house became more and more difficult.”
Candela benefitted from these circumstances, establishing himself as an independent architect in 1920, just around the time that the demand for luxury apartment housing began its whir. In 1922, the city’s Department of Buildings issued 23 permits for penthouses to be constructed; by 1929, that number had soared to 391.
But the growing number of wealthy New Yorkers shopping for aeries began looking down at the convoluted layouts of earlier luxury buildings such as The Dakota. And so, Candela found his niche by perfecting the floor plan. It’s a seemingly banal signature, but experts say it remains among his greatest contributions for enhancing the way in which the rich lived.
“There’s a sumptuous grandeur to them,” Goldberger said of Candela’s floor plans. “Everything flows very beautifully. The rooms are large, but somehow everything just feels right.”
‘When you’re entertaining, it can be quite wonderful,” said Kirk Henckels, vice chairman of real-estate brokerage Stribling & Associates, of his 3,400-square-foot home at the Candela-designed 775 Park Ave., which dates to 1927. An entrance foyer leads to a 20-foot-long gallery, which pours into a 30-by-20-foot living room and then connects to a library.
“We can easily hold 100, 150 people for drinks,” Henckels said.
According to Candela’s sole written thoughts on apartment layouts, published in the 1934 Bulletin of the Beaux Arts Institute of Design, public areas (living rooms, dining rooms and libraries), service areas (kitchens and servants’ quarters) and private areas (bedrooms) should be self-contained, but work together seamlessly.
His 10-room duplexes at 1220 Park Ave., completed in 1930, offered entertainment spaces on one floor and bedrooms on another.
“If you entertain at home, 1220 Park Ave. provides the logical solution to the problem of finding an apartment best suited to your needs,” its sales brochure read.
Original floor plans for 1931’s 834 Fifth Ave., regarded as one of Candela’s prime properties, reveal a sprawling 17-room full-floor apartment, where small servants’ quarters cluster around the kitchen and pantry. A nearly 40-foot-long living room connects the dining room, gallery and library — all adjacent to servant work areas. Off in their own wing: five bedrooms, each with their own bathroom.
Candela’s layouts also lent themselves to over-the-top customizations, which only enhanced their stature.
According to Michael Gross’ “740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building,” Candela personalized several apartments. Still, he could not provide a wish-list item for the wife of George S. Brewster, one of Standard Oil’s largest shareholders: an elevator that wouldn’t climb floors but rather turn corners and traverse from one end of the apartment to the other.
“But that is very inconvenient!” Eleanor Brewster reportedly said when told it was impossible.
740 Park’s stately exterior, designed in tandem with Arthur Loomis Harmon, also helped usher in a shapely new aesthetic. Finished a year after a 1929 law allowing new buildings to stand higher if the upper floors were set back, its series of terraces resemble a glorious wedding cake. Fine materials solidified its curb appeal.
“The building is sheathed entirely in limestone, made very, very tame, for nothing would be worse than to have the gentry of Park Avenue think they were being given the style of Central Park West and the Grand Concourse,” Goldberger wrote in “The City Observed: New York: A Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan.”
Candela launched his career in a boom, but it largely ended in a bust.
By the time of the stock market crash on Oct. 29, 1929, plans for his six most-famed buildings — including 740 Park and 834 Fifth — had been designed and filed.
“They represented the final display of fireworks before the Depression descended, and they were completed only after its effects had begun to be felt,” Alpern wrote. “The fat years had ended with a bang.”
Candela’s commissions suffered — lowering to just one in 1931 from 26 in 1929 — and he was forced to shutter his Madison Avenue office, which once employed 50 draftsmen.
While he was able to draft and complete apartment buildings in later years, “[they] never approached the scale seen in the 1920s,” wrote Christopher Gray of The New York Times.
The architect’s decline was severe, but he made do.
“He didn’t have family money to fall back on,” Alpern said. “He did whatever would help to sell his services, and if it meant designing in an art deco style, then he’d do that.”
But as 740 Park shows, his legacy endures. Even though the prized co-op fell out of fashion for several decades due to changing tastes and economic circumstances, it has since bounced back — and continues to break real-estate records.
Today, it’s home to private-equity titan Stephen Schwarzman, who bought his 34-room dwelling in 2000 for $35 million, and hedge-funder Israel Englander, who in 2014 paid $71 million for a duplex — $22 million over its asking price.
“They’ve really held up,” Albrecht said of Candela’s creations. “They’re still very prestigious addresses.”
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