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

by Gross, Michael

  Suddenly, “the idea that you need a fancy co-op to be socially acceptable is gone with the wind,” says Elizabeth Stribling, founder of an eponymous brokerage. “New York has become much more of a moneyed town, and buildings are now being created for them. Money trumped the club.”

  Today’s individuals of great wealth don’t want to be known as members of a set. Unlike their immediate predecessors in the Forbes 400, they profess no desire to assimilate into anything other than the floating crap game of wealth. Society was once defined by geography; even if you belonged to the jet set, you came from Rome or Paris or London or New York. Today, what matters seems to be continued accumulation, which makes rootlessness a virtue, and belonging, cohesiveness, and obligation vestigial. There’s no need to assimilate when your money, not your country, your family, or old friends, is what defines you. “It’s a different kind of club,” says a 15CPW apartment owner. “You just need a big checkbook.”

  Buildings such as Fifteen have been called redoubts of the .01 percent, symbols of a self-perpetuating conspiracy designed to protect its wealth and privilege while denying them to the 99.99 percent outside its walls. The presence of Goldman Sachs, the much-reviled investment bank, among the investors in the building, and of numerous Goldman Sachs bankers and friends among its residents seems to support such a theory. But where cooperatives have actually functioned like secret societies over the last century, the rootlessness that defines those attracted to today’s luxury condos argues against such a notion. Fifteen people are guilty of cosmopolitanism, but not conspiracy.

  Yes, they sit on the same boards, attend the same conferences, share the same investment bankers, golf clubs, and schools for their children. They can, if they choose, hobnob with others occupying the same socioeconomic stratum, but “this is global as opposed to local connectivity,” says Ajay Kapur. “You can’t have both astronomical prices and local buyers.” The local elite, at least in world cities, has become an endangered species.

  The new global super-elite, though it enjoys the benefits of life in New York, adopted some of its predecessor’s superficial trappings, and has developed a taste for unique experience, extreme quality, and personalized service, is still new to the territory and unsure of its footing. In its first generation of wealth, this new society remains tentative and resistant to the sort of assimilation that would make it a cohesive force with shared socioeconomic interests. Living under the same roof is one thing. Living under collective rules is precisely what these people have chosen to avoid by living in condominiums. For the atomistic cohort that cohabits at 15CPW, it’s still every man for himself.

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  I Among them are Titan Capital, Canyon Capital, SAC Capital, CCMP Capital, Duquesne Capital, Joho Capital, Kingdon Capital, Knighthead Capital, Millennium Capital, Point State Capital, Vedanta Capital, Kilmer Capital Partners, Meridian Capital Partners, Arts Capital Management, Goffe Capital Management, Davidson Kempner Capital Management, Och Ziff Capital Management, Capital Research and Management, Brevan Howard Asset Management, Citadel Asset Management, Marble Bar Asset Management, Visium Asset Management, Marathon Asset Management, Deerfield Management, RBC Wealth Management, Aurora Investment Management, Area Partners, Jana Partners, OpusPoint Partners, Realm Partners, D. E. Shaw, J. Goldman & Co., Urdang Real Estate Investment Advisors, Perella Weinberg, and JGP Gestão de Recursos of Rio de Janeiro.

  Part One

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  THE OTHER GOLD COAST

  He who considers things in their first growth

  and origin, whether a state or anything else,

  will obtain the clearest view of them.

  —ARISTOTLE

  New York is not always kind to those who seek to leave their mark on it. Some names persist, sticking to streets and alleyways like gum to a shoe, even after the people behind them are forgotten. Names disappear, washed away in sudden storms or slowly eroded until nothing is left save a shadow of a memory.

  John Somerindyck’s name, for instance.

  On October 19, 1784, Somerindyck bought two hundred acres on the west side of Manhattan from the new New York State’s Commissioners of Forfeiture, who’d taken it away from the Tory de Lancey family after the American Revolution. The de Lanceys were the namesakes of today’s Delancey Street, a Lower East Side thoroughfare commemorating a colonial-era chief justice of New York, a descendant of a French Protestant who came to New York to escape religious persecution in 1686.

  That first de Lancey married a Van Cortlandt (later namesakes of a Bronx park), became a merchant, and rose in politics to membership on His Majesty’s Council of the British Province of New York. He acquired what later became Somerindyck’s farm in the early eighteenth century. Left to his children, it came to be owned by James, a grandchild whose service as a lieutenant governor of the British province during the Revolution led, after the war, to a charge of treason and the forfeiture of his land.

  John Somerindyck died without a will in 1790, and his children divided up the farm and over the years sold it off. The block where Fifteen Central Park West now stands belonged to Abigail Somerindyck Thorn, a widow. With a later husband, William Cock, she occupied a rambling, one-story Dutch-gabled house with an attic in a dense forest about nine blocks north and west of today’s Amsterdam Avenue. In 1826, their land was sold. In the meantime, the onetime Indian trail called Bloomingdale Road when it first opened in 1703—today’s Broadway—was narrowed and widened again, and in 1867, it was rebuilt as a grandiose roadway called the Boulevard. Bloomingdale Road was and remains the spine of Manhattan.

  Bloomingdale was an anglicized version of Bloemen Daal, or “valley of flowers”; it was a beautiful wilderness named for a flower-growing region of Holland. Manhattan’s earliest European settlers called the island New Amsterdam, until it was seized by the British in 1664 and renamed. The closest thing to a community in the vicinity of today’s 15CPW was Harsenville, centered on today’s Seventy-Seventh Street, the southernmost of a string of hamlets off Bloomingdale Road. The local gentry clustered uptown on the elevated banks of the North (now Hudson) River. Their string of river-view estates “was the Newport of New York in the olden time,” between the 1750s and the 1890s, said a 1901 real estate promotion brochure, “the watering place of the wealthy, the resort of distinguished strangers, and the place, above all others near the city, where social delights were the study and business of summer life.” But the presence of swells notwithstanding, the two square miles of land on the West Side was not seen as swell.

  In 1811, an official commission created a plan for the undeveloped part of Manhattan Island, most of the island, a rectangular grid, detailed down to streets and property lines, all the way north to Washington Heights, with wide, numbered north-south avenues and narrower cross streets intersecting them at regular intervals. Thirty years later, developers focused on and rapidly consumed the available land on the East Side—mostly level, it was easy to build on. The craggy, inhospitable West Side plateau was home only to what local historian Peter Salwen called “humbler settlements,” those hamlets off Bloomingdale Road as well as lesser ones populated by the poor, including one in what is now Central Park, then the site of a reservoir, the city’s first man-made source of water.

  Just inside the future park at Eighty-Fifth Street, several free African-American laborers had bought small parcels from an English family, and on the steep, rocky land a squatters’ community of about 250 sprang up with dozens of homes and shanties built of boxes, timbers, flattened tin cans, and other found material. Immigrants, freed or escaped slaves, and displaced American Indians occupied those structures, and even nearby caves. “A suburb more filthy, squalid and disgusting can hardly be imagined,” observed a contemporary quoted by Salwen in his book Upper West Side Story. Dubbed Seneca Village, it lasted until the mid-1850s, when a civic experiment—the creation of a public park—caused its eviction and set the stage for the development of the West Side.

  New York’s population had ex
ploded, pushing its boundaries ever northward. The city’s outer limits were settled by the working and the criminal poor, some of whom squatted on whatever open land they could find on the rough, ravine-crossed western plateau. Some large estates were converted to inns in the 1840s, when a day in the country meant a trip to the West Side. But a cholera epidemic in 1849 caused wealthy residents to flee, and the arrival of a railroad on the riverbank in 1851 sealed the doom of the great riverside estates. The whole district was given up to squatters and wandering goats.

  Before the Civil War, an American gentleman returned from a grand tour of Europe with the notion that his city, to be world-class, needed a great public park. He and some like-minded men of wealth and influence focused on a large piece of land on the East River, but as so often happens in New York, bitter argument followed. The board of the Croton Aqueduct floated the notion that a “central” park would better serve the city and could include a new water reservoir. They pointed out that a swath of craggy, uneven, swampy land to the west would be much cheaper to acquire. The 778 acres in question were, like the rest of the West Side, “rocky and precipitous,” with ninety-foot outcrops, ledges, huge boulders, ridges, furrows, ravines, irregular plateaus, and watery spots that could turn into swampy breeding grounds for cholera, malaria, and even yellow fever.

  In 1854, the New York State legislature approved that “central” park after “wealthy New Yorkers—motivated by a combination of private greed, class interest and a sense of duty as the city’s ‘leading’ citizens . . . carried the day,” Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar wrote in The Park and the People, their history of Central Park. That the mayor then, Fernando Wood, owned land alongside the proposed park was likely not a coincidence. Two decades later, he would buy still more property adjacent to the park. For a time, he even owned a lot on the block where Fifteen Central Park West now stands.

  Four years after the park was authorized, the land was bought and its residents cleared. That was both good and bad for the West Side. It would soon profit from proximity to the future Central Park, but first it faced an immediate problem. Dislodged from their squats in the underconstruction oasis, the poor—many of them honest laborers, but some of them vagrants and criminals—migrated west to Bloomingdale Road. Their shabby villages, where dog packs and bands of thugs roamed freely, set a bad image for the West Side, one that worsened after the financial Panic of 1873.

  Central Park was finished that year. Frederick Law Olmsted, a progressive journalist and landscape designer, and his partner, an English architect, Calvert Vaux, had won the competition to design it with a plan later hailed as one of the world’s greatest works of landscape architecture. The public was so eager for it that as early as winter 1858, a lake at West Seventy-Third Street filled with ice-skaters. By 1861, the southern end of the park was nearly complete, and its effect on the streets to the west was immediate.

  Public transportation, like wealthy tastes, had long veered toward the east side of Manhattan. Only a stagecoach on Bloomingdale Road had served West Siders, but in 1852, construction of a horse-drawn streetcar line was approved and then slowly built and opened as far as Eighty-Fourth Street, setting off a speculative bubble in the late 1860s. Land prices tripled until the Panic, when many speculators went broke. So many who lost their shirts in that collapse were German Jewish immigrants that the West Side was briefly nicknamed the Hebrew Graveyard. “Jews couldn’t own property in Europe,” says architectural historian Andrew Alpern, “but they could here. Land was cheaper, so they ended up on the West Side.”

  In 1867, the city’s administration had commissioned a West Side master plan that reinvented Bloomingdale Road as a European-style, tree-lined boulevard, beginning at a new traffic circle, dubbed the Grand Circle, at its intersection with Fifty-Ninth Street (its name wouldn’t be changed to Central Park South until 1896). Officials predicted that a gracious new bedroom community would spring up beside it. That didn’t happen, but a sewage system was nonetheless built, streets were cut, and water and gas lines were laid. Though still mostly empty, the West Side had state-of-the-art infrastructure.

  Finally, an elevated railroad, popularly known as the El, opened on Ninth Avenue,I up to Eighty-First Street in 1879, and a significant psychological barrier was overcome. At the same time, the economy improved. Development of the West Side became a serious possibility—but still, it wasn’t realized. On Fifty-Ninth Street, right at the gateway to the West Side, a stockyard and abattoir, when winds blew wrong, served as a repellent. The predictions that the Boulevard would soon be lined with mansions like those on the Champs-Élysées in Paris proved overly optimistic, too. Landowners on what was touted as soon to become “the finest residence boulevard in the world” held out for unreasonable prices. When West Side development finally did begin, it happened almost everywhere but along the Boulevard. In 1878, Real Estate Record and Building Guide, which had earlier deemed the west end “the cheap side of the city,” flatly declared that Central Park had “failed as a device for attracting fashionable residence.”

  Today, Edward Clark is remembered as a visionary, but in the 1880s, many thought the president of the Singer Sewing Machine Company a damned fool. Clark paid $280,000 for a block along Eighth Avenue from Seventy-Second to Seventy-Third Streets—close to the Ninth Avenue el stop—and began erecting an eighty-five-apartment, eight-story apartment house on about twenty lots there. He’d decided to promote the West Side as a new upper-middle-class neighborhood and wanted to give its streets and buildings names inspired by the American West: he proposed that Eighth through Eleventh Avenues be renamed for Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, and Idaho. In the same vein, he named his yellow-brick apartment château—a riot of turrets, gables, cupolas, dormers, finials, and ironwork mythological beasts designed by Henry Hardenbergh, later the architect of the Plaza Hotel—the Dakota.

  Clark conceived of the Dakota as a palace to be shared by people who lacked the money but not the ambition to own one. The Dakota had a dry moat, gated archway entrance, and internal carriage courtyard just like a real European castle. Inside was a huge, princely dining room and vast wine cellar for use by residents only. Stephen Birmingham wrote in Life at the Dakota that Clark “was designing a building for a new class of New Yorkers of means.” One hundred twenty-three years later, 15CPW, with its own gated carriage courtyard and restaurant, would prove the wisdom of Clark’s vision, but at the time, his building’s location was considered so far from civilized society that it was compared to the Dakota Territory. Nonetheless, by the time the building opened in 1884 (the same year electric streetlights first lit up Eighth Avenue), renters had already filled its apartments, which had between four and twenty rooms.

  Most famous, perhaps, for its starring role in Roman Polanski’s film of the satanic horror novel Rosemary’s Baby and as the site of the murder of John Lennon, the Dakota has been defined since its opening by “vaguely intellectual and artistic” residents who “were choosing a social life independent of the rules and rituals of the Four Hundred,” as Birmingham wrote. Over the years, they’ve included original renters Gustav Schirmer, a music publisher, and Theodore Steinway of the piano family, and later Boris Karloff, Leonard Bernstein, Judy Holliday, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, and Roberta Flack.

  What the Dakota lacked—and still does—were the sort of wealthy, social residents who traditionally banded together on the East Side. “It couldn’t have been more removed from Fifth and Park Avenues,” says Wilbur Ross, a prominent investor who moved into the Dakota with his young family in the early 1960s. “People [on the East Side] did make fun of us. Parents wouldn’t let their kids come play.”

  After the Dakota, the pace of building slowly picked up around the el stations at Seventy-Second and Eighty-First Streets, though it was concentrated on the side streets since speculators had bought up every vacant lot on Central Park West and were asking far too much money for their land to justify building private houses. Shanties, empty lots, and old frame houses sti
ll dominated, but they were being squeezed by the single-family houses that multiplied in the 1870s and ’80s; like the Dakota, they were designed for the city’s burgeoning upper middle class, who would come to define the West Side. “The houses sold readily to Jewish buyers,” wrote architectural historian Sarah Bradford Landau.

  The Boulevard was paved with asphalt, and the southern end of the neighborhood filled in with cheap-to-build tenements for blue-collar workers, clerks, salesmen, and civil servants, and with modest “flats” for white-collar professionals, doctors, engineers, merchants, and successful salesmen. None of them could afford the private houses that were occupying the numbered east-west streets. The riot of styles of the new buildings contrasted starkly with the monotonous rows of uniform brownstones and sober mansions of the East Side, where empty lots traded for twice the price. New mansions eventually rose on the West Side, too, built by and for members of the urban bourgeoisie, the professional and mercantile class.

  The West Side building boom continued unabated until the turn of the century. Streets were graded and paved, more row houses sprang up, and luxurious multifamily dwellings finally justified the high prices speculators expected to get for land around Central Park. Tragically, Clark died in 1882, before the Dakota was finished, so he was never able to experience the flowering of his remarkable vision.

  In 1913, Edith Wharton published Custom of the Country, a novel about a beautiful young social climber named Undine Spragg, whose ambition was matched only by her clueless obstinacy. Cultural markers in the novel set the time of Undine’s move to New York with her parents from a fictional Midwestern city called Apex at about 1902. She quickly convinced her father to give up a house he’d bought on West End Avenue and rent rooms instead at a West Side “family” hotel called the Stentorian, which would be the base from which Undine would begin her conquest of first New York and then international society.