Rosario Candela's 1929 720 Park Avenue

 

In the decade following World War I, the Presbyterian Hospital, greatly funded in 1868 by James Lenox, moved to Morningside Heights.  In 1925, architects Eliot Cross and J. E. R. Carpenter joined forces with real estate operators Robert E. Dowling and James T. Lee to purchase the site on the northwest corner of Park Avenue and 70th Street.  Something went awry with their plans, and in 1928 they sold the property to MonteLenox.  The firm hired Italian-born architect Rosario Candela to design an upscale apartment house on the site.  

The prolific architect was known for his apartment designs.  In 1927 and 1928 alone he designed 19 apartment buildings, including 720 Park Avenue.  Interestingly, working with him on this commission was Cross & Cross, of which Eliot Cross, one of the previous owners, was a partner.  

The collaboration resulted in a neo-Renaissance style, 17-floor-and-penthouse structure faced in brick above a three-story limestone base.  The spandrels above the first floor windows were decorated with exquisitely carved festoons of fruits and flowers.  The doric columns that flanked the main entrance supported a carved entablature topped by a large, broken pediment.

The top six floors broke free, rising asymmetrically as setbacks, terraces, and bays.  Here the architects introduced neo-Tudor elements, a decision that annoyed T-Square, the architectural critic of The New Yorker.  Calling it "a disturbing pile of architectural motives," he felt the lower portion was "in an orderly enough fashion," but lamented the "jumble of setbacks, stick-outs, bays, battlements and buttresses."

Less put off were the potential residents.  On September 1, 1929, the New York Evening Post reported, "Although not scheduled for completion for a full year, the $6,000,000 apartment house that is to occupy the northwest corner of Park Avenue and Seventieth Street and to be known as 720 Park Avenue, is already 50 percent sold from plans...The building is to be 100 per cent co-operative." 

The article described:

There will be no more than three apartments alike in the entire building.  The suites will range from eleven to twenty-seven rooms, with from five to ten baths, and extra lavatories.  Ceiling heights in the masters' rooms will range from 10 feet to 15 feet.  Ingenious mezzanine floors will contain parts of the service quarters.  Each apartment will have from three to seven log-burning fireplaces.  All apartments above the twelfth floor will have terraces. The plans indicate such luxuries as flower rooms, valeting rooms and breakfast porches.

The interiors of the sprawling apartments were designed by Candela to the owners' specifications.  According to Christopher Gray, writing in The New York Times on September 11, 1988, "Candela told his son Joseph that the commissions for customizing interiors at 720 Park Avenue alone were enough to pay his entire overhead."

Among the original owners were Jesse Isidor Straus, president of R. H. Macy & Co.; Frederick H. Frazier, chairman of the General Baking Company; Middleton Shoolbread Burrill and his wife Emilie; and William E. Iselin and his wife, the former Alice Rogers Jones.  The most colorful of the initial residents was broker Harold Russel Ryder.

Ryder's wife was Roma Woody, daughter of wealthy corporation lawyer Charles L. Woody, Sr.  Ryder's partner in the Wall Street firm Woody & Co. was his brother-in-law, Charles L. Woody, Jr.  The Boston Globe noted on June 30, 1930, "In 1928 [Ryder] bought a co-operative apartment at 720 Park av., which represented a total investment, with furniture and decorations, of around $500,000."  That figure would translate to about $8.9 million in 2024.

The newspaper said, "It has been a long while since Broadway has produced such a loose spender as Harold Russell [sic] Ryder, 'Little Boy Blew,' who says he regarded money as he would marbles and thought nothing at all of shooting $1500 on an evening's entertainment."  Ryder spent lavishly, his customary tip to a night club doorman being "a $100 bill," according to The Boston Globe.  But, as it turned out, his spending was a smoke screen.

While Ryder had made millions in the stock market, The Boston Globe explained, "the market crash of last November cost Ryder $3,000,000...But the young man kept up his 'front.'"  The ruse worked for a while, convincing investors to entrust their money to the broker, but eventually one, Frank Bailey, sued him to repay $2,025,000.

In court on June 29, 1930, an attorney for his creditors asked, "Do you realize that you were spending at the rate of $500,000 a year on pleasure?" 

Ryder replied, "Fifteen hundred dollars a night isn't too much to spend.  You have 10 or 15 people as your guests.  You have dinner, go to the theatre, and then to the night clubs.  Why, you are lucky if you get by on $1500." 

The Daily News said Roma Woody Ryder would possibly be called to testify about "the circumstances under which she assigned the luxurious Park ave. apartment [and] the circumstances under which Bailey demanded her jewels."  In the end, Ryder was sentenced to Sing Sing prison for three to ten years.  He was released in 1933, only to be sent back in 1937 after being convicted of defrauding two women of $19,000.

Harold Ryder was the anomaly among the well-heeled, respectable residents.  Despite the ongoing Depression, their names appeared in society pages for debutante entertainments, dinner parties and receptions.

Jesse Isidor Straus was the eldest son of Isidor and Ida Straus, who had perished on the RMS Titanic.  He and his wife, the former Irma Nathan, moved into a sumptuous 17-room duplex, which Candela had given an ultra modern Art Deco decor.  Highly involved in politics and a close ally of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Straus was appointed U.S. Ambassador to France in 1933.

A bedroom (top) and a portion of the library in the Straus apartment.  photos by Samuel H. Gottscho, from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

In 1936, The New York Times reported that Jesse Isidor Straus's "health had been slowly failing for many months."  He resigned his post as Ambassador to France in August.  The gravity of his condition was clear two months later when the family was called to his bedside.  On October 5, The New York Times reported that Irma and their three children, along with Jesse's only living brother, Percy S. Straus, were at his bedside when the 64-year-old died.

Candela's Georgian design for the Francis M. Weld apartment stood in start contrast to the Straus duplex.  photos by Samuel H. Gottscho, from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

William E. Iselin was described by The New York Times as being "of the prominent New York family of bankers, merchants and yachtsmen."  His wife came with an equally impressive social pedigree.  She was the granddaughter of Mary Mason Jones, a grande dame of 19th century New York society whose white marble mansion sat opposite the Cornelius Vanderbilt chateau on Fifth Avenue.  The couple's summer home was in New Rochelle.

Alice Rogers Jones Iselin became ill in the fall of 1932 and died in the apartment at the age of 82 on October 22.  Her husband survived her by five years.  He died here on January 26, 1937, two weeks after his 89th birthday.

Occupying a 15-room apartment at 720 Park Avenue in the 1950s were Dr. James Craig Joyner and his wife, the former Lucie Burke Alcott.  Born in North Carolina, Joyner had served as a surgeon in the U.S. Navy during World War I.  The couple, who were married in 1948, maintained a summer home in East Hampton.

In March 1959, the Joyners went on a trip "of several days," according to The East Hampton Star.  In preparation for their return, a maid went to the apartment on the evening of March 21 and found a kitchen window open.  The newspaper said, "The window is twenty feet above a second-floor terrace in a wall so smooth as to make a foothold a practical impossibility, police said."  Nevertheless, a burglar had entered and made off with $100,000 worth of jewelry.  The heist would translate to just over $1 million today.

The various wall treatments in the Candela-designed Frederick H. Frazier apartment included full-height paneling in the living room and painted wallpaper in the dining room. photos by Samuel H. Gottscho, from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

Living here at the time were William F. R. Hitt and his wife Eugenia.  A retired financier, Hitt was the son of former Assistant Secretary of State Robert R. Hitt.  William's first wife, Katherine Elkins, had been engaged to the Duke of Abruzzi before their marriage in 1913.  The couple divorced in 1921 and then remarried in 1923.  Four years after Katherine's death in September 1936, William married Eugenia Jemison Woodward Jelke.

The couple maintained a second home near Washington D.C.  A noted sportsman, Hitt owned race horses and was a member of the Jockey, the Racquet, and Tennis Clubs of New York; and the Chevy Chase, Alibi, and Metropolitan Clubs in Washington.

Hitt was Eugenia's second marriage, as well.  Her first, to wealthy Wall Street broker Ferdinand Frazier Jelke ended in divorce in 1933.  (During the hearings, Jelke flatly called Eugenia "a dirty little gold digger," according to the Milwaukee Journal on May 23 that year.)  In fact, she had little need for an affluent husband.  She was the daughter of the founder of the Woodward Steel Company of Birmingham, Alabama.  Having begun collecting as a young woman, Eugenia filled both homes with her notable collection of 18th century French furniture and decorative items.

William F. R. Hitt died in the Park Avenue apartment on April 23, 1961 at the age of 81.  Four years later, in June, Eugenie traveled to Baden-Baden, Germany.  The New York Times explained, "Mrs. Hitt visits Baden-Baden, noted for its thermal baths, almost every year."  On June 12, the newspaper said, "She arrived last month with a chauffeur."

On the evening of July 7, Eugenie left "the fashionable Brenners Park Hotel" and returned four hours later.  She noticed nothing wrong until the following afternoon.  The yellow leather case that contained her jewelry and $4,000 in cash was missing.  Eugenie placed the value of the stolen jewelry at $250,000--about $2.45 million today.  Police questioned each member of the staff, convinced it was an inside job.

Astoundingly, a month later, on August 7, The New York Times reported that police had recovered the jewels.  A 35-year-old telephone operator of the hotel, Elisabeth Krelemann, had stolen the case, then became panicked by the intense police search.  She left the case on a train luggage rack to be discovered by a railway official.

Upon Eugenie Woodward Hitt's death here in 1990, she bequeathed the bulk of her furniture and art (valued at over $50 million) to the Birmingham Museum of Art.  One item, a bronze wall clock, went to the Chateau de Versailles.

Marcia Brady Tucker had moved into 720 Park Avenue in 1969 after selling her magnificent townhouse across the avenue at 733 Park Avenue.   Her husband, Carll Tucker died at their country home, Penwood, in 1956.  The New York Times said, "when she had to vacate a previous Park Avenue residence, Mrs. Tucker donated her collection of 19th-century English children's portraits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to the Cincinnati Museum of Art."  Nonetheless, her apartment here was magnificently furnished.  She died in the apartment on December 21, 1976 at the age of 92.

On December 11, 2005, Josh Barbanel commented in a article in The New York Times, "If you can afford the many millions you need to live at 720 Park Avenue--and you squeak past the co-op board--you will find yourself in a building with all the advantages New York has to offer.  It is one of the great old Park Avenue luxury apartment buildings, with tasteful 12-room apartments and neighbors who grace the social pages, the business pages, and the lists of the world's richest people."

Among them were Mark and Nina Magowan, who had purchased their 7,000-square-foot, 14-room duplex apartment in 1986 from Caroline Lynch.  Magowan was president of Vendome Press.  

While the couple had renovations done, they retained the original Candela interiors--drawn from French 18th century precedents.  On March 20, 2016, The New York Times described the apartment's, "ornate and sometimes whimsical boiserie paneling...plaster cameo moldings, overdoor painted inserts and four marble wood-burning fireplaces."

The article mentioned that the 29 apartments at 720 Park Avenue had "been home to various captains of industry and entrepreneurs, like Leonard Liggio, the founder of Barnes & Noble, and Randolph D. Lerner, the former owner of the Cleveland Browns."

photographs by the author

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