Candela & Jackie O: A Match Made in Heaven

A brief lesson in New York living arrangements is in order. Throughout the 1920s, developers began putting up buildings like 740 Park (and 1040 5th) full of grand apartments with the proportions of fine, freestanding homes—mansions stacked one atop the other, designed as suitable replacements for the private homes that had led society’s march uptown and become obsolete within a single generation.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Manhattan’s social elite, the Knickerbockers, who were descendants of the original Dutch settlers of New York, the English colonists who followed them and finally, the American revolutionaries who tossed the English out, went to bed at night exclusively in private houses. The location of those homes had moved inexorably uptown over the years. In the eighteenth century, the city’s genteel residential district was a tiny enclave at the southern tip of Manhattan island; south of Chambers Street, clustered around Trinity Church and St Paul’s church, lower Broadway, Bowling Green, and the Battery.

Driven north by fire and yellow fever epidemics, social life first alighted in what is now Tribeca, in the 1830s, skittered east to a new district surrounding the intersection of Lafayette Place and Bond Street in today’s NoHo. It was eighty more years before the town-home era ended, years in which new money poured into New York faster than derogatory names for the arrivistes could be coined.

New York absorbed its outer boroughs in 1898 and was inching toward a new role as a world-class city, second only to London, and beginning to reach for the sky. Nothing was permanent in this new New York, least of all living arrangements; the famous skyline was created as thousands of new apartment buildings and grand new office and public buildings rose in Manhattan and redefined fashionable life. The east side of Central Park was dubbed the city’s emerging “aristocratic residential section” in 1906 by the Real Estate Record, which also pointed out that thanks to Park Avenue’s width, it was well suited to large buildings.

Candela: An Italian Master Conquers Manhattan

Born in Sicily in 1890, Rosario Candela, the son of a plasterer, came to the United States at nineteen, somehow gained entrance to Columbia’s School of Architecture, and graduated in 1915. Christopher Gray, the leading historian of New York real estate, reports that Candela was already so sure of his talents that he placed a velvet rope around his drafting table to keep other students from copying his work. “He really was a genius,” says his granddaughter Jackie Candela. “He was very arrogant and knew his talents.”

Candela began his career working for several fellow Italians, Michael Paterno and Anthony Campagna, the most significant luxury apartment-house developers of the time. Candela started small, with apartment houses on the West Side of Manhattan, but in the mid-1920s, with two dozen completed buildings on his resume and the economy bubbling like fine champagne, he began planning the building that would become, half a century later, the most lust-inspiring real estate in the world.

The inevitable trend toward taller apartment buildings on Park Avenue played to Candela’s strengths. He discovered he was an expert at fitting different sized-and-shaped apartments together like puzzle pieces inside his buildings.

His early architectural efforts were mostly flat-topped and sedate. Then a landmark zoning law passed in 1916 allowed buildings to rise higher if they incorporated setbacks – a requirement that above a certain height, buildings be set back a certain distance from where their walls stood at street level so that light and fresh air would reach streets and neighboring buildings that would otherwise be submerged in darkness. By varying the lines of these setback buildings, urban planners created the jagged, vertical modern skyline and gave the Jazz Age and Manhattan their visual signatures.

The first great co-op sales record was set at Candela’s 950 Fifth Avenue, built by Anthony Campagna, which opened in 1928. A jigsaw puzzle of one-and-two-story apartments, it contained one especially sparkling gem – the apartment of a widower, Dr. Preston Pope Satterwhite, with a dining room and library each thirty feet long flanking double-height fifty-eight-foot-long living room that contained a crisscrossing double staircase up to Satterwhite’s bedroom, which had a balcony overlooking the grand parlor.

Nine Sixty Fifth was the first of a Babe Ruthian string of home runs for Candela. In 1929, 720 Park Avenue was completed. That year the Times predicted that 1929 would be “the greatest of all building construction years,” and a new multiple-dwelling law went into effect in New York, allowing apartment houses to rise to nineteen stories. In a mere eight months, Candela would design and file plans for six more buildings – 740, 770, 778, and 1220 Park Avenue and 834 and 1040 Fifth Avenue – that are “the most magnificent assemblage of extraordinary apartments ever produced by any architect,” according to Andrew Alpern, “the final display of fireworks before the Depression descended.”

Candela’s innovations, listed singly, may seem mundane, but they added up to something extraordinary. As the architectural designer David Netto has noted, Candela thickened walls to hide columns, structural framing, plumbing risers, and building mechanical systems. In his buildings, protruding radiators disappeared beneath deep windows, and rooms and windows were re-proportioned, “endowing [them] with a feeling of greater space and balance.”

The architect Donald Wrobleski, who has made a lifetime study of Candela, praises his use of visual axes, diagonals that “produce a panoramic view upon entering” a Candela apartment. “This gives complete orientation of the sort that one might expect in a great country house,” Wrobleski writes. Thanks to Candela’s genius, windows are perfectly framed in doorways, daylight is maximized throughout, and not only the public rooms but also the hidden sleeping quarters on the second floor of the duplexes are immediately perceived as elements of an integrated whole. Yet uncannily, privacy is maintained.

Jackie O: A Candela Girl

There were two blessed events in James T. Lee’s family in the summer of 1929. A granddaughter Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, Janet and Black Jack’s first child was born on July 28, 1929. A few days in early August, the 740 Park Avenue Corporation (where Jackie was raised) was born. The handsomely printed prospectus for 740 Park made Lee’s audacity clear. He’d set out to build a stack of mansions, four triplex mansionettes and another twenty grand duplex apartments…it was a beehive of apartments , each fit for its own queen. Candela proposed (and built) a 506-room fortress occupying twenty-two thousand square feet covering half a block on Park Avenue and most of Seventy-First Street.

Jackie and Lee (Jackie’s younger sister) had a blissful life, doted on by servants in a Park Avenue apartment, each with her own room and a playroom besides. “I lived in New York City until I was thirteen,” Jackie later recalled. “I hated dolls, loved dogs and horses, and had skinned knees and braces on my teeth for what must have seemed an interminable length of time to my family. I read a lot when I was little, much of which was too old for me. There were Chekhov and Shaw in the room where I had to take naps and I never slept but sat on the windowsill reading, then scrubbed the soles of my feet so the nurse would not see that I was out of bed.”

Sidebar by Christopher A. Pape

Years later, after becoming the most glamorous First Lady in American history, after the birth of her two wonderful children and the horrifying assassination of her husband, John Fitzpatrick Kennedy, Jackie O. returned to Manhattan. Just like in her youth, she lived in a sprawling Candela apartment, this time at 1040 Fifth Avenue. Designed by Candela the year after 740 Park in 1930, 1040 5th was and continues to be one of the most sought-after addresses in New York City. Towering seventeen floors above Central Park, there are only 27 apartments, some occupying full floors and/or duplexes. Its architecture, with Candela’s famous approach for asymmetry and large windows, makes 1040 one of the most recognizable buildings in Manhattan. Yet, it is most famous as the home of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis; in fact, she purchased and moved into 1040 only one year after JFK’s assassination. She bought the apartment, located on the 15th floor, in 1964 for $250,000. After her death in 1994, the apartment was sold to David Koch and his wife for $9.5 million. He subsequently gut renovated it for a cost of over $10 million, but later moved to a larger apartment in 740 Park, claiming the 1040 home was too small for him and his family, even though the apartment had four bedrooms, two dressing rooms, staff quarters, library, living room, dining room, conservatory, wine room, three fireplaces, five and a half bathrooms and two terraces.