Defining Luxury a Century Ago: 998 Fifth Avenue

Yesterday, Curbed reported that the penthouse at City Spire (150 West 56th Street) has been listed for $100,000,000 (yes, one hundred million dollars). If it sells for the asking price, that would make it the most expensive apartment sale in New York history.

This got us wondering: what was the most expensive apartment in the city a century ago? Not surprisingly, the answer is 998 Fifth Avenue. Erected in 1911, it is still one of the grandest apartment buildings on the Upper East Side.

As the New York Times reported in 1910, the neighborhood was being "invaded" by the 12-story McKim, Mead, and White apartment building. (Up till then, Fifth Avenue had resisted large-scale luxury apartment buildings, those being the domain of the ne'er-do-wells on the Upper West Side.) The building was to have only eighteen apartments, none smaller than 17 rooms. According to a contemporary advertisement, each unit had a separate servants' hall with six servants' bedrooms. The buildings amenities seem rather pedestrian: concealed radiators, a jewel safe, cold storage in the basement. The building did boast refrigeration, but the Ansonia on the Upper West Side had been offering that almost a decade earlier.

Courtesy of the New York Public Library

Rents in the building -- virtually all apartment buildings in the city at the time were rentals -- started at $10,000 and went up to $26,000 per year, which the Times noted was the most expensive in the city. (Other sources note the top rate was $25,000.) It can be challenging to accurately convert 1911 dollars into today's money, but one easy method is to use the consumer price index. Using the CPI, a $25,000 apartment would today rent for approximately $588,000 a year, or $49,000 a month. That seems like a lot of money, but it's a lot less than whatever a 30-year mortgage on $100 million is going to be. Those $25,000 apartments today sell for $20 million and up -- with common charges of over $11,000 monthly -- making 998 Fifth a real bargain in 1911.

By the way, not everyone paid top dollar: the building was listed by Douglas Elliman and Elliman convinced Senator (and former Secretary of State) Elihu Root to move in at the cut rate of $15,000 a year. As Robert A.M. Stern, et al, note in New York 1900, "once Root, who had earlier established the respectability of a Park Avenue address...moved into 998, others immediately followed." Around the time he moved in, Root won the Nobel Peace Prize, which can't have hurt in Elliman's PR campaign for the building.

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Read more about the dawn of apartment living in New York

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The Municipal Building

A reader and fan of Inside the Apple sent along the above photo and asked if we could delve a little into the history of the building. It is the Municipal Building, built 1909-14 by William Kendall, a junior partner in the venerable firm of McKim, Mead, and White. It was the first foray of that firm into skyscraper building, and it had a huge impact on the form--at least in the Soviet Union.

Despite its importance to New York City, many people aren't familiar with the Municipal Building, which sits at the intersection of Chambers and Centre streets. (Originally, Chambers Street actually went through the loggia and connected traffic to the Lower East Side; the construction of One Police Plaza in 1973 forced Chambers Street to dead-end.)

Starting in the last decades of the 19th century, the city began contemplating tearing down its 1812 City Hall, which was too small for the modern workings of government, and replace it with a grander building. They even went so far as to have a design contest, which was won by John Rochester Thomas. Meanwhile, a plan was concocted to move the old City Hall to 42nd Street and use it to house the New York Public Library. In the end, however, the American Scenic & Historic Preservation Society--one of the first preservation groups in the country--prevailed on the government to leave City Hall alone. Thomas's new City Hall was built, with modification, on Chambers Street, and became the Surrogate's Court.* This meant that the city was still in dire need of more office space for its workers--especially after January 1, 1898, when New York consolidated the five boroughs into one city.


With consolidation, New York was, without question, America's largest city, and many felt it needed a true Civic Center to match. Only fifteen years earlier, the city had began systematically destroying the old Five Points neighborhood, which lay just north of Chambers Street, and over the first three decades of the 20th century, the building of the Civic Center allowed the city to clear the worst blocks of the Five Points. In rapid succession, the city, state, and federal governments erected the Municipal Building, Supreme Court, U.S. Court, Department of Health, and what's now called the Louis J. Lefkowitz State Office Building, in the area that only a few years earlier had been teeming with immigrant families.


The architecture of the Muncipal Building reflected New York's place in the world--and Manhattan's place in New York. The top of the building is crowned by Civic Fame by Adolph Weinman--the second tallest statue in New York after the Statue of Liberty, though no one can agree how tall it is: sources list it as 20 feet, 25 feet, and 30 feet. The figure represents New York leading the way into the future, a beacon for other cities to follow. (Being famous, in this instance, meant "setting a virtuous example for future generations" and not "being Kim Kardashian.") The statue sits atop a high tower that is surrounded by four smaller towers. The big tower is Manhattan--the four other towers are the outer boroughs, surrounding Manhattan like satellites.

The Municipal Building was evidently greatly admired by, of all people, Josef Stalin. Certainly copies of it soon began popping up all over Moscow and around the Soviet bloc, from Moscow University (pictured at right, on the school's crest) to the Hotel Družba in Prague.


Until 2009, many New Yorkers only knew the Municipal Building as the place to go for a civil marriage ceremony. However, that has moved to the Lefkowitz State Office Building, just a couple of blocks north, where, in just a few days, hundreds of couples will celebrate New York's marriage equality law.


* Thomas's Surrogate's Court building, based on the Opera in Paris, is the subject of a blog post we're working on right now. Don't change that dial!

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Do you have a picture of building in New York that you want to know more about? Send it to info@insidetheapple.net and we'll see what we can dig up!

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Read more about the Five Points and the Civic Center in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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