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

in Inside the Apple

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The Odd Couple

When we heard yesterday that Jack Klugman would be returning to the stage in Twelve Angry Men (he is the only cast member from the original 1957 film still living), our thoughts immediately turned to Klugman's most famous role--that of New York City sportswriter and notorious slob Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple.

Based on Neil Simon's hit play and film of the same name, the television show ran from 1970 to 1975. Klugman played opposite Tony Randall's Felix Unger, a photographer and neat freak. Though produced on a sound stage,* the opening credits were filmed on location around New York, and like many shows of that era, they provide a glimpse into the city of the time.

* Season one was filmed on the movie's set; subsequent seasons were in front of live audience  in Hollywood.

The two men live in Oscar's apartment at 1049 Park Avenue, from which they are seen emerging in the opening credits (above). A coop building from 1919, it hasn't changed much over the years, though we doubt Felix and Oscar were paying $8,100 a month rent (which at least one apartment is currently going for). Even adjusting for inflation, that would be about $1,500 in 1970, which still seems high. In the fourth season episode "The New Car"--filmed partly on location in New York--the characters inexplicably move to Central Park West and 74th Street, presumably into the San Remo.

Oscar is a writer for the New York Herald; the only problem with this is that the Herald had gone out of business in 1924, purchased by its rival the Tribune. (As the New York Herald Tribune, it continued publication until 1966; the International Herald Tribune is still in business.) The Herald was published from a wonderful Stanford White building on Herald Square, which is also gone. In the credits, we see Oscar getting out of a taxi in midtown, near Times Square.

Perhaps the best part of the original credits shows Felix and Oscar learning to dance at a maypole celebration on Sheep Meadow in Central Park. In the background the Century (25 Central Park West) and the old Gulf and Western building (now Trump International Hotel) loom over them.

Maypole celebrations in Central Park go back at least as far as 1909, and by 1914, the New York Times was reporting that 7,000 girls from sixty-eight public schools had come to the park to erect maypoles and dance. Indeed, maypole celebrations still take place each year in Central Park, though we're guessing nowhere near as many people show up.

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We'll be back before the ball drops to wish you a Happy New Year, but in the meantime, hope you are having a wonderful Hanukkah, that you amaze your friends with feats of strength tomorrow at Festivus, that you have a Merry Christmas, and a wonderful Kwanzaa.

Michelle and James Nevius

www.insidetheapple.net

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Free Admission to the Andrew Carnegie Mansion

In celebration of National Design week, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design museum is free from October 19 to 25.

The museum is housed in the former mansion of steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Built by Cook, Babb & Willard from 1899 to 1901, the home featured 64 rooms including vast public rooms, a conservatory, one of the first passenger elevators in a private home, and a very early version of central air conditioning.

Today, it is one of only two full-block mansions on Fifth Avenue left from the Gilded Age (the other is the former home of Carnegie's crony Henry Clay Frick). It is well worth a visit both for its architecture and to see the collections of its current tenant, the Cooper-Hewitt, which is the Smithsonian's National Design Museum.

Much more about Carnegie and his mansion can be found in Inside the Apple.

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Also in the news: a nice story in the October 20 issue of the New York Observer about the house on West 11th Street that was blown up by the Weather Underground, who have been in the news so much lately vis a vis Bill Ayers and Barack Obama.

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