740 Park Avenue
also 71 East 71st Street, 75 East 71st Street, 742 Park Avenue | Upper East Side | built 1930
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1929
Plans for 740 Park are filed in March 1929 after James T. Lee persuades a neighbor to give up his mansion
Plans for 740 Park were filed in March 1929 for the builder James T. Lee, with construction expected to cost $2.225 million, not counting the land. A year earlier Lee, who lived in a private house at 750 Park Avenue, had persuaded his neighbor George Brewster to give up the large limestone-fronted mansion Brewster had built in 1911 at the northwest corner of 71st Street and take an apartment instead. The Brewster and Lee properties and adjoining lots then became the building site.
Source: Internet Archive
- 1930
James T. Lee opens 740 Park Avenue
Developer James T. Lee built this Art Deco cooperative, designed by Rosario Candela with Arthur Loomis Harmon, and opened it in October 1930. It held about thirty duplex and triplex apartments. The timing was bad: the building had failed financially by 1933 and remained in the red for roughly fifty years.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1930
The Bouviers buy an apartment while daughter Jacqueline is two months old
The Times reported that Janet and John Vernou Bouvier 3d, daughter and son-in-law of builder James T. Lee, bought an eighteen-room, six-bath apartment here. Their daughter Jacqueline, later First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, was two months old at the time.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1937
John D. Rockefeller Jr. files plans to join two apartments into one
John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his wife Abby combined apartments 15B and 16B, linking the two floors with a private elevator and staircase. The finished residence covered about 20,000 square feet, with 37 rooms and 14 bathrooms.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1948
Mrs. Marshall Field and Lillian Hellman host a benefit tea for the Wiltwyck School in a 740 Park apartment
In early June 1948 Ruth Pruyn Phipps Field, the wife of Marshall Field III, opened her apartment at 740 Park Avenue for a tea raising money for the Wiltwyck School for Boys. Lillian Hellman was co-hostess. Two judges spoke about juvenile delinquency and the work of the school, an interracial, nonsectarian home for delinquent boys aged 8 to 12, as reported by The New York Age.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1952
William Zeckendorf's Webb & Knapp is reported to have bought 740 Park Avenue
On August 3, 1952, a Binghamton newspaper reported that Webb & Knapp, the real estate firm headed by William Zeckendorf, had bought the building. The article named some of the residents at the time: John D. Rockefeller Jr., R. T. Vanderbilt, Jack F. Chrysler, Countess Allene de Kotzebue, Mrs. S. R. Guggenheim, Col. William Schiff and Mrs. Janet Auchincloss.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1971
Martha Baird Rockefeller dies in the 740 Park apartment she inherited from her husband
John D. Rockefeller Jr. died in Tucson on May 11, 1960, leaving the bulk of his estate in roughly equal shares to his widow, the former concert pianist Martha Baird Rockefeller, and to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The apartment at 740 Park Avenue was among her inheritances. She died there of a coronary occlusion on January 24, 1971, at the age of 75.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1990
Scaffolding swallows 740 Park as repairs cost each shareholder $258,000
In 1990 the limestone-fronted building was undergoing extensive repairs and was so covered in scaffolding and construction sheeting that The New York Times's Streetscapes column compared it to a project by the artist Christo. The column put the bill at $258,000 for each shareholder, which it described as simply the price of keeping the rain out of one of Park Avenue's best-regarded apartment houses.
Source: Internet Archive
- 2000
Stephen Schwarzman buys the former Rockefeller apartment from Saul Steinberg for about $30 million
The 15th- and 16th-floor apartment where John D. Rockefeller Jr. lived from 1937 to 1960 passed to the financier Saul Steinberg, who bought it in 1971 for $285,000. After two divorces he sold it in 2000 to Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, reportedly for close to $30 million. No Park Avenue sale topped it, and the record held until May 2012, when Howard Marks spent $52.5 million on a pair of adjoining duplexes.
“In 1971, Saul Steinberg bought that triplex for $285,000 and after two divorces sold it to Stephen Schwarzman for "slightly above or below $30 million" in 2000.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 2005
David Ganek pays $19 million for Jacqueline Bouvier's childhood duplex at 740 Park
The hedge fund manager David Ganek paid $19 million in 2005 for the duplex where Jacqueline Bouvier, later Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, spent her childhood. The same year Michael Gross published 740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building, which reports that Janet and Jack Bouvier took the final open lease and, by one account, did not pay for it.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2006
Enid Haupt's penthouse at 740 Park goes on the market for $27.5 million and is bought by John Thain
The publisher and horticulture patron Enid A. Haupt bought her duplex penthouse in 1967 for $350,000 and died on October 26, 2005. The next year the apartment, which had two terraces on the 17th floor and another sprawling one on the 18th, was listed at $27.5 million. The buyer was John A. Thain, then chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange, together with his wife Carmen; the couple relisted it in 2018 at $39.5 million.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 2014
France sells its UN ambassador's duplex at 740 Park for $70 million after a bidding war
The French government had bought an 18-room duplex in the building in 1979 for $600,000 to house its ambassador to the United Nations. In June 2014 it sold the unit for $70 million, reportedly $22 million above the asking price, after three prospective buyers bid against each other. Israel Englander, a hedge fund billionaire, won the bidding; he already lived in the unit directly above.
“The French government's duplex unit was sold in June 2014 for $70 million, reportedly $22 million over the asking price…”
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- 740 Park AvenueWikipedia
- Rosario Candela's 1930 740 Park AvenueDaytonian in Manhattan
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