![]() ![]() ![]() 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. His early architectural efforts were mostly flat-topped and sedate. He discovered he was an expert at fitting different sized-and-shaped apartments together like puzzle pieces inside his buildings. The inevitable trend toward taller apartment buildings on Park Avenue played to Candela’s strengths. 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. “He was very arrogant and knew his talents.”Ĭandela began his career working for several fellow Italians, Michael Paterno and Anthony Campagna, the most significant luxury apartment-house developers of the time. “He really was a genius,” says his granddaughter Jackie Candela. ![]() 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. ![]() 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.Ĭandela: An Italian Master Conquers Manhattanīorn 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.ĭriven 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. The location of those homes had moved inexorably uptown over the years. 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. 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. A brief lesson in New York living arrangements is in order. ![]()
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