This Side of Paradise

My first nature was an Upper West Side apartment building: the lobby an eternal frozen pond of white marble, a hedgerow of wrought iron shielding the passage from the building’s entryway to the elevators; once inside the apartment, a molded ceiling of hexagonal honeycombs, the smell of wood, the feel of that wood, the honeyed color of that wood glazed by early morning light through high windows. There was also something about the scale and the proportions of the place, especially for a small child, that felt natural. Maybe this is because the apartment’s plan still followed simple ratios observed in the natural world, passed down to the modern West since Vitruvius as principles of architecture. The building went up in 1910, and the apartment had been left untouched by various waves of subdivisions during economic downturns elsewhere in the city. What I’m trying to say is that both building and apartment felt not “roomy,” not “big,” not—to use a certain New York real estate mogul’s favorite word—“huge” but expansive. It took a while for the mind to run into a wall, and when it did my attention usually was drawn upward.

Space is also time, and the apartment’s design permitted different tempos (tempi for you classical music pedants): Consider the staircase—three curved steps up took me to a little landing at the bottom and then a straight flight up to the second floor of bedrooms and bathrooms. Up or down, I could take it fast, attempt a reckless slide down the banister, or, ascending, test the length of my stride by how many stairs I could skip; otherwise, at reluctant bedtimes, I’d creep up molto adagio on hands and knees; if I wanted to spy on my parents and their guests I would measure each step down, sliding with socked feet over the lip of each small ledge, on the edge between slipping and silence, until I figured out how far down I could sit while remaining unobserved.

Looking downtown from the corner windows of the living room onto the fay lights of Tavern on the Green, or at the oil-drum fires lit by a group of homeless men across the street in Central Park, I’d feel terror, fear of the unknown, or awe when staring into the twinkling galaxies of buildings across the dark expanse of what, by day, was a mild and smiling world of trees, lawns, and well-marked paths. At the same time, there were burrows, closets, places to hide, rooms to feel enwombed in: luxe, calme et volupté. Sublime and beautiful.

What was true for the single apartment also held for the streetscape created by the buildings: Cliffs of limestone cladding (at least up to the fifth floor, about as far as the eyes of a walking child could see) became strange rock palaces at higher registers, punctuated by pilasters, various heraldic animal sculptures and escutcheons, or little decorative balconies and ledges where no one except brave window cleaners ever set foot. There was a rhythm to this procession, a basic beat with subtle variations and then the odd glaring exception like the thrusting ochre-tan brick-clad twin towers of the Majestic (1931) and the soot-blackened stone of the Dakota (1884) from the era when even celebrity co-ops lacked funds for power cleaning.

Certain New York neighborhoods and side streets are jazz; the Lower East Side mix of vacant lots and community gardens emerging between mounds of trash bags on narrow sidewalks, grimed stoops, graffitied walls, and precarious fire escapes, used to be punk rock before it cleaned up and became overproduced LCD Soundsystem pop, but the Upper West and Upper East Sides remain resolutely classical to my inner synesthetic ear, repeating the same motifs with different types of ornaments. Even with the later Gershwinesque additions of Jazz Age deco, some sketches of Spain, and hints of Egypt, my internal soundtrack for these avenues sounds more like Mahler.

In my childhood, however, my experiences were immediate, without history, without knowledge, without preconceptions. These apartment buildings along Central Park West and later Broadway from Lincoln Center to Symphony Space and across the park—both like and unlike mine and where my friends lived—simply were. They did not signify as class or wealth or status; they didn’t occasion reflections on privilege. The sea-monster-wreathed Neptune heads on the fence around the Dakota were frightening until they became friends. Nobody asked what anything cost or how much anyone had paid. These buildings were both dreamscapes and the soil from which we sprung.

This natural experience, this first world, was of course a result of design and planning, of forces both technological and economic, also historical, that allowed both modestly and immodestly successful recent American immigrants to live, within two generations of arrival (sometimes less than that), in these holy halls crafted from the imaginations, desires, and memories of other members of these same groups. The traditions that New York architects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most frequently reached for were Greco-Roman (classical orders, rusticated bases, loggia, large cornices, anthemion or accretion); English (Georgian brick and stonework: quoins, escutcheons, molding); and French (exaggerated corbels, oeil-de-boeuf windows, channeled rustication, iron railing, mansard roofs, cupolas). These were sometimes combined in hybrid ways that would doubtless have seemed vulgar to someone born to any of these particular manors.

The recombination of different eras and parts of Europe, however, was itself an immigrant fantasia. What my mind still insists on calling “my building”—with all the unearned proprietariness of a three-year old—was the product of the firm Schwartz & Gross.^* I have since learned its particular Juliet balconies, green oxidized copper-trim roof, the lion-face sculptures (technically corbels supporting the balconies) on the façade above my bedroom window, belong to something called either the Beaux Arts or Neo-Renaissance style. The whole thing just one particular vision of the American Dream. But all that after-knowledge—like learning the word paradise derives from the Persian word for walled garden and wondering why a garden should need walls—is itself a fall from grace and an expulsion from innocence.

I’M DILATING ON THIS primitive experience of architecture here because it’s both foundational and antithetical to the spirit that animates a new fancy coffee-table book cum vanity project celebrating Rosario Candela: one of those architects who, without being an international star, founding a school, or even having designed a museum or an airport, created one of New York’s signature building types that make it unlike any other city in the world.

Candela designed apartment buildings. “Plenty of other architects designed luxury apartment buildings,” Paul Goldberger writes in one of the volume’s trio of introductory essays, “but Candela’s are so revered that knowledgeable real estate brokers have always referred to them simply by their street numbers, as if they were speaking in code.” For the most part, this ultraniche numerology applies to the East Side: 1040 Fifth Avenue, 960 Fifth Avenue, 740 Park Avenue, 1 Sutton Place, 19 East 72nd. Eighteen of these magic numbers are featured here, with their plans and luscious photographs of interiors and exteriors, accompanied by commentary from interior designer and architecture history enthusiast David Netto, who also contributes a stand-alone essay. These buildings represent between a quarter and a fifth designed by or with plans signed by Candela. Netto puts the total at seventy-five; Peter Pennoyer, author of another essay here, says eighty-five. The qualifier luxury is important to Goldberger’s sentence and more so to the ethos of the book, which explains why Candela’s more utilitarian but now scarcely less valuable apartment buildings along what used to be solidly middle-class West End Avenue don’t make the cut.

Rosario Candela and the New York Apartment is foremost Netto’s brainchild, a lavish labor of love. A longtime Candela fan, Netto, like me, is a Manhattan kid with a 1970s and 1980s New York childhood. He evokes his own early experiences of Candela’s buildings, writing of “the second city … that started above the 12th floor at the point many of his buildings set back from the lot line and begin to terrace their way up to an enclosed water tower.” The terracing and setbacks, sometimes modulated in the fantastical mold of Italian hill towns, are partially a result of what would today be called “design-build” collaborations between architects and future owners pushing at the limits of the customary and the permitted. Candela was among the first to exploit the 1916 zoning resolution that compelled setbacks in buildings of a certain height toward creative ends. As Goldberger notes, Candela cunningly adapted morphological strategies earlier deployed by the architects of FiDi office towers. The reasons for his success—or rather, the ease with which his buildings quickly became the backdrop for Hollywood movies, as Netto observes—perhaps say something about the American Dream of social climbing: Living at the top of a skyscraper is vastly superior to working at the top of one. Another of Candela’s signatures, according to Netto, is his perfection of what he terms the “off-the-foyer” layout for apartments, essentially a calibrated reinvention of the Roman atrium or indoor peristyle court at previously undreamed-of elevations.

In addition to engineering and spatial design sense, Candela possessed stellar intuitions for how building and street play together: The buildings breathe, the blocks where they sit also breathe. Netto calls this ineffable quality a “sensual instinct.” A coffee-table book-object, however, is not a biography, so the reader doesn’t learn how “the son of a plasterer from Sicily” who arrived in New York in 1910 came to develop this instinctual care for one of the few fundamental “civic” or “public” functions of private buildings for the very wealthy that can’t be written into law but ought to be stamped into social code. It’s tempting to fantasize that Candela thought as much about the tradesmen, servants, doormen, and staff who would use or experience these buildings as he did of his clients. Or at least tempting to think that by gracing the façades of his buildings with these touches of Tuscan villas or Roman and Venetian palazzi he was granting an experience of travel—a grand tour to a Europe of memory and imagination—to other New Yorkers who only could have afforded their one-way steerage passage to the New World.

Biographical insights from Candela’s early years are scarce in any case. In his contribution, Pennoyer—an architect whose originalist renovations and restorations of Candela’s apartments have made him a custodian of Candeliana—acknowledges that “we don’t know how [Candela] gained admission to Columbia’s school of architecture,” only a couple years at most after arriving in America (he’d graduate in 1915), nor how he learned to make it in the mainly WASP-dominated “gentlemen’s profession.” A genteel hint is offered when Pennoyer notes Candela’s partnership with a Sicilian team of developers, Campagna and Paterno, i.e., less genteelly, he took advantage of the intraethnic solidarity networks that have always fueled changes in the composition of New York City’s professions as much as in the city’s political classes.

Whatever we can infer about Candela, the man himself seems to have shunned the limelight. Aside from his buildings, he is best known for being a passionate cryptographer and even published two books on cryptography and crypto-analytics in the lean years after the Great Depression. Every working architect needs a good hobby when worldwide financial crises hit, and, in Candela’s case, his 1930s foray into cryptography eventually proved instrumental to US military intelligence training in World War II. Fittingly, for someone equally devoted to coding and decoding, his buildings and apartments are intended to conceal as much as they reveal. Goldberger terms the designs “opaque architecture for the age of privacy,” in contrast to the later glass-walled exhibitionism of the “age of celebrity.” It is hard to believe that Candela’s first building, 1105 Park Avenue, went up a couple years shy of a century ago, a blink of an eye in architectural time.

The urban conditions that gave rise to Candela’s type of genius and also allowed for its full expression are unlikely ever to reoccur. Candela was not only the beneficiary of an age more accommodating to immigrants but also of a peculiar deconsolidation of New York wealth coming out of the Gilded Age. The building plots for many of Candela’s earliest commissions had previously been the sites of enormous single-family mansions along Fifth Avenue—either in French country house or faux-château style. The Frick Museum is one of the only traces left of what once had been a mile of nouveau-riche housing estates. One of Candela’s commissions turned out to be the apartment building on the corner opposite the Frick at 2 East 70th (1927), replacing a copycat mansion. Candela’s 2 East 67th Street building (also 1927) replaced a mansion that had lasted less than thirteen years from construction to demolition. Netto includes the charming detail that the home’s marble stairway could be had for one dollar to anyone with the means to cart it away. Unlike the original Penn Station’s statues, it’s unlikely to have ended up in a New Jersey landfill.

Although Candela’s Roaring Twenties New York was hardly a beacon of equality, it was at least a beacon of opportunity. And here we come to the contradiction at the heart of Netto’s Candela tribute. This is a luxury book about luxury apartments for rich people. It is sure to pedigree the buildings, sprinkling the names of various owners through the years like truffle shavings over the architectural osso buco: Gianni Agnelli, Consuelo Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller Jr.—whose apartment improbably sold to the artist Saul Steinberg before, as we learn, Steinberg’s estate sold it for $30 million at the turn of the millennium, and—of course—Jackie O at 1040 Fifth Avenue. Netto’s point is that game recognizes game, or class in the monetary sense recognizes class in the aesthetic sense. Above all, we learn, a Candela apartment has held what Netto calls value: “In five distinct eras in the history of the US economy and that of New York City, spanning the date of construction to the present day (the years 1927, 1970, 1982, 2000, 2014 and 2015) the price records for a New York co-op apartment were all set in buildings designed by Rosario Candela.”

I mean, how vulgar. This is like watching nature turned into pornography. At the same time, much as my mind clings to its first experiences of New York apartment living, such is the true nature of New York and better to be upfront about it. Paradise is a walled garden. What Netto et al. don’t say—because they seem unable quite to admit it even to themselves—is that the recent rise in the value of a Candela is in part because the buildings have been transformed from mere luxury apartments into wholly unrepeatable works of art. Nothing so good will be built again in New York City, not for the billionaires nor anybody else. The art, the technique, the know-how with the materials is all gone. Owning a Candela now is like living in a piece of Chartres Cathedral or a Gothic abbey in the English countryside. In less than a hundred years, New York’s wealthy classes took some pretty democratizable skills related to the building trades, simple enough for a plasterer, and also took the applied outcomes of these skills: recessed, terraced limestone-clad steel frame buildings with apartments spatially organized on domestic principles familiar for over two thousand years of so-called Western Civilization and alchemized them into another kind of unobtanium.