Other developments from this era also struggled for profitability. The most famous of these early ventures, the Dakota, was a gamble by Edward Clark, the head of the Singer sewing machine company, and ran at a loss for many years. They were still a form of speculation on the part of developers who didn’t know for sure if there was money to be made by building into the sky. New York’s first luxury apartments were built in the 1880s, attempts to offer an alternative to row houses for those who were rich but newly so, lacking a pedigree in the form of inherited brick and limestone. Whatever the truth behind that useful story, Candela went straight from Columbia to work with a fellow Sicilian architect, Gaetan Ajello, and within five years had established himself on his own. He managed to gain entry to Columbia University’s School of Architecture, graduating in 1915 with an appropriate legend already in place, of a young man so talented he had to put a velvet rope around his desk to keep the other students from copying his work. Rosario Candela was born in Sicily in 1890, the son of a plasterer, and emigrated in 1909 to join his father in the construction business. Photo by Wurts Bros/Museum of the City of New York, Wurts Bros. Architect Peter Pennoyer, whose firm designed the exhibition, points out that streetscape and skyline were equally important to Candela: the way the building looked up close and from far away, what it meant to those inside and to those down on the ground, gazing up, forming a vision of ambition nesting in those terraces in the sky.ħ70 Park Avenue apartment entrance, 1930. The water towers are hidden in red brick cupolas, and the terraces look, if you squint, like the uneven stepped vista of an Italian hill town. His designs, explored in photographs, floorplans, and digital video renderings, are warm and solid, grounded in the confident wealth of Jazz Age New York (however misplaced that confidence turned out to be), but with flourishes-urns and terraces and decorative friezes-that evoke a half-remembered fantasy of Italy.Īccording to curator Donald Albrecht, Candela’s style blends “poetry and pragmatism.” He transformed the restrictions and rules of New York architecture-water towers on the roof, and setbacks on the high floors to avoid overshadowing the ground-into charms. As a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York illustrates, the origins of high-rise, prewar luxury lie with the thoughtful, elegant designs of the relatively unsung architect Rosario Candela.Ī talented Sicilian immigrant, Candela understood that no matter how high off the ground it rose, an apartment was more than a status symbol or a gilded cage, and ought to feel and function like a home. Yet for a previous generation of urban titans, who in the 1920s abandoned their mansions for luxury high-rises, superiority alone wasn’t the draw. The shiny towers spiking up along the southern fringes of Central Park are the manifestation of this chilly vision, multimillion-dollar apartments designed, as New York Magazine’s architecture critic Justin Davidson once described it, for “people who think of the city as their private snow globe,” for the lonely oligarch prowling in his sky-high box like a less community-minded Iron Man. In today’s New York, it can seem as though the super-wealthy are blindingly literal, choosing simply to go higher and higher to make their success feel palpable. The rest of the city is pressing not only uptown but up into the sky, and you’ve spent a fortune not to live in anyone else’s shadow. When you’ve made it in New York City, how do you make sure the world knows it? There is only so much desirable Manhattan ground to build on, and mansions are a lot of work.
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