Lavish, Secluded Lives : New York’s Principality of Plenty

The chateaus of the rich that once graced Manhattan’s streets have been demolished, victims of high taxes, a shortage of servants and changing life styles.

Although wealthy New York families may still treasure maids and governesses, they no longer keep a dozen faithful retainers. When large numbers of English butlers and French maids are needed at galas and large dinners nowadays, they often are played convincingly by unemployed actors and actresses.

But if the butlers and maids are pretenders, the wealth is still real, and for those who have it, life in New York City can be filled with great comfort, opulence and privacy behind the facades of apartment buildings that give little hint of the vast luxury inside.

Zip Code 10021

The most illustrious of these neighborhoods today is a principality of plenty tucked away within ZIP code 10021, a narrow strip of land running along three of the world’s most famous avenues, Park, Madison and 5th, from the Metropolitan Museum on the north at 80th Street to the Regency Hotel at 61st Street on the south.

“I think there has never been such a concentration of wealth in such a small area in the history of man,” said Edward Lee Cave, who owns a firm specializing in apartments and town houses for the affluent.

“I don’t say it’s all piled up in apartments here. It can be in Swiss banks, Hong Kong holding companies or 10,000 acres in Australia somewhere. But everybody who is really important and powerful keeps some sort of presence in New York. . . . There is probably a larger concentration of wealth than ever existed at Versailles or anywhere else. In this town, you don’t have to apologize for being rich.”

Pay Cash for Homes

ZIP code 10021 is a neighborhood where buyers of multimillion-dollar apartments often must pay for them in cash and display net worth of at least three times the purchase price to pass the scrutiny of co-op boards. Many of its dwellings hold private art collections rivaling those in museums. It is a world of exclusive clubs, lavish charity balls and black tie dinner parties. Like some European duchy, the neighborhood has its own military drill team, housed in an armory largely furnished by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

These days, the style of old wealth once again is fashionable in New York, and many new millionaires are working hard to give the impression that their vast fresh fortunes are old and inherited. The Spartan, minimal look of the 1960s and ‘70s, when social consciousness was a decorating as well as a social style, has given way. Ball gowns have replaced gingham and blue jeans. It is the time of the lavish decorator, the socially correct florist, the society caterer.

Some residents of ZIP code 10021 believe that they are part of a new belle epoque.

Many More Galas

“It’s far more lavish now than Paris. Paris is a very staid city now. I think London has great charm and style of life that is comparable to ours,” said Mai Hallingby, the wife of an investment banker. “Maybe the life in New York is more opulent. We have many more galas and grand events and black tie dinner parties. . . . The food is getting better and better. We’re right now in our glory. We’re at the peak of the Renaissance.”

In ZIP code 10021, a life of Champagne wishes and caviar dreams is often lived by many who would hang up if Robin Leach, TV’s guide to life styles of the rich and famous, phoned. Privacy is a precious commodity guarded by uniformed doormen. The exteriors of most apartment houses give little hint of the opulent mini-mansions within, often with spectacular views of Central Park.

“The sybaritic style is hidden in New York,” said Robert Denning of Denning & Fourcade Inc., decorators of luxurious residences.

“You can achieve a lot of privacy in New York,” observed Mark Hampton, another prominent society decorator. “New York is so big it can be impenetrable if you want it to be. There are a lot of people who live public lives and then drop the curtain if they want.”

“In many ways, the extremely wealthy live in the city but also above the city,” said one perceptive Park Avenue resident who asked that she not be identified. “They don’t cope with the same problems. They can insulate themselves from the Sturm und Drang that drags down all of us.

Masseur Comes to Them

“A limousine and driver wait by the front door. Servants pick up the cleaning, fetch the children at school, do the grocery shopping, pay the bills,” she said. “Some people have social secretaries. Their secretaries sign their checks. The hairdresser comes to them. The masseur comes to them. Their exercise instructor comes to them. They have large, orderly closets because they have a lot of space. They lead a life of well-kept order.

“Things are well maintained. There are fresh flowers in the major rooms. They surround themselves with pleasant servants. None of the help will discuss anything with anybody. They are very discreet. The doorman is respectful and nice. When the wealthy go out to dinner the car and driver sit outside the restaurant and wait for them to come out. They never worry about getting caught in the rain or having to look for a taxi. They never carry shopping bags. It’s just something you don’t do. You don’t have to carry an umbrella. There are people who do that for you.”

Wealth helps to make the inconvenience and harshness of the city evaporate. A private banker can handle financial transactions. A family jeweler can reset important old pieces or help select new ones. A personal shopper can circumvent lines in crowded department stores. An art consultant or curator can supervise new additions to collections. Accountants, lawyers, administrative assistants or financial advisers can provide distance from favor-seekers or people pushing purchases or charities. In New York, many physicians with wealthy practices do indeed still make house calls.

One can be insulated even from one’s equally rich neighbors. Many apartment dwellers merely nod in the elevator, and meet en masse perhaps only once a year at their co-op’s annual meeting to discuss the building’s condition and finances.

“New York is very private,” Hallingby said. “You don’t have to befriend all your neighbors.”

$4.4 Billion in Income

Since 1979, the total income of the residents within ZIP code 10021 has soared from $2.6 billion to $4.4 billion, according to census reports and data from private demographers. The figure is expected to reach $5.8 billion by 1991.

Increasingly over the last decade, New York has become a safe haven for the world’s wealth. To a far greater degree than London and many European capitals, success in New York does not depend on family, old school tie, accent or social connections. In America these days, rock stars routinely are richer than many Rockefellers.

Perhaps partly as a result, there appears to be far less animosity between social classes in New York than in many cities abroad. Revelers parking in front of Maxim’s in Paris run the risk of curses and slashed tires as a social protest. Party goers double-parked at Regine’s on Park Avenue risk at most a $50 ticket.

New York, like many other large cities, is a place where the best and worst life offers can coexist on the same street. Stretch limousines with opaque windows and bag ladies pushing shopping carts piled with their belongings pass on the same blocks. In ZIP code 10021, churches and synagogues where wealthy parishioners worship also provide shelters and soup kitchens for the homeless.

The gulf between poverty and plenty, between tenements and town houses is not a new story in New York. Nor is the story of socially committed wealth working to narrow that chasm--reformer Jacob Riis and social critic Edith Wharton are longtime themes in this city. But what does seem new is the proximity in which wealth and despair exist--the stripping away of insulation.

Enormous Chasm

“The spread between wealth and poverty has gotten greater and more visible,” said Felix Rohatyn, the Lazard Freres & Co. investment banker who lives in the 10021 neighborhood. “The real problem of the city is that this enormous gulf between wealth and poverty is living cheek by jowl. It is so obvious and so visible and so heart wrenching. Every day it is painful to face that reality and to think that, in a great many cases, the roll of dice is fate.”

But clearly, fate has been exceedingly kind for a growing number of 10021’s residents. So immense is the scale of wealth in New York that the word millionaire has been redefined. To many bankers and brokers here, a millionaire is not one with assets of a million dollars, but one with income of $1 million or more a year.

“I sold three apartments this year for over $5 million to men who 10 years ago probably didn’t have $10,000 annual income and none of them are over 40 years old,” said Cave, a founder of Sotheby’s real estate division and now the owner of his own firm specializing in apartments and town houses. “I think that is something our entire country should be proud of. They have been successful on Wall Street or buying or selling companies.”

Such wealth allows vast choices in experiencing all that New York offers.

“I’m not sure you can generalize about wealthy life styles,” Rohatyn said. “There are so many different ways of life.”

Stereotype Is Gone

“What makes Park Avenue, what makes New York great is that a stereotype no longer exists,” said Judith Price, president and publisher of Avenue, a monthly magazine thick with status advertisements, focusing on 10021 and adjoining prestige areas. “I am involved in different circles. . . . One day you can be uptown at Le Cirque, the next day you can be at Hawaii 50 in the East Village.”

“I know one man, who is a client of mine to whom I sold a property this year, who gives away each year to charitable institutions in New York $5 million--just in New York,” Cave said. “And he has houses in four other cities in two countries. So you can imagine what his annual income is. He lives in New York very privately. His name, if I mentioned it, and I won’t, would mean nothing to you. I don’t think there are any more than four people at one time at any place where he is dining. He is not a public person.

“On the other side of the coin, there are some people who give dinners, who three or four times a week will sit down to dinner for 36 people. The cost of living in New York of that set, if you want to be in the columns, means your wife has to spend maybe a minimum of $50,000 on clothes every year. That is not taking into account major purchases of a superior fur coat. That can cost you $125,000.

“Schooling for their children, we all know what that runs. Even the baby schools can run $15,000 a year. Certainly they keep a car and driver. They keep an apartment which is probably worth anywhere from $3 million to $8 million. They have to surround themselves with an art collection which is acceptable, and they have to appear to be civilized--which most of them actually are. But an art collection today, even if you collect in the unknown schools or have what’s called ‘eccentric taste,’ can cost you $1 million to $50 million. You cannot decorate a room in New York for less than $50,000. Curtains alone are $5,000 to $10,000 a pair.”

‘Quietly Ticking Clocks’

ZIP code 10021 has changed dramatically since Stephen Birmingham described it two decades ago in his perceptive book “Our Crowd” as “a world of quietly ticking clocks.”

Nowhere is that change more dramatic than on Madison Avenue, which has been turned into a showcase for the world’s great designers. Givenchy now rubs shoulders with Lanvin, Valentino, Versace and Kenzo on Madison Avenue. Rents have become so high that many galleries and antique dealers have been forced to move upstairs from the street. Symbolic of the change is the Rhinelander Mansion, one of the last examples of the lavish life style of a century ago. It has been turned into Ralph Lauren’s Polo showcase.

Parts of the neighborhood, once a culinary desert, have become a culinary oasis. New restaurants and chic gourmet shops are thriving. Additional luxury hotels have opened. A prime attraction is the American counterpart of Paris’ Plaza Athenee, just off Madison Avenue, which draws an international clientele. The prosperity has extended east to the less wealthy areas of 10021, where store rentals and co-op prices have risen sharply.

Within 10021, the unique resources available for the affluent have expanded. It takes little imagination to spend $1 million in the galleries, antique furniture stores, jewelry shops and boutiques on just a block or two along Madison Avenue.

High-Powered Parties

“Our client list is just like one millionaire after another basically,” said florist Dennis E. Wilson, manager of Renny, as he sat amid the flowers and plants in his shop. “We do lots of high-powered dinner parties for very special people, anywhere from 8 guests to 30 or 40 guests in someone’s home. There has been so much of that in New York lately.”

He gestured toward a small bowl of flowers on a table. “This bowl of lily of the valley. Something like this could be $1,200, for example--just a tiny little thing jammed full of hundreds of stems of lily of the valley. Those are a wonderful look, one simple flower in masses on a table.”

Renny provided floral arrangements for a recent Manhattan dinner party honoring Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). The decor: up to 10-foot-long lavish branches of climbing roses.

“Our clients expect an extremely high level of quality,” Wilson said. “Flowers come in all sorts of different grades. Here in New York, you can buy flowers at the greengrocer at the corner. But the flowers are the fourth level down. All of ours are absolutely premium quality. They (clients) can expect the most unusual, the most special things.”

He paused for just a moment. “I have never seen a chrysanthemum here in all the years I have been here.”

Some of Renny’s clients can be demanding. “When they come to somebody like us, they expect the best, and you’d better give it to them, which is totally correct,” Wilson said. “A power client has a leaf on her tree, I’d certainly send somebody over there to look at this yellow leaf and diagnose the situation. That’s all part of being like a service organization. We do try to give excellent lifelong service.”

A few blocks to the north in 10021, Denning, the interior decorator, sat in a Napoleon III slipper chair surrounded by antique vases, statues, candelabras and paintings in the front parlor of his town house.

Love Their Bathrooms

“Everyone wants the same thing,” he said. “They all say the same thing. They just want a small library, a very large living room. They say they will give up the dining room and they want a terrific bathroom. In the last 10 years, people have gotten to love their bathrooms.

“The first thing you ask, are there children? As children disappear, so does guilt about money. The moment all the tuition fees are paid, people can think about themselves. . . . Often this is the second marriage. The new wife is very often a great stimulus for a man to be more luxurious. He is willing to give his second wife what his first wife didn’t ask for.”

In the best New York apartment buildings, wanting and having can take time, money and patience. Redecorating can contain more hurdles than a steeplechase.

In many Park and 5th Avenue co-ops, architectural plans to remodel apartments, sometimes on two or three floors, must be cleared by the building’s board of directors. Work can proceed just from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Some buildings let workmen in only during the summer, when most residents are away. Tearing down thick plaster walls not only can be dusty and noisy, it can be expensive. In Manhattan, private haulers may charge $1,000 to take away a garbage-truck load of debris.

Staff Must Be Tipped

Doormen and other members of the building’s staff must be tipped. The cost of experienced contractors is very high. Ordering fabrics, paints, carpeting and rugs, and installing special wiring so all the lights in a room go on with the flick of a single switch, all takes time.

“If you do things like moving toilets, that’s hell on wheels,” Denning said. “You need a jackhammer in these buildings. And it has to be done only on certain hours with the approval of your neighbor below.

“I am an enemy of plain painted walls,” he said. “What do I like to do with a wall? Anything but plain paint--marbleize walls, paint them, cover them with fabric, but never paint them white. What I call the art gallery and fur salon principle I am fighting. All fur salons and art galleries want the future owner of the fur coat or the painting to be the standout. I want the future owner of the apartment just to blend in.”

The cost of redecorating? Denning has a rule of thumb. Wealthy apartment buyers will often spend as much on it as on the purchase price of their abode. With luck, he says, they will avoid ZIP code 10021’s cliches of style.

Park Avenue Yellow

“There was a point where nobody could do an apartment without sisal carpeting. That sisal carpeting full of dog spots became a New York cliche. There are colors that I call Park Avenue yellow in living rooms, and invariably their decorator will inflict on them a dark red library,” Denning said, running down his hit list. “Mulberry-colored libraries are one of the cliches of New York decorators. . . . Also, people have pillow mania now. . . . The red library is the killer, though. You could bore a hole in those expensive buildings, all will have red libraries.”

All this and much more takes place behind the thick walls in 10021.

“Here within the mass of New York, you have a community that is international, cultural, financial, mercantile and urban residential,” said Texas developer Raymond Nasher, who lives in an elegant converted carriage house with a private garden. “It is so pleasant. . . . I think Paris was like this in the Gertrude Stein era. This area in New York is one of the rare areas in the world.”