Link to article - 11 East 68th Street, The Marquand

unreal estate
by
MICHAEL GROSS
Marquand
Our Words
The latest residence on the northwest
corner of 68th Street and Madison Avenue,
a luxury condominium, brings it full circle.
Isn’t that rich?
J
ust before Christmas, 1870, a group of New Yorkers of wealth
and taste, all among the earliest American art collectors, assembled to begin the arduous task of raising funds to establish
a hometown art museum. Among them was Henry Gurdon
Marquand, who would shortly become the treasurer and, then at the
turn of the century, the second president of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art.
Eleven years later, Marquand, the son of a jeweler who’d made a fortune of his own in banking and railroads, joined a number of other
swells—among them William C. Whitney and the mass-transit moguls
Charles Tyson Yerkes and Thomas Fortune Ryan—who had all taken
up residence on East 68th Street between Fifth and Madison avenues.
Marquand commissioned the society architect Richard Morris
Hunt to design three architecturally-integrated gabled and mansardroofed houses on the northwest corner of Madison—among which
a large one opened on to the side street for himself,
A rendering of The Marquand
and two smaller ones (later occupied, respectively,
A private elevator foyer
by his daughter and the former president Grover
tury working class had time for cultural pursuits;
Cleveland) had doors directly on the avenue. Though
Marquand worried that the Met’s treasures would
he spent about a million dollars to build them, they
be at risk if the masses were free to roam its corwould stand for less than two decades. Today, the
ridors.
apartment house that replaced them is in the final
He would finally lose that fight in 1889. Flash
stages of a gut reinvention. Designed to attract a new
forward to today, however, when the masses defigeneration of wealth, it is called The Marquand in its
nitely will be unable to afford The Marquand. The
creator’s honor.
least expensive apartment is $16 million, for a
Marquand, himself, was described in his day as
3,800-square-foot five-bedroom unit with both
“sensitive, withdrawn and sternly melancholic,” a
family and formal dining rooms, a 30-foot living
man who was said to buy art “like an Italian prince
room, and a master suite as big as many apartments.
of the Renaissance.” He also created a home that I dePrices rise to $58 million, for a maisonette on stescribed in Rogues’ Gallery, my history of the museum
roids that the developer HFZ Capital Group calls
and its benefactors, as “riotously overdecorated.”
“The Mansion.” It isn’t Marquand’s mansion, but it
Specifically, I was referring to its “three-story interior
courtyard with a skylight roof, a Japanese room with embroidered silk will have to do.
Marquand died in 1902 of complications from a severe cold. A year
walls, a Moorish smoking room, an English Renaissance dining room
hung with sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries, a marble-floored hall later, his empty adjacent lot was sold, and in 1905 the Marquand house
with an oak staircase, a bronze fountain, mosaic walls and windows by was put up for sale at auction but failed to attract any buyers. Four
Louis Comfort Tiffany, and a stone fireplace topped with a copy of a long years on, the house was said to have been sold to a neighbor in an
adjacent property. That neighbor, together with others, who included
terra-cotta altarpiece he gave to the museum in 1882.”
Marquand gave the museum much more than that, although many Harry Payne Whitney and a former state senator, actually made the
of the 52 “old Masters” he donated were later re-attributed to lesser purchase. Then, in 1912, fronted by architect Herbert Lucas, their syndicate bought the two adjacent houses from Marquand’s daughters,
artists.
The Met president was also a stern defender of keeping the muse- announced plans to build a cooperative apartment house and promptum’s doors closed on Sundays, the one day of the week the 19th cen- ly knocked down the existing houses. But their name lived on.
42 | AVENUE MAGAZINE • OCTOBER 2013
unreal estate
Designed to attract a new generation of wealth,
The Marquand IS NAMED FOR HENRY MARQUAND, THE
METROPOLITAN Museum president whose elaborate
art-filled mansion once occupied its site.
The apartments by Lee Mindel of Shelton, Mindel & Associates feature eat-in kitchens and formal dining rooms, white oak-paneled walls, limestone and oak
Parquet de Versailles floors, bay windows, working fireplaces, and 10 and 11-foot ceilings.
The wrecking of Marquand’s private gallery deprived the city of
an art history landmark. Its place was taken by a 12-story apartment
building briefly called Marquand House, “an attractive, well-designed
early-20th century structure that, unfortunately, cannot hold a candle
to the building it replaced,” as Tom Miller puts it on his Daytonian in
New York blog. Yet the limestone, brick and terracotta u-shaped building with its courtyard entrance and apartments of seven to 16 rooms,
was among the first patrician apartment buildings on Madison.
Over the years (though it apparently failed as a cooperative and became a rental), it has attracted quite a cast of characters.
Early buyers included several real estate men, society types, the cofounder of Bon Ami and J. Walter Thompson, the ad agency founder,
who would die there. In the 1930s, Adele Harriman, widow of one of
E.H.’s cousins, was a renter, alongside a Mayflower descendent, and
the great-great-great-granddaughter of a now forgotten businessman
known as “the Merchant Prince of New York.”
Later on came two sculptresses, the widow of a cousin of the great
judge Learned Hand, himself a federal judge, and Ernest Brummer,
an archaeologist and gallery owner who, with his brother Joseph, sold
44 | AVENUE MAGAZINE • OCTOBER 2013
many of the objects that became the Metropolitan Museum’s Cloisters.
That was then. More recently, 11 East 68th, with some of its original
apartments cut up, and stripped of its name but not the ornamental
“M” on its façade, has been home to Abigail “Dear Abby” Van Buren, Yul Brynner and Colin Cowie. Also living there, says a former
renter, have been such local notables as hedge fund manager James
Chanos, investment manager Christopher Flowers, Alessandro and
Ulrica Lanaro (he’s the CEO of Moda eyewear) and social fixtures
Marisa Noel Brown and Dori Cooperman. “We paid $30,000 a month
for 5,000 square feet, and that was cheap, really cheap,” says the former
renter. “And we put a lot of money in. No one knew we were going to
be kicked out. And then, buh-bye. It was a drag.”
But, again, that was then. Once the exterior restoration by Beyer
Blinder Belle and the elegantly restrained contemporary interiors—all
white oak, limestone, Travertine, and Parquet de Versailles—by Lee
Mindel of Shelton, Mindel & Associates, are complete next year, the
latest iteration of the Marquand mansion will once again be a plutocrat-ready Manhattan palace, now balancing evocative history with
modern luxury. ✦