Generation to Generation

In 1915, Louis Cartier created a double strand Oriental pearl necklace of enormous value; it was said at the time to be worth over one million dollars (don’t forget there were no cultured pearls in those days!) Among the women from all over who came to view the necklace was Maisie Plant, whose enthusiasm for the pearls was so great that she offered to trade Cartier her house, on 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue, for the necklace. I suspect no one was more surprised than she (excepting perhaps MR. Plant) when he agreed. So Mrs. Plant got the world’s most beautiful pearl necklace, and Mr. Cartier got an impeccable location for his shop, where it has thrived ever since.

A decade later, in 1926, an enterprising developer approached Post Toasties heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (at that time married to E.F. Hutton, the second of her four husbands) and made her an offer to purchase her mansion on the south corner of 92nd Street and Fifth Avenue, with an eye to erecting an apartment house there.  Mrs. Post acquiesced with one condition: the builder, George Fuller, had to agree to REBUILD her house at the top of the newly constructed building. And so he did, providing her with a separate porte cochere and entrance on 92nd Street leading to a private elevator which opened onto all three floors of the 54 room terraced triplex. Mrs. Post lived there with her husband (and the next one) and three daughters for many years, renting rather than owning the home. It was subsequently divided into six enormous co-op apartments, as it remains to this day.

Of course, all this had been done before, although on the far less socially prominent West Side. In 1906, the contentious parvenu tabloid publisher William Randolph Hearst had arranged to take the top three floors of a building under construction at 137 Riverside Drive, on 86th Street. Hearst moved into the apartment in 1908 with his wife and three sons, and in 1913 he bought the whole building, adding the better part of two more floors in the meantime. Soon after, he began his notorious affair with the actress Marion Davies, and a few years after that he left Mrs. Hearst and the kids behind as he gallivanted around, eventually settling in California south of Big Sur, where he built the Hearst Castle. Mrs. Hearst remained in residence until the 1930s, when the bank foreclosed on the building and split most of it up into smaller apartments. The heart of Mr. Hearst’s apartment remains however: a 7,000-square-foot penthouse triplex which sold just this year for $20 million.

And finally, my favorite story: In 1944, after seven years of living as a widow in the enormous house she had built with her husband 35 years earlier, Frieda Schiff Warburg, after years of searching for the appropriate recipient, gave her house at 1109 Fifth Avenue to the Jewish Theological Seminary. The Seminary had tentatively begun around the turn of the century to amass a collection of Jewish objects both sacred and profane, and the collection grew through bequests and through the receipt, from Poland, of precious household and temple objects which the members of several communities there feared would not survive the war. The Seminary had no place to display this growing collection and was delighted when Mrs. Warburg gave the house to become the Jewish Museum in honor of the memory of her late husband, Felix.

I write this blog today in honor of the birth, on August 8th, of my grandson Felix Malone, the son of my daughter Clelia Peters, Warburg Realty’s President, and the great great great grandson of Frieda and Felix Warburg. Little Felix is the honored recipient of that name which has meant so much to the history of philanthropy in New York and throughout the world. May he have a long and happy life!

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