Living It Up

By general consent, Manhattan is the U.S.'s cultural capital, the greatest concentration of taste and wealth in the nation. But only 3,000 people have homes there. The rest live in apartments.

Manhattanites are cliffdwellers by choice as well as necessity. Somehow, apartment living best expresses the basic personality--and impersonality--of the city. Its inhabitants are the young on the way up, the successful who were born somewhere else, the uncertain, the transitory, and the ambitious who are aware that further success (or new failure) may dictate a sudden change in their whole way of life. For the rich (who generally have several other places elsewhere), an apartment is a kind of permanently rented hotel suite. For seekers of anonymity or those who merely hope to be rich, the city apartment is a springboard, a stopping-off place that can be left without regret or nostalgia on the way to a better spot. It is ideal for those who value convenience and mobility above roots (their roots are generally back in Indiana, or in the suburbs), for people who are eternally on the edge of their chairs, ready to leave for Europe or the Caribbean or to take over the West Coast office at an executive's whim.

The Treasure Trove. Being New Yorkers, they are also self-consciously tastemakers. Where money is no object, the lady of the house can call on the nation's most expensively enterprising decorators, who in turn have at hand a huge treasure trove of materials, antiques, furniture ancient and modern in Manhattan's syth

Street stores and Third Avenue backwaters. Probably only in Manhattan can a decorator find a Gobelin tapestry, an Early American sideboard or a Mies van der Rohe steel chair within a few blocks.

Furthermore, since an apartment is an adjustable part of a huge, self-supporting structure, the enterprising designer or owner can often tear out partitions and rearrange walls with a freedom that anywhere else would bring the house down on his head.

Apartments came early to Manhattan.

In 1869, Rutherford Stuyvesant built the first--a thick-walled, five-story brick building on East 18th Street. He called it Stuyvesant Apartments, but most other people dubbed it Stuyvesant's Folly. Still, these "French flats," patterned after Parisian apartments of the day, right down to the watchful concierge, caught on fast. Until the day it was torn down a few years ago, the building never had a vacancy. Moreover, it set the pattern. As the residential section of the city crept uptown, fashionable New Yorkers moved in evergrowing numbers into the massive and ornate variants of Stuyvesant's Folly that rose along Park and Fifth Avenues. They were solidly built, with highceilinged, spacious rooms.

As the island filled up with apartment buildings, house building declined, and has now all but ceased. There have been only eight new houses built in all Manhattan since the end of World War II. Today Manhattan is in the midst of the biggest apartment-building boom in its history. But high prices since the war have tempted most builders into cutting corners, cramping spaces, and scanting on wall thicknesses. Says Architect Bernard Guenther: "Nowadays, when the fellow upstairs rolls a pair of dice, you can tell when they come up seven." Ceilings are now a standard and skimpy eight feet, and it is a rare apartment that has a working fireplace. Complains Decorator Elizabeth Draper: "The rooms are so neutral: they have no moldings or cornices, no 'eyebrows,' no character." Echoes Designer T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings: "Apart from their shabbiness, the interior spaces are so ignoble. The ceilings are too low--the areas are just not worthy!" The grand old apartments are still perhaps the city's best, still command towering prices (the remaining rentals along Park and Fifth Avenues run as high as $1,500 per room per year, and co-ops sell for as much as $250,000). A few of the postwar generation of apartments are at least cleanly designed. The energetic occupants, with ingenuity, enterprise and money, can make these filing-cabinet spaces spectacular, impressive, or merely comfortable, according to the owner's particular taste, income or inclination.

Venice on the East River. "Today's rooms," says Mrs. H.J. Heinz II, wife of the 57-varieties man, "are either so slickly modern that one becomes Mrs. Plastic or so ornate that one is Madame Ormolulu. I prefer to have something that will last." To restyle part of their eleven-room triplex co-op on the East River at 5 2nd Street, the Heinzes brought in Jansen Inc., international decorators. Drue Heinz used mostly classic French furniture but aimed at a Venetian effect. The high ceiling had been strung with beams. They were ripped out. and the walls were "papered" in green velvet to show off the Heinzes' big collection of modern French paintings. "By doing the room in velvet," says Mrs. Heinz, "we've assured ourselves that it will age well; as the velvet gets shabby, it will look better." Intimacy & Nice Things. Another East Side co-op (i Sutton Place South) in which Jansen has had a hand belongs to Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, an heir to the Phipps steel money, and his wife Lucy ("C.Z."). Boston-born "C.Z." was a Ziegfeld girl and artist's model for Diego Rivera before she settled down as one of New York's more active society matrons. The Guests have homes in Palm Beach and Roslyn, L.I., and rent a "hunting box" in Virginia, have turned their Manhattan apartment into a showcase for their English and French antiques and porcelains. To bring intimacy to the big, high-ceilinged living room, they divided it into three distinctive furniture groupings. "I wanted it comfortable," says C.Z., "so guests don't feel that the room is a museum. It should be cozy and attractive; that's the charm of having nice things. But people should be able to relax and feel at ease."

Fantasia. Movie Producer Sam Spiegel hired Architect Edward Stone (TIME cover, March 31, 1958) to build a glossy Park Avenue duplex penthouse. With the help of his wife Maria, Stone turned the place into a never-never land of white marble, pink silk, Turkish lamps and other assorted fixtures of Cinemascopic proportions. The sunken marble tub is merely outsize; the master's bed looks roughly like a polo field covered in cardinal red velvet. Like all dedicated cinemagnates, Spiegel has his own home-projection facilities. The wide screen is hidden behind curtains. When he wants to put on a private screening, Spiegel presses a button, and two paintings--a Rouault and a Picasso--slide aside to reveal the projectionist's peepholes.

Back at the Ranch. The West Side apartment of Textile Manufacturer Benjamin Heller strikes some as an art gallery with a bed. Huge paintings by Pollock, Rothko. Newman and other abstractionists, as well as Greek and African sculptures and pre-Columbian potteries, loom everywhere--in the living room and kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. Because action painters feel a compulsion to paint big, Heller kept the apartment free of cornices, architectural decoration and ornamental bric-a-brac whose fussy detail would clash with the large-scale paintings. But, insists Collector Heller, "the idea that our apartment was built around an art gallery is a total misconception. It is a home, and paintings look best in a home. We were solely interested in creating an atmosphere in which art would look best." The living room was "somewhat of a problem. You can't sit along a wall and enjoy art.'' So the modern, clean-lined furniture was grouped in the center, affording views all around. Says Heller: "We think of our apartment as a ranch-home on the tenth floor."

Picasso on Park Avenue. The Heller solution was. in effect, to let the paintings take over the apartment. Victor Ganz, manufacturer of costume jewelry, found a different answer for his 13-room Park Avenue apartment. The Ganzes own America's biggest private collection of Picassos, and called in Designer Robsjohn-Gibbings to find a way to keep the Picassos from overpowering the rooms. Robsjohn-Gibbings and Mrs. Ganz selected massive pieces of authentic Italian Renaissance and Spanish Gothic furniture, mixed them with 17th century English chairs, created a remarkably effective multi-century effect that recognizes Picasso's presence but does not succumb to him altogether.

A. Matter of Esthetics. On a more modest scale, Architect Gordon Bunshaft, chief designer for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, also had a problem with paintings. His were Picasso, Miro, Modigliani, Dubuffet, and they all had to be fitted into his five-room rental apartment on East 66th Street. He chose "neutral" furnishings "to let the paintings do the coloring." To create more space, Bunshaft removed a wall separating the entranceway from the dining area. His TV set is placed behind a sliding Dubuffet, and from behind a Miro comes the sound of his hi-fi speaker. By using stainless steel, Formica and marble, and by keeping the place uncluttered, Mrs. Bunshaft cuts cleaning chores to a minimum.

Game Rooms. Financier J. Daniel Weitzman started out with an eight-room, three-bath East Side co-op penthouse, and ended with three baths, four rooms and a striking living room that plays "background music to the view" of the East River and the United Nations buildings. The designer, Architect Paul Lester Wiener, ripped out walls to forge the big living room out of four of the original rooms, then used the space to set up a "game" of varying planes and forms and colors--purples, magentas, blues and greens. To bring the outside in, Wiener installed a pebble garden and a black marble shaft that echoes the shape of the U.N. headquarters. To hold the Weitzman collection of heavy, 3,000-year-old Egyptian stone fragments, he anchored a dividing wall in concrete.

Clasped Hands & Needlepoint. In the penthouse in the same East River building where the Jack Heinzes live, the elevator button is imbedded in a pair of carved, clasped hands. The penthouse apartment belongs to Actress iviary Martin and her Manager-Husband Richard Halliday, for whom the clasped-hands motif recalls their courtship days. Placed here and there in the apartment are hands of brass, porcelain, ivory and onyx; the theme is even repeated on the stationery of Halliday's Halmar Productions, Inc. Decorated chiefly by the Hallidays themselves, the seven-room duplex is hung with paintings by Mary Martin and such friends as Noel Coward, Beatrice Lillie and Janet Gaynor. is furnished more for comfort than for show. Highlights: a needlepoint rug, made during backstage waits by Mary in her South Pacific days, a shower with mirrored walls, an enclosed, almost closeted antique bed, which the maid found uncommonly hard to make up until she hit on the ideal solution. Says the enterprising maid: "I get into it." Country Place. David Kapp, president of Kapp Records, was a longtime suburbanite, and in giving up commuting, was a little uneasy about the austerities of vertical living in the city. So the Kapps commissioned Decorator Melanie Kahane to build some homey warmth into their new six-room co-op penthouse on East 57th Street. To avoid "the sterility of the average co-op," says Melanie, "I tried to suggest a country place in the city. By that I don't mean a fireplace with a spinning wheel in front of it. It's more a matter of creating an architecture which gives the impression of a home." One homey touch: Carolina pine paneling, scorched with a blowtorch, in the library.

Self-Help. Singer Pat Suzuki and her husband. Fashion Photographer Mark Shaw, decorated their own 5 1/2-room rental apartment on East 30th Street in Kips Bay, one of Manhattan's better-designed (by I.M. Pei) new buildings. Side by side with antiques that they picked up on foreign travels, the couple have put such odds and ends as a polarbear rug, a $10 coffee table and a butcher's table (in the dining room). To help soften the chilling effect of a lot of glass, including Shaw's mercury glass collection. Pat Suzuki introduced warm fabric colors, contemporary Spanish chests and floor pillows, and picked up a few Japanese items, e.g., candlesticks. Says she: "They were probably cheaper at Lord & Taylor's than we could have gotten them for in Japan." The Built-in Look. The problem for Author-Editor (Doubleday) Margaret Cousins was how to set up a four-room apartment on East 63rd Street in such a way that she could live with her multitude of books and some favorite furnishings saved from the big Westchester home that she sold. Decorator William Pahlmann (see below) built storage walls wherever he could find the space, gave the study-guest-room the famous Pahlmann tent treatment: the walls are covered with striped mustard-and-red cotton, which winds around to the window wall and folds into drapery, while the ceiling is covered with a light blue fabric and a scalloped border at the top.

Paradise of Color. Decorator Pahlmann describes his own place as a "paradise of color." Currently under sublease to J. Davis Danforth, a vice president of Curtis Publishing Co.. Pahlmann's nine-room apartment on Park Avenue is filled with items and ideas that could furnish a museum twice its size. He designed his own V'Soske area rug, has mixed Louis XV and XVI, 17th century English, :8th century Genoese and Venetian, Chinese tea paper, Portuguese rag rug. In Pahlmann's favorite manner, one small bedroom is tented with cotton in blue, red and gold stripes. The library has a door, concealed by bookshelves, that leads directly into this bedroom. The master bedroom, whose ceiling is overlaid with the Chinese tea paper, has a bedspread made from a Greek rug, and a headboard upholstered in mustard-colored leather.

It takes a heap of fussin' to make an apartment a home.

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