How Jackie Designed a Safe Palace in Manhattan – HT
Jackie Bouvier was the rich girl from New York and East Hampton. Then the Georgetown wife. Later the first lady walking through the White House like it’s a stage set. Then the widow. The whole world looks on in sorrow. But despite her influence and popularity, for 30 years, Jacqueline Kennedy Onasses lived not in a grandiose mansion, but in an apartment.
Today we’re going [music] inside Jackie’s New York City residence and into the second life she built there after Camelot fell. Before she was Jackie Kennedy or Jackie Onasses, she was Jacqueline Bouvier, a little girl whose grandfather built apartment houses the way some men collected raceh horses. James T. Lee was the developer of 740 Park Avenue, a grand art deco building completed in 1929.
and now notorious as one of Manhattan’s most exclusive addresses. The apartment building later became a home for billionaires. The [snorts] Bouvier moved into a duplex there when Jackie was a child. Big stairway, panled library, marble entrance hall. According to later accounts, for a while her father couldn’t afford to fully furnish the place, so Jackie and her sister had enough empty rooms to roller skate in.
Later in life, Jackie would constantly be filling rooms with books, textiles, art, plants, seashells, and children’s projects. She seemed almost allergic to emptiness. Throughout her life, Jacqueline Kennedy Onasses lived in grand estates and luxury apartments, including the White House, while her husband, President John F.
Kennedy, served as president. She grew up in spacious New York apartments and 7 acre estates. [music] And after her marriage, she frequently spent her summers at the famed Kennedy compound and winters on the family’s estate in Palm Beach. Now, jump forward. The White House years. You know those images.
The Restored East Room. The famous televised tour where a young first lady explains [music] why historic American furniture belongs in American rooms. She worked with decorator Sister Parish and French designer Stefane Budon there, shaping her taste in what we now call American country elegance. Chints, painted furniture, old rugs, but used in a relaxed, livedin way.
And then, of course, Dallas, November 22nd, 1963. We won’t stay there long, but you can’t walk into a New York apartment without carrying that ghost in with you. Jacqueline Kennedy had spent the months after President Kennedy’s assassination in Georgetown, still surrounded by reporters and tourists. She wanted privacy for Caroline and John.
New York offered that magical combination, anonymity in crowds and dorm who say no very firmly. And she needed that safety. Only a few months earlier, she had buried her infant son, Patrick. By the time she left the White House, she had already lived through more loss than many people see in a lifetime. About a year later, widowed with two [music] children, she leaves Georgetown and moves back to the city of her childhood.
Not to 740 Park this time, to another Rosario Candela building, a short walk from the Metropolitan Museum, looking out at the Central Park reservoir that will eventually bear her name, honoring her work for the city and the fact that she enjoyed jogging there just steps from her home.
This is where our [music] story really begins. 1045th Avenue, beige limestone. Elegant, a little severe. Built in 1930 by architect Rosario Candela, one of the great designers of New York’s luxury apartment houses. Unlike glassy modern towers, Candela’s buildings were designed as vertical mansions, few apartments, enormous rooms, entrances that felt like you were walking into a private club.
At 1040, there are only 27 apartments in the whole building. On the 15th floor, one apartment stretches across the entire footprint. About 5,300 square ft of space wrapped in windows with sweeping views over Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jacqueline bought the penthouse for around a quarter of a million dollars, hoping Fifth Avenue and a strict co-op board [music] would do what the Secret Service could not, keep the world at bay.
Was she right? Yes and no. The apartment itself was classic candela luxury. Five bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, a library with a wood burning fireplace, a formal dining room, a large living room that opened to a conservatory and terrace, three fireplaces, terraces on multiple sides, staff quarters, a wine room, and a kitchen big enough to cook for a small embassy.
But Jackie wasn’t interested in living in a museum. She just left one. Instead, she layered her own history into the space. French antiques from her childhood summers in East Hampton. White painted furniture and slip covers that echoed the breezy feeling of Highest Port. Equestrian paintings and horse sculptures that nodded to the one sport that had always been her escape.
French foot toys, lacquered tables, floral fabrics, red and gold draperies, and a serious fireplace. Let’s turn left first into the library. Now we’re in one of the most photographed rooms in the apartment. Walls lined with books. A sofa covered in a bold cotton print with a feathery motif. On the floor, an antique needle point rug.
Its pattern softened by decades of footsteps. Now we [music] walk back through the gallery. Here that long entrance corridor became Jackie’s stage for art and memory. Turn into the living room and the mood shifts. This is a larger, more formal space with a fireplace as its anchor. In period photos, the walls glow with patterned paper.
The shelves are filled with red spined books and low upholstered pieces. Club chairs, ottomans are covered in exuberant floral prints. Curtains frame the French doors that open out to the terrace. We don’t have many published photographs of these rooms. Jackie was intensely private, but auction catalogs and later listings mention four poster beds, [music] painted furniture, wallpaper, and more of that.
And then there was the part of the apartment most guests never saw, the service wing. Back near the kitchen, beyond the main gallery, a narrow corridor connected the staff rooms, their own baths, storage spaces, and a back elevator. Floor plans and contemporary descriptions mention a service hall, a conservatory, [music] and separate staff quarters.
Classic for pre-war luxury buildings that assumed live-in help. Below us, Central Park spreads out like a dark green sea. From these same windows, Jackie could look along Fifth Avenue toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art, specifically to the Sackler Wing, where the Temple of Dender stands. As first lady, Jackie had used her influence to help bring the ancient temple to New York when it was rescued from the rising Nile during the Azwan Dam project.
The United States received it as a gift from Egypt, and the Met ultimately became its home. Years later, in her residence, she could sit at a small drawing table by the window and paint watercolors of Central Park. According to accounts of the apartment, her drawing table sat near the windows overlooking Central Park and the museum’s Egyptian galleries, and she often spent time there sketching.
Carolyn and John Jr. grew up here as New York children. They walked out under that canopied entrance, crossed Fifth Avenue, and disappeared into Central Park the way countless city kids have done, except they had agents and photographers tracking their every move. And then there was one man who would become her personal nightmare.
Paparazzo Ron Galella. Gala stalked Jackie and her children around New York for years, following them to school, to the park, to the front door of this building. His aggressive pursuit [music] led to a landmark court case. In the early 1970s, Jackie sued him, alleging harassment and invasion of privacy. The court ultimately ordered Gala to keep a distance at least 25 ft from Jackie and 30 ft from the children, an extraordinary legal recognition of her right to move through her own city without being hunted. In 1968, Jackie
shocked much of America by marrying Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Anassis. She became Jackie Onasses or Jackie O in the tabloids. Their life moved between his world, the island of Scorpios, yachts, Europe, and hers in New York. When Onasis died in 1975, Jackie was widowed for the second time. This time though, she didn’t retreat into anonymity.
She leaned into New York. She took the job at Viking, kept her children in their schools, and made 1045th her undisputed home base. In the autumn of 1975, she took a job as a consulting editor at Viking Press. Later, she became a senior editor at Double Day. [music] The Penthouse in the Sky had quietly become the home office of a New York publishing professional who just happened to be Jackie Kennedy.
She also found a quieter, more lasting companionship with businessman Maurice Templesman, who eventually moved into the apartment and remained by her side until she died. Of course, the story of a home like this doesn’t end when its owner passes away. After Jackie’s death in 1994, her possessions were auctioned at Sibies over several days in April 1996.
The catalog ran to nearly 600 pages and included not just jewelry and White House memorabilia, but also furniture, porcelain, paintings, and everyday objects from her New York apartment. The sale brought in more than $34 million. The event drew enormous attention [music] and raised millions of dollars, some of which went to charity.
But for many people, it was a strange feeling watching the contents of such a private life go under the hammer. Shortly after, the apartment [music] itself was sold to businessman David Ko for about 9.5 million. Later reports say he regretted redecorating the apartment, essentially admitting that the true magic wasn’t in the square footage.
It was in the way Jackie had put it together. Over the years, later owners remodeled parts of the layout, combining bedrooms, updating the kitchen, refreshing the gallery, but the basic Candle of Bones remain. There’s a rumor that real estate agents still can’t resist slipping her name into any listing in the building, Jackie O’s building, one floor below the Jackie apartment, because even decades later, her presence sells.
I’ll let you decide how much of that is marketing and how much is genuine reverence. The building is still there, of course, still beige, still dignified. Other famous names have lived in it, including at one point actress Candace Bergen. So, why does this apartment capture people’s imagination so powerfully? It’s not the square footage.
Although, let’s be honest, more than 5,000 square ft on Fifth Avenue with three fireplaces and a terrace is the stuff of real estate dreams, it’s what it represents. For many women, especially those who watched the Kennedy years unfold in real time, Jackie’s life looks like two separate movies spliced together. In the first one, she’s the glamorous young first lady standing in ball gowns next to a handsome president, giving a televised tour of a freshly restored White House.
In the second, she’s a New York widow in oversized sunglasses walking down Fifth Avenue with a shopping bag, ignoring the cameras. So, what does this apartment actually tell us about Jackie Kennedy? First, she liked comfort. Deep sofas, soft fabrics, books everywhere, nothing stiff or staged.
Second, she cared about history, but not in a museum glass way. the antiques, the Chinese dogs, the sera porcelain, the old rugs. They weren’t there to impress guests. Third, she paid attention to the world beyond the walls. Choosing a Candela apartment facing the Met wasn’t just about views. It was about waking up every morning in a city of museums, parks, and culture she loved deeply.
[music] If you could live in one famous apartment or house just for a week, which would you choose and why? Do tell me in the comments and stay with us. Hit subscribe, give this video a like and then pick another story to [music] dive into where architecture, memory and very sophisticated people all collide.