The Real Estate: Kim Velsey

The Dinosaurs of Park Avenue Apartments in grand uptown co-ops are sitting on the market for years. Why?

FOR YEARS, buying an apartment at 740 Park meant something. And that something was, quite simply, that you'd won. It was not a building for those on the make; it was a building for those who'd made it, the socially and financially dominant.

The childhood home of Jackie Kennedy Onassis (her grandfather built the place in 1929), 740 Park counted John D. Rockefeller Jr., a Chrysler heiress, and numerous financiers among its first residents. In the boom periods of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, apartments routinely fetched record prices, sometimes provoking bidding wars between billionaires. In 2000, Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman bought Rockefeller Jr.'s old 35-room penthouse for $37 million, a record at the time, and he was so besotted with the place that a few years later, he had part of the Park Avenue Armory transformed into a replica of the apartment for his 60th-birthday party. In 2004, David Koch and Len Blavatnik, two of the richest men in the U.S., were both vying for an 18-room duplex that was being sold by the Japanese government. Koch came out on top, boasting to Michael Gross, the author of 740 Park, that he "took it out from under his nose."