The Preston Pope Satterwhite apartment at 960 Fifth Avenue

In 2014, Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris purchased the penthouse apartment of the late Edgar Bronfman, Sr., at 960 Fifth Avenue, for $70 million, setting a record price for a co-op in New York City.

It was not much of a surprise, as 960 Fifth Avenue, designed by Rosario Candela in 1927 on the site of the William A. Clark house and completed a year later, is considered one of the best if not the best co-op building on Fifth Avenue.

(Museum of the City of New York)

It wasn't the first time that 960 Fifth Avenue had set a record, either. In fact, 960 Fifth Avenue may have been the first co-op sale record ever set in New York.

In the year 1927 (as Marcel Proust was publishing the last volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu and Germans packed into theaters to see Fritz Lang's Metropolis), the New York Times reported that a gentleman called Dr. Preston Pope Satterwhite had purchased a 20-room apartment at 960 Fifth Avenue for $450,000, "a figure that is said to be the highest ever paid."

This apartment may well have been grandest one the Avenue has ever seen, and it was specially built for Satterwhite by Anthony Campagna, the builder — taking up all of the 10th floor and part of the 11th. The sprawling apartment's main feature was a 58-foot-long double-height living room, with five distinctive windows that are easily seen from the street. It also featured a unusual staircase that gave access to the master bedroom, right above the dining room.

According to testimony given by a witness in a New York appellate court case from the 1930s, the Satterwhite apartment was "highly ornamented throughout" at an additional cost of tens of thousands of dollars. The living room had antique teakwood floors with a butterfly motif that were imported from China (back when "made in China" meant something a little different). The vaulted ceiling was custom to Satterwhite's apartment, as were many of the other trimmings and features.

We are lucky that we have two pictures of this remarkable interior.

The unusual staircase gives access to a master suite.

A view from the master bedroom's balcony, with the library beyond.

According to Satterwhite's Times obituary, the apartment also "contained a large collection of art treasures," including Beauvais tapestries depicting the conquests of Louis XIV, now in the Speed Museum of Art. While the tapestry below can't be seen in the photos we have of the interior, you can see one of its companions to the left of a staircase, with the same coat of arms in the top center.

The Siege of Doesburg, 1692 - 1722.

(Probably) Beauvais Tapestry Manufactory

Speed Art Museum 1947.25

Needless to say, the plan of the Satterwhite apartment is a delight. Besides the enormous living room, there are four en-suite bedrooms, a windowed gallery, a large library, dining room, and seven maid's rooms.

The upper part of the duplex was much smaller, consisting of only of the master bedroom (taking the same print as the dining room below it), a dressing room, a large bath, closets, and a passage. (The area above the library on the 11th floor is part of a large apartment at neighboring 3 East 77th Street, also designed by Candela and built at the same time — the only apartment in that building to have frontage on the Avenue.)

An incomplete, low quality image of the upper floor. If anyone is fortune enough to have a copy of The Classicist, Issue I (1994) they can find the full plan on the 41st page.

Satterwhite sold the apartment a few years before his death, and between 1945 and 1947, the Satterwhite apartment was broken up into two apartments (10A and 10/11 B), with Candela himself overseeing the work. The staircase was taken out, the living room amputated. We can only wonder what pain it brought him.

In 1947 it is likely that C. Douglas Dillon, who later became President John F. Kennedy's Treasury Secretary, purchased the grander, southern portion of the Satterwhite apartment, 10A, which still retained part of the double-height living room. I have several reasons for believing it was Dillon who purchased the apartment at this time, one clue being that architect Mott Schmidt was hired by Dillon to do alterations in an apartment at 960 Fifth Avenue in 1947. (Dillon lived in the building at least as late as the 1980s. He died in 2003. It is unclear who owns the apartment now.)

We have no plan for 10A, but it might look something like this:

The rest of the apartment became a duplex apartment known as 10/11 B, which was recently sold by Toys 'R' Us founder Charles Lazarus to Peruvian billionaire Carlos Rodriguez Pastor for $27.5 million.

The northern part of the famous living room became a library, and the upper part, a windowless dressing room and bath.

The awkwardness of the new apartment is obvious from the plans:

These books are in trouble if the bathroom above ever leaks.

(There's also a mystery here. Notice that the 11th floor portion is larger than it was in Satterwhite's day — and not just by eating up some of the old living room. There is a bedroom and bath in the place of... nothing. Probably, the bedroom and cramped bathroom used to be a lower-level service area with maid's rooms attached to the 12th Floor apartment currently owned by Anne Bass. Your guess is as good as mine.)

As fas as co-op prices go, there is little sign that the real estate market is slowing down. It took less than 3 months for the Bronfman co-op record to shatter when hedge funder Israel "Izzy" Englander bought a duplex at 740 Park Avenue for a cool $71.3 million, from none other than the French Republic. The record was shattered again the following April. That's New York City for you.