![]() In the end, her efforts to keep up with the Joneses backfired. ![]() That standard was living alone in an apartment on the Upper East Side, ordering takeout from fancy restaurants and splurging on glitzy trips. “But I was so desperate to maintain a certain standard.” “I look back now and think, ‘What on Earth was I thinking?’ ” West-Rosenthal tells The Post about the early 2008 bank visit. She was sent packing - but not before receiving an earful from the bank employee who laughingly told her that wouldn’t work. “I want to quit my job and pay off my credit card debt,” she earnestly told the manager. “And I have adored it from the very moment I saw it.Dropping by Chase on her lunch break in Manhattan, Lauren West-Rosenthal argued her case for a loan. “It was just a terrific apartment,” says Slater. Now that it’s for sale, most of Slater’s furniture and art has been packed up, leaving only the apartment’s elegant proportions-and her amazing memories-behind. A few months later, the building went co-op. Slater and her mother went to see it, and she rented it on the spot. Astor called to tell her an apartment with a layout similar to his was available at 998. “He sort of patted me on the head and said, ‘Yes, of course.’ ”Ī few years later, in 1953, Slater and her first husband, William Grace Holloway Jr., were living in an immense apartment at 420 Park Avenue (“I really downsized when I moved here,” she says). “I walked in, and I just adored it, and I said, ‘Jack, I am crazy about this apartment! This is exactly the apartment I want to live in in New York!’ ” Slater recalls. She’d come to an engagement party for her friend Gertie Gretsch, who was marrying John Jacob Astor. Slater got her first glimpse inside as a 17-year-old attending Finch Junior College. A broker named Douglas Elliman-just starting his career-stocked the building with Guggenheims and Astors, whose presence ignited a vogue for buying mansions in the sky. Each simplex on the Fifth Avenue side contained a servant’s wing with six to nine maid’s rooms, as well as a dining room for staff. “This building,” says Kathy Sloane, of Brown Harris Stevens, the exclusive broker for the Slater apartment, “was commissioned by two gentlemen who wanted to transform the way people lived in the city, by encouraging the rich of Upper Fifth Avenue to abandon their single-family houses in favor of European-style apartments.” (Lee and Fleischmann wanted to buy up those houses and replace them with more apartment buildings.) They hired McKim, Mead & White to design the Italian Renaissance– style twelve-story building for the very rich, incorporating amenities like jewelry and silver vaults in the apartments and wine cellars in the basement. The Duke of Windsor Played the Drums Here Inventory Check: East 64th Street Nightmare on Hudson Street Win This Client! One Apartment, 125 Years Market Research: Penthousesĭancing bears and drumming abdicators were probably not what Stanford White envisioned when he drew up the plans for the stately limestone edifice in 1910. Her guest-list regulars were “a mishmash” of people like Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Porfirio Rubirosa, Grace Kelly, and Fred Astaire. When El Morocco closed, Slater explains, the club would empty out and head over to her place for a few late- night/early-morning games of Ping-Pong. Ho-hum never had a chance here, between the duke of Windsor’s impromptu drum performance one night and Rosie the dancing bear doing a waltz with Johnny Gallagher another. I like something that is, you know, a little fuller.” “I don’t like just having parties where you come in and you get hors d’oeuvre. ![]() The style icon and social fixture is reminiscing about the extremely lively scene that took place in her sprawling apartment at 998 Fifth Avenue, which overlooks the Metropolitan Museum of Art-and which is now on the market for $17.7 million. ’New York was a moving cocktail party,” says Anne Slater, immaculately dressed, accessorized with her signature cobalt-blue glasses.
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