The lavish apartment overlooking Central Park where Jackie Kennedy spent her final years

One of the anecdotes about Jackie Kennedy that continues to be told in New York has to do with the Temple of Dendur: for a long time, this Egyptian building, more than 2,000 years old, functioned as a bedside table lamp for her.

As the MET guides often explain when visitors reach this part of the museum, it was she who, as First Lady, chose it as a gift from Egypt to the United States for its help in saving the heritage site damaged by the Aswan Dam. Since her Fifth Avenue apartment overlooked the glass-enclosed museum hall where it was installed, she only had to look out of her bedroom window to see it illuminated.

But there were, and still are, many other reasons to envy Jackie’s home besides these privileged views of Ancient Egypt. Over the years, more and more value has been placed on the fact that, like the rest of the dwellings at 1040 Fifth Avenue, it is one of the apartments designed by Rosario Candela, an essential architect in the history of New York who has only recently been given the full credit he deserves.

He was, to begin with, one of the main people responsible for making bird’s-eye views of Central Park one of the most prized assets for New York’s elite, because the buildings he designed between the 1920s and 1930s were so comfortable and luxurious that wealthy families like Jackie Kennedy’s didn’t hesitate to trade their mansions for a life with neighbors.

“Rosario Candela’s architecture coincided with the years in which New York was transitioning from single-family homes to apartment buildings,” designer David Netto, author of the recent book Rosario Candela & The New York Apartment, explains via email. “The elegance with which he planned his homes, the grace with which he managed to draw the eye toward the large windows or a fireplace upon entering a living room, meant that upper-class families, when taking that same step, didn’t see the change as a renunciation of their lifestyle.”

The designer mentions, for example, the case of Consuelo Vanderbilt, a member of the well-known dynasty of railroad magnates, who despite growing up in the Petit Chateau at 660 Fifth Avenue (one of the most splendid mansions of Gilded Age New York) and being able to afford to live anywhere, ended up preferring Candela’s apartments. After living for a time in one of his duplexes, this wealthy heiress moved to an apartment at 1 Sutton Place South, another of the buildings designed by the architect, where she lived until her death in 1964 (shortly after, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, JFK’s sister, moved in).

Jackie Kennedy had also experienced the comforts of Rosario Candela’s apartments when, a year after her husband’s assassination on November 22, 1963, she decided to leave Washington, D.C., and return to the New York of her childhood. Her maternal grandfather, James T. Lee, was the developer of what is considered one of the architect’s most notable buildings, 740 Park Avenue, and it was in an apartment on this block that the first lady spent her early years.

Opened in 1930, her apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue allowed her to once again surround herself with some of the most characteristic elements of Candela’s buildings. With a surface area of approximately 5382 square feet, the apartment occupies the entire 15th floor of the building and, in Jackie’s time, featured a staff wing, five master bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and ensuite dressing room; a kitchen and wine room; a dining room; three fireplaces; a conservatory, a hallway, a foyer, a library and a living room.

The most spectacular space is the terrace overlooking Central Park, located at the foot of one of those ziggurats of penthouses and rooftops so typical of Candela’s buildings and which, as David Netto explains to EL PAÍS, was what gave the Manhattan skyline that romantic air of floating castles and cascading apartments without which New York would not have been the same city.

Jackie Kennedy bought it for about $200,000 (a little over €2 million at today’s exchange rate) from the Republican politician Lowell Weicker. After her husband’s assassination and her subsequent departure from the White House, she moved with her two children to the Newton D. Baker House, a historic mansion in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., but the constant presence of admirers stationed at the entrance made her change her mind and decide to put those fifteen floors of distance between people and her privacy.

In New York, the co-op gave her a mixed sense of peace. Netto recounts in her book how one night, when two of her neighbors, the parents of now-Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, were hosting a dinner party, the doorman had a memory lapse and, upon hearing that name (the “White House”), sent some of the guests to Jackie’s apartment, where she came out to open the door wearing a cardigan and barefoot. But the real nuisance was the paparazzi chasing them, most particularly Ron Galella, who ended up sentenced to seven years in prison for 12 violations of his restraining order. His is, among others, the famous photograph of Jackie that he managed to take after honking the taxi in which he was following her and getting her to look at the camera.

Apparently, painting watercolors of Central Park on the drawing table she had set up in the living room was one of Jackie’s solaces in her new apartment. A fan of architecture and design, she also greatly enjoyed decorating it, although, as recounted in an article in Vanity Fair the year after her death, her friends and guests always found the long list of decorators (among them Albert Hadley, Harrison Cultra, Vincent Fourcade, Georgina Fairholme, Mark Hampton, and Richard Keith Langham, but there were several more) she hired over the years a bit mysterious, because the apartment’s appearance changed very little and it remained unfazed by all the fashion trends that made the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s some of the most turbulent eras in the history of interior design.

“It was the apartment of someone who comes from an old family. Not a marble-filled showroom like all those new people’s homes,” the designer Carolina Herrera, one of Jackie Kennedy’s friends who visited her at the house, told the magazine.

That old family was the Bouviers, Jackie’s maiden name, and honoring their French origins (her great-great-grandfather was a cabinetmaker from Pont-Saint-Esprit who fought in the Napoleonic Wars), much of the furniture in her apartment had that same provenance. Of note, for example, were a pair of Louis XVI armchairs that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson (and which Jackie had already chosen a few years earlier to decorate the White House), a Louis XV table lent to her by one of her confidants, the landscape artist Bunny Mellon, who also gave her the four-poster bed, and some John Fowler curtains with a design inspired by the Tuileries, in her bedroom.

The house’s bohemian touch was provided by African-themed prints from Design Works of Bedford-Stuyvesants, a program sponsored by Jackie to stimulate the economy of this Brooklyn neighborhood through fabric design; and by objects made by her children, such as the vase John John made from a Coca-Cola bottle and shells collected on the beach.

In most rooms there were equestrian portraits (Jackie loved riding); stacks of books (in her later years she worked as an editor); and antiques and souvenirs from her travels (Chinese porcelain; crystal rosaries and Turkish eye beads she brought back from Greek holidays with her second husband, the shipowner Aristotle Onassis; and a few gifts from the Egyptian authorities for the aid to that country).

All of this vanished from the apartment after the death of its owner on May 19, 1994, and with the disappearance of Jackie and her belongings, that last link between Candela and the Bouviers was broken. The apartment was sold for $9.5 million to the U.S. businessman David Koch, who, although he ended up tripling that figure when he sold it in 2006, always regretted having wasted three years of his life and money redecorating it. “If I knew what Jackie’s possessions would fetch at Sotheby’s, I would have taken the place furnished,” the businessman remarked in a 1998 article in The New York Times about the party with which he inaugurated the apartment: the star guest of the evening was none other than former president George Bush.

Indeed, the auction of Jackie’s furniture, art, and antiques collection held by Sotheby’s two years after her death was historic. Not only because of the prices achieved, but because the exhibition of the various lots was one of the city’s sensations that year. According to The New York Times, the lucky winners who had won a ticket by purchasing one of the 75,000 copies of the catalog came to Sotheby’s New York headquarters from places as far away as Hong Kong and waited in long lines for their turn to enter the auction room, where some of the spaces of Jackie’s apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue were recreated. For once, people were able to penetrate the secrets of Kennedy’s widow.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition