NEW YORK: The coming-out party for the palatial penthouse restaurant of the Hotel Pierre was a chilly one. On a blustery February afternoon in 1930, a genteel hotel impresario named Charles Pierre Casalasco led a hardy troupe of debutantes wearing cloche hats and fur stoles up flight after flight of stairs to the roof of the unfinished 42-story building.
Perched on high heels with only a few wooden planks standing between them and a plunge to Fifth Avenue, the debutantes blinked into a stiff wind as one of them helped drive the last rivet, a gold one, into the steel framework.
By October of that year, the Pierre's top two floors, including the exposed wooden platform on which the debs braved the elements, would be transformed into a glamorous breakfast room and night club, "decorated to resemble the interior of a zeppelin cabin," according to The New York Sun. Not long after that, the hotel would begin to operate the space as a ballroom.
A place of Champagne bubbles and swing bands, the Pierre Roof, as it became known, was the exclusive province of high society in Depression- era New York. Though its interior was off-limits to most of the city, however, its ornate exterior became a signature feature of the Fifth Avenue skyline. Set atop a slender tower of cream-colored brick, the Pierre's upper floors had the rarefied aspect of a French château in the sky, complete with a gleaming copper mansard roof 500 feet, or about 152 meters, above 61st Street.
The New Yorker hailed the new hotel as a "millionaires' Elysium," and the description still applies. The space once occupied by that rooftop restaurant is now a private penthouse triplex on the market for a cool $70 million, which brokers say is the highest price ever listed for a New York residence.
The primary selling point is the 3,500-square-foot — about 325 square meters — grand salon, the former ballroom of the Pierre Roof. On each of the room's two west-facing corners, soaring French doors open onto terraces offering breathtaking views of Central Park and beyond.
The financial guru Martin Zweig, author of "Winning on Wall Street," bought the apartment in 1999 for $21.5 million, then a record. He is now trying to sell it because he and his wife, Barbara, live in Miami and spend only a month or two a year in New York. If the triplex sells for anything close to its asking price this time, it will again smash the record for the biggest single residential deal in city history, topping the Harkness mansion on East 75th Street, sold in October for $53 million.
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Though the Pierre penthouse's staggering price tag has attracted news media attention from around the world, its lavish interior has been seen only rarely over the last three decades.
The ballroom was shuttered in the early 1970s and largely forgotten for nearly 20 years until it was sold as a private residence. Few of its stories have been told, and little has been revealed about its present incarnation as a luxury pied-à-terre decorated with iconic popular-culture artifacts, like the crystal-studded dress Marilyn Monroe wore while singing "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy in 1962.
The dress does not come with the apartment. But the grand salon's oversize measurements have their own va- va-voom allure for prospective buyers.
"When they walk into the ballroom, their mouths just fall wide open," said Elizabeth Lee Sample, the Brown Harris Stevens broker who, with a colleague, holds the exclusive listing for the triplex.
The wallet of the eventual buyer will also have to fall wide open. The Pierre cooperative requires that apartments be bought entirely in cash.
When the Pierre opened in October 1930, the hotel's 41st and 42nd floors became home to the Club Pierrot, an exclusive supper club led by business and society figures including William Vanderbilt, Walter Chrysler and Condé Nast. But in the depths of the Depression, the club could not attract enough members to sustain itself. The Pierrot disbanded within three months.
Even so, the Pierre Roof went on to a vibrant life as a popular summer ballroom. Each year, a succession of debutante receptions were held in the spacious aerie. Their guest lists were sprinkled with names like Astor, Auchincloss, Villard and Gerry, the prominent family whose mansion previously occupied the site on which the Pierre was built.
In the years before air-conditioning, roof gardens provided a popular escape from the summer heat, and the Pierre was not shy about advertising itself as having "the highest and coolest hotel roof in Manhattan."
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