740 Park by Michael Gross

Author:Michael Gross
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307418760
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-03T11:00:00+00:00

22

AS IN THE DAYS OF JAMES T. LEE, A FEW 740 FAMILIES LIVED APART from, even unaware of, the building’s influential web. Bartholomew Barry was a textile broker from a humble Boston Irish background. His wife, Lillian, was the daughter of the Coal King of Brooklyn, Michael Francis Burns. Married in 1908, they had a house in Rumson and in 1948, before the co-op conversion, rented an A-line apartment at 740.

The Barrys were fortunate. Burns sold his company just before the crash, so his fortune was liquid and largely unaffected. Cotton brokerage was flourishing, and Barry sold cotton canvas to tire and sneaker makers. “He knew the Keds family,” says his granddaughter Sandy Packard. “He provided the uppers.” He had a yacht and a house on Shelter Island and gave enough to the church that he had his own pew at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But after the war, Barry retired, and then died in 1951.

When Lillian Barry died, the apartment was sold, but not before two turndowns. Sandy Packard’s mother and her sister, who had inherited it, were told the purchasers were rejected because they were Jewish. “That’s what we thought,” Packard says. “They were very annoyed.”

LIKE THE MEN WHO PUT ROSARIO CANDELA IN BUSINESS, MICHAEL DEL Balso was an immigrant from Italy who struck it rich doing heavy construction in New York. The Del Balso Construction Company built roads and bridges, not luxury apartment buildings, but it made Del Balso’s son, Anthony, rich enough to live like a Rockefeller—and free enough to become 740 Park’s first wife-swapper.

Michael Del Balso came to America from Italy in 1902 and by the time he died in 1947 had built structures worth $200 million, including parts of the East River Drive, several subway lines, the Triborough and George Washington bridges, a steel plant, and storm sewers in Washington, D.C. Just after Anthony took over his father’s company, he won a contract to connect the Bronx River and Cross County parkways. Jobs like that made it easy for him to afford the $647 monthly rent for apartment 2/3A (the equivalent of $5,000 a month in 2004), and a few years later, the $12,000 purchase price (about $93,000 today).

In 1938, Del Balso had married Mary Therese Perrotty, a girl from the New York suburb Yonkers. By the time they moved to 740 twelve years later, they’d had two children and become leading figures in New York’s equestrian world. Anthony had long been a foxhunter, and together they took riding lessons at the Ox Ridge Hunt Club in Darien, Connecticut, and Secor Farms Riding Club in White Plains, New York, both among the finest riding and training stables in the Northeast.

“Most of us good riders started taking lessons with Gordon Wright, the premier riding teacher,” says one of their equestrian friends. “He produced all the great riders of his day. Somehow the Del Balsos hooked in with him and became very good clients.”

Secor Farms “was a bit of a Peyton Place,” says the horseman. “There was a lot of socializing.

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