740

In New York, the great apartment houses of the 1920s, buildings the cognoscenti know so well that they identify them only by numbers such as “834” (834 Fifth Avenue), “778” (778 Park Avenue), “1040” (1040 Fifth Avenue), and, the noblest of them all, “740” (740 Park Avenue), which happens to have been built by James T. Lee, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s grandfather, have a kind of holy aura that comes, I think, from their nearly perfect equilibrium of social status and understated architectural quality.