CANDELA & JACKIE O.

Steven Myers

Listing: $50 billion In Yachts

“Do what you love” is the recipe for success cited by some of the world’s most accomplished people, from Maya Angelou to Steve Jobs. That’s how Steven Myers turned his lifelong passion for boating into YATCO, the official MLS and sole online service dedicated exclusively to yacht and boat listings by qualified professionals. A digital marketplace for more than 20 years, YATCO has over $50 billion in new and used yachts always listed for sale and supports more than 2,000 professional brokers around the globe. Think of it as the Zillow or Realtor.com of the boating industry. “We’re offering the same thing for the yachting industry,” says Myers. “We are the only platform dedicated to true central listings. The moment any big yacht in the world goes up for sale, it will go into our system.” Then all the professionals in the industry will get alerts that that vessel is now for sale, and they can present that inventory to their client base. Link: https://www.yatco.com/

Expanded Offerings: Builders, Charters, Consumers, Smaller Boats

The company has expanded and now allows boat builders to present their offerings. “On our platform, you can see, for example, who is building a vessel between $10 and $20 million, in a certain category and region, Europe, Asia, or the U.S.,” Myers says.

They’ve also recently expanded the service to offer yachts for charter globally, an area that has never had a central source provided by the industry. “Previously, you had to go to one representative to find any charter for sale, and we’re now opening that up so that you can find, in real-time, what’s available, with a calendaring system, so that you can say, ‘I want these two weeks on the Italian Riviera. What’s available?’”

Consumer Friendly

Traditionally a source for industry professionals, YATCO has now opened its platform to consumers. The site gets millions of visits and already has about 150,000 registered users. As with real estate, if you inquire about a listing, you are contacting a licensed broker who has been contracted to sell the vessel. A recent acquisition in Australia, YachtandBoat.com, has doubled the company’s inventory, and encompassed the Asia Pacific region. That site also focuses on smaller boats, not only yachts. With that combination, it allows us to really expand our reach worldwide and cover from the smallest boat, whether it’s a tender or a little runabout, all the way up to the world’s biggest superyachts,” says Myers. Link: https://www. yachtandboat.com/

Pandemic Yacht Boom

Yacht sales worldwide have boomed during the pandemic; prices are up and inventory is way down. “It’s one of the best family activities you could do throughout Covid; you get on your boat, you’re isolated, you’re contained,” says Myers. As a result, private ownership has exploded, as has private use of vessels, because people are apprehensive about being in a hotel, while a yacht provides an isolated environment with a dedicated crew.

Boating life

Myers grew up boating on the Chesapeake Bay in his family’s small Sea Ray-style boat. Over the years, he got jobs cleaning boats and sport fishing on charters out of the Maryland coastline. After graduating from Penn State, followed by a program at the University of Nice in France, and another at Wharton, Myers worked for Habitat for Humanity. “I was interested in saving the world, so to speak, as a fresh college grad,” he says.

Viking Yacht Company

He soon realized that his passion for yachting had been displaced and, at age 22, accepted an offer from the Viking Yacht Company to take over their inventory in Nice, France. Because of a 10% luxury tax that was later repealed, Myers saw Viking go from 1,400 employees to 40 and eventually back to over 1,000. Viking grew exponentially, and it seemed like every time he sold a boat, he saw another hundred cars in the parking lot. Providing jobs, Myers realized, is another way of helping people; he could make a difference doing what he loves. “I never looked back and have been building my career around the yachting industry ever since.” Traveling to boat shows around the world, he eventually saw the inefficiencies in the market and decided to create an online platform to connect retailers. Industry associations were supportive, and he launched YATCO in 2000.

Angelina Jolie, Bill Clinton; family

Through charity events involving the yachting industry, he attended Elton John’s Oscars party and met VIPS including Bill Clinton, Angelina Jolie, Denzel Washington and Brad Pitt. A big proponent of international travel, Myers tries to expose his two college-age children to different cultures as often as possible. A recent trip took them to 11 countries, including China, Singapore, Tokyo, New Zealand, and Australia. They did not travel by yacht, but they managed to go boating in just about every place on their itinerary. “That’s one of the advantages of having been in the yachting industry for 30 years,” he says, laughing. “Any port in the world I go to, I know someone with a boat that I can go on.” P yatco.com

A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN

BY MICHAEL GROSS

IT’S BEEN A PRINCESS OF WALES FALL, thanks to Kristen Stewart, the Duke and Duchess of Montecito and CNN (Breaking News! Diana!), but don’t let it be forgot that once this was the spot where America’s Queen of Camelot grew up and returned to live out her last three decades. Does Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis still matter in a world fixated on dysfunctional royals and hyped-up “reality” and TikTok celebrities? A world where Old Masters get dusty while hedge funders get lusty over the latest name in art, condos are worth far more than coops and substance is trumped by surface? She should. So, here’s to a first rate First Lady, to elegance, understatement and restraint, to speaking in whispers, persuasively, and to planting roots in the center of the world. It’s never not Jackie time here.

An Introduction to NYC Real Estate at the Turn of the 20th Century

A brief lesson in New York living arrangements is in order. Throughout the 1920s, developers began putting up buildings like 740 Park (and 1040 5th) full of grand apartments with the proportions of fine, freestanding homes—mansions stacked one atop the other, designed as suitable replacements for the private homes that had led society’s march uptown and become obsolete within a single generation.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Manhattan’s social elite, the Knickerbockers, who were descendants of the original Dutch settlers of New York, the English colonists who followed them and finally, the American revolutionaries who tossed the English out, went to bed at night exclusively in private houses. The location of those homes had moved inexorably uptown over the years. In the eighteenth century, the city’s genteel residential district was a tiny enclave at the southern tip of Manhattan island; south of Chambers Street, clustered around Trinity Church and St Paul’s church, lower Broadway, Bowling Green, and the Battery.

Driven north by fire and yellow fever epidemics, social life first alighted in what is now Tribeca, in the 1830s, skittered east to a new district surrounding the intersection of Lafayette Place and Bond Street

From 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building, Courtesy Steven Candela

MANHATTAN RETURN

BY CHRISTOPHER PAPE

in today’s NoHo. It was eighty more years before the town-home era ended, years in which new money poured into New York faster than derogatory names for the arrivistes could be coined.

New York absorbed its outer boroughs in 1898 and was inching toward a new role as a world-class city, second only to London, and beginning to reach for the sky. Nothing was permanent in this new New York, least of all living arrangements; the famous skyline was created as thousands of new apartment buildings and grand new office and public buildings rose in Manhattan and redefined fashionable life. The east side of Central Park was dubbed the city’s emerging “aristocratic residential section” in 1906 by the Real Estate Record, which also pointed out that thanks to Park Avenue’s width, it was well suited to large buildings.

Candela: An Italian Master Conquers Manhattan

Born in Sicily in 1890, Rosario Candela, the son of a plasterer, came to the United States at nineteen, somehow gained entrance to Columbia’s School of Architecture, and graduated in 1915. Christopher Gray, the leading historian of New York real estate, reported that Candela was already so sure of his talents that he placed a velvet rope around his drafting table to keep other students from copying his work. “He really was a genius,” says his granddaughter Jackie Candela. “He was very arrogant and knew his talents.”

Candela began his career working for several fellow Italians, Michael Paterno and Anthony Campagna, the most significant luxury apartment-house developers of the time. Candela started small, with apart-

Years later, after becoming the most glamorous First Lady in American history, after the birth of her two wonderful children and the horrifying assassination of her husband, John Fitzpatrick Kennedy, Jackie O. returned to Manhattan. Just like in her youth, she lived in a sprawling Candela apartment, this time at 1040 Fifth Avenue. Designed by Candela the year after 740 Park in 1930, 1040 5th was and continues to be one of the most sought-after addresses in New York City. Towering seventeen floors above Central Park, there are only 27 apartments, some occupying full floors and/or duplexes. Its architecture, with Candela’s famous approach for asymmetry and large windows, makes 1040 one of the most recognizable buildings in Manhattan. Yet, it is most famous as the home of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis; in fact, she purchased and moved into 1040 only one year after JFK’s assassination. She bought the apartment, located on the 15th floor, in 1964 for $250,000. After her death in 1994, the apartment was sold to David Koch and his wife for $9.5 million. He subsequently gut renovated it for a cost of over $10 million, but later moved to a larger apartment in 740 Park, claiming the 1040 home was too small for him and his family, even though the apartment had four bedrooms, two dressing rooms, staff quarters, library, living room, dining room, conservatory, wine room, three fireplaces, five and a half bathrooms and two terraces.

‘‘THE INEVITABLE TREND TOWARD TALLER APARTMENT BUILDINGS ON PARK AVENUE PLAYED TO CANDELA’S STRENGTHS.’’

ment houses on the West Side of Manhattan, but in the mid1920s, with two dozen completed buildings on his resume and the economy bubbling like fine champagne, he began planning the building that would become, half a century later, the most lust-inspiring real estate in the world.

The inevitable trend toward taller apartment buildings on Park Avenue played to Candela’s strengths. He discovered he was an expert at fitting different sized-and-shaped apartments together like puzzle pieces inside his buildings.

His early architectural efforts were mostly flat-topped and sedate. Then a landmark zoning law passed in 1916 allowed buildings to rise higher if they incorporated setbacks – a requirement that above a certain height, buildings be set back a certain distance from where their walls stood at street level so that light and fresh air would reach streets and neighboring buildings that would otherwise be submerged in darkness. By varying the lines of these setback buildings, urban planners created the jagged, vertical modern skyline and gave the Jazz Age and Manhattan their visual signatures.

The first great co-op sales record was set at Candela’s 950 Fifth Avenue, built by Anthony Campagna, which opened in 1928. A jigsaw puzzle of one-and-two-story apartments, it contained one especially sparkling gem - the apartment of a widower, Dr. Preston Pope Satterwhite, with a dining room and library each thirty feet long flanking double-height fiftyeight-foot-long living room that contained a crisscrossing double staircase up to Satterwhite’s bedroom, which had a balcony overlooking the grand parlor.

Nine Sixty Fifth was the first of a Babe Ruthian string of home runs for Candela. In 1929, 720 Park Avenue was com-

Galella Ron

Captures His Mona Lisa

BY MICHAEL GROSS

Agesliaus II, the King of Sparta in the 5th Century B.C., was surely never confronted by a paparazzo, but he was the first person in recorded history to cite the most important elements of success in that field. “It is circumstance and proper timing,” he wrote, “that give an action its character and make it either good or bad.”

Ron Galella, like all paparazzi, has benefited from good luck and timing. But what makes him singular, not just part of the flash-lit crowd outside red-carpeted events and subterranean nightspots, is what also makes him more than a mere pap. Alongside luck and timing, Galella has maximum skill and resolve. And it’s those traits that raise his character and make it good, distinguishing him from the churning shoal of pirhana. The result is photo-journalism with staying power. The pictures make that plain.

The fine gradations that separate photographers are not often as clear as the focus on the subjects of their photos. The same is true of print journalists. I

started my career writing puff-pieces about rockstars, slow wet kisses, as they were sometimes called, about idols, for fans. In mid-career, I turned to what are known as write-arounds, deeply reported stories about the most public figures who felt they could and should control their images, how others saw them. I always felt my writearounds were more revealing and interesting than my previous idolatry. In celebrity photography, where Galella excels, there is a similar dichotomy.

Some photographers make authorized portraits, often plotted out in advance with subjects and their handlers, or else submit their photos for approval, with the subject given the right to say This one not That one. Others, notably the party photographers whose work is so ubiquitous in today’s culture of controlled voyeurism, only shoot with permission, and strive to make their subjects look as good as possible, in order to ensure they are invited back to shoot the next party, preferably exclusively.

Not Galella. As you can see in some of his most iconic photos, as when the restaurateur Elaine Kauffman, proprietress of the defunct but legendary sleb saloon Elaine’s, was caught in the flash of a strobe, trying to whack his camera (or him) with a garbage can lid. Or when the youngish Mick Jagger flipped Ron the bird, as Jerry Hall, unperturbed, posed, a picture-perfect supermodel, beside him.

Galella has stones; he didn’t flinch, he got the shot. And he also has a sense of humor, as made manifest in the photo of him in a football helmet, stalking a Jor-elera Marlon Brando. That quality is present, too, in his posed shot of Ringo Starr and Peter Sellers, cocooned in sleeping bags on the set of the 1969 film The Magic Christian. It’s one of the surprises in his ouevre. And it’s a great picture, like so many others Galella has taken of cooperative members of the famous-or-infamous set, but to me, it’s not as revealing as those grabbed, snatched, hunted, yes, even stalked. It’s the difference between shooting a bird in a well-stocked game park where killing is a fixed game, and bagging prey in the wild. I don’t like hunting, but hope you get my point. And yes, paparazzi have arguably been lethal. But not Galella. Consider his photograph of Diana, The Princess of Wales. It humanizes her (Royals! They’re just like us!); it doesn’t exploit.

Ron call “Windswept Jackie” his Mona Lisa,. I suspect Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis secretly liked it, despite their public battles. “Let Mr. Galella take as many pictures as he wants,” a Secret Service agent once ordered, after their court battles, and, tellingly after conferring with her. The world’s a visually richer place because he did.