A Real-Estate Heir’s Beekman Place Duplex

Beekman Place is just two blocks long — squeezed between the United Nations and Sutton Place, perched over FDR Drive and the East River. River views are endless, and through traffic doesn’t come — a combination that has drawn celebrities, including Irving Berlin and Greta Garbo, and Gloria Vanderbilt and William Paley, whose townhouse sold last year for $27.5 million. The novel Auntie Mame imagines the aunt living at the most glamorous address imaginable in 1955: the fictional 3 Beekman Place. 

Today, the most prestigious, old-money building on the block is 1 Beekman Place, a 17-story, white-glove co-op with only 39 units. It was built in 1929 when the architects of Rockefeller Center, financed with Rockefeller money, replaced an empty lot with a brick tower, designed around river views. (The project was headed by a Rockefeller son-in-law, who took a triplex.) Amenities included a pool, tennis court, and a tearoom on a terrace; the typical unit was a duplex with views on four sides. There was no financing allowed; there still isn’t. Original tenants included a senator’s widow and a son of Teddy Roosevelt, followed by diplomats and heirs — like the A&P scion Huntington Hartford II, whose 1991 biography is titled Squandered Fortune. 

In 2007, the building drew another heir, Patricia Bauman. Her father was a real-estate investor who owned what was once the St. John’s Terminal, now Google’s New York headquarters. He left behind a foundation that gives $6 million in grants every year to address economic inequality and social-justice issues. Patricia, who had a law degree from Georgetown, led the foundation for 35 years, juggling that work with seats on the boards of the National Resources Defense Council and the Brennan Center for Justice. But she also had an early career studying art history and working at MoMA. And in her 40s, she married John Landrum Bryant, a jewelry and furniture designer who ran a gallery on East 57th Street with a niche selling cast-bronze faucets and sconces that resembled animal heads. His range encompasses anything fabulous and fun, including gem-encrusted earrings resembling computer chips, an Art Deco armchair upholstered in python, and a coffee table whose surface shows a diorama of gold-colored waves. Clients included socialites in Bauman’s set, like Sweet’N Low heiress Barbara Tober. (Bryant, who sometimes attends events in a royal sash, signs emails as Prince John, a title he has claimed derives from Monteagudo, a town in Spain.) Bryant eventually helped Bauman grow a collection that included old European masters and enough art from China to fill an actual book.

The pair bought a duplex at 1 Beekman Place for $7.1 million with plans to install a jade fireplace and turn the apartment into a “showcase” for a collection of bronze animals from prewar France and Japanese art from the Meiji era, as Bryant told the New York Observer. The double-height, 42-foot-wide-foot living room was grand enough to display tenth-century solid-gold regalia from the Liao dynasty. But the centerpiece was the first piece that Bryant made for their home and the last to be installed: an eight-foot-long ellipse-shaped glass sculpture, lit from behind, that showed what he described as “water creatures cavorting in the waves.” “I set myself a goal that anything in the apartment was either an antique or a piece created and designed by me,” Bryant wrote in an email. What he created stands out from staid traditional décor in other units upstairs — like a $6.25 million four-bedroom listed with plush settees and impressionist art, or a $3.999 million three-bed with a floral bedroom and a stuffy, wood-paneled library.

Bauman died this spring, leaving behind a home that, thanks to her husband’s taste, is more Auntie Mame than William Paley. Bryant’s broker, Linda Sebastian, says the apartment is set up for grand parties with an oversize chef’s kitchen and an immense, double-height living area that can fit up to 150 people — and has. “They were a very opulent couple,” she said.

Still, Bryant remembered how they typically spent evenings reading — anything else would disturb a pair of Caique parrots that Bryant said were put to bed by singing the lyrics to military taps (“Day is done. Gone is the sun. Sleep well”). Upstairs, the couple slept under the watch of a sculpture of a Baku — a mythical Japanese creature said to eat nightmares. Their bed, with ear-shaped side tables, was nicknamed “the elephant bed.” As Prince John remembered, “We had a life together of fantasy and fun.”

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