277 Park Avenue

In 1925 the railroad leased a 200 x 400 block extending to Lexington Avenue to investors who hired McKim, Mead & White for what was then one of the biggest apartment houses in New York. Most of the 300 or more apartments, at $200 to $400 per month, ran from two to seven rooms, arranged in a rectangular doughnut shape around a centrally planted driveway area. With such a large structure, there were inevitable imperfections in tenant screening. In 1933 a police raid found a dozen men and women around a roulette table and $2,500 in chips; they were, however, in evening clothes. The 2001 book “Letters From the Editor,” an anthology of correspondence from Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker, includes one from 1934 objecting to an eviction notice for “having persons of the opposite sex” in his apartment overnight. Mr. Ross was between marriages, and noted that he had rented a three-bedroom apartment for just such a purpose, not “to sleep in each one successively for two or three hours each night.” John F Kennedy's father also leased an apartment to serve as campaign headquarters in New York.The building was demolished to make way for an office building now housing J. P. Morgan Chase's Investment Banking division.