An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(34)
It began as a storm does: a gentle rumbling on the horizon in a still-sunlit landscape. On September 3, 1929—Allene’s marriage was just six months old, and she was busy with the purchase of Chateau de Suisnes—share prices on Wall Street reached the highest level in history. This rendered Allene, whose fortune was almost entirely in American shares, even wealthier than before.
A year earlier, in the summer of 1928, an unexplained fall in prices had caused brief panic at the stock exchange, but the prices had soon risen again, setting new records. And America had peacefully continued settling into the “new era of prosperity” President Calvin Coolidge had promised his fellow Americans in 1927.
But halfway through October 1929, the stock market in New York again began to waver, just like the previous time, ostensibly out of the blue. Tense days followed, even though everyone expected the situation to rapidly stabilize, if at a slightly lower level than previously. But on October 24, the day that would later be known as “Black Thursday,” the market went into a rapid and relentless nosedive, taking everything and everyone down with it. Desperate investors tried to fob off large portfolios of shares on errand boys for a few cents, entire fortunes evaporated, and dozens of despairing bankers jumped to their deaths from their luxurious offices.
The cause of the stock market crash was actually the same as all the other financial crises in the history of Wall Street: greed and sleight of hand with money. Now, too, speculators, financiers, and banking institutions turned out to have kept prices artificially high for years on end. Shares were offered against a small down payment; the rest of the amount could be paid off later from the profit made on them. But now with share prices dropping, there was no question of profits; only the debts were left, and the entire flimflam system collapsed like a house of cards.
The American colony in Paris was in the grip of anxiety and astonishment. Most of the expatriates took the first boat home to save what could still be saved. If they could no longer obtain enough cash to pay for their travel, they tried to sell off their French possessions for next to nothing—with revealing advertisements in the real estate publications as a result:
For Sale, Cheap, Nice, Old Chateau, 1 hr. from Paris; original boiseries, 6 New Baths. Owner Forced Return New York Wednesday. MUST HAVE IMMEDIATE CASH. Will Sacrifice.
On November 12, a little less than three weeks after Black Thursday, Allene also boarded a ship for New York. At that moment, share prices on Wall Street, and with them their capital, had already lost a third of their value. Immediately upon arrival, she put the large city villa on Park Avenue and Birchwood, the country house in Locust Valley, on the market. In January 1930, when the market had calmed down somewhat and the worst seemed to be over, a Chicago businessman made an offer for Birchwood that was deemed good enough to be accepted. With this, Anson’s house—the place where Allene had spent the happiest years of her life—disappeared from her possession for good.
Anyone thinking or hoping that the worst was over would be disappointed. From April onward, share prices continued to plunge unabated. The United States’ total industrial production was reduced by half; a quarter of the population was already unemployed. A further eight hundred American banks collapsed. The construction cranes that had dominated New York’s skyline since time immemorial came to a standstill, and apple sellers appeared on the city’s street corners—former stockbrokers in expensive but already worn coats who tried to support themselves by selling fruit.
Improvised shantytowns of wood and cardboard sprang up among the rocky outcrops in Central Park, lived in by people who no longer even had a roof above their heads. And in the middle of this “echoing tomb,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald described the crisis-hit New York, stood the new Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world, empty—as though to mock the megalomania and greed that had brought the city to its knees.
At some point in that cheerless, hopeless winter of 1930–1931, Allene finally managed to get rid of her vastly expensive mansion on Park Avenue. In its place, she bought an apartment in a building a little farther up that had become almost as much a concrete symbol of the crisis as the Empire State Building. Like the Empire State Building, 740 Park, on the corner of Park Avenue and Seventy-First Street, also had the bad luck to have been designed at the zenith of prosperity and completed at its nadir. The building was supposed to have been the magnum opus of Rosario Candela, a Sicilian immigrant who had come to America as a teenager and evolved into the New York upper class’s architect of choice during the boom years.
In March 1929, construction had started on what was to be the most expensive and most exclusive apartment complex in New York. Most of the thirty-one apartments in the seventeen-story building were big enough to compete with detached houses in terms of space and proportions. They had their own halls, servants’ wings, built-in refrigerators, telephone and radio sockets, marble floors, bronze window frames, fireplaces, and cedar closets to keep away moths. The basement was outfitted with rooms for chauffeurs, its own post office, laundry, storage, and wine cellars.
But when the building was completed in October 1930, there was almost no one left who wanted or was able to pay for all that luxury. In the spring of 1931, Allene was one of the very last buyers, and even she could only afford a relatively small apartment on Seventy-First Street, the darkest and least attractive side of the building. The many remaining empty apartments were simply rented, for a fraction of what their normal value would have been.