(rshsdepot) Campbell Apartment - GCT

[jdent1_@_optonline.net]

From the NY Times...

March 5, 2007
Threadbare to Quite Posh, in Just 12 Hours 
By ANTHONY RAMIREZ

In 1923, John W. Campbell, a millionaire American financier, built a big corner office resembling a 13th-century Florentine palazzo, a whim not unusual in the age of Gatsby, save for the whim’s location.

Mr. Campbell chose Grand Central Terminal. There, in a hide-in-plain-sight corner only steps away from commuters pouring onto Vanderbilt Avenue, he built his ground-floor office in a space the size of a chapel.

It had a butler, a pipe organ, a library and one of the world’s largest Persian rugs. After Mr. Campbell’s death in 1957, the space fell into peculiar times, including a stint as a jail.

Not until 1999 was it restored and renovated into a lush saloon of dark wood, dim lamps and Jazz Age cocktails now known as the Campbell Apartment. 

Last year, Mark Grossich, who restored the leased space and owns the bar, decided the place was getting threadbare and needed Nina Campbell, an interior designer in London, to spruce it up. In less than 12 hours, they would do everything, to avoid closing for even a night. 

Yesterday, a platoon of workers labored morning to afternoon to refashion the Campbell Apartment into something still agreeably old but almost entirely new.

Ms. Campbell, who is not related to the American financier, is known for designing the interiors of Annabel’s club in London and the Hotel le Parc in Paris.

When she first saw the Campbell Apartment about a year ago, she recalled, she was stunned. “I came in the doorway and I said, ‘Oh, my God, what is this, Pandora’s box?’

“Then I began thinking of Anna Karenina and train stations and steam and illicit meetings.” She added, “Luckily for me, the upholstery needed attention.”

Ms. Campbell’s strategy was to replace a largely blue palette with a largely red one — to lay new carpet, banquettes, bar stools and chairs, and brighten it all with red, much like turning up the color on a television set. 

The 1999 restoration of the Campbell Apartment cost more than $1.5 million and the current makeover more than $350,000, Mr. Grossich said.

The breakneck renovation, months in the planning, began at dawn yesterday. Under the 25-foot ceiling, union workers being paid double overtime hauled away old tables, chairs and sofas, and then peeled away the carpet.

Shuffling along on knee pads, they scraped away sheets of carpet adhesive, stuck like fried egg on a pan, as well as the remains of countless spilled martinis.

The new designer furniture left Hickory, N.C., on Friday morning and with luck and clear skies would be rumbling into Manhattan in time for the beefy workers to arrange it just so.

As it happens, the new red furniture arrived a bit late, but serendipitously so, at 3:45 p.m. The furniture workers arrived just as the carpet workers were leaving.

A last-minute glitch: Some of the furniture was too big for Grand Central’s single doors. But employees at the restaurant next door, Cipriani Dolci, let the big furniture caravan its way through their double doors.

By 5:53 p.m., barely 12 hours start to finish, the makeover was complete, the maître d’s lectern in place, and a beaming couple from out of town were the first customers of the evening.

“I like the idea that it’s rather grand,” said Edwin Foster, 53, a music director from Boonton, N.J., who was visiting the Campbell Apartment for the first time. 

“And a piece of old New York,” added his friend Judith Stuss, 57.

There is no evidence that John Williams Campbell wrote letters or kept diaries. To Allyn Freeman, who is writing a book about the Campbell Apartment, personal facts about him are almost as scarce as those about Shakespeare.

But what facts there are are choice. Mr. Campbell, who resembled Warren G. Harding, favored Savile Row tailoring but disliked wearing socks, even with shoes, said Mr. Grossich and Mr. Freeman, who have spoken about him with Elsie Fater, his niece. He liked unwrinkled trousers, so he hung his in a humidor, while he worked untrousered at a desk.

Mr. Campbell was born in 1880, the son of John Campbell, the treasurer of Credit Clearing House, a credit-reference firm specializing in the garment industry. The younger Campbell had a sister and an older brother. The family lived on Cumberland Avenue, in the affluent Brooklyn neighborhood known as The Hill, now called Fort Greene.

There is no record of the younger Mr. Campbell attending college. He started work at 18 at his father’s firm, where he became a senior executive at 25 and later president. 

In 1920, he was appointed to the board of New York Central Railroad, where he would have crossed paths with William K. Vanderbilt Jr., the railroad scion whose office was in Grand Central Terminal.

By this time, Mr. Campbell was prosperous enough to have workmen come from Tiffany & Company to polish his silver. His wife, the former Rosalind D. Casanave, nicknamed Princess, was once listed in The New York Times as a “patroness” of a “Monte Carlo party and dance” at the Ardsley Country Club at Ardsley-on-Hudson.

Sometime in 1923, he commissioned Augustus N. Allen to build an office in leased space in Grand Central Terminal. Mr. Allen was an architect known for designing Long Island estates and grand offices.

Mr. Campbell filled his new office with Italian furniture, a pipe organ, a piano and a steel safe inside a large stone fireplace. There was a bathroom and a small kitchen. Mr. Campbell had a butler there named Stackhouse.

Perhaps the most striking piece was a Persian rug that covered nearly the entire floor, which is the length of a subway car. It was said to have cost $300,000, or roughly $3.5 million in today’s money.

After Mr. Campbell’s death, it was unclear what happened to the rug and other furnishings, Mr. Freeman said. The space became a signalman’s office and later a closet, where the transit police stored guns and other equipment. It also became a small jail, in the area of the present-day bar.

As for the name Campbell Apartment, that is a misnomer, according to Mr. Freeman. People assumed that such a baronial space was an apartment.

While there was a couch in the office, there was no bed. Mr. Campbell and his wife lived a few blocks away at 270 Park Avenue, not far from the Waldorf-Astoria. There was no need to sleep in the office overnight, Mr. Freeman said.

And for the record, there is no record, or rumor, of dalliance on Mr. Campbell’s part in what must have been one of the city’s great stages for assignation. Not one chorine, hat-check girl or taxi dancer?

“ ’Fraid not,” Mr. Freeman said.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 

Jim Dent
Oakland, NJ
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