5b: Paul Cejas
In 1999, Mr. Cejas, once a Clinton-appointed ambassador to Belgium, hosted Hillary Rodham Clinton in his co-op during her first Senate campaign. His neighbors reportedly complained about Secret Service agents patting down guests, refusing to allow unattended packages in the lobby, and keeping residents from the elevators whilst Ms. Clinton traveled up and down.
Five years later, six 834 Fifth residents scraped together only $6,500 for the Democrats’ Presidential campaigns. On the other hand, nine folks gave $41,000 to the Republicans. Watch out, Senator Clinton!
5c: Clayton Frye, Jr.
Public records list Mr. Frye as a senior associate at the estate of Laurance Rockefeller, so his presence in the building makes sense: His late boss bought the whole building in 1946, transformed it into a co-op and chose the triplex penthouse for himself.
6b: Stephen and Nan Swid
Mr. Swid lost out to his neighbor Al Taubman in his bid for Sotheby’s. Now he’s the chairman and C.E.O. of the performing-rights organization SESAC (Society of European Stage Authors & Composers).
His apartment once belonged to the well-named Lydia Mendelssohn Buhl Morrison.
7b: Ruth Stanton
When callers ask to speak with Ms. Stanton, the accented gentleman who answers her phone says, “Very well.” She paid a little less than $400,000 for her apartment in the mid-70’s.
“All this new money,” she said. “There are apartments now that are selling in the building; people have put huge prices on them. There’s so much money around. People are so self-absorbed. They can afford it, and I don’t know—I’m not going to sell this apartment. I’ll stay here forever.”
After she met the stately Fifth Avenue real-estate broker A. Laurance Kaiser IV, who has sold over 10 apartments in the building, “he said: ‘You’re 10 windows.’ I never heard myself described that way—because I have 10 windows on Fifth Avenue.”
7 and 8a: John and Susan Gutfreund
The Gutfreunds’ Henri Samuel–designed apartment stretches 12,000 square feet. “I have a winter garden,” Ms. Gutfreund said about her favorite room. “It just gives enormous pleasure because of the amount of light and fantasy.”
As for her husband: “He has a room where he can smoke his cigar.”
Before the cigar-smoking ex-C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers (and his bombshell wife) came along in the mid-80’s, there was Revlon co-founder Charles Lachman.
“When people arrive at 834,” she said, “they are so surprised by the beauty of the view. They’re not realizing it’s because of such low windows! It’s a secret that people don’t pass around often.”
Might she one day redesign the duplex? “I really have no interest,” she said, “in reinventing the wheel.”
8b: Joe and Hilppa Roby
Even though Mr. Roby helped design the union of Credit Suisse First Boston with his firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, which BusinessWeek has called “one of the more unsuccessful mergers in Wall Street history,” he has a record-setting apartment in the building. In 1997, the couple paid $12 million for the apartment.
The 15-room apartment was, according to The Times, the first Manhattan sale to break $1 million when the place was sold in 1978 to the Bolivian miner Antenor Patino by Jean Flagler Matthews—whose grandfather was Standard Oil partner Henry Flagler, thus a friend of the Rockefeller family.
9 and 10a: Loida Lewis
The 15-room apartment is on the market with Mr. Kaiser for $39.5 million. Ms. Lewis is the widow of the late Reginald, billionaire C.E.O. of Beatrice Foods: According to reporter Steven Gaines, the African-American mogul and his Filipino-born wife were two of “the few people of color to own an apartment in a ‘Good Building’ on Fifth Avenue.”
Disgraced winged-door sports-car man John De Lorean sold the place to the Lewis couple in 1992; the equally scandalous blonde Gregg Dodge Moran (who married a different car man) had lived there earlier. It boasts a 640-square-foot living room and master bedroom, both overlooking Central Park
