The building was constructed in 1929 by James T. Lee, the grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – Onassis lived there as a child – and was designed by Rosario Candela and Arthur Loomis Harmon; Harmon became a partner of the newly named Shreve, Lamb and Harmon during the year of construction. The building was officially opened in October 1930, a year after the Great Depression began, and the poor timing was devastating. Even though the New York elite had moved in, the building had failed financially by 1933. It remained in the red for 50 years. It was not until the 1980s that the building's apartments sold for incredibly high prices. In 1937, one of the first well-known residents was John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who moved into 15B, a three-storey triplex that many still consider New York'scrown jewel apartment. According to New York City real estate lore, "whoever inherits the biggest penthouse at 740 inherits the throne of New York society itself." In 1971, Saul Steinberg bought that triplex for $285,000 and after two divorces sold it to Stephen Schwarzman for "slightly above or below $30 million" in 2000. This was the highest price ever paid on Park Avenue until May 2012, when Howard Marks paid $52.5 million for two adjoining two-storey duplexes, which set a short-lived record as the highest price ever paid for a co-op apartment. In 1979, the French government purchased an 18-room duplex for $600,000 to be used as their United Nations ambassador's residence. The French government's duplex unit was sold in June 2014 for $70 million, reportedly $22 million over the asking price – a bidding war involving three prospective buyers escalated the eventual selling price. The buyer was hedge fund billionaire Israel Englander, who already lived in the unit directly above, and surpassed a record set just days earlier by Egypt's richest man, Nassef Sawiris, for a penthouse unit on nearby Fifth Avenue. In 2005, author Michael Gross published a detailed book on the building and its history, '. According to Gross, builder Lee's daughter, Janet Lee Bouvier, and son-in-law Jack Bouvier, attained the final open lease; according to one account, they did not pay for the lease. Hedge fund manager David Ganek paid $19 million for the childhood duplex home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 2005. The residents of 740 Park were heavily affected by the financial crisis of 2007–2008, as many of the residents are hedge fund billionaires as opposed to the titans of industry like Rockefeller who moved in during the 1930s. The building was once home to one of the world's largest private collections of Mark Rothko works. The former owner—alleged Bernie Madoff middleman and ex-financier J. Ezra Merkin—still lives there, but the paintings were sold during the Madoff scandal. Hedge fund billionaire Charles Stevenson paid $9 million for an apartment in the building and was the head of the 740 Park Avenue cooperative in December 2011. In 2012, the Alex Gibney documentary ' aired on the "Independent Lens" series of the PBS TV network. The film details that the building was home to the highest concentration of billionaires in the United States.
David H. Koch - businessman, co-owner of Koch Industries, occupied an 18-room duplex on the fourth and fifth floors said to have been purchased in 2005 for $17 million
