The Ghost and a Necklace

Cartier’s flagship store in Manhattan sits at 651-653 Fifth Avenue, including 4 East 52^nd Street. Begun in 1903 and completed in 1905, the six storey Italian Renaissance building was designed by Robert W. Gibson and Charles P. H. Gilbert. Both were prominent architects in early 20^th century New York. Gibson designed the Albany Cathedral and the New York Botanical Gardens Museum while Gilbert designed mansions for names like Kahn, Woolworth and Warburg.

Source: Wikipedia (it is useful sometimes)  

The plot of land under which the building sits originally belonged to William K. Vanderbilt, whose family built several large mansions in the area in the late 19^th century. In Vanderbilt’s day the area was a residential neighbourhood, but as the city developed commerce began to intrude, presaging the move uptown by the great and the good.

Plant lasted till 1917, when he gave up and moved to a house on 86^th and Fifth. Three years earlier, Plant married Mae Cadwell Manwaring. He was 61 while legend has it she was 19, and also already married. Maisie, as she was known, one day spotted a double-strand necklace of pearls at the Cartier store, valued at $1 million.

Run by Pierre Cartier, grandson of founder Louis-Francois Cartier, the store was at 712 Fifth Avenue, near 56^th Street, though Cartier desired to move downtown. Plant, on the other hand, having already decided to go uptown, agreed to swap his 52^nd Street mansion for the necklace as well as $100. And with that, a Cartier myth was created.

And so in 1917, Cartier moved into Plant’s former home. Though the exterior was retained, most of the interior was remodelled, save for Plant’s second floor music room with an elaborately coffered ceiling, which is still there, largely the same as it was. In 1970 the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building a landmark, for its “special character, special historical and aesthetic interest and value”.

The store, with its entrance on 52nd Street, as seen from the opposite side of Fifth Avenue

Source: Wikipedia 

Though Cartier has occupied the building at 651-653 Fifth Avenue since then, it sold the property many years ago. By the year 2000, Cartier was a tenant of Olympic Tower Associates, a corporation controlled by a foundation founded by Aristotle Onassis; Olympic Tower is just adjacent to the Cartier store. But even though it no longer owns the building, the Fifth Avenue location is a Cartier landmark, along with its stores at Rue de la Paix or Old Bond Street.

Today the Cartier building is one of the few remaining mansion buildings in midtown Manhattan, along with its immediate neighbour on Fifth Avenue which was the former home of George W. Vanderbilt and the last Vanderbilt mansion still standing. Originally one of a pair of Vanderbilt townhouses known as the “Marble Twins”, the building is now a Versace store. Facing Cartier on 52^nd Street sits a Ferragamo store, in a thoroughly modern eight storey building, on a site that once sat William K. Vanderbilt’s mansion.

Plant passed away in 1918, after which Maisie remarried twice, or thrice, details are unclear. A year after her death in 1956, the famous string of pearls was auctioned for a mere $151,000. Cultured pearls had by then ruined the market for natural pearls.

No one knows where the pearl necklace is today. But a long way away, in Clearwater, Florida, sits the Belleview Biltmore hotel. Built by Plant’s father in 1895, the hotel is well known for supernatural goings-on, including the customary happenings of lights that switch off and doors that slam shut, all on their own. But there is also said to be a ghostly lady that roams the halls. She is said to be Maisie Plant, looking for her treasured necklace.