2 July 1927 issue, page 19 & 20, written by Poster Ware
Charles Vincent Paterno, M.D., Cornell Medical College, Class of 1899, came by his doctor’s degree as a result of a feeling in the family that he never would make a builder, like his father. Of the numerous Paterno offspring, Charles seemed least likely to thrive in the robustious “building game.”Anthony and Joseph, his brothers, plainly had the stuff that builders are made of, and the Paterno tradition could be carried on by them. The family had come to New York from Potenza, Italy, when Charles was a child of seven. He was smaller, and not so strong as the other boys, and he limped just a little – all of which seemed to mark him for a career in the great, sedentary indoors. Hence, it was decided that Charles should go to college and get an education , something that no Paterno had ever before felt called upon to do.
Into this scheme Paterno entered obediently and even eagerly. He rather liked the idea of becoming a doctor. He took his degree on schedule time, and was all set to begin practice when – the break came.
Paterno’s father died, leaving a grieving family and a new apartment house in upper Manhattan only about half finished. It was up to somebody to finish that house. The other brothers were busy. It was decided that Charles should put aside his medical practice for the time being and help Joseph finish the house. This he did. When they had the house up, Joseph and Charles traded it for a nice vacant lot uptown. The lot was of no use to them unless they “improved” it. Another building job for the doctor. He would build this one more house and then pull out and open a medical office. But when the second building was finished and sold, the Doctor found that in two years he had accumulated $40,000, which quite impressed him when he thought of what he might have collected from patients in two years of doctoring. About this time he gave up the idea of ever being a doctor at all.
It was a period of tremendous activity in Manhattan real estate, and the Doctor, when not building, found time to invest in a lot or two. He proved a shrewd operator, apparently knowing instinctively where the market was good. Dealing in building lots was a business with a quick turnover – and this he liked. Altogether, he scored many more hits than misses, and the riches grew.
Although he has never had a patient, Paterno hangs on to the title of Doctor. He seems to like the sound of it. Go into his office, twenty-three floors above Forty-second Street and Park Avenue, and you will alway find a flock of people waiting to see “the Doctor.” All the Paternos have met with success in their building ventures, but the Doctor alone seems to have displayed genius above the average. He is what the success school of writers would call a dynamo for work. He fairly lives on the scene of a “big job” while it is under way. In fact, in the case of Hudson View Gardens – the enterprise which he considers his greatest achievement to date – he did camp out on the premises, night and day, for nearly a year.
He “sees” everybody at his office by appointment and all appointments are made for three o’clock in the afternoon. Mornings he is always away somewhere, superintending work on one of his new buildings or prospecting for other sites to conquer. By early afternoon, when he breezes into his office, the waiting room is pretty certain to be filled. This is as he would have it. Since everybody there has been told to come at the same hour each must wait his turn to see him.
The Doctor is a short, erect, vital little man with a neat goatee and a shock of black hair streaked with gray. As he strides from the inner office to greet you, hand extended, blue eyes snapping, there is more than a suggestion of the medical man about him. Indeed, you are half conscious of a feeling that this man will presently be peering down your throat, inquiring into your blood pressure and wanting to know how many cigarettes a day you smoke. But the consulting room overflows with blueprints and architect’s drawings; and the talk is of brick and stone and steel, of building lots and big “developments,” of Castle Paterno, the Doctor’s feudal home of upper Riverside Drive, and of that greatest of all Paterno projects, the Paterno Tower, which some day may – nay, will, since the Doctor has ordered it – top the Palisades, for a mere matter of a thousand feet.
The Doctor talks earnestly about that tower. In fact, he talks earnestly about everything that has to do with Charles Vincent Paterno. Dinner parties there have been at the Castle at which, after the ladies have withdrawn and the gentlemen are mulling over their Paterno Havanas, the Doctor has stood up and for perhaps an hour entertained his guests with a glowing account of his “plans.” Superlatives fairly stagger as the Doctor talks, yet no item is too small to escape his notice. He can recall every detail of one of his earliest triumphs – the Magic X-Ray Box, a device which, as a boy, he invented, constructed and himself sold to the passing throngs at Ann and Nassau Streets. Would you like to know how the trick worked? Ask the Doctor. He will tell you. It was all very ingenious, and the Doctor – who was a mere kid then – made quite a lot of money with it.
It would seem that Paterno has what is called “vision.” Also there is a touch of magic in his business undertakings. Where a more cautious builder might think twice, Paterno says “Presto” – and a new building rears its roof. He put up that modern multiple mansion, No. 270 Park Avenue, at a time when many sage realtors were convinced he out to have his mind examined. Paterno chose for this venture an entire city block Forty-seventh to Forty-eighth Street, between Madison and Park Avenues. He had Warren & Wetmore design the building, and he installed duplex apartments in it renting as high as $25,000 a year. No. 270 Park Avenue “went over” and blazed the way for many another Park Avenue “millionaires’ home.” The building today is said to have a market value of $15,000,000.
Castle Paterno is clearly the product of his penchant for living and doing things in the grand manner. Here, in this feudal pile on Fort Washington Heights, Paterno enjoys having people about him who listen in rapt attention to the story of what he has done, what he is doing and what he will yet do. There is much to amaze the visitor at the Castle. A fountain plays in a large central rotunda. Hidden away somewhere is a great organ, and that too is invariably playing – electrically. The there is the Japanese room, the dining-room, the living-room and finally the Louis XV library containing life-size portraits in oil of the lord of the castle and his chatelaine. Nor shall we forget the mushroom cellar and the grand ballroom upstairs. Still another wonder is to be added – a two-hundred-foot swimming pool, to be enclosed in glass and equipped with an electric sun-ray apparatus which the Doctor say will put a Palm Beach tan on while you wait.
With equal pride, Paterno points to the building to the north of his home – Hudson View Gardens – a venture in which he risked nearly everything. These buildings, on land which he bought from the James Gordon Bennett estate, cost more than $5,000,000. They have apartments for three hundred and sixty families. Today they are all occupied on the ownership plan; but for one whole year Paterno had to carry them with over two hundred apartments vacant. Instead of spending $50,000 in advertising, as he had planned, he spent $400,000 – and he camped out there till the last flat was sold.
From the window of the castello Paterno can look across the Hudson and see the wilderness where as a boy he used to go camping. Of late he as been acquiring most of this territory – in fact, he now owns about six hundred acres of it – and as soon as the new Hudson River bridge is actually under way he plans to begin work on his greatest opus, Paterno Tower, which will rise above the Palisades.
When he came back from a trip to Europe last year, Paterno’s mind was set on one thing – to out-Eiffel the Eiffel Tower; Paterno Tower will be the fruit of this ambition.
Paterno Tower (to be) will rise to a height of a thousand feet, starting on the top of the Palisades, which give it a six-hundred-foot rise to begin with. Thus the topmost turrets of Paterno Tower (to come) will loom head and shoulders above all other skyscrapers and properly glorify the name of its maker. There are to be apartments for contented tenants all the way up; each apartment is to have an electric sun-ray bath. Several engineers are trying to help the Doctor bring this monument nearer to a reality. He himself has already figured out that it will take at least sixty million separate and distinct bricks.
Though essentially a man of business and a thinker in large terms, Paterno finds time for the gentler arts of dancing and golf. The latter he plays with much vigor and perhaps a little less skill than he himself might desire. Dancing, on the other hand, has been cultivated to a point where it may be said to rank as a major sport.
Probably Paterno is the only man in these parts who makes a hobby of raising Christmas trees. At his farm in Bedford Hills he has planted some 100,000 seedlings which he bought at a cent apiece. In three years they will be being enough to go to market and fetch and dollar each at Christmas time – at least, so the Doctor figures.
Mrs. Paterno was a widow when he met her. It was almost romantic. She had been visiting friends in New York when the loss of a garment that had been hung on the line caused such distress that a complaint was made to the managements of the apartment house where she was stopping. Who should answer the complaint but Dr. Paterno himself? For it was he who owned the building. And so they met and became friends, and before very long Castle Paterno had a chatelaine. The Paternos have one son, Carlo, who is just finishing his freshman year at Yale.
Even if Paterno Tower never materializes, there should be glory enough in the Paterno bookplate that the Doctor is going to put in each of the fifteen thousand volumes which he intends of give to Columbia’s new Italian House. It is done in simple black and gold and contains the names of Italy’s great – in one corner, Leonardo da Vinci; in another, Michael Angelo; in a third, Galileo; in a fourth, Verdi. Below these, in larger letters, appears the name of Charles V. Paterno. Within the border are the figures of Dante and a lady, who this time isn’t Beatrice but – Miss Columbia. The happy pair walk in the chummiest manner toward a streaming light. Some say this light is meant to be the light of learning. Other suspect it really represents the beacon that some day will flash from the top of Paterno Tower.
