Jackie Kennedy's grandfather who made luxury apartments in Manhattan

On September 12, 1953, in Newport (Rhode Island), what was at the time labeled as the wedding of the century in the United States took place. The bride and groom were Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, 24 years old, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 36. She worked in the print media world and he was a senator with a great future in politics. Everyone knows that President J.F. Kennedy came from a wealthy family, but the origins of who from that moment on would be Jackie Kennedy are not as well known. Among her ancestors, her maternal grandfather James Thomas Lee, a lawyer, banker, and builder with Irish ancestors, should be highlighted.

Lee's life was always centered in New York City, where he was born and where he studied law (Columbia University). His first job as a lawyer in a firm did not satisfy him much, so he decided to set up his own practice. But his great success was not related to the law, but to his curiosity about the projects that were brewing in the big city, especially regarding a proposed subway line under Seventh Avenue. He acquired some properties in the area and when the line opened, their value was already three times greater. This operation allowed him to build a fortune of 2 million dollars before turning thirty... but in the year of his thirtieth birthday, 1907, a stock market panic caused a large part of his fortune to evaporate (the episode went down in history as the Knickerbocker Crisis, with a market drop of 50% from previous highs). Having overcome this hurdle, he continued to dedicate himself to real estate development with his company, Shelton Holding Corporation, and in 1912, a luxury apartment building opened its doors at 998 Fifth Avenue, very close to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the following years, until 1920, he dedicated himself to building office buildings next to the emblematic Grand Central Terminal station. But not all were successes in the world of real estate business, because in 1923 he built a completely bizarre project consisting of a hotel on the prestigious Lexington Avenue, the Shelton Bachelors, which was intended only for male clientele who wished to enter to live a kind of monastic regime. From a business point of view, it turned out to be an absolute disaster and Lee had to reconvert the establishment into a conventional hotel, which did work.With a very important fortune and considered one of the most respected businessmen in the city, in 1928 he became part of the board of directors of Chase National Bank, where he remained for three decades, until he was appointed president of Central Savings Bank (today known as Apple Bank, but with no relation to the technology company). To this last financial entity, he left a phrase that became integrated into the corporate culture of the place: "I prefer a bad decision made today, to a good decision that arrives three weeks late." So much business activity did not manage to exhaust his energy and, in fact, for many years he had the custom of taking a break in his daily routine to dedicate some time to practicing boxing with a personal trainer. He also showed some political involvement, as he supported the democratic party.In 1930, Lee's company completed the construction of what was considered the most luxurious housing development in New York City. It was the building at 740 Park Avenue, with eighteen floors and thirty apartments that ranged from nine to twenty-three rooms each. The twists of fate caused the building to go on sale just after the 1929 Crash and as the long crisis of the thirties was beginning, which made it very difficult to find buyers. The solution was to rent out the apartments, until in 1952 one of the residents, John D. Rockefeller Jr., decided to acquire the entire building and sell it off in parts. By the way, today one of the residents of the development is Stephen Schwarzman, founder of the investment fund Blackstone.Our protagonist was still alive when his granddaughter's husband was murdered in Dallas by, apparently, Lee Harvey Oswald. The assassination immediately entered the corpus of Yankee popular culture as one of Americans' favorite conspiracies. And for a few months, Lee did not see America's widow remarry, this time to the Greek multimillionaire Aristotle Onassis.