Visiting the U.N. Guy
Yesterday marked UN World Health Day, and now that I’m out and about regularly, I thought I’d drop by the official residence of the Secretary General of the United Nations and show him my vaccination card. Just as every American knows that the official residence of the President of the United States is the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, any New Yorker can tell you the official home of the Secretary General of the UN is located at 3 Sutton Place, at East 57th Street in Manhattan. (Just kidding about every New Yorker knowing that; it is my experience virtually no one does.)
The four story, 14,000 square-foot neo-Georgian townhouse used to be the residence of Anne Morgan, the daughter of financier J. P. Morgan. It was donated to the U.N. in 1972. The current occupant is the 9th Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, who after he took office in 2017 debated selling the home to help the world body with its budget problems. He was informed that the townhouse could only be sold to the United States and only if the United Nations leaves New York.
An early UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, had a one bedroom apartment on the 38th floor of the 39-story United Nations Secretariat building on First Avenue. He furnished it with paintings he had borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art. What was less well known was that Hammarskjöld, who tended to keep his private life private, also had an apartment on East 73rd Street, paid for by the United Nations. Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia in 1961 under circumstances that still aren’t clear. He was probably the best leader the U.N. ever had and became the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace posthumously. The award is named after his fellow Swede, Alfred Nobel, who loved peace so much he became an arms merchant and invented dynamite. I liked Hammarskjöld because he often stood up to the most powerful nations in the world at the time, the United States and the Soviet Union.
His successor, U Thant of Burma, had a UN-funded apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The first SG to use the Sutton Place location was Austrian Kurt Waldheim, followed by Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru, then Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, who was succeeded by Kofi Annan of Ghana. Annan had previously lived in a New York State-subsidized apartment on Roosevelt Island in the East River. It can be seen from the Sutton Place residence, which is on the Manhattan side of the river.
My favorite U.N. Secretary General however, was Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, because I once saw him on Halloween standing in the doorway of 3 Sutton Place handing out candy to neighborhood trick-or-treaters. I can’t imagine too many world leaders who would do that.