Epic Real Estate Moves: Former Kennedy Palm Beach Compound Reportedly Sold By Billionaire Jane Goldman For A Cool $70 Million

The storied seaside Palm Beach estate that big daddy Joseph P. Kennedy bought in 1933 has had three owners since the Kennedy clan sold it in 1995, the next-to-last being New York real estate billionaire Jane Goldman, who has, according to public records, just sold it after owning it for a mere five years in a remarkable and apparently off-market deal, reported to have been for $70 million. The new owner, reported to be a trust whose beneficiaries are at the moment unnamed, will have gotten a right hefty chunk of American history along with the 15,347 square feet of living space that the 11-bedroom, 12-bath former Winter White House and its outbuildings provide.

Situated firmly at the epicenter of South Florida’s gold coast at 1095 North Ocean Drive in Palm Beach, the house has 200 feet of beachfront beyond its sea wall, a tennis court and a swimming pool, of course, and a roster of 20th-century guests that frankly boggle the mind. Above, the early-1960s defense chiefs at planning session with then-Vice-President Lyndon Johnson and, far right, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. At this fraught January 1962 moment, McNamara and the Joint Chiefs would certainly have included in the discussion the, in their view, necessity for increasing the involvement of the U.S. military in Southeast Asia.

But beyond the many government luminaries it hosted, the old Ocean Drive place was where JFK and his siblings had been vacationing since their father bought it in 1933. It was where JFK recovered, as a senator, from back surgery, where, as president-elect, he took respite after his election, where he composed his famous inaugural speech, where he wrote much of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles In Courage, and it was the house to which he and Jacqueline Kennedy often took the family for holidays, as at Easter in 1963, pictured below. In November 1963, it was from Palm Beach that President and Mrs. Kennedy flew to Dallas, Texas, where the president was assassinated as he was driven in the Texans’ welcoming motorcade. Put another way, 1095 North Ocean Drive was a major feature of JFK’s life from the time he was a young teenager until the days before his death.

Mrs. Goldman, a principal of New York’s Solil Management, has had what is being termed as “stewardship” of 1095 North Ocean Drive since 2015, when it was being marketed by the owner who had bought it from the Kennedy estate, John Castle, for $31 million. For his part, Mr. Castle made a tidy profit on that 2015 sale, having bought it in aristocratically run-down shape from the Kennedy family in 1995 for $4.9 million, an improvement of some 600% on his purchase price. Mrs. Goldman, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes to be $3.1 billion, restored and renovated it rather gloriously in 2017. In other words, in the mid-90s, the Kennedy clan sold what it clearly felt was an old and rather run-down house. They had used it for three generations. But the value of the acre of land on which it sits, as well as its old-school 1920s capaciousness has in the last 25 years driven the street value of the old place into the current stratosphere.

Designed by society architect Addison Minzer and built in the 1920s for department-store heir Rodman Wanamaker, JFK’s father Joseph Patrick Kennedy bought it in 1933, in the teeth of the Depression, for a reported $110,000. The house’s name was La Guerida, which apparently translates loosely, and ominously, as “The Spoils of War.” Unknown is whether Wanamaker or Kennedy gave it the sobriquet, but either way it seems an obvious reference to the aggressive management of business. In a larger sense, though, the house saw a lot of Kennedy family life since the early 1930s. The press certainly followed the stellar clan to Palm Beach, especially after JFK made 1095 North Ocean Drive the Winter White House, but in an old-school way it was where this most illuminated and closely-tracked family could be, for a moment anyway, offstage.