Mae Caldwell Manwaring Plant, known as Maisie Plant, is remembered chiefly for a single transaction: the exchange of her husband Morton F. Plant's Italian Renaissance mansion at 653 Fifth Avenue for a double-strand natural pearl necklace that Cartier had displayed in the shop window. The building has been Cartier's New York flagship ever since. The story, which turns on the intersection of the natural pearl market at its peak and a specific piece of Manhattan real estate, is one of the most discussed episodes in the firm's American history.
The Pearl Necklace
The necklace comprised two strands of natural pearls: 73 in one strand and 55 in the other, 128 pearls in total. At the time, natural pearls of this quality represented one of the most expensive categories in the jewellery market. The necklace was valued at approximately $1 million, a figure that gives some measure of what the natural pearl trade still commanded before the widespread adoption of cultured pearls in the decades that followed.
Maisie Plant had seen the necklace in the Cartier window during the period when the firm occupied temporary premises on Fifth Avenue, having not yet acquired a permanent New York address. The full context of Pierre Cartier's negotiations to establish a significant New York presence is discussed in The Cartiers and the Pearl Market and in The Cartiers, chapters covering the American expansion.
The role of natural pearls in Cartier's early twentieth-century business was substantial; they were among the highest-value items the firm traded in, and Pierre Cartier in particular built important client relationships around them.
The Trade for 653 Fifth Avenue
Morton F. Plant was the son of Henry B. Plant, the railroad and steamship magnate who had developed Florida's west coast. Morton had inherited significant wealth and, with Maisie, maintained a lifestyle associated with Newport and New York society. The mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street was a substantial Italian Renaissance building, designed by Robert W. Gibson, that the Plants had used as their New York residence.
The mechanics of the exchange, as described in The Cartiers, involved Pierre Cartier approaching Morton Plant with the proposition that the mansion could serve as the consideration for the necklace. The price difference was bridged by $100 in cash, paid by Plant to Cartier. The transaction was completed in 1917. What Pierre Cartier acquired was not merely a building but a Fifth Avenue address at one of the most prominent intersections in the city, which gave Cartier New York the kind of visibility it had lacked in its earlier premises.
The building itself underwent adaptation for retail use. Cartier Inc has occupied it continuously since the acquisition. A portrait of Maisie Plant wearing the necklace hangs today in the room within the building known as the Maisie Plant Salon.
After Maisie's Death: The 1957 Auction
Maisie Plant outlived her first husband by many years. Morton F. Plant died in 1918, the year after the transaction. She remarried, becoming Mrs John E. Rovensky, and died in 1956. Her estate directed that the pearl necklace be sold. Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York auctioned it in January 1957.
The result illustrated how dramatically the market for natural pearls had shifted in the intervening forty years. The two strands sold separately, realising a combined total estimated at between $151,000 and $181,000 (sources differ slightly on the precise figures). Against the $1 million valuation of 1917, the decline was stark. The collapse of natural pearl values in the mid-twentieth century, driven by the success of cultured pearl production, is examined in Pearls for Your Debutante Daughter and The Cartiers and the Pearl Market.
The building that Morton Plant had traded for the necklace, by contrast, had appreciated considerably. The asymmetry between the two trajectories, the property rising in value while the pearls fell, is one of the reasons the story continues to be cited in accounts of both the New York real estate market and the natural pearl trade.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019)
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, "How Cartier's New York store was paid for with pearls", Business Insider
