"The Carlyle was the signature project of Moses Ginsberg, who was born in Poland in 1885 and came to the United States via London in 1896. Ginsberg started out in banking, but by the 1910's he also had shipping interests. One of his steamers was sunk by a German submarine in 1917. In the mid-1920's he was putting up small apartment buildings in . By 1929 he was in full swing, buying sites on the West and East Sides of Manhattan for large-scale apartment development. ... He had bought the east blockfront of Madison Avenue from 76th to 77th Streets, and in early 1929 he filed plans to build a hotel and an apartment tower. ... The earliest hotel tenants included , an investment banker and art collector who was later president of the . His collection of French 19th- and 20th-century paintings was one of the finest of the mid-20th century. Another tenant was Truman H. Talley, a director for who sometimes appeared in and narrated the newsreels."