Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

  Rudolf Arling was thirty-four years old, fair-haired and big-boned, with a short trim blond beard and piercing gray eyes. He agreed to listen seriously to Martin’s ideas, which by this time were abundant and precise, and to apply them whenever possible, but he insisted on absolute freedom in the design of the floor plans, which he defined as the sum of solutions to precise technical problems. Martin hesitated, irked by the imperious tone but attracted by the air of supreme confidence, and hired him after their second meeting, during which Rudolf Arling introduced the idea of inner eclecticism.

  It was an age, Arling said, of outward eclecticism, as everyone knew—witness the confections of cast iron and marble covered with Renaissance scrolls and brackets that greeted the eye on every New York street. But far more than this it was an age of inner or enclosed eclecticism, by which he meant not the familiar combination of antiquated styles with modern technological devices like elevators and telephones, but rather the tendency of modern structures to embrace and enclose as many different elements as possible. Consider the modern apartment building with its hairdresser and tailor’s shop, the Pullman train with its dining tables and parlor chairs and beds, the transatlantic steamer, the department store with its tearoom and glove counter and string orchestra, the hotel lobby, the drugstore window, the knickknack shelf, the dime museum, the Iron Pier at Coney Island with its food stands and bath lockers and dance platform, and that marvel of the modern world, that model of ingenuity and know-how, the American sales catalogue, with its grab bag of detachable collars and steel plows, tin toys and buggies and sacks of nuts, all enclosed within the covers of a single book—a book far more wide-reaching than any epic. This striving after the enclosed eclectic was a note he had heard in Martin’s ideas for a large family hotel, and more than anything else it made him think that the two of them saw things in somewhat the same way. He had been struck by Martin’s idea for several basement levels, devoted to shops and a subterranean courtyard; it was the sort of thing he liked to work out.

  After all, Martin thought, I can always fire him if he doesn’t stick to my plan.

  The success of the New Vanderlyn was gratifying no matter how Martin looked at it: revenues were up, vacancies were practically unheard of, guests paid their compliments to the manager and then repeated their praises to cousins and neighbors in Philadelphia and Boston. Within three months half a dozen more shops were leased in the Vanderlyn Bazaar. The new telephones rang on the polished front desk, electric lights flashed out the floor numbers above the bronze doors of elevators, dresses swished across the lobby—and always, in a careful gesture of the young manager, in the sweep of heavy drapes along the high windows, in the tapestry-upholstered armchairs beside their reading lamps, in the open doors leading to softly lit reading rooms or private lounges, always there was an invitation to put oneself at ease, to escape from the harshness of the world into a pleasant haven that was itself a little world, with carefully controlled excitements of its own. People came in from the street, to buy a cigar or newspaper, to sit for a while in the great public lobby, perhaps to have lunch in the public restaurant or get a haircut in the Vanderlyn Bazaar. And guests stayed on, soothed by glints of lamplight on rich brown wood, excited by the promise of something they could not name.

  Even as Martin hired workers to increase the shop space in the Vanderlyn Bazaar, he pursued his walks north of the Bellingham, along the mansions and vacant lots of Riverside Drive. He had in mind a certain stretch in the nineties, where whole blocks of vacant lots with rocky outcrops gave the city a wild and stubborn air. Some of the lots and blocks were owned by private speculators, but others were in the hands of Lellyveld and White, a real estate firm that sold lots to builders and provided them with building loans. One day Martin visited Lellyveld and White, whose offices were in Bank Street, not far from his own small office. Lellyveld was a jovial man with glittering eyeglasses and thinning black hair, combed back over the shining knobs of his temples. He told Martin that a block of lots was indeed available on Riverside, up in the mid-nineties. A week later Martin had the first of his meetings with Rudolf Arling, and only then did he reveal his plan to Emmeline.

  It was to be eighteen stories high, with turrets and cupolas and a broad central tower rising another six stories: a fever-dream of stone, an extravaganza in the wilderness, awaiting the advance of civilization that had already been set in motion by the announcement of the plan for a subway under the Boulevard. The Dressler, soaring into the sky like a great forest of stone, would also throw down deep roots: three underground levels and a basement, including a subterranean courtyard illuminated by electric lights twenty-four hours a day and a level of shops arranged in a labyrinthine arcade. The ground floor was to be a vast system of interconnected lobbies, ladies’ parlors, smoking rooms, reading rooms, and arcaded walkways, above which would rise more than two thousand rooms, arranged in seductive combinations and divided into suites or apartments ranging from a single room with bath to twenty rooms with six baths. Roughly half the apartments would be provided with kitchens and dining rooms, so that guests could choose between the pleasure of private meals in their own suites or public meals in any of several hotel dining rooms. Monotonous regularity, he had told Rudolf Arling, was to be avoided like the plague: the note to strike was pleasurable diversity, a sense of spaces opening out endlessly, of turnings and twistings, of new discoveries beyond the next door.

  “It reminds me of something,” Emmeline said. “It’s a hotel, an apartment hotel, but it reminds me of something else. It’s like something strange you come across in a dream.”

  It wasn’t exactly what he had hoped to hear; he considered it. “You mean a nightmare?”

  “No, not that. I’m just trying to see it. There’s a strangeness, Martin, like a picture of a castle in an old book.”

  “A castle with elevators and electric lights and a parking space for motorcars. You think it’s bound to fail.”

  “I think it might do anything.” She paused. “It’s a leap.”

  “In the dark?”

  “Or straight into the light. I don’t know which.”

  He drummed his fingers. “Well, I’ll find out soon enough. Meanwhile you can get a nice safe job with Bill Baer in the family cigar store.”

  Emmeline’s cheeks flared. “That was cruel. Why do you take that cruel tone?”

  “Since you’re leaving me—”

  “I’ll never leave you,” she said coldly.

  Though his mind was made up, Emmeline’s hesitation, her failure to embrace his plan at once, set him wondering, and when a few weeks later he stood beside Rudolf Arling and bent over a great sheet of paper covered with meticulously drawn small strokes of black ink, indicating the structure of the grand ground floor, after which the architect spread out for his inspection an India-ink wash of the building itself, with its prickly roofline of turrets and gables, it struck Martin that she had been right: it was something you might come across in a dream. It was precisely what excited him about the drawing, and about the venture itself. Through the great arch of the entranceway, which rose to the height of two stories, Martin could see shadowy figures standing about, and bending closer he saw or seemed to see, through one of the scores of little windows, a woman’s face. “You appreciate my little joke, then,” Rudolf Arling said, and Martin saw that the architect was watching him closely. The fierce gray eyes had the shimmer of mercury. Martin saw that here and there in the windows of the hotel, little hands were clutching curtains. He had the sense that Arling had imagined, in precise detail, the furnishings of the more than two thousand invisible rooms, including the designs of the brass handles on bureau drawers and the contents of jewelboxes.

  From a window in Arling’s small office, crowded with carved parlor stands heaped with statuettes and little ivory animals, there was a view of the East River and part of the Brooklyn tower of the great bridge. The view of the bridge made an impression on Martin, it seemed a secret bond between him and the archit
ect, for hadn’t he as a child looked up at the great tower as the ferry approached the Brooklyn shore? But he was struck still more by the framed engraving that Arling had hung beside the window. The engraving showed a bearded, brooding Washington Roebling seated at his window in Brooklyn Heights with his hands folded tensely on the broad windowsill. Through Roebling’s window was a view of the Manhattan tower of the great bridge, its two Gothic arches crisscrossed by a pattern of cables and suspenders. On the windowsill beyond Roebling’s folded hands stood a pair of large binoculars. On a table beneath the window curtain lay a violin.

  “Well I must say,” Margaret Vernon said, frowning down at the fan of cards in her left hand, “I don’t understand why there’s all this talk about going underground when there are already trains in the air and trains on the streets. It makes me wonder what the world is coming to. I think … yes.” She played the ten of diamonds.

  “But mother,” Emmeline said, “you’ve always said the El roads were dirty and noisy and scared the horses to death. Your turn, Martin.”

  Martin played the queen of diamonds.

  “Well I might have known,” Margaret Vernon said, staring forlornly at her hand. She placed the cards face down on the table and heaved a sigh. “Mrs. Wallace told me that when she was a little girl she saw a live coal fall right through the track onto a butcher’s awning. It burned a hole clean through.”

  “Well there you are,” said Emmeline. “Lucky it didn’t catch fire.”

  “I don’t know whether it caught fire. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it did. Your turn, Caroline. Don’t forget that diamonds are trumps, dear. It’s just like Martin to have a queen of diamonds. Lucky in cards, unlucky in love, my father always used to say. Imagine those poor men working outside in this hot weather. How are things coming along up there?”

  “Martin,” Emmeline said, “mother asked you a question.”

  “Is it my turn?” Martin asked, looking up in surprise.

  One winter day Martin picked Emmeline up at the Vanderlyn after work and took a long ride uptown in a hansom cab. It was already dark, snow glittered under the lamps in Madison Square Park. As a child he had always stopped at the park with his mother, so that the places beyond seemed to him not simply inaccessible but imaginary, like pictures of igloos or cactus flowers. Adulthood therefore was sheer magic: with a wave of the wand you summoned a cab and ventured into the imaginary world. He directed the cabby to go up Fifth Avenue and cut across the Park at Seventy-second Street. On one side the great palaces rose from the shadowy snow like presences glimpsed in mirrors. In the light of a streetlamp a bearded man in a shiny silk hat and a long coat with a black fur collar stood knocking his stick against the side of his snowy shoe. It occurred to Martin that Emmeline must be hungry, that he had forgotten about dinner. They turned into the Park; lights seemed to blink or tremble through faintly shaking black branches. Martin remembered riding in the Park on his wedding day, the purple flower, leafshade rippling on her white dress. On the other side of the Park the cab continued across town and turned up Riverside. Through the trees the river showed white and black: black water, white snow on ice. One by one the mansions behind their walls would melt away, they were nothing but palaces of snow and ice. Through the side window he could see up ahead a faint glow from the building site.

  The building had not yet risen above the ground; the hoarding rose higher than Martin’s head. He led Emmeline through a gate behind which a guard with a kerosene lantern sat in a wooden shack. At the edge of the great pit two big arc lights gave off a harsh white light. Below, sharp black shadows lay crisscrossed over a sunken world of steel columns and snowy wooden planks, through which openings gave glimpses of lower depths. Here and there men worked beside glowing lanterns.

  Martin led Emmeline along the grassy side of the pit to a place where the columns and floors came up to ground level. He picked up a lantern and stepped out onto the snow-streaked planks. “It’s safe,” he said. “Are you willing?” Holding out the lantern by the handle, he took her hand and led her onto the temporary floor. The floor ended ten feet later; a ladder led down to the next level, which stretched halfway across the excavation. Holding out his lantern, he made his way down. At the bottom he stamped. “It’s safe,” he called up, but Emmeline had already started down. When she stood beside him she looked up and said, “It’s like a canyon.” “A poured concrete canyon,” Martin said, pointing to a half-finished wall behind scaffolding. A face looked down from above. “You want to be careful down there, Mr. Dressler. Slippery as all get-out.” “We’re fine,” Martin called, and gave a wave. At a black opening he shone the lantern at a ladder going down. “I think we’ll be better off down there. Are you game?” He climbed down first, then held the lantern up for Emmeline, startled to see one of her button boots reaching down from shadowy shaking skirts. “Careful,” he called up. At the bottom she stamped snow from her boot and said, “Where now?” The darkness was broken here and there by patches of light from openings in the floor above. Shadowy steel columns rose up before them and in every direction. He led her along, holding up his lantern, past ladders and piles of lumber and a solitary black glove. “This will be the main shopping arcade,” Martin said, “with smaller branches running off. Watch it.” They were nearing an open end of the building. “Look!” cried Emmeline. She stepped to the last column and pointed down to moonlit rockpiles, swept her arm out at the shadowy moon-glittering far wall of the pit. “Come back!” Martin said. She turned and walked with him past dark columns glinting with lantern-light. Martin stopped and held up the lantern to Emmeline’s face. “Well? What do you think?” Her face in the light was so bright it looked wet. “I was right,” she whispered. “I was right, I was right.” He looked at her, not understanding. “What I said that time: it’s something you come across in a dream. It’s a castle in a forest.” He stared at her fiercely; she burst out laughing. “Oh come on,” she cried, “I want to keep going forever. Come on!” Her face was so bright that he had to lower the lantern.

  Harwinton

  “IMAGINE TWO STONES,” HARWINTON SAID. “Gray, smooth, flattish: small enough to hold comfortably in your hand. There is nothing interesting about these stones. Now, imagine that I single out one of them. Either one will do. I describe the pleasing feel of the stone in my hand. I compare its color to the color of an exotic animal. I admire its remarkable shape. I say that this stone fills me with well-being and confidence. Then I tell you that you may have either of the two stones. Which one are you more likely to choose? That’s advertising.”

  “But suppose one stone is really superior to the other?” Martin said.

  “That’s an interesting fact. It may even be a useful fact, a fact we can use. But it has nothing to do with the art of advertising.”

  As Harwinton spoke, Martin was struck again by his extreme youthfulness: with his short sandy hair combed neatly to one side in the manner of a schoolboy, his light-blue blond-lashed eyes, and his small neat teeth, he looked no older than seventeen. In fact he was twenty-eight and reputed to be one of the best in the business. Harwinton had grown up in Indiana and attended the University of Minnesota, where a popular professor of psychology had given a series of lectures on the psychology of advertising, with special emphasis on the role of association in making ads memorable. He had made them read The Principles of Psychology by William James. Did Martin know the book? As Harwinton put it, his eyes were opened: advertising was a science, a system of measurable strategies for awaking and securing the attention of buyers. A study conducted by a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, had demonstrated that the right-hand pages of a magazine held the attention of readers more than the left-hand pages. Experiments aimed at gathering information about the attention value of particular kinds of space had shown that a full-page ad was more than twice as effective as a half-page ad. But size alone was only part of it: there was also the question of seizing the attention forcibly by an imaginative but expe
rimentally verifiable use of words and pictures. One test showed that of fifty people who were asked to look through a magazine, immediately close it, and name all advertisements remembered, twenty-three mentioned In-er-Seal, but only sixteen of those twenty-three knew that In-er-Seal was used for wrapping a biscuit, whereas all twenty of the people who remembered the Pears advertisement knew that Pears was a kind of soap. Harwinton had come to New York to work in one of the new ad agencies, where he had devised a successful campaign for a new kind of pink soap powder produced by a company determined to seize a portion of the market controlled by cleansers in cake form. A year later he had begun his own agency, with a staff of artists and copywriters and a specially trained band of researchers who prepared questionnaires, conducted scientifically controlled tests, and studied the effectiveness of particular ads on particular social and economic groups.