Life at the Dakota
Page 1
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The Auerbach Will
A New York Times Bestseller
“Has the magic word ‘bestseller’ written all over it … Birmingham’s narrative drive never falters and his characters are utterly convincing.” —John Barkham Reviews
“Delicious secrets—scandals, blackmail, affairs, adultery … the gossipy Uptown/Downtown milieu Birmingham knows so well.” —Kirkus Reviews
“An engrossing family saga.” —USA Today
“Colorful, riveting, bubbling like champagne.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Poignant and engrossing … Has all the ingredients for a bestseller.” —Publishers Weekly
The Rest of Us
A New York Times Bestseller
“Breezy and entertaining, full of gossip and spice!” —The Washington Post
“Rich anecdotal and dramatic material … Prime social-vaudeville entertainment.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Wonderful stories … All are interesting and many are truly inspirational.” —The Dallas Morning News
“Entertaining from first page to last … Those who read it will be better for the experience.” —Chattanooga Times Free Press
“Birmingham writes with a deft pen and insightful researcher’s eye.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer
“Mixing facts, gossip, and insight … The narrative is engaging.” —Library Journal
“Immensely readable … Told with a narrative flair certain to win many readers.” —Publishers Weekly
The Right People
A New York Times Bestseller
“Platinum mounted … The mind boggles.” —San Francisco Examiner
“To those who say society is dead, Stephen Birmingham offers evidence that it is alive and well.” —Newsweek
“The games some people play … manners among the moneyed WASPs of America … The best book of its kind.” —Look
“The beautiful people of le beau monde … Mrs. Adolf Spreckels with her twenty-five bathrooms … Dorothy Spreckels Munn’s chinchilla bedspread … the ‘St. Grottlesex Set’ of the New England prep schools, sockless in blazers … the clubs … the social sports … love and marriage—which seem to be the only aspect which might get grubbier. It’s all entertaining.” —Kirkus Reviews
“It glitters and sparkles.… You’ll love The Right People.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A ‘fun’ book about America’s snobocracy … Rich in curiosa … More entertaining than Our Crowd … Stephen Birmingham has done a masterly job.” —Saturday Review
“Take a look at some of his topics: the right prep schools, the coming out party, the social rankings of the various colleges, the Junior League, the ultra-exclusive clubs, the places to live, the places to play, why the rich marry the rich, how they raise their children.… This is an ‘inside’ book.” —The Washington Star
“All the creamy people … The taboo delight of a hidden American aristocracy with all its camouflages stripped away.” —Tom Wolfe, Chicago Sun-Times
The Wrong Kind of Money
“Fast and wonderful. Something for everyone.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer
“Dark doings in Manhattan castles, done with juicy excess. A titillating novel that reads like a dream. Stunning.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Birmingham … certainly keeps the pages turning. Fans will feel at home.” —The Baltimore Sun
Life at the Dakota
New York’s Most Unusual Address
Stephen Birmingham
Contents
Introduction
ONE “CLARK’S FOLLY”
1 “An Era of Upholstery”
2 “But Not for the Gentry”
3 Clark and Singer
4 The Architect
5 East Side, West Side
6 Snobs in Reverse
7 Class vs. Cult
8 Spooks
TWO THE CHRISTMAS CRISIS
9 The Panic of 1960
10 The Rescue Team
THREE COOPERATIVE “WITH OTHERS IN A COMMON EFFORT”
11 After the Crisis
12 The Old-Timers
FOUR BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER
13 Nuts and Bolts
FIVE PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS
14 The Park
15 Dust
16 Winnie’s World
17 Old Guard vs. New
18 The Palace Revolution
19 “High Noon”
20 Deals
21 The Bottom Line
22 Faith
Image Gallery
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
THE RISING AND FALLING CASTLE
There is a castle in northern France that rises and falls against the horizon as one approaches it along the highway, driving westward from Épernay. The castle is the ancestral home of the Dukes of Montmort, and the rising and falling phenomenon is caused by the repeated gentle dips and elevations of the roadway. The castle appears on each incline, then disappears with each declivity, then reappears again. It sinks and surfaces many times before one finally reaches it, rather like a ship cresting and then vanishing across a rolling sea. Counting the appearances and disappearances of the Château Montmort is a favorite pastime of small children, as they return home to Paris with their parents after weekend picnics in the Champagne country.
But the curious thing about the rising and falling castle of Montmort is that each time it appears it not only seems larger, it also seems to change shape and form and outline, even color. New turrets appear, new wings, new towers. With each appearance the castle seems an entirely different building, with no relationship to the one the traveler has seen just moments before. In each appearance Château Montmort rearranges itself not subtly but dramatically, as though one had tapped the tube of a kaleidoscope and made the pieces of colored glass compose themselves into an entirely new pattern. The mystery of how the castle tricks and surprises the mind and eye is one of light and landscape and, perhaps, memory, though there is a tale in the region that each view of the castle is a mirage, a ghost, capable of emitting fluctuating, pulsating, changing images of itself, because when one arrives at Montmort at last, the castle is hardly visible.
The rising and falling castle might be a suitable metaphor for the Dakota apartments in New York. Not just because in the course of its nearly hundred-year history the Dakota has had its ups and downs, but because every aspect of the Dakota changes, depending upon the angle from which it is viewed, and also depending upon who is viewing it. No two visions of the Dakota are quite the same, and, because it is a building that has housed and continues to house a number of people, the Dakota has collected more than its share of visions.
Memory is as tricky an instrument as vision, and the Dakota houses many memories, no two quite alike. The Dakota has collected many stories, some of them improbable, many of them contradictory. Many of the Dakota’s tales have strikingly different versions, depending on who is recalling them, depending upon how events were perceived. One cannot, therefore, approach the Dakota in terms of “getting down the facts.” In a sense, the Dakota has no facts to offer, only impressions. So one must approach the Dakota rather as one would enter a fun-house Hall of Mirrors, full of wonder, watching the images and impressions change in shape and size and substance each time they appear.
At the same time, tracing the history of the Dakota and the people who have lived there is a little like examining the past of a small village in New Hampshire, a village which, on th
e surface, appears to have slept unchanged for a hundred years or more, and yet which, in human terms, has changed constantly. But this is a peculiar little village. For one thing, its neighbors abut each other vertically as well as horizontally. For another, it is a town whose residents have always been, for the most part, rich—at times chic, at times trend-setting, at times foolish, at times eccentric, always interesting.
But, for the most part, rich.
Part One
“CLARK’S FOLLY”
Oh, who of us would change a jot,
Or even an iota—
We happy few whose happy lot
Is Life in the Dakota?…
Where else, Oh fortress of delight,
Inhabitants so famous
That every chronicle in sight
Must write of us or frame us?…
Blessed be the roof that shelters us!
With all our hearts we praise it,
And daily pray, unanimous,
That nobody will raze it!…
FROM “Ballad of the Dakota”
BY Marya Mannes
Chapter 1
“An Era of Upholstery”
Modern New Yorkers have grown accustomed to the experience of going around the corner to what was last week’s favorite delicatessen only to discover that, this week, it has become a wig shop; or finding, where the little place that sold handbags used to be, just off Lexington, that the entire block has disappeared to make room for an office tower. Faced with yet another example of the fact that New York is a restless, ever-changing, never-finished city, New Yorkers simply shrug and go on about their business.
New York in the 1880’s was already a city that seemed to have made up its mind that whatever existed was dispensable and replaceable, provided some more profitable use could be found for it. In the years following the Civil War, when great New York fortunes were being made—by men named Rockefeller, Harriman, Gould, Frick, Morgan, Schiff and Vanderbilt, among others—money had become New York’s main industry, while the city’s secondary pastime seemed to involve systematically turning New York’s back upon its past. Anything of even mildly antiquarian or historic interest was the target of destruction, and anyone who deplored the way the city was remaking itself from a sleepy seaport into a bustling capital of finance was regarded as a hopeless sentimentalist. The past was not New York’s concern; its concern was the future, and Progress. Buildings were flung up only to be torn down a few years later and replaced by newer, more modern structures. Any structure that didn’t quite work or didn’t quite pay was demolished to make room for something else that might. The modernization of New York, as it marched toward the twentieth century, was as reckless as it was relentless.
Already it seemed that New York was destined to become a city of towers, that it would grow upward as rapidly as it grew outward. In 1884, the year that the Dakota was completed, the architect Richard Morris Hunt had put the finishing touches on a huge new building on Park Row to house Whitelaw Reid’s New York Tribune. The Tribune tower soared an unprecedented eleven stories into the sky and was topped by a tall campanile, but it was not to be New York’s tallest building for long. A year later Bradford Lee Gilbert designed the Tower Building, to be erected at 50 Broadway. The Tower Building, which was to occupy a plot of land only twenty-one feet wide, was to rise to a startling thirteen stories, eclipsing the Tribune building in height. The doubters and naysayers confidently predicted that the building would never withstand a high gale. Gilbert was so confident of his structure’s safety that he announced that he himself would occupy the topmost floors with his offices, but at least one neighbor in an adjoining building evacuated his property, certain that his building would be crushed by the weight of Gilbert’s when inevitably it fell. In 1886, when the building had reached only ten stories, eighty-mile-an-hour winds struck the city and huge crowds gathered on Broadway—at a safe distance—to watch the Tower Building topple. Gilbert, in a panic, rushed downtown and climbed to the top of his building to see how it was doing. All night long the winds raged, and the Tower Building didn’t even tremble. It remained standing until 1913, when it was demolished.
All at once the building of taller and yet taller buildings became a matter of competition. Joseph Pulitzer’s new building for the World clocked in at fifteen stories and was surmounted with a cupola with a dazzling golden dome. Then came the American Surety Company’s tower opposite Trinity Church—twenty stories high. As New York flexed its muscles for the future, there seemed to be no limit to how high a building could go.
At the same time, while all this building was going on, New Yorkers suffered from what a modern psychologist would label a poor self-image. New Yorkers who cared about such matters, and who had visited such European cities as London, Paris and Rome, were the first to admit that New York was becoming a not very pretty city and disparaged (according to a contemporary account) “this cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without … porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness.” The rigid, block-by-block pattern of the new streets that were being laid out was considered boring, and the problem of naming the new streets seemed to have defeated the imagination. They were simply numbered, south to north for the streets, east to west for the perpendicular avenues. Sophisticated New Yorkers complained that their city had none of the exuberance and spectacle of Paris—no Place de l’Étoile, no Place de la Concorde, none of the monumental statuary, arches, bridges and vistas that Baron Hausmann had created. New York lacked the intimate, formal little squares of London’s Mayfair and Belgravia. Instead of a Piccadilly or a Champs Élysées, New York had Broadway, and the most that could be said for Broadway was that it was very long. The fashionable area to live was now Murray Hill, on Madison Avenue north of Thirty-fourth Street, where a few years earlier gentlemen of fashion had gone quail hunting, though a few diehard families like the Astors still clung to their mansions on lower Fifth Avenue, between Washington and Madison Squares, even though that part of town was rapidly being taken over by “trade.” But the houses of the rich, each trying to outdo the others in opulence and splash—and built in wildly varying architectural styles from Moorish to English Gothic to Italian Renaissance—were considered pretentious and embarrassing to the purists. New York seemed capable of creating everything but a style of its own.
New York, in the late nineteenth century, was also an astonishingly dirty city for a variety of reasons. Only about half of New York’s families had bathrooms; the rest were served by outhouses. The Saturday-night bath had become a national ritual, but brushing one’s teeth was unheard of. By 1885, some 250,000 horses—pulling carts, carriages, trolleys and public omnibuses—jammed New York’s streets. The clatter of horse-drawn traffic up and down Broadway continued night and day. Venturing out into the streets on foot was for the daring, and strollers encountered an obstacle course between piles of steaming dung which swarmed with flies. In hot, dry weather the horse manure in the streets quickly dried to a fine powder and swirled in the air as dust. Ladies wore heavy veils for shopping, not out of modesty or for fashion, but to keep this unlovely substance out of their mouths, eyes and noses. New York horses were driven until they expired, and as many as a hundred horses collapsed daily in the streets. It was often a matter of days before the carcasses could be hauled away, and the odor of decaying horseflesh added its own pungency to the city air. In the 1880’s, meanwhile, New Yorkers were only beginning to get used to the luxury of paved streets in certain areas.
Forty-second Street had become the northernmost limit of fashionability; beyond that Fifth Avenue and its adjoining streets had a ragged, unfinished look. Still, though the metropolis consumed less than a third of the area that it does today, New York had already become a city of inconvenient and time-consuming distances. It took a Manhattan businessman anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half to get from his home to his place of work in the slow-moving traffic of the densely congested streets. In 1883, when finishing
touches were being applied to the Dakota, the Brooklyn Bridge opened to great civic fanfare, after thirteen years in the building. (Like the builder of the Dakota, the designer of the bridge, John Roebling, would not live to see the completion of his great project.) The Brooklyn Bridge was not designed to appeal to the aesthetic sense. It was without the ornament, spontaneity or romance of bridges that crossed the Seine, the Arno or the Thames. Its beauty was in its stern, no-nonsense practicality—a utilitarian bridge in which every exposed cable slung from the two sturdy towers at either end clearly had a duty to perform: to support the roadbed. The bridge was designed to provide New Yorkers with the novelty, and the convenience, of driving across the East River instead of crossing it slowly by ferryboat. The bridge also dramatized New York’s need for a public transportation system less cumbersome than the hansom cab and horse-drawn omnibus, and suddenly the phrase on everyone’s lips was “rapid transit.”
London had had a subway system since 1863, but New York had not yet gone underground for at least two reasons. For one thing, New York was built on solid rock, and tunneling through the Manhattan schist presented enormous engineering obstacles. For another, during the years when “Boss” Tweed had the city in his grip, Tweed and his “ring” controlled the surface transportation lines and wanted no competition. Still, a number of ambitious underground plans had been proposed. One was the “Beach Pneumatic Tunnel,” a scheme by which a blast of air, blown out by a giant blowing machine at the rear of a car, would force an underground car along a track like a sailboat before a wind. It was an era of extravagant speculation and high-blown promise; the backers of the Pneumatic Tunnel claimed that it would carry passengers from one end of Manhattan to the other at the rate of 20,000 people per hour. A short experimental section of the Beach Pneumatic Tunnel was actually built under Broadway between Warren and Murray streets, a distance of one short block. This precursor of the jet age did not work well. It traversed the distance in more time than it took to walk it.