Life at the Dakota

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “My husband and I got this apartment in 1967 or 1968 because we were thinking of separating. This looked like our apartment in Madrid, it reminded us of Europe. The building lends itself to the Edwardian style. I still keep an apartment in Madrid. I don’t know why. I’m attached to it, and I don’t know what to do with it.

  “The East Side is a cliché. I used to live on the East Side, on Seventy-first between Fifth and Madison. I went to all the right places—P.J. Clarke’s and Michael’s Pub. But here, I see people who look like me every day. It’s healthy. If you’ve ever been in the art world, you want to be a star. My cousin directed Saturday Night Fever—it was his first success. Now I’m trying to catch up with my cousin. I feel the New York pressure terribly. I do more in ten days than most of my friends will do in a year. My friends are writers, book people, people who come through, friends from California—a terrific variety of friends. Right now I’m going out with a psychiatrist. I go to Nan Kempner’s parties. I like to be with people who are doing things.

  “I’m interested in a theater group called the Performing Garage—I think it’s beautiful. I’m interested in the Organic Theatre from Chicago. I’m interested in the Theater of Cruelty—neorealism takes energy, you know. As a single woman I don’t feel bad going out alone. In Spain they would call you a puta if you went out alone. I said to a woman the other day that I lived on the West Side. Her eyebrows went up. I said, ‘I won’t be a cliché.’”

  It has always been assumed that the people who lived at the Dakota were somewhat different from other fashionable New Yorkers. “My family nearly died when I said I was moving to the West Side,” says Mrs. Davenport West, a doctor’s widow in her eighties, who moved into the Dakota in the 1920’s—she no longer remembers the exact year. Mrs. West is something of an anomaly in a building of anomalies. She is not a bit Bohemian but is a proper Social Register type who says, modestly, that her father “thought there was a future in New York real estate and that it might grow,” and thereupon acquired quite a lot of it. Actually, though like many Dakotans her late husband was of the high-income, professional working class, and though Mrs. West is not the sort of woman who would say so, she is one of the wealthiest people in the building. She was a Phelps, an heiress to the Phelps Dodge Industries fortune, grew up on a huge estate in New Jersey and still maintains a summer place in Harwich Port, on Cape Cod, called “Malabarra,” which rivals the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port in terms of size and luxury. Mrs. West’s father was a noted yachtsman, the first man to circumnavigate the globe in a private sailing vessel. In her Dakota apartment Mrs. West keeps a small collection of precious antique clocks. A man from Tiffany’s comes once a week to wind them.

  In the 1920’s, Mrs. West recalls, there was a shortage of good apartments on the East Side. “My husband said, ‘Why don’t we try the West Side?’ and I said, ‘Well, why not?’ Of course it was our second choice.” The Wests looked at the Dakota, liked what they saw, and took the apartment in which Mrs. West still lives. “People said, ‘How can you stand it?’” Mrs. West says. “My friends told me we’d hate it, moving over there, with all those bourgeois, nouveau people. They told me that they were sure they’d never see me again. But the building was so nice. Before we moved in, my friends came over, one by one, to see what kind of Hell’s Kitchen we were living in. They said, ‘Well, the apartment is nice,’ as though they hated to admit that it could be, but then they’d always add, ‘But Dorothy—it’s the West Side! How could you?’ Of course they meant the neighborhood, and of course the neighborhood was a little crummy.”

  For all the crumminess, Mrs. Davenport West has no intention of ever leaving her large apartment, which she “thinks” has seven rooms and knows has three bathrooms and four working fireplaces.

  And yet if the building today is a “melting pot” it is one in which the contents have not quite melted. The Dakota pot seethes and boils with ingredients that have not quite come together, and feuds and rivalries and jealousies and factions abound. Some people, for example, feel that, among other things, the Dakota itself has been divided along an East Side-West Side axis. “The people who live on the sunny side [the east] are entirely different from those who live on the shady side [the west, which is now permanently in the shadow of the Mayfair Tower Apartments],” says Sheila Herbert, a young advertising woman who grew up in the Dakota and, like a number of “Dakota babies,” ended up with her own apartment there. Sunny-siders, Miss Herbert feels, are more sunny-dispositioned, more outgoing and gregarious, give more and better parties, have done splashier things in terms of decorating their apartments. The John Lennons, Roberta Flack and the flamboyant restaurateur-entrepreneur, Warner LeRoy, are all examples of sunny-siders. Shady-siders are more quiet and reserved, more conservative and staid, less given to party-going and party-tossing, and socializing with their neighbors. Mrs. West is a shady-sider.

  Miss Herbert may have a point. But there is more to it than that.

  Chapter 7

  Class vs. Cult

  At every point in New York’s history, it sometimes seems, there have been social observers willing to offer the opinion that the city “just isn’t what it used to be.” This not very profound observation has also been made about the Dakota. The building has always managed to engender an intense self-pride among its residents, and part of this is based on the Dakota’s long struggle to change as little as possible in an ever-changing city. This struggle has set the Dakota apart, psychologically, from the rest of New York and, particularly, from the Dakota’s growing number of new neighbors on the West Side.

  The Dakota was not only different and special, it was better—“The only really good address on the West End,” as Mrs. M. A. Crate used to remind her friends. Mrs. Crate was the building’s first housekeeper and served in that capacity until her death in 1931. With its feelings of superiority the building tended to turn inward upon itself, to isolate itself, to become a bit inbred. For years everyone in the building felt it necessary to own a Steinway piano, if not two, in a demonstration of loyalty to the Dakota Steinways. The building bought its dairy products from Edward S. Clark’s farm. The Dakota quickly became not only smug but self-centered, and if the burgeoning West Side was becoming a separate city within a city, the Dakota became a private village within the separate city. As far as the rest of the city was concerned, the Dakota’s apartness from the general scheme of things made it the object of some curiosity. When the building opened, sightseers had flocked up to Seventy-second Street on the Ninth Avenue el to gape at it, to wonder about who lived there and what they were really like. Over the years tourists and passers-by continued to wonder. Aloofly, the Dakota did not offer a ready answer.

  When the first edition of the New York Social Register appeared in 1887, no residents of the Dakota were listed in it, which was hardly surprising since the Register’s list was loosely based on Ward McAllister’s tally of those New Yorkers whom he and Caroline Astor considered socially acceptable, plus the list of those who attended the opening night of the National Horse Show, which annually launched New York’s winter social season (the two lists overlapped more than a little.) The Social Register made it official that the Dakota was socially below the salt, but in some ways the Dakotans may have been grateful for the snub. Journalists and newspaper editors had taken over the role, formerly assigned to clergymen, of watching over the city’s morals. And now that Who Was Who had been officially codified and published, it was easier for editors to see who the city’s alleged leaders were and to scold them when they misbehaved. One editor who turned misbehavior to profit was Colonel William D’Alton Mann, whose gossipy and widely read Town Topics was actually an instrument of blackmail. When an Astor or Gould or Vanderbilt was suspected of committing an indiscretion, he was contacted by one of Colonel Mann’s minions who would warn that unless a certain sum were paid, Town Topics would print the story it had heard. Away from the mainstream of New York social life, the Dakotans were spared this sort of thing.


  After Mrs. Astor’s death in 1908 no real New York social leader came forth to fill her place. In fact, New York had no real arbiter of comme il faut until 1922, when Emily Post’s Etiquette was published.* Though Etiquette became a national bible of manners, the setting of the book is very much New York. The famous Post characters—the aristocratic Wellborns, Oldnames, Titheringtons and Kindharts—are all New Yorkers. So are the ostentatious Miss Millions, the penny-wise Miss Smallpurse, the haughty Mrs. Toplofty and the somewhat raffish Mr. and Mrs. Worldly and Bobo Gilding. Some were even identifiable. (Bobo Gilding reminded many people of fun-loving Willie K. Vanderbilt.) No Gildings, Oldnames or Smallpurses lived at the Dakota, though Mrs. Post made at least one condescending allusion to West-Siders in her book, calling them “the new Spendeasy Westerns.” This was a good general description of the Dakota’s tenants. Though not as rich as the Belmonts, Vanderbilts or Goulds, the early Dakotans were families of men who had made money—first-generation money.

  The first actor did not move into the building until the late 1930’s. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man named William Henry Pratt, whose professional name was Boris Karloff. At the time there was a feeling in some quarters of “There goes the neighborhood.” (“The building’s going theatrical, but it doesn’t know it yet,” said Miss Adele Browning.) Boris Karloff’s good friend Basil Rathbone lived just down the street, and the two sinister-looking men made an awesome pair when they strolled together in the park—it was Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein. Mr. Karloff liked to tell a sad tale. Every Halloween, he used to say, he set out a bowl of candy for the building’s trick-or-treaters. But no children ever rang his bell. They were too frightened of the heavy-lidded, wired-jaw monster he played in the movies.

  Long before the arrival of Boris Karloff, however, there were members of the first Dakota families who felt that the building had hit upon sorry times, and that the Dakota—and New York in general—just weren’t what they used to be. By 1932, for example, Miss Cordelia V. Deal had lived at the Dakota for nearly fifty years. She had moved into the building with her parents when it opened and now, a spinster in her eighties, she lived alone with an attendant. “Everything now is in the moderne style,” she complained to an interviewer at the time. Miss Deal pointed out William Eichhammer, the Dakota’s head painter, who had been with the building as long as she. Mr. Eichhammer had painted the walls for the original tenants in beautiful frescoes, friezes and French tints. “Now he’s painting everything over, in plain white, because everybody wants moderne.”

  Miss Deal was obviously a voluble woman as she recalled the old days. “During the summers the building was empty,” she reminisced. “Everybody went away, to Long Island, or Westchester, or the Adirondacks, or the Jersey Shore. If you went to Long Island, the husbands didn’t stay behind. The whole city would be empty in the summers. Now if people go away, it’s just a weekend. Goodness me, what kind of a summer is that? When I was a girl, I never knew what it was like to perspire, because in hot weather we were always at some cool shore place. People went to Europe for the summers, too, and each family had its favorite boat. In the country there were dress-up parties for the children. The country was very formal then. Women wore long dresses and pearls for picnics. People with children went to Atlantic City, too, at any time of the year, even in January, because Atlantic City was good for your health. Goodness me, every time I had a sniffle I was whisked off to Atlantic City to get the ocean breezes and the good sea air. The place to stay was the Marlborough-Blenheim.

  “I remember there was something called ‘The Ladies’ Mile,’ which ran down Broadway from Twenty-third Street to Eighth. That was where the ladies shopped, in their long ‘walking dresses’ every afternoon. The ladies had to pick up their skirts to cross the street, and gentlemen stood on the street corners to catch peeks of ladies’ ankles. A. T. Stewart and Company was there, and Arnold Constable, and Lord and Taylor. But for quality, Altman’s was the best. Later came Siegel-Cooper, on Sixth Avenue and Nineteenth Street. In the center of the store was a huge fountain with a statue at the center like the Statue of Liberty, all lit with colored lights. All around were little tables and chairs where they served ice-cream sodas that were the talk of the town. It was the place where everyone met. Everyone said, ‘Meet me at the Fountain,’ and it meant Siegel-Cooper’s.

  “People were politer then, it seems to me. Mothers went for tea at Sherry’s, and the children had hot chocolate. Young men sent young ladies candy from Sherry’s. It came in lovely lavender tin boxes, and you saved the boxes to keep your toiletries and love letters and other treasures in. There was so much more service then. The manicurist came to the house. The hairdresser came once a week to wash my mother’s hair. If she were going to a ball, she came to dress her hair. The chiropodist came to the house. The dressmaker came to the house. People have taken to using colored people for servants now, but in those days they were always white. The maids were Irish or German, and the coachmen were usually Scotch, for some reason. Goodness me, we had a cook, a laundress, a chambermaid, a governess and a coachman, and we were not all that rich. For a while, Father had a valet. I remember when automobiles were a big issue. Some people refused to give up their horses. Father’s first car was a 1905 Winton that opened from the back. There were no school buses. Fathers would drop the children at school on their way to the office. The Benjamin School was for girls, and Robert Louis Stevenson was for boys. Collegiate, Horace Mann and Ethical Culture were for intellectuals, which wasn’t a very fashionable thing to be.

  “When Mother and Father moved to the Dakota, it was brand new, and some people said they thought it was too ‘flashy.’ But we loved it because of the Park. Every Sunday, we went riding in the Park, and the ladies rode sidesaddle. We went for picnics in the Park, and in the winter there was a pond for skating with a little house where you changed into your skates, and a boy who put your skates on for you. When you came in from the cold, they served hot chocolate in the little house. It cost a penny. Goodness me, looking back it seems to me as though I grew up on hot chocolate. In the summer the whole family would take the night boat to Albany. You left in the evening and arrived in the morning. It wasn’t considered ‘fitting’ to take your chauffeur on the boat with you, so the chauffeur drove up and met you in Albany with the car. Then we drove on to Lake Placid. That was just for August. In July we went to the Jersey Shore. There was a song I remember—

  Why do they all take the night boat to Albany?

  That’s what’s been puzzling me.

  They say they go there just for the ride,

  But all the same they travel at night …

  “Nobody talked about crime. Nobody talked about security. Here at the Dakota no one bothered to lock apartment doors. There was some talk I remember about bribery and corruption in the city government, particularly during the Boss Tweed period. I remember that Mother and her friends would have tea and talk about men and their mistresses. It seemed every man had a mistress. This was considered perfectly acceptable, as long as the mistress wasn’t a member of one’s own ‘set.’ I remember hearing Mother say that one man at the Dakota had his mistress right here in the building. That was considered shocking. We were told never to speak to that woman, to that man, or to that man’s wife.”

  Of course Miss Deal was talking about changes in the city’s style. In substance, the Dakota had changed not all that much. “Moderne” might have become the vogue, and people might be painting over frescoes, but Miss Deal was still one of the oldest living Dakota loyalists and would only depart, unwillingly, a few years later through the Seventy-third Street door.

  For people like Miss Deal—in addition to the service and extraordinary cubic footage which the Dakota offered—the most attractive aspect of the Dakota’s changelessness was the fact that, while the cost of everything else in the city of New York was going up, the cost of living at the Dakota had stayed just about the same. No one had given much thought to the dollars-and-cents reason for t
his, but it had a lot to do with the adoption, in 1913, of the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution authorizing taxes on the net incomes of individuals, and the progression principle, which was introduced five years later. By 1933 the Dakota was losing some $300,000 a year, and to the accountants who managed Edward S. Clark’s huge estate the Dakota had become an interesting tax write-off.

  The Dakota, however, in its dreamy way, had begun to believe that the low rents were maintained out of sentiment, out of some sort of humanitarian feelings that flowed from Mr. Clark in far-off Cooperstown. This seemed the easiest explanation for such gentle treatment. After all, the building had begun to accumulate a number of elderly people, such as Miss Deal, who lived on fixed incomes, and who could raise the rent on tenants like that? Rents were often arbitrarily arrived at and could be subject to negotiation. Once, when a longtime tenant, a Mr. Hartenstein, was undergoing financial reverses, the building’s management came to him and said, “Please don’t move out—we’ll lower your rent.”

  In 1931 the building’s manager was Mr. George P. Douglass, and when Mrs. Charles J. Quinlan was looking at an apartment that year, Mr. Douglass told her that the rent would be $4,000 a year. Mrs. Quinlan remarked that her husband might find that a trifle high. Mr. Douglass smoothly replied, “Why don’t your husband and I have lunch, and we’ll discuss it.” This, it might be remembered, was in one of the worst years of the Great Depression. While foreclosures and evictions were taking place all over the country—in farm communities in Nebraska and in luxury lakefront properties in Chicago—the Dakota complacently continued to take care of its own.