By the mid-1970’s the building became aesthetically divided between the traditionalists, who wanted to preserve the old details, and the revisionists, who wanted to change things around. One tenant painstakingly, and at great expense, had the woodwork in her apartment stripped of the layers of paint that had accumulated over the years, and taken down to its original, natural golden glow. But when she sold her apartment the new owner promptly covered the old woodwork with paint again. One of the building’s many committees was the Aesthetics Committee, which deplored such doings, but with no real power to enforce its aesthetic standards, all it could do was cluck its tongue when they occurred.
Lauren Bacall is decidedly on the side of the traditionalists, and her apartment, which she has decorated herself, recalls the stately apartments on the Avenue Foch in Paris. She has furnished it with antiques. “Furniture has to be old and good,” she says. “I love French Regency, Provincial, and pieces from India and Morocco. When it comes to decorating, I prefer to do it myself. I have never been able to find a decorator I could communicate with in terms of me.” In her front hallway a chest from Damascus houses a collection of Oriental monkeys, along with opaline and old pewter pieces. Her apartment, the traditionalists say, is what a Dakota apartment ought to look like. So is Leonard Bernstein’s. In fact, Bernstein’s late wife was so in favor of turning back the clock that for years she waged an unsuccessful campaign to have the electric street lamps outside the Dakota replaced with gas fixtures.
Freddie Victoria, as would be expected of a man who deals in art and antiques, has carefully preserved his sculptured-plaster “birthday cake” ceilings, and one of the remarkable features of his living room is the way he has treated his windows. At a glance they seem to be framed with festoons of flowing silk. But the effect is trompe l’oeil, and the “draperies” are not draperies at all but lambrequins made of hand-carved and painted wood—executed by craftsmen in his own shop. The apartment also contains Mr. Victoria’s extraordinary collection of antique clocks—some seventy in number and all in perfect working order—including a spectacular clock chandelier (one must stand beneath it and look upward to read its face). The clocks tick and chime peacefully throughout the apartment.
Judy and Gyora Novak straddle the fence somewhat between the traditionalist and revisionist point of view, but most Dakotans feel that the Novaks have treated their apartment splendidly, considering what they had to work with. When they bought the building’s old dining room on the ground floor it lacked baths, a kitchen, closets, and even walls where it opened from the public corridor. The marble floor of the big main room had been layered with so many years of wax that it was almost black. The Novaks had the marble cleaned and restored to its original white, with a colored border. From what were pantries and storage rooms, the Novaks created a kitchen-pantry, a guest bathroom, and a combination library-guest room off the main room. What was originally the “little” dining room, designed for private parties, became the Novaks’ bedroom, with a master bath, dressing room and closets.
At Philip Johnson’s suggestion, the walls of the apartment were upholstered in oyster-white carpeting to deaden the sound of the subway below and to provide a soft backdrop for the Novaks’ paintings and sculpture. The mahogany doors and coffered ceiling, which had been of a light-brown color, were cleaned and rubbed a black-brown to avoid casting reddish reflections on the paintings, and the old brass hardware was blackened to avoid glitter. All glossy surfaces were toned down. The white marble floor was given a no-gloss finish, and a non-shiny finish was applied to the snuff-colored leather with which the benches, sofas and dining chairs were covered. Modern touches included big globe lighting and can-shaped spotlights that are adjustable on ceiling tracks. Outside light is controlled by adjustable vertical louvers of heavy oyster-colored fabric at the windows. From the main apartment a staircase leads down to an area the Novaks reclaimed from the Dakota’s basement. This includes a small reception room for Mr. Novak’s clients, and a huge, white-walled studio lit by powerful lights, where Gyora Novak sculpts, paints, and designs jewelry and mens’ clothing.
Upstairs, on the sixth floor, Dr. and Mrs. Scott Severns have retained their apartment’s original amber-colored mahogany doors, moldings, window frames, its heavy brass hardware, fireplaces, parquet floors and carved ceilings. Otherwise the Severns’ decor is starkly modern. The long, wide living room is sparsely furnished, dominated by a grand piano from which Mrs. Severns gives occasional lessons. A huge abstract painting, some twenty feet long and ten feet high, covers one wall. The room is furnished with Mies van der Rohe’s famous Barcelona chairs, but Mrs. Severns likes to point out that “the really comfortable pieces” were designed by Philip Johnson, who happens to be her brother. (The apartment also affords a view of a new Philip Johnson building across the park.) The Severns’ library is called the Andy Warhol Room, and its walls are hung only with paintings by the artist—the Marilyn Monroe, the Jackie Kennedy, the poppy pictures and so on. One room that Mrs. Severns has not chosen to modernize is her kitchen. Though large and comfortable, it is decidedly old-fashioned.
To Theodate Johnson Severns the Dakota’s connotations will always be romantic. Mrs. Severns is a small, peppery person with boyishly cut gray hair, an emphatic manner, and a collection of Siamese and Abyssinian cats. “The Blanchards called me in late August of 1961,” she says. “They said, ‘Come, come quick, there’s an apartment available.’ I came, and I brought Scott with me. I had been married before, and it hadn’t worked out. I hadn’t really thought much about getting married again. I looked at the apartment, and it seemed enormous. Everything was painted a hideous elephant gray. I thought, how can I ever fill this up with furniture? I said no, no, it’s just too much apartment for me. Then Scott looked at me and said, ‘Who said you had to take it alone?’ And he handed me the deed to apartment sixty-four. We were married three days later—to take advantage of the long Labor Day weekend.
“It had been Emmett Hughes’s apartment. The Andy Warhol room was a bedroom which he had rented out to a paying guest. There are so many reasons why we love living here. It’s more than just the space and the four-inch thick doors. It really is like one big family. Oh, we have our little spats and differences. But even when we fight we fight like a family. No one entertains without including some of the Dakota neighbors—that’s something that never happens in most New York buildings. The other day we had a party for Virgil Thomson. First there was a screening of a film in Warner LeRoy’s movie room. Then everyone came back for cocktails and dinner here. It’s a real community.
“Of course we pay for it. We pay more maintenance than the most expensive rental buildings in the city. It’s a question of: If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it. But it’s a good investment. This apartment has tripled in value since we bought it. But it’s more than that. It’s the funny little things that happen. The other day I got into a taxi and gave the driver my address, and he turned around to me and said, ‘Lady, can I ask you a question?’ I said I’d try to answer. He said, ‘Is it true that in that building they even have fireplaces in the bathrooms?’ And the old people, like the Brownings. The other day I had a note from Adele Browning, and it was written on the back of a 1914 letter. There’s a sense of continuity here, a sense of life, a sense of fertility. Take the Novaks’ parrots, for example. The Novaks have some rare parrots which, they were told, would never lay eggs in captivity. They never did lay eggs, until the Novaks moved here. When they got to the Dakota, the parrots started laying eggs right away! It’s something in the air.…”
Downstairs, on the first floor, in what is roughly 60 percent of what was once Miss Leo’s old apartment, the Larry Ellmans have chosen to go the traditionalist route, keeping the original details and covering walls with rich fabrics, decorating with antiques to create a turn-of-the-century mood. Larry Ellman, however—the former owner of Longchamps and now the proprietor of the Cattleman Restaurant—has gone all out on his kitchen, fitt
ing it with every modern appliance conceivable. Next door, in the remainder of what was Miss Leo’s apartment before the Ellmans divided it, actor Michael Wager occupies the Dakota’s only “maisonette” apartment, with its own private entrance from the courtyard. Wager, too, is a traditionalist, decorating with antiques and covering his walls with Fortuny fabric to create an effect, as he puts it, of “instant Old Money.”
Princess Mona Faisal, whose father founded the Arab League, is married to Mohamet Faisal, the son of Saudi Arabia’s king. She and her brother Issam Azzam share a large Dakota apartment that is all done in pale desert colors and is considered one of the loveliest and most peaceful in the building. Some think it amusing to note that Michael Wager, an ardent Zionist whose father headed the Chaim Weizmann Institute, lives directly below the Arab princess.
When King Faisal was visiting the United States, the story goes, there was no time on his schedule for a personal call on his son and daughter-in-law, but the king was driven past the Dakota. “Ah,” he said, looking up at the building, “I see that my son has bought a castle.” Of course the story may be apocryphal. Many Dakota stories are.
Up in the southeast corner of the third floor, Frederic and Suzanne Weinstein have left intact all the architectural and decorative details that were there when they moved in but, like the Scott Severnses, they have chosen to furnish the apartment in a severe, contemporary style. A woven-to-order rug in an abstract design provides the only real color in the living room, a long sectional sofa, also custom-made to fit the room, is covered in a light coffee-colored fabric, and the walls are painted flat white. Adding to the feeling of airy lightness in the Weinsteins’ apartment is the fact that the Weinsteins prefer to keep their white walls bare of art or any other decoration. “We wanted the rooms themselves to be the only decorative statements,” Suzanne Weinstein says. Everything else is subordinated to the rooms’ scale.
The largest apartment in the Dakota belongs to restaurateur Warner LeRoy, the son of movie director Mervyn LeRoy and the nephew of all the Warner brothers. Originally, the LeRoys’ apartment consisted of only ten large rooms on the sixth floor, but when another apartment of the same size became available on the floor immediately above, the LeRoys bought that one too. They persuaded the building to let them construct a staircase between the two apartments, giving them the Dakota’s only duplex, unless one counts Ward Bennett’s split-level pyramid on the roof, the Novaks’ basement studio, and the various sleeping-lofts and balconies that have been inserted between floors here and there. The LeRoy apartment, as might be expected, has been decorated in a theatrical style that one might call Hollywood High Camp, featuring Tiffany glass chandeliers like the ones used to adorn LeRoy’s popular restaurant, Maxwell’s Plum. The LeRoys have become the building’s most ambitious host and hostess, and toss four or five big parties a year for as many as two hundred guests, plus numerous smaller dinners. To help her bring these large entertainments off, Kay LeRoy, a cook of some note, has a kitchen—or kitchens, really, since the kitchen area consists of several rooms—furnished with all the latest equipment, all of it hotel-size. In fact, Mrs. LeRoy got into a bit of trouble early in 1978 when it was learned that she was preparing certain dishes in her kitchen for the Tavern on the Green, another of her husband’s restaurants just down the street. This, it seemed, violated some city health code. In addition to kitchens that a luxury hotel might envy, the LeRoy apartment also contains a screening room for movies.
Though not the largest, certainly the most spectacular apartment in the Dakota belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Peter Nitze. Peter Nitze is a lawyer and chairman of the board of Nitze-Stagen & Co., Inc., financial consultants. He is also a descendant of Harry Pratt who, along with a man named John D. Rockefeller, helped put together Standard Oil. His grandmother Pratt was New York’s first woman alderman. The Nitze apartment on the sixth floor contains the building’s largest room, the colonnaded salon measuring 24 by 49 feet with twin facing fireplaces at either end, originally intended as a ballroom. The Nitze apartment was the “bachelor flat” of Edward Severin Clark, and the ballroom is said to be a facsimile of a similar room in the old Clark mansion off Washington Square. Later it became the C. D. Jacksons’ apartment. The Jacksons divided it, and part of it became the apartment of Edward R. Murrow. When the Nitzes bought it, they undivided it and as a result now have two kitchens. In addition to the kitchens and the ballroom there are some fourteen other rooms, but that is only counting the rooms that have windows. In all, there are eight working fireplaces.
The Nitzes undertook a complete restoration, as opposed to a renovation, of the apartment. Generations of paint were stripped from doors, moldings and paneling, uncovering the original mahogany and heavy brass hinges, which even had brass plates to conceal their screws. In the process of stripping one heavy door, the restorer asked Peter Nitze, “Do you really want this door put back into its original condition?” Certainly, said Nitze. The workman than pointed out what appeared to be traces of sterling silver in the corners of the panels; the panels had originally been edged with silver. The Nitzes stopped short of replacing the silver trimmings. Grace Jackson had taken one of the old elevator cages and placed it in a vestibule, intending to later install it as a powder room. The Nitzes kept the elevator where it was, and use it as a cozy setting for childrens’ tea parties. Though it is the only part of the apartment that was not there in 1884, the Nitzes feel that the elevator belongs there for sentimental reasons.
Other tenants have been less scrupulously respectful of the Dakota’s innards. The traditionalists who deplore sleeping lofts are somewhat at cross-purposes with Paul Segal, the architect, who has lived at the Dakota since 1969. Segal is a redheaded, enthusiastic and immediately likable young man, and has helped redo a number of Dakota apartments. He supervised the renovation of Paul Goldberger’s new apartment, helped the Ellmans divide Miss Leo’s old place into two apartments and helped Michael Wager create an apartment out of his end of that division. He oversaw the renovation of the Wilbur Rosses’ apartment and designed a superkitchen for John and Yoko Lennon. He was also responsible for the renovation of the Bernard Rogers’ apartment (the dust from which filtered up into the Weinsteins’ place on the floor above).
In the process of this work, Paul Segal has familiarized himself with every nook and cranny of the Dakota, from the basement crawl spaces to the mazelike corridors of the eighth and ninth floors, and to the narrow walkways on the roof. He once won a bottle of Scotch on a bet with a fellow Dakotan who said that it was not possible to walk completely around the building through the various eighth-floor hallways. It was possible, and Paul Segal showed his neighbor how to do it through what amounted to a secret door. Also, in the process Paul Segal has gained the unofficial title of the Dakota’s “house architect.”
Paul Segal’s architectural style is very contemporary, and though he boasts that he has “never completely gutted” an apartment, he has brought a number of apartments up to date. He favors sleeping lofts and had one built in his own apartment, though it is used as a study and not for sleeping. The construction of a mezzanine, with a curved balcony extending over the living room, was part of Segal’s design for the Bernard Rogers’ apartment. Planned as a library-study, the mezzanine certainly added floor space, though it cut the ceiling height in half. Segal’s design was considered sufficiently innovative to be given a four-page color spread in House Beautiful in 1978.
But purists in the building, Frederic Weinstein in particular, feel that some of Paul Segal’s designs are seriously eroding the building’s inner personality. Weinstein has watched sadly as one by one venerable interior details have disappeared—the corridor globes on the second floor replaced by more “modern” fixtures, the steady removal of old mantelpieces, doors, cornices, the growing pile of architectural detritus in the basement. Weinstein raises another question in terms of the Segal renovations. To renovate an apartment according to the building’s Hoyle, all plans must be approved by the outside
architectural firm of Glass & Glass. They must then be approved by the building’s board of directors. Finally, building permits must be obtained and specifications reviewed by whatever city inspectors are involved. When the C. D. Jacksons divided their apartment they had to tear down and rebuild the wall three times before the city inspectors were satisfied with it.
Paul Segal, meanwhile, is a member of the building’s board and has served two separate three-year terms. He has, however, been very scrupulous about not participating in those architectural and remodeling decisions which involve his own work or his recommendations. In fact, Segal makes a point of physically absenting himself during many of these discussions.
Frederic Weinstein clearly does not approve of Paul Segal’s architectural style and insists that this has nothing to do with the fact that Segal’s renovations on the floor below inconvenienced him.
Weinstein later commented: “In my opinion the Dakota stands as a tragic landmark to a skin-deep conception of landmark conservancy. While its façade is now protected, throughout its history renovations of apartments have been undertaken which in some cases have permanently distorted the interior architectural context and ambiance of the building. I am not a blind antiquarian sentimentalist. Reasonable and functional renovations have been and are necessary adaptations to each era and have kept the Dakota a living building rather than a museum piece. But there is a distinction between this kind of renovation and profound, irreparable and irreversible surgery. Paris and London, while also experiencing grave landmark crises, have so much more margin for error. In Europe, buildings like the Dakota, while not commonplace, are nevertheless not uncommon.”
Weinstein went on to say, “The Dakota is a poignant document precisely because we all subsist in a society here which perpetually erases itself. We have so much more to lose because we have so much less to begin with. I believe there is still time to practice landmark conservancy from the skin inwards. Not as a matter of antiquarian preciousness. The Dakota’s survival as the Dakota is itself at stake—survival as something more than a gutted interior with a quaint façade.
Life at the Dakota Page 18