Life at the Dakota

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Professor” Coykendall, as he was often called, was a gentle-mannered gentleman with a full head of white hair, and was once described by a contemporary as a “quiet man who says but little, but when he does speak has already made up his mind and states it with a force that instantly brings to him the concurrent support of his associates.” When Mr. Coykendall died his Dakota apartment on the courtyard was one of the few that had remained in its original state, its doorways draped with heavy portieres and tassels, its walls all hung with dark-green velvet. Windows and over-doors were of stained glass and, just inside the front door, was a stuffed bear that carried a silver card tray in one paw. After his death the New York Times editorialized, “Frederick Coykendall did not use his excellent taste in letters and the arts as a refuge from the storms and responsibilities of life. Instead, he projected them into many years of able service to Columbia University. Combined with a talent and industry that made him a force in the business life of New York State, they were of great importance to the university.” During his funeral service, Columbia suspended all classes.

  Another distinguished Dakotan of the past was Dr. Michael Idvorsky Pupin who lived at the Dakota until his death in 1935. His was a Horatio Alger success story—a Serbian shepherd boy, the son of illiterate parents, who came to America, became one of the most famous scientists and inventors of his day, won the Pulitzer Prize and numberless other honors and degrees, and died a millionaire. In his autobiography, From Immigrant to Inventor, Dr. Pupin wrote of how, at age fifteen, he persuaded his parents to let him immigrate to “the land of infinite opportunity,” taking with him only a small bundle of food and clothing. When he arrived at Castle Garden in the autumn of 1874, he had only five cents to his name. He immediately spent his fortune on a slice of prune pie that, when he bit into it, seemed to contain mostly prune pits. On his voyage from the old country he had lost his hat, and when he stepped out into the streets of New York he was wearing a fez. This marked him as a foreigner, and he was immediately set upon by a group of young hoodlums. In the end, Pupin won the fight but lost both the fez and the piece of pie. Still, despite this unfriendly welcome, he cheerfully set out to make a name for himself in the New World.

  For a while he worked as a mule driver in Delaware City, Maryland. He also worked in a cracker factory, in a grocery store as a shipping clerk, and as a laborer on farms in New Jersey. By 1879 he had saved $311 from these odd jobs, which was sufficient to permit him to enter Columbia. He passed the entrance examinations with high honors, and four years later graduated, again with honors, as president of his class. Michael Pupin then went to Cambridge for a while, where he studied mathematics and physics, and then to the University of Berlin, where he studied thermodynamics. In 1901 he returned to Columbia where, until 1931, he was Professor of Electro-Mechanics.

  It was during these years that his genius as an inventor became apparent—with inventions in electrical wave propagation, electrical resonance and multiplex telegraphy. He discovered secondary X-ray radiation and invented a means for short-exposure X-ray photography by means of a fluorescent screen. This produced a method of photography that shortened the time of exposure from about an hour to a few seconds. During World War I he invented an X-ray device for spotting submarines, which he donated to the United States government. His most celebrated invention, however, was the Pupin Coil, which greatly extended the range of the long-distance telephone. This he sold to the Bell Telephone Company and to other foreign telephone interests. The Pupin Coil made him a rich man.

  For the rest of his life Dr. Pupin went on inventing devices in telephone, telegraphy and X-ray technology, collecting, as he went, a long string of medals, awards, honorary degrees and prizes. His book, when he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924, was cited as “the best American biography teaching patriotic and unselfish services to the people.” When he died, at age seventy-six, the huge Cathedral of St. John the Divine overflowed with mourners, and among those who sent flowers were King Peter II of Yugoslavia, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. Bishop Manning eulogized: “Michael Pupin was a noble and illustrious American whose life was an honor to his adopted country.”

  Michael Pupin was a plump, cheerful man with a walrus moustache and round, steel-framed spectacles that perched on the tip of his nose. Though his scientific inventions had, for the most part, practical human uses, Dr. Pupin also had a strong faith in God, in a divine plan and in a life of the human soul and intelligence beyond the grave. In an interview with the New York Times he once said, “Science gives us plenty of ground for intelligent hope that our physical life is only a stage in the existence of the soul. The law of continuity and the general scientific view of the universe tend to strengthen our belief that the soul goes on existing and developing after death.”

  His first intimations of immortality, he said, came to him on nights as a boy in Serbia, where he guarded his father’s sheep and cattle from wolves and thieves, when he gazed at the stars and listened to the tolling of distant church bells. “It seemed to me then,” he said, “that light and sound were divine methods of speech, and so two questions: What is light? And what is sound? filled my waking thoughts and penetrated my dreams. The more I have thought of these things as a scientific man, the more do I realize that my boyhood fancy was correct. When I hear a great musician play Beethoven or Brahms on a violin, I feel he is making the vibrating strings speak a language that is a true message from Heaven.”

  He was asked to explain his concept of Heaven. “It is what scientists call the real world and of which this world is only a picture. All scientific work and investigation are directed toward further revelation of the world beyond. All of this world—the present world—that we know anything about is perceived through the senses. We see a sunset, a rainbow, the new green of spring. We hear the songs of the birds, we smell the perfume of the rose, we taste, we feel, but it all leads to glimpses of another world. Wherever science has explored the universe, it has found it to be a manifestation of a coordinating principle, a definite, guiding principle which leads from chaos to cosmos. I choose to believe in this coordinating principle as a divine intelligence. There is dependability, continuity everywhere present in the universe.”

  Finally, Dr. Pupin was asked what sort of state the soul would occupy when it progressed to what he called the real world, and he answered this question with another question. “The soul of man is the highest product of God’s creative handiwork. Now, after God has spent untold time in creating man and endowing him with a soul, which is the reflection of his image, is it reasonable to suppose that man lives here on earth for a brief span and then is extinguished by death? That the soul perishes with the physical body? That it existed in vain?”

  Of course, not all the early Dakotans were philosophers, humanitarians, scientists and educators. Those more serene, less harried days also saw people who almost made it a point to do very little with their lives. There was Mr. James King Hand, for example. Though he served as a lieutenant in the Navy during World War I, stationed comfortably in Washington, Mr. Hand’s only other real occupation was as “perpetual president” of the James King Hand Walking Club. The James King Hand Walking Club was started in 1894, when Mr. Hand was thirty-seven and was in the habit of going to Sunday worship at the old Holy Trinity Church, which was then at 122nd Street and Lexington Avenue. One of Mr. Hand’s contemporaries in the congregation was Mr. J. Oakley Hobby, Jr., who later became treasurer of the American Locomotive Company. Another friend was Theodore Bridgeman whose father, the Reverend C. DeWitt Bridgeman, was pastor of the church.

  The Sunday before Christmas of that year, young Bridgeman advised Messrs. Hand and Hobby that a visiting clergyman, whose sermons were considered less than stimulating, would be in the pulpit that day. Bridgeman suggested that the trio might find something more amusing to do than sitting in a pew. Mr. Hand suggested a walk in Westchester County. Hand had grown up in Ossining, knew the countryside well, and that Sunday the three young men hiked from
Ossining to Yorktown, about twenty-five miles. The three had such a wonderful time on their walk that they decided then and there to make it an annual pre-Christmas Sunday tradition.

  Theodore Bridgeman eventually dropped out of the Walking Club, but Hand and Hobby continued to observe the yearly ritual, and some twenty new members were taken in. The club became very exclusive, and it was not long before it had closed itself to new members. As the years went by, this had the effect of gradually thinning the numbers of hikers. By the late 1920’s only a handful remained, and the distance of the yearly walk had been cut down to three and three-quarters miles, from Chappaqua to the Campfire Club in White Plains. By the early 1930’s some of the members had become so enfeebled that they actually covered this distance by automobile, and met the others at the club for dinner. In 1932 Mr. Hand was too ill to join his group at all. Still, as he had done for forty years, Mr. Hobby went out the day before the hike and blazed the trail, stashing in advance a supply of snacks and spirits here and there so that the hikers could pause and refresh themselves during the course of their ordeal.

  The little group had become very touchy about publicity, and members were irked by the fact that for some time the local press had been having a bit of sport with the annual activities of the James King Hand Walking Club. For several years, newspaper photographers had taken to concealing themselves in the shrubbery along the trail in order to get pictures of the elderly members observing their rite. This grew so irksome to the group that in 1933 the perpetual president announced that that year’s hike was being cancelled, due to the advanced age of the members. Of course it was only a ruse to throw the newspapers off the scent. The group met clandestinely, and carried out the rite in secret.

  In 1934 the perpetual president died in his home at the Dakota, and what remained of the James King Hand Walking Club disbanded.

  Mr. Hand, a bachelor, liked to entertain at small “gentlemens’ dinners” at the Dakota, and was celebrated among his friends for his original cocktail recipes. With his effects were found several of his private formulas from the Prohibition era. One favorite was called the Last Resort, consisting of one-part gin, one-part grapefruit juice, one-part orange juice, and a teaspoon of grenadine. This was served in a glass rolled in granulated sugar. Then there was the Three-Mile Limit—two-thirds brandy, one-third Bacardi rum, a teaspoon of grenadine and a dash of lemon juice. But considered the most delicious was the Lady Corday—two-thirds gin, one-third vanilla ice cream and a teaspoon of grenadine. This concoction was then shaken until the ice cream liquefied.

  What, a short generation later, would the likes of Mr. Hand and his contemporaries have made of the 1970 party tossed at the Dakota by a thirty-two-year-old record-company executive named Robert Crewe? His apartment blazed with flashing strobe lights and rocked with noisy music. There were three hundred guests, including such people-of-the-moment as Mrs. Leonard (“Baby Jane”) Holzer, Andy Warhol, Christiana Paolozzi and the Rolling Stones. Among other things, the guests heard a singer called Tiny Tim sing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” in a squeaking falsetto.

  Against such a frenetic background and harried life-style, even the bizarrely dressed John Lennons seem like creatures of another, gentler era. Lennon isn’t very active in the music world anymore, though he does operate something called Lennon Music, Inc., with offices on Sixth Avenue, and a telephone, which is an answering service. In our fast and frenzied world of today—an era which seems characterized by a terribly short community, and national, memory—the Beatles seem suddenly quite long-ago.

  David Marlowe, a novelist (Yearbook), can look from his eighth-floor living-room window down into the Lennons’ seventh-floor kitchen in the Dakota. Sometimes he sees John Lennon sitting in the kitchen, alone, strumming his guitar. If the window is open, faint music drifts up. The old Beatles songs, with their wild bursts of melody, which once seemed so exuberantly cheerful (“Yeah, yeah, yeah”), and which were about love as much as anything, now sound sad from David Marlowe’s window listening-point. The tunes fill Marlowe with a curious feeling of melancholy, a wishful wistfulness for the old days when, it sometimes seems, everything (including people) was a little nicer.

  *This letter is dated September 19, revealing the interesting fact that in 1907 it took no more than a day for a letter to travel between New York and Boston.

  Chapter 18

  The Palace Revolution

  In the little town of Coventry, Connecticut, not long ago, a local lawyer’s Irish setter got into a neighboring farmer’s chicken coop and killed some broody hens. Though the owner of the offending dog fully compensated the farmer for his loss, bad blood remained between the farmer and the lawyer. Some time after the incident the lawyer was named for a government post that required top-secret security clearance, and, as it routinely does in such cases, the Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed a number of the lawyer’s fellow townspeople. The FBI learned nothing of a security-threatening nature until the neighboring farmer was interviewed. From him the agent learned that the lawyer was not only a scoundrel and a rogue but, to boot, a drunkard and a wife-beater and a member in good standing of the Communist Party. Fortunately for the lawyer’s future, further checking revealed that what was at issue was not politics but poultry.

  Sophisticated New Yorkers, of course, would not stoop to such small-town stuff as Hatfield-McCoy feuding. And yet, quite recently, in a luxury cooperative on the West Side, a similar controversy developed over the issue of storm windows. The windows chosen by the incumbent board of directors had been of the single-panel variety. Another faction in the building, however, favored two-track aluminum-frame windows. The controversy reached such a degree of intensity that at a basement caucus convened to discuss the matter, a fistfight broke out between members of the opposing factions. At the same time, two young people in the building, meeting for the first time and discovering themselves both to be impassioned defenders of the two-track aluminum-frame devices, fell in love and were married.

  Of course this all took place in another building—not the supersophisticated Dakota.

  “Here at the Dakota, we’re like kids at a summer camp,” says Mrs. Henry Blanchard. Some people think that Mrs. Blanchard tends to view Dakota life through rose-colored spectacles, but she may be stating the situation aptly. Kids at a summer camp, one remembers, fight a lot. The Dakota had not been a cooperative long before it became apparent that some people were more cooperative than others. Still, in 1969 few people realized that storm clouds were gathering in the building that would bring on another important crisis in the building’s history, the worst since Zeckendorf-Glickman et al.

  It all began innocently enough when Mr. and Mrs. Gordon K. Greenfield agreed to sell their Dakota apartment to Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur L. Ross, Jr. The Rosses and the Greenfields had much in common. Both Wilbur Ross and Gordon Greenfield were men in the prime of life, successful businessmen, handsome, with slim, attractive, dark-haired wives. Gordon Greenfield was in real estate and was the son of the millionaire Albert M. Greenfield, a legendary Philadelphia real estate man. Wilbur Ross was an investment banker at the time, a partner in the New York firm of Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan. Both men were able, responsible, bright and tough—and knew it. For the Greenfields it was a within-the-house move of the kind that so often took place under the Dakota’s roof as apartments became available and were shuffled or traded off, and tenants moved up or down in search of larger or smaller spaces. The Rosses were moving into the Greenfields’ old place, and the Greenfields were moving to another floor.

  There were, however, in Greenfield’s eye, certain subtle differences between the Rosses and the Greenfields involving social class, not unlike the differences that had kept Edward Clark and Isaac Singer at arms’ length throughout their business careers. Gordon Greenfield, a graduate of Lawrenceville and Princeton, had grown up in Philadelphia, where the Greenfields were almost if not quite accepted as part of Philadelphia society, and he considered himself a philanthrop
ist and patron of the arts. To Greenfield, Wilbur Ross’s New Jersey origins were more humble. Furthermore, in terms of the Dakota the Greenfields considered themselves among the building’s Old Guard. They had lived there since before the building went cooperative. The Rosses had been in the building since only 1969 and were therefore, in the literal sense, parvenus. Finally, when Ernest Gross had retired as president of the Dakota’s board, he had selected Gordon Greenfield as his heir. Greenfield ran the building, and, it had to be admitted, he ran a tight ship.

  The Greenfields had agreed to move out of their apartment the day before the Rosses were to move in. In many ways moving can be a shattering experience in itself. Not only are there the heavy chores of packing and supervising packers; there are also the attendant fears of breakage and loss of cherished objects. Added to the trauma of moving day are its emotional connotations, the wrench of leaving a familiar place and its memories. Psychologists have pointed out that moving day, while it can be a nightmare for everyone, can play particular havoc with a woman’s psyche. It is the nest she has built for her brood that must be moved. Thus it was with considerable dismay that Judy Ross and her movers arrived at her new apartment on the appointed day to find the Greenfields still in bed. They had not even begun to move out. “I really hit the ceiling,” says Mrs. Ross. What followed was a scene of the first order, and in the end the Greenfields moved out the back door while the Rosses moved in from the front.