Life at the Dakota (7 page)

Over two hundred miles of plumbing were cemented into the thick walls of the Dakota to service the cast-iron wash basins, sinks and laundry tubs in the Dakotan kitchens. Bathroom fixtures were all of porcelain, including seven-foot-long bathtubs that crouched on claw-and-ball feet. In the beginning, however, bathrooms were in somewhat scant supply in Dakota apartments—again because Victorian sensibilities were involved. (Called water closets, they were considered unmentionable necessities.)

Though individual needs and whims of the Dakota's first tenants played havoc with Mr. Hardenbergh's original floor plans, some elements of his interior design remained that were innovative at the time and have since become almost standard in the layouts of luxury apartment houses. There was his “stem” system of elevators, for example. Each of the four passenger elevators—placed just inside the four corners of the courtyard—was designed to service two, or no more than three, apartments to a floor. Elevator lobbies were therefore small and intimate, creating a sense of privacy, eliminating the feeling of being in a building that housed more than two hundred other people—and also eliminating long, echoing corridors through which children would be fond of running. Apartment kitchens, meanwhile, opened out onto a similar system of four service elevators—a novelty in themselves in the 1880's.

But for all the practicality of some of his ideas, it was in the area of
purely frivolous and expensive ornamentation that Henry Hardenbergh's heart clearly lay. By temperament he was more an interior and exterior decorator than an architect. He covered the Dakota with carved stone friezes and mullions, surrounded the outside dry moat with an elaborate iron fence adorned with the fierce, bearded heads of sea gods entwined with sea urchins with human faces. Inside were the carved marble mantels, no two of them alike, the carved plaster ceilings, the walls paneled with oak and mahogany, the heavy doors and over-doors and mortices with hardware of the heaviest solid brass. (In the Clark apartment doorknobs and plates and hinges were overlaid with sterling silver.) There were inlaid marble floors, wrought-iron staircases, walls wainscoted in rare marbles and choice hardwoods, bronze lamp fixtures and railings in the elevator lobbies. The elevators themselves were extraordinary examples of the millworker's art—delicate, open cages of carved, spindled wood set in fanlike patterns.

Then there was the private dining room, designed to resemble an English baronial hall. The floors were of inlaid marble and the bases of the walls were of hand-carved English quartered oak. The upper portions of the walls were finished with bronze bas-relief work—designs of Indian heads, arrowheads and ears of corn—and the ceiling was also of hand-carved English oak. Dominating the room was a huge fireplace, big enough in which to hold a small party, made of Scotch brownstone and engraved with more Western symbols. In other words, the Dakota was built not only to last forever but to astound. A persistent rumor in the Dakota has it that one of the first tenants buried $30,000 in cash in the floor of his seventh-floor apartment. If true, the money reposes beneath the parquet of what is now John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's bedroom. It would cost at least $30,000 to dig up the bedroom floor, and besides, the Lennons don't really need the money.

The thick walls and floors were designed not only to insulate the Dakota in winter and to keep it cool in summers when air conditioning was unheard of, but also to block out the city's noises, dust and stench. Though the upper reaches of Eighth Avenue were still relatively quiet and soot-free, the Eighth Avenue streetcar rattled by, and it was assumed that the West Side would soon be as noisy and smelly as the rest of town. The Dakota was designed to protect its residents from all of that.

But one aspect of Henry Hardenbergh's design—in a building that
over the years has posed a number of riddles—remains a mystery. Though he covered the Dakota's exterior with elaborate ornamentation on the north, east and south sides, he left the west face of the building absolutely blank and unadorned, as though when he got around to that side of the building, he had lost interest or run out of imagination. To be sure, the west side of the building could be regarded as the “back” of the Dakota. And yet this back side overlooked one of the building's most gracious attractions—the private park with its clay tennis and grass croquet courts, an area of Dakota land roughly equal in size to the acre upon which the building stood. In the building of New York brownstones it had become something of a tradition to leave the backs of buildings blank, and these were called “party” or alley walls because they usually faced an alley or an air shaft. But the Dakota's back did not face an alley; it faced a garden. Is it possible that Hardenbergh anticipated the day when the Dakota's back would indeed face an alley? That would not happen for eighty-five years, until, as we shall see, Louis Glickman entered the picture. Until then, the Dakota'a west-facing façade wore an embarrassed and unfinished look. From its own pretty garden, the Dakota looked truncated, as though Mr. Hardenbergh's great château had been neatly and cleanly sawed in half.

Two events occurred in 1882, meanwhile, when the building was only half completed, which affected its history profoundly. The first was the official renaming of Eighth Avenue as Central Park West. This was an indication that the city, too, had faith in the expansion of the West Side, and it gave Mr. Clark's building a somewhat prettier address. The second was the sudden death, of a heart attack, of Edward Clark at the age of seventy-one. When he heard this news, Henry Hardenbergh was dumbstruck. What would become of the project now? For several anxious weeks Hardenbergh worriedly waited to hear whether or not Clark's heirs would call the costly effort off. He spent his time characteristically—designing Corinthian columns to embellish the old Third Avenue trolley-car barns. He was, however, eventually reassured that the building was to continue as planned.

When the Dakota was at last completed, on October 27, 1884, four years, almost to the day, from the date when ground had been broken, it was greeted with an article in the New York
Daily Graphic
headlined:

A DESCRIPTION OF ONE OF THE MOST

PERFECT APARTMENT HOUSES IN THE WORLD

The article led off almost breathlessly to say

Probably not one stranger out of fifty who ride over the elevated roads or on either of the rivers does not ask the name of the stately building which stands west of Central Park, between Seventy-second and Seventy-third streets. If there is such a person the chances are that he is blind or nearsighted. The name of the building is the Dakota Apartment House, and it is the largest, most substantial, and most conveniently arranged apartment house of the sort in this country …

A 2,500-word paean of praise to the building followed, and the article was reprinted in the New York
Times.
Throngs of people journeyed uptown to look at the new wonder of the city, and hundreds of requests for apartments in the Dakota poured in. But it was too late. The Dakota was already fully rented. It had not even had to advertise.

Not only was the completed building a commanding presence on the city skyline, but it also afforded its tenants extraordinary views. Bizarre though it seemed, the location Edward Clark had chosen for his folly had rare advantages. It was on one of the highest points of land in Manhattan. From the Dakota's upper windows one could see the entire island and much of the surrounding countryside as well. To the east, across Central Park with its picturesque castle and lake, was the museum and the Mall, and beyond all that it was possible to see the blue waters of Long Island Sound and the hills of Brooklyn. From the west the view was equally panoramic and took in the Hudson River, the Palisades and the distant Orange Mountains of New Jersey. When the famous Hudson-Fulton Ship Parade was held from New York Harbor up to Albany, Dakotans could watch much of its course from their roof. To the north lay the hills of Tarrytown, and to the south one could admire the steeples and church spires of lower Manhattan in an era when God had not yet been replaced by Mammon in the city's order of priorities. One could also see the tall towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, Governor's Island, the green tip of Staten Island and the waters of Lower New York Bay. As the
Daily Graphic
remarked with wonder
at the time, “Every prominent landmark in the landscape can be discerned from this location, and the great buildings of the lower city are as prominently marked as if the sightseer were floating over the island in a balloon.” In those days it was not difficult for New Yorkers to remember that they lived in a seaport. Today, of course, nearly all these stirring views have become obscured by New York progress.

The article in the
Graphic
went on to comment that the Dakota “guaranteed to the tenants comforts which would require unlimited wealth in a private residence.” This, of course, was the key to the building's immediate popularity. One could live like a king at the Dakota without paying a king's ransom to do so.

The rents, which Edward Clark had set before his death, seemed more than reasonable for the period. A ten-room apartment could be leased for three thousand dollars a year, and tenants wrote out their monthly rent checks to one “Edward S. Clark.” At first, some people were not sure who, exactly, Edward S. Clark was, since the original Edward Clark had used no middle initial. The terms of Edward Clark's will were complicated, and since the estate was vast there were many individual bequests. In terms of the Dakota, however, the will was quite specific. Clark had not left the building to his son, Alfred Corning Clark, whose interests were art and music, and did not include real estate. Edward Clark had skipped a generation and left the building to his grandson and namesake, Edward Severin Clark.

The news that he had become the proprietor of the Dakota and the possessor of an enormous apartment with a ballroom-sized drawing room—as well as the boss of one of New York's most flamboyant architects—must have bewildered Edward Severin Clark. When he fell heir to the Dakota he was only twelve years old.

Chapter 5

East Side, West Side

In a way, the fact that the stewardship of the Dakota had passed to a little boy may have amounted to one of the very first in a long series of reprieves that would be granted to the building over the years. Young Edward Severin Clark and his family were already comfortably rich from Singer Sewing Machine Company stock. Their financial affairs were in the hands of bank trustees and lawyers, and they had moved into a social world—denied to the founder of the fortune and his wife—in which the making of mere money was considered a tasteless, unsuitable concern. One of the delights of the Dakota from the beginning was that it appeared to be run more as a charitable, luxurious rest home than as a business. When something went wrong, one simply rang downstairs and someone immediately appeared to fix it. If one got a bit behind in one's rent, no angry landlord appeared at the door; it was simply assumed that, in time, the arrearage would be paid. No one seemed to remember that the senior Mr. Clark had put up the building to make money or to care that, despite its popularity, it didn't really show much of a profit. Had the elder Mr. Clark lived, he certainly
wouldn't have tolerated such a situation. He would either have raised the rents, dispensed with some of the building's costly little extra services or disposed of the property altogether.

In its earliest days, meanwhile, the clientele of the Dakota was pretty much of the sort the senior Mr. Clark had expected—prosperous New York businessmen and their wives, solid folk who cared more about their pleasant, busy lives than about striving to be in society. They tended also to be older people, either childless or couples whose children had grown and moved away, and this gave the building a reputation it didn't deserve—that children were unwelcome at the Dakota. The fact was that the Dakota, at first, was not convenient to the city's better schools, though a number of excellent ones—Ethical Culture, Collegiate and Trinity among them—would soon come to the West Side.

From the beginning, the Dakota's clientele conveyed a vaguely intellectual and artistic tone. Socially, this set the early Dakotans immediately apart from the members of Mrs. Astor's inner circle, where anything that smacked of intelligence and wit was actually frowned upon. In Mrs. Astor's world, conversation was almost studiedly irrelevant, and its topics were restricted, as Lloyd Morris puts it, to “thoughtful discussions of food, wines, horses, yachts, cotillions, marriages, villas at Newport and the solecisms of ineligibles.” Anything that might remotely be considered an idea was eschewed at the Astor dinner table. During the day Mrs. Astor's set had the dinners of the previous evenings to discuss. Actors, opera singers, composers and people connected with the theater in any way were considered socially disreputable. Writers, painters and sculptors were not deemed worth discussing—or buying—until they had been suitably dead for a number of years. Politicians were vulgar, nor were educators or even clergymen regarded as fit for inclusion in fashionable society. The only “working” people to whom the Four Hundred gave the nod were high-ranking members of the military, and the Astor-McAllister list included at least five generals and two colonels and their respective ladies. Needless to say, an imported titled Britisher, such as Sir Roderick Cameron, went sailing onto the sacred list. Mrs. Astor and her friends' one concession to the arts was to attend the opera at the Academy of Music on Monday and Friday nights during the winter season, but the dictates of fashion precluded any real appreciation of music.
Comme il faut
required that one not enter one's box until the end of the first act. Then, during the second interval, one socialized with one's friends in the neighboring boxes. Then, before the third-act curtain lifted, one went home.