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    Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address
    Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address
    Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address
    Ebook353 pages6 hours

    Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

    By Stephen Birmingham

    3.5/5

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    • New York City

    • Architecture

    • Apartment Living

    • Urban Development

    • New York City History

    • Class Conflict

    • Rags to Riches

    • Fish Out of Water

    • American Dream

    • Power of Community

    • Haunted House

    • Social Commentary

    • Rich People Problems

    • Power Corrupts

    • Haunted Building

    • Building Management

    • Dakota Apartment Building

    • Real Estate

    • Co-Operative Living

    • Poetry

    About this ebook

    A history of the Manhattan building and its famous tenants, from Lauren Bacall to John Lennon, by the New York Times–bestselling author of “Our Crowd”.

    When Singer sewing machine tycoon Edward Clark built a luxury apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the late 1800s, it was derisively dubbed “the Dakota” for being as far from the center of the downtown action as its namesake territory on the nation’s western frontier. Despite its remote location, the quirky German Renaissance–style castle, with its intricate façade, peculiar interior design, and gargoyle guardians peering down on Central Park, was an immediate hit, particularly among the city’s well-heeled intellectuals and artists.
     
    Over the next century it would become home to an eclectic cast of celebrity residents—including Boris Karloff, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, singer Roberta Flack (the Dakota’s first African-American resident), and John Lennon and Yoko Ono—who were charmed by its labyrinthine interior and secret passageways, its mysterious past, and its ghosts. Stephen Birmingham, author of the New York society classic “Our Crowd”, has written an engrossing history of the first hundred years of one of the most storied residential addresses in Manhattan and the legendary lives lived within its walls.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2015
    ISBN9781504026314
    Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address
    Author

    Stephen Birmingham

    Stephen Birmingham (1929–2015) was an American author of more than thirty books. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he graduated from Williams College in 1953 and taught writing at the University of Cincinnati. Birmingham’s work focuses on the upper class in America. He’s written about the African American elite in Certain People and prominent Jewish society in Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York, The Grandees: The Story of America’s Sephardic Elite, and The Rest of Us: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews. His work also encompasses several novels including The Auerbach Will, The LeBaron Secret, Shades of Fortune, and The Rothman Scandal, and other non-fiction titles such as California Rich, The Grandes Dames, and Life at the Dakota: New York’s Most Unusual Address.

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    Reviews for Life at the Dakota

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Some interesting historical background and some celebrity gossip, but also very dated in content and approach. The book was originally published in 1979 so many of the stories and attitudes therein are extremely dated!
    • 3/5
      This was an entertaining social history of the Dakota apartment building in New York. The early parts of the book discusses the early history of the building, its first tenants, & its place in the history of the city & this is where the book is at its most interesting. Who knew that early apartment buildings & hotels were frowned upon because they were so much like the tenements of the day? The last bit of the book is a bit gossipy, but that's also delicious in its own way, although somewhat disconcerting after the earlier historical writing. There are some cool photographs, as well, but I would've liked to have seen more photos of the interior of the building - maybe not the insides of people's apartments, but surely there's a picture of the lobby somewhere!I love the notion of this building going up on the west side of Central Park & being called the Dakota because at the time it was so far out west. Its original budget was a million dollars & it took four years to build - from 1880 to 1884.This, of course, is where John Lennon lived & where he was shot. The exterior of the building has been used in a couple of movies, Rosemary's Baby most notably, but they don't allow filming inside.This is an enjoyable, if not terribly scholarly, book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Prior to reading this book, I had never heard of the Dakota. Since then, I see it everywhere! I wonder how I remained ignorant of it so long. The building is architecturally fascinating and its inhabitants not one scintilla less so. It's not great, but it's a good, gossipy page-turner.

    Book preview

    Life at the Dakota - Stephen Birmingham

    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 the 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.

    Still another proposal called for building an entire underground street below Broadway, complete with sidewalks, gas lamps, shops and stalls. This street would be wide enough for horse-drawn vehicles and would have a railroad track running down its center for steam-driven locomotives pulling trains. This project came to naught when John Jacob Astor III and other powerful landlords protested that the underground avenue would weaken the foundations of their buildings.

    And so, instead of building down, New York built up, and elevated railroads began to sprout along Sixth Avenue, Third Avenue, Ninth Avenue and eventually Second Avenue. The four-car green-painted trains carried passengers uptown and downtown from daybreak to midnight at the astonishing speed of thirty miles an hour. Though certainly convenient, the elevated trains were not an unmixed blessing. They were bumpy and noisy—horses reared in fright at the approach of each clattering locomotive—and they were not without danger. Newspapers filled with accounts of accidents and of trains that had jumped their tracks and threatened to dump their passengers into the street some thirty feet below. One hair-raising turn on the Ninth Avenue line seemed particularly hazardous. The engineers, it seemed, believed that the proper way to accomplish this turn was at the highest speed. After several accidents the engineers decided they were wrong.

    The streets beneath the elevated lines were dark. As the trains rattled by, they spewed out ashes, hot cinders and live steam onto the sidewalks below and into the second-story windows of the buildings they passed. During the great blizzard of 1888 some 15,000 New Yorkers were trapped in elevated trains on tracks that had become blocked by snowdrifts, and a number of enterprising souls made a tidy business out of raising ladders from the street and helping passengers climb down, at a dollar a head. At least one train that was too high for a ladder to reach was stalled in the air for sixteen hours while the passengers were kept from freezing with whiskey that was hoisted up from the street by ropes.

    The avenues along which the elevated lines ran quickly became soot-blackened slums, their buildings divided into tenements of sunless two-room Dumbbells (so called because the floor plans were of a shape) or railroad flats. The word flat, which had been perfectly acceptable in England and Europe, took on a new connotation in New York. Living in a flat, to a New Yorker, denoted misery and poverty of the meanest kind. At the same time, the elevated trains, which ran northward from the Battery, enormously speeded the city’s northward expansion. The entire island, all the way to the Harlem River, was now easily accessible. But in terms of building, it was for the most part an expansion of the poor. The rich remained on Fifth Avenue and Murray Hill.

    Visitors from Europe, meanwhile, deplored the noisy ugliness of the elevated railroads. A reporter from the Revue des Deux Mondes in Paris wrote condescendingly that he had seen well-dressed, well-bred New Yorkers clinging to straps, jaded, jammed, jostled, panting in the aisle of these hearselike equipages, to reach their goal. Still, for a city that ranked practicality above beauty, it had to be admitted that the transportation system was now both fast and cheap. During rush hours it cost only a nickel to take the el from one end of Manhattan to the other. At other times it was a dime. For all the convenience and economy, as New York became a city of straphangers one also had to be wary of the dip, or pickpocket, a practitioner whose counterpart could be found in medieval paintings and in all crowded cities of the world.

    By the 1880’s a number of imposing hotels had already been built in the city. There was the Astor House, on Broadway and Barclay Street, which had been built by John Jacob Astor in the 1830’s. Further uptown, and even grander, was the St. Nicholas Hotel on Broadway and Broome Street, which had cost one million dollars to build and could accommodate some eight hundred guests; the St. Nicholas boasted the unheard-of luxury of central hot-air heating. The Metropolitan Hotel was equally costly and sumptuous, and contained a hundred suites of family apartments, which, it implied, could be leased as permanent residences. But the newer Fifth Avenue Hotel was unquestionably the most elegant in town and advertised more than one hundred suites of apartments, each combining the convenience and luxury of parlor, chamber, dressing and bathing rooms. Private bathrooms were an extraordinary novelty. The Fifth Avenue Hotel also introduced another controversial feature—an elevator, described as a perpendicular railway intersecting each story. Theretofore, elevators had been installed only in a few of the taller office buildings. In buildings of only six stories, such as the Fifth Avenue, one expected the drudgery of stairs.

    The new luxury hotels gave New York a cosmopolitan, sophisticated air, along with a transient population the city had not known a generation earlier. The plush-covered lobbies and opulent bars and restaurants in these hotels lent a European tone to the city. Still, there was something about Victorian New Yorkers that was put off by all the plush. Proper New Yorkers remained, at heart, rather puritanically moralistic. America still looked to England as her model for social decorum, and Americans felt more at home with English austerity and reserve than with French silk and gaudiness. To some critics the hotels seemed more like palaces of license, caravansaries of carnality, or worse. The effect of the hotels on New Yorkers’ morality was pondered, and one social commentator of the time asked whether the hotels did not open an era of upholstery, with a tendency to live in a herd, and the absence of a subdued and harmonious tone of life and manners? Upholstery, obviously, was somehow synonymous with sin. Another travel writer warned visitors to the city that Hotel life is agreeable and desirable for masculine celibates; but he is unwise who takes his wife and family there for a permanent home. How many women can trace their first infidelity to the necessarily demoralizing influences of public houses—to loneliness, leisure, need of society, interesting companions, abundance of opportunity and potent temptations! Still another found hotel living unsuitable even for masculine celibates. Gentlemen, he noted primly, will never consent to live on mere shelves under a common roof!

    Meanwhile, to everyone’s amusement, a newly rich millionaire named Edward Clark was building, of all things, a luxury apartment house at a location that wasn’t even an address—Seventy-second Street and Eighth Avenue—so far out of the swim of city life that it seemed like the North Pole. Clark was spending a million dollars on this foolishness, and, obviously, it would never work. Still, New York in the 1880’s had become a city of mad, entrepreneurial schemes, many of which didn’t work. Into this mood of hectic speculation and crazy chance-taking, Mr. Clark’s scheme fitted perfectly. It was an era of folly. Building the Dakota could be Edward Clark’s.

    Chapter 2

    But Not for the Gentry

    By 1880, New York had passed beyond the Age of Innocence, of which Edith Wharton wrote, and had entered what James Truslow Adams called the Age of the Dinosaurs. In it, fortunes were being made on a scale that had never before been imagined and that were difficult even for the men who made them to comprehend. Twenty-five years earlier there had not been more than five men in the United States worth as much as five million dollars, and there were less than twenty who were worth a million. Now, however, the New York Tribune would report that there were several hundred men in the city of New York alone who were worth at least a million, and a number who were worth at least twenty million. The money, furthermore, was being made from sources never before heard of—from steel mills, steam engines, oil from the Pennsylvania hills, and all manner of mechanical inventions from machine guns to washing machines.

    To the Old Guard of New York, the impact that all the new money was having upon the city was deplorable. George Templeton Strong, a diarist of the period, bemoaned the oil-rich shoddy-ites from out of town who had descended like an invasion upon New York* and wrote:

    How New York has fallen off during the last forty years! Its intellect and culture have been diluted and swamped by a great flood-tide of material wealth … men whose bank accounts are all they rely on for social position and influence. As for their ladies, not a few who were driven in the most sumptuous turnouts, with liveried servants, looked as if they might have been cooks or chambermaids a few years ago.

    With money was supposed to come respectability, and all at once there was emphasis on being in society. New York society was the subject of much attention in the newspapers, which fulsomely covered the banquets, fancy dress balls and quadrilles tossed by the likes of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Lispenard Suydam, Mr. and Mrs. Columbus Iselin, Mrs. Brockholst Cutting, and Mr. and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. There were no motion picture or television stars then to capture the imagination of the public, nor were there any stage actresses who were considered really respectable, and so every new-rich parvenue—and every shopgirl—had her favorite society figure whose doings she followed vicariously, whose life she longed to emulate, and whose perfumed circle she dreamed of entering.

    But entering society was not easy. Society in 1880 was firmly delineated by Mrs. William Astor and her chief lieutenant, Ward McAllister, and her list of the Four Hundred New Yorkers who, supposedly, were as many as she could conveniently fit into her ballroom. (When Mrs. Astor’s list was eventually published, it turned out to contain only three hundred and four names.)

    To get into society, it seemed, required more than money and the ability to surround oneself with the luxurious trappings of money. There was a new and important ingredient called taste. Good birth, which was so important a standard in English and European society, could not be purchased by newly rich New Yorkers, but good taste could. In 1870, Charles L. Tiffany had opened his splendid new store on Union Square, which had quickly become the bellwether of taste. In fact, as the New York Post solemnly advised its readers, Tiffany’s was a school for taste for those New Yorkers who needed such an education. Tiffany’s was an immediate success.

    Good taste implied good breeding, which meant good manners, correctness in all things. In a popular play of the era called Fashion, a character with social pretensions named Mrs. Tiffany, a former milliner whose husband has struck oil, declared, "Forget what we have been, it is enough to remember that we are of the upper ten thousand!" But more than forgetting the past was involved; the past had to be covered by a new veneer of polish, and a flurry of books and manuals appeared—how-to books on etiquette and comme il faut and proper social usage. To judge from some of the social dos and don’ts published in this period, many people needed to be elevated to comme il faut from a fairly primitive state.

    One etiquette writer, for example, scolded, What an article is a spittoon as an appendage to a handsomely furnished drawing room! And another advised guests at a dinner party against shaking with your feet the chair of a neighbor—an activity whose purpose is hard to imagine. It was also suggested that ladies should never dine with their gloves on unless their hands are not fit to be seen. If a lady should make an unseemly digestive sound at table or raise an unmanageable portion to her mouth, the proper reaction was to cease all conversation with her and look steadfastly into the opposite part of the room. While at table, advised one writer, all allusions to dyspepsia, indigestion, or any other disorders of the stomach are vulgar and disgusting. The word ‘stomach’ should never be uttered at table. The same writer cautioned that the fashion of wearing black silk mittens at breakfast is now obsolete. Decorum while traveling had to be observed, and when traveling alone, ladies should "avoid saying anything to women

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