Life at the Dakota

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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 p
osition 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 in showy attire, with painted faces, and white kid gloves … you will derive no pleasure from making acquaintance with females who are evidently coarse and vulgar, even if you know that they are rich.”

  Men of the era were also instructed in the rules of delicacy; one etiquette manual commented that “The rising generation of young elegants in America are particularly requested to observe that, in polished society, it is not quite comme il faut for gentlemen to blow their noses with their fingers, especially when in the street.” The gentlemen’s habit of chewing tobacco also created problems. “A lady on the second seat of a box at the theatre,” wrote one social critic, “found, when she went home, the back of her pelisse entirely spoilt, by some man behind not having succeeded in trying to spit past her.” And an English visitor had been surprised to see none other than John Jacob Astor remove his chewing tobacco from his mouth and absent-mindedly trace a watery design with it on a windowpane.

  When a French critic reported that it was the custom, in crowded New York omnibuses and elevated trains, for gentlemen who were already seated to let ladies perch on their knees, the New York newspapers angrily denounced this report as a piece of fiction. But these papers themselves were often critical of New Yorkers’ manners, and the Herald took society to task for “loud talking at table, impertinent staring at strangers, brusqueness of manners among the ladies, laughable attempts at courtly ease and self-possession among the men—the secret of all this vulgarity in Society is that wealth, or the reputation of wealth, constitutes the open sesame to its delectable precincts.”

  Where one lived and how one lived in New York was also a matter of comme il faut, and that was what made Edward Clark’s plan to build a large luxury apartment house in the far reaches of the upper West Side seem so preposterous. Society would never place its sacred imprimatur on that part of town. No less an authority than Ward McAllister (or Mr. Make-a-Lister, as he was sometimes called) had declared that he could not bother “to run society” north of Fiftieth Street.*

  West Seventy-second Street was not only far north of society’s imaginary boundary line, it was also far west of it. The perimeters of Central Park had already been laid on the city’s maps, but Eighth Avenue (not yet renamed Central Park West), the park’s western border, was still a dirt road. Though Mr. Clark’s expensive building would face the park, that section of the park had not yet been landscaped or developed. In the park, opposite and all around Mr. Clark’s building site, lived squatters in shacks built of roofing paper and flattened tins—shanties without plumbing or heat, whose owners kept pigs, goats, cows and chickens that grazed and foraged among the rocky outcroppings. Those deplorable hovels and their unlovely occupants would be Mr. Clark’s next-door neighbors.

  Society in London, Paris, Rome and Madrid had been living in apartments for years, but New York was not Europe. New York gentlemen would never live “on shelves under a common roof,” and apartment houses, like the gaudy hotels, were regarded as architectural inducements to immorality. There was even more to it than that. Apartment living implied a sleazy and suspicious transiency. In those days, as Lloyd Morris pointed out, “Failure to own your own home was a confession of shabby antecedents or disreputable habits.”

  The fact that the poor of New York were tenanted in the miserable railroad flats merely added to the stigma of apartment living. But more than that, to the sensibilities of Victorian New Yorkers there was something very Parisian, and therefore naughty about the thought of having bedrooms (euphernistically called “chambers;” the word “bedroom was considered as vulgar as the word “stomach”) on the same floor as the floor where one dined and entertained. Discreet staircases were expected to separate public from private rooms. Edith Whaton writing of a somewhat earlier era, had described a certain elderly new York lady whose

  burden of … flesh had long since made it impossible for her to go up and down stairs, and with characteristic independence … had … established herself (in flagrant violation of all the New York proprieties) on the ground floor of her house; so that, as you sat in her sitting room … you caught … the unexpected vista of a bedroom …

  Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fiction … such as the simple American had never dreamed of. That was how women with lovers lived in wicked old societies, in apartments with all the rooms on one floor, and all the indecent propinquities that their novels described.

  These attitudes toward si
ngle-floor living had remained unchanged. But things had been happening in New York that the highest reaches of society may not have noticed. For one thing, with all the new money that was pouring into the city, New York had become easily the most expensive American city in which to live. Most hard-pressed—since they appreciated the niceties—were the city’s genteel, well-educated professional people of moderate means. A house in a respectable, if not affluent, neighborhood could not be rented for less than eighteen hundred dollars a year. A woman who considered herself a lady felt it essential to have at least three in staff. The Irish cook cost from eighteen to twenty dollars a month. A chambermaid, usually also Irish, cost from twelve to fifteen dollars monthly and a nurse for the children, usually French or German, cost about the same. The costs of living had escalated alarmingly. Butter was fifty cents a pound, compared with thirty-five cents or less elsewhere in the country. Eggs were fifty cents a dozen, sugar was sixteen cents a pound, chicken was twenty-five cents a pound and beef was thirty-five cents a pound. A family with an income of six thousand dollars a year—well above the median American income of the era—found itself having to watch pennies. The dinner party, meanwhile, had become a fixed New York institution, and well-bred New Yorkers were expected—almost required—to do a certain amount of entertaining, and to do so on a modest income had become something of a hardship.

  Adding to the cost of everything was the fact that New York was becoming a very crowded city. As early as 1870, an angry reader wrote to the New York Times, demanding to know why the city was keeping empty land in Central Park “while the middle classes are being driven out of the City by excessive rents.” Indeed, it was upon the middle class that the squeeze was most extreme. Of the million people in New York, half the population lived in 40,000 houses of between five and fifty rooms. The other half lived in just 20,000 dwellings, mostly consisting of one room. In addition, more than 24,000 immigrants from Europe and Ireland were crammed into 8,500 basement cells without heat, light, ventilation and, of course, plumbing. New York was threatening to become a city of the enormously rich and the desperately poor.