Life at the Dakota

by Birmingham, Stephen;

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.

  At Mrs. Astor’s Fifth Avenue house, entertainments were equally ritualized. Dinner was at seven, and an invitation to dine with the Astors meant arriving at seven, not a moment later. If too early, one waited in one’s carriage outside the door and alit to ring the bell at clockstroke. The gentlemen wore white tie and tails, and the ladies long gowns and their best jewels. The ladies took their wraps to a downstairs cloakroom, and the gentlemen took theirs upstairs. In the gentlemen’s cloakroom, white envelopes were arranged on a silver tray, with a gentleman’s name on each envelope. Inside was a card with a lady’s name on it—the lady he was to escort in to dinner. The ladies and gentlemen gathered again downstairs, and there their hostess received them in her black wig and nearly always wearing black, the better to show off her jewels, which included “the costliest necklace of emeralds and diamonds in America,” or “the finest sapphire”—all, of course, from Tiffany’s.

  A butler appeared with a tray, and cocktails were served. There was never a choice of drinks. Mrs. Astor preferred something called a Jack Rose, and a Jack Rose was therefore what was offered, one to a guest, and in rather small glasses. A maid then entered with a tray of canapés—one apiece. Nobody would have dreamed of asking for a second canapé, much less a second drink. In exactly fifteen minutes dinner was announced. At the table were printed place cards and menus, each embossed with the Astor crest, outlining the courses through the appetizer, soup, fish, meat or game, salad, cheese and fruit, dessert and coffee, with perhaps a sherbet course somewhere in the middle.

  Dinner lasted at least two hours, and through it all one had to keep an attentive eye on the hostess to catch the exact moment when she “changed the conversation.” When Mrs. Astor shifted the focus of her attention from one dinner partner to the other, the entire table shifted with her. At approximately half-past nine, Mrs. Astor rose, and the table did likewise. The ladies and gentlemen separated—the men to the library for brandy and cigars, the ladies to the adjacent drawing room for mirabelle and gossip. In exactly half an hour a butler opened the doors between the two rooms, and the gentlemen joined the ladies for another thirty minutes. At half-past ten, Mrs. Astor rose again, the signal that it was time for everyone to go home.

  But the new residents of the Dakota were a rather different sort of folk, with different notions of what civilized New York life might consist of—notions which Mrs. Astor would have found dangerously radical. There were the Steinways, for example (ironically, Theodor Steinway, perhaps because of his sensitive musical ears, frequently complained about the sound of pianos being played in nearby apartments). As piano merchants, the Steinways would never have been eligible to join the Astor set; even worse, they were immigrants, having arrived in New York from Germany as recently as 1850, and they spoke with accents. Then there was John Browning, an educator, and the founder of the Browning School on the West Side, which later on would educate a whole generation of Rockefeller brothers. (Mr. Browning’s two daughters, Miss Edna and Miss Adele, were both born in the Dakota in the early 1890’s and continue to live there to this day.) Then there was Mr. Gustav Schirmer, the great music publisher.

  The Schirmers were the building’s leading host and hostess of the day, and their guest lists indicated that New York social life might have a bit more to offer than the Four Hundred. The Schirmers had the odd notion that there were actually interesting people in New York, and that interesting people also passed through from out of town. Herman Melville, by then well into his seventies, often walked with his little granddaughter in Central Park. He had been living quietly in New York for years, convinced that his literary career was over, working as a customs inspector on the Hudson River piers. The Schirmers “discovered” the almost-forgotten author of Moby Dick, and gave a dinner for Melville and his wife. The Schirmers apparently found Melville charming but a little sad. He was working again on a final novel, to be called Billy Budd. But, he said, he was sure his book would never be published unless he had it privately printed, because his popularity of more than thirty years earlier had all but vanished. (In fact, Billy Budd was not published until many years after Melville’s death.)

  Another celebrated guest of the Schirmers was William Dean Howells, the poet, belletrist and raconteur who, it turned out, could not be invited to the same dinner parties as Mark Twain; the two authors vied so vociferously to upstage each other in terms of story-telling and producing bon mots that they threatened to resort to fisticuffs. Through Howells, the Schirmers were introduced to a thin, intense young novelist named Stephen Crane, whose first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, had still been unable to find a publisher because its contents were deemed too sordid for the tastes of the times. He was now working on a second book with a Civil War setting, to be called The Red Badge of Courage.

  The Schirmers also found stimulating company in some of the prominent political figures of the day, and one of their great friends was Senator Carl Schurz, a former major general in the Union Army, and later Secretary of the Interior under President Rutherford B. Hayes. The Schirmers and the Steinways were good friends, since both families were in the music business and in no way competitors. In fact, both families had emigrated from Germany at about the same time—as a result of the Revolution of 1848—had settled near each other in the West Fifties in New York, and had moved together into the Dakota. Many Schirmer parties overflowed into the Steinway apartment, and vice versa. A number of these entertainments were musical in nature, and every important composer or performer who passed through New York was entertained at dinner by the Schirmers, and visiting artists were always eager to step next door to try out one of Mr. Steinway’s new pianos.

  Once the Schirmers gave a dinner for the composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who was passing through on an American concert tour. After dinner, thinking that Tchaikovsky might be pleased with the view, Mr. Schirmer took him up to the roof of the Dakota and pointed out the park below and the city lights beyond. Tchaikovsky, whose English was limited, misunderstood the whole experience and came away with the impression that the entire Dakota was Mr. Schirmer’s house. “No wonder we composers are so poor,” he wrote in his diary. “The American publisher, Mr. Schirmer, is rich beyond dreams. He lives in a palace bigger than the Czar’s! In front of it is his own private park!” In The Life & Letters of
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, by Modeste Tchaikovsky, a letter is quoted in which the composer also speaks of the Schirmers’ “house”:

  Schirmer took us on the roof of his house. This huge, nine-storied house has a roof so arranged that one can take quite a delightful walk on it and enjoy a splendid view from all sides. The sunset was incredibly beautiful … We sat down to supper at nine o’clock … and … were presented with the most splendid roses, conveyed downstairs in the lift and sent home in the Schirmers’ carriage. One must do justice to American hospitality; there is nothing like it—except, perhaps, in our own country.

  Still, a number of Mr. Schirmer’s relatives thought that the Schirmers had chosen a very peculiar address. Mrs. W. Rodman Fay, for example, who is Gustav Schirmer’s granddaughter, recalls that she was “bundled up in scarves, sweaters, coats, mittens, long woolen underwear and heavy boots” for the carriage ride uptown to see her grandparents for the required ritual of Sunday dinner. “My mother was always sure I’d catch cold going way up there,” she says. “To her, it wasn’t a trip. It was a journey.”

  Others of the building’s early tenants, meanwhile, were ordinary, successful, unartistic businessmen and their families. There was Alexander Kinnan, for example, who was president of the Union Dime Savings Bank, and Adolph Olrig, another banker, and Samuel Hamilton Kissan, a member of the Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange. William Pipsey was a woolen merchant, Alfred J. Cammeyer made shoes, Tarant Tatum was a lawyer and commodore of the New York Yacht Club. Calvin H. Allen was president of the Union Copper Mining Company and of the Western New York and Pennsylvania Railroad, and William Arbuckle Jamison was a sugar refiner and a director of the Chase National Bank. Two spinster sisters named Adams were also early Dakotans, but they were no kin to the redoubtable Adams clan of Boston. Their money came from Adams Chewing Gum. Then there was Mr. C. F. Bates, who was a sportsman of the era and also something of an eccentric. Early Dakotans chuckled at the odd way Mr. Bates drove himself home in his tandem dogcart (a horse-drawn vehicle, not dog-powered). Bates always handled the reins himself, while his two coachmen sat stiffly facing the rear and his driver sat idle at Mr. Bates’s side in front.

  The new style of New York society that families such as the Schirmers began to represent was catching on—particularly on the West Side. The Dakota, fully rented before it even opened its doors, seemed to be a big success, though no one but the Clark family knew that the building had not yet managed to turn a profit. Ground was being broken for other luxury apartment houses, or “family hotels.” In the Dakota’s wake came the Osborne on West Fifty-seventh Street, which, because of its proximity to Carnegie Hall, quickly became a truly “artistic” building, much favored by musicians and composers. Then came the New Century Apartments on West End Avenue, the Graham Court on Seventh Avenue, the famously gingerbread Dorilton on West Seventy-first Street, the wedding-cake Ansonia on Broadway, and the Majestic and the Beresford on Central Park West. Taking their cues from the Dakota, all these buildings offered huge rooms, high ceilings, plentiful fireplaces.

  The West Side, it suddenly seemed, was becoming a Mecca for those who preferred apartment living, and were choosing a social life independent of the rules and rituals of the Four Hundred. In fact, the whole mood of the West Side had become one of airy independence—by no means an attempt to answer or defy Mrs. Astor’s version of “society,” but simply to be free of it and to create a social milieu, and neighborhood, that would be unrestrained by the rest of New York. West Side apartment living might not be really fashionable, but it was becoming, to use a term that was then coming into use, “smart.” (That term, in fact, describes the character of the Dakota as it was to evolve over the years.) To be smart implied a who-cares? attitude, and a bit of daring. The Dakota’s private tennis and croquet courts were daring and innovative in themselves. Tennis was by no means the universally popular game that it would become, and croquet was downright avant-garde—even, to Victorian New Yorkers, a bit risqué. (“Croquet,” a social critic of the times had ominously warned, “can lead to things.”) The narrow streets in the western portion of Greenwich Village might be becoming the “Bohemian” quarter. But the Upper West Side was becoming Bohemian with, as an addition, more than just a touch of class.

  The Dakota had also started a vogue for naming West Side apartment houses after Western states and territories. Soon there would be luxury buildings called the Nevada, the Montana, the Yosemite and the Wyoming.

  Much West Side land was being set aside for new schools, churches, hospitals, and other public and cultural institutions. By 1897 Shearith Israel synagogue, the worshiping place of America’s oldest and proudest Jewish congregation, had established itself in elegant new headquarters on Central Park West at Seventieth Street. A year later the Fourth Universalist Society—now the Church of the Divine Paternity—had come to the southwest corner of Seventy-sixth Street and Central Park West. Among the church’s more prominent worshipers was Andrew Carnegie, who regularly attended Sunday services there. Within a few years the New-York Historical Society was building its splendid new headquarters on the opposite corner. The Society for Ethical Culture, with its church and adjoining school, occupied the western flank of the park between Sixty-third and Sixty-fourth Streets, and further uptown on Eighty-eighth Street, the Walden School, considered a pioneer in progressive education, was built. The Dutch Reformed Collegiate Church and its adjacent, and more traditional, Collegiate School had come to West End Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street in 1892. The latter had been in continuous operation since 1638, when Manhattan was still a Dutch colony, and both the school and church remain notable examples of the gabled Dutch architectural style. All these institutions were designed to serve the growing numbers of what the New York World called “the Neo-Cliff Dwellers of the Northwest,” whom Mrs. Astor would have simply dismissed as nouveaux riches.

  By 1890 the Dakota’s grand façade still faced the shacks and shanties, chicken coops and pigsties of squatters in the park. Opposite the Dakota’s entrance on Seventy-second Street stood a vacant lot enclosed by a ramshackle picket fence, a half-hearted attempt to keep out more squatters and their livestock. (Squatters would remain a problem until as late as 1894 when the Hotel Majestic—now replaced by the Majestic Apartments—was built across the street from the Dakota.) To the west of the Dakota lay a heap of rubble where horse-drawn carts delivered bricks and mortar for the construction of the Olcott Apartments, which would become the Dakota’s first real neighbor. A number of nearby West Side streets still conveyed something of the air of a shantytown, with open cesspools, blacksmith shops and cheap saloons. All this the Dakota managed somehow grandly to ignore, for New York was already becoming a city unique for the fact that, even in the finest neighborhoods, the wealthy and the poor lived cheek by jowl.

  At the same time, north of Seventy-second Street, and particularly along West End Avenue, a number of expensive private houses were being built. Edward Clark and Henry Hardenbergh had helped lead the way when Clark had commissioned the architect to design a row of town houses on the north side of Seventy-third Street, to create an instant neighborhood for the Dakota. Several of these houses are still there. Architecturally, these new buildings seemed to have a special exuberance and flair. On the older, stolider and more conservative and conventional East Side, builders had lined the streets with uniform, traditional high-stooped houses, all of the same stone, and in the process the East Side had acquired a certain brownstone monotony. But as the Elegant Eighties gave way to the Gay Nineties, the new West Side houses began to display an originality and spontaneity of style. Most were built on the so-called “American basement plan.” The high, old-fashioned front stoop was abandoned, and a visitor entered on street level into a large, formal reception hall. A staircase led up to the sitting room, music room and dining room on the floor above. On the upper two floors—usually these houses were four stories tall—were “boudoir bathrooms.” Kitchens were placed in the basement, and
the second-floor dining rooms were served by dumbwaiters. Often these town houses had gardens in the rear, but these spaces were frequently used for extensions to provide other rooms—smoking rooms, libraries and additional bedrooms.

  The most obvious difference about these new West Side houses lay in their façades. The East Side brownstone traditionally had a flattened roofline and symmetrical rectangular windows. The new West Side houses had gabled, dormered, peaked or pyramid roofs, bay windows often of stained glass, arched doorways. Instead of displaying a dreary brownstone sameness, the new houses were faced with a variety of materials, with everything from whitest marble to blue-gray sandstone, with brick that ranged in color from gray to the Dakota’s own pale yellow, from the softest rose to the deepest red. The new architectural individuality gave the West Side a sense of variety and fun that the East Side lacked. Going up to the West Side in 1890 felt like entering an entirely different city, one with its own special mores, customs, usages and social tone.

  More than three quarters of a century have passed, and the West Side still remains “different.” Different—but not fashionable. For all the dreams of the early builders and developers (the grandeur that was planned for Central Park West, for West End Avenue, for Riverside Drive), the West Side never caught on nor achieved the social acceptability of the East Side. Though there is little logic to it, many of the sober East Side town houses have survived as elegant private residences, while the more fanciful West Side houses have for the most part been divided into apartments or rooming houses. The huge mansion that Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark (daughter-in-law of the original Edward Clark) built in 1900 of white marble and red brick on Riverside Drive—it had a colonnaded private bowling alley—is gone. So is the Schwab mansion which was just down the street from Mrs. Clark. The East Side palaces of Andrew Carnegie, Otto Kahn, Henry Frick and J. P. Morgan still stand, though they have been put to other uses.