Life at the Dakota

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Just how the mystique that the East Side offered better addresses than the West evolved is not all that hard to fathom. In the late nineteenth century, it had a lot to do with the West Side’s physical distance from society’s traditional epicenter on Fifth Avenue, where New York ladies saw each other daily on their rounds of shopping. To New Yorkers, “The Avenue” was only Fifth Avenue. Then too, there was the elaborate and time-consuming ritual of visiting and calling-card-leaving, a rite so complicated that only the most dedicated could master its intricacies: which card should be left by a lady, which by a husband and wife, which should be left by children, how many cards should be left for each member of the family being called upon, which corners should be turned down, and when the letters P.P.C. should be inked in the lower left-hand corner of a card (pour prendre congé—to take leave, indicating that one was going out of town). A great deal of a woman’s day was spent depositing the little cards at the houses of her friends and, since a lady with a sable lap robe would not use the elevated trains to deliver her calling cards, and traveled instead in her coach-and-four, the West Side simply seemed too far away.

  Later, when America entered the era of the automobile, there was a noticeable tendency for the affluent of American cities to build their homes on the east side of town rather than the west. This occurred when it was noticed that with this arrangement, the motorist had the sun behind him and not blazing in his eyes when he drove to work in the morning, and behind him again when he drove home at night. But why this notion should have persisted in Manhattan to the present day—when hardly any New Yorkers drive themselves to and from work—is unclear. Compared with the airy views available to those who live on unfashionable Central Park West, those who live on the East Side’s fashionable Park Avenue live along a boring, airless tunnel of granite and glass, where apartment buildings merely look at one another. Beneath the surface of much of Park Avenue run the tracks of the Penn Central Railroad’s New Haven division, which causes Park Avenue buildings to tremble and china to rattle whenever a commuter train hurtles through the subterranean tunnel. Aesthetically, Park Avenue has almost nothing to recommend it. It is like Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive without the Lake, Boston’s Beacon Hill without the Common, San Francisco’s Russian Hill without the Bay, and Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia without the Square.

  On fashionable upper Fifth Avenue, meanwhile, where apartments have an identically graceful view of the park as can be had from Central Park West, park-facing apartment dwellers must close off the view with heavy draperies on most clear afternoons because of the descending sun’s punishing glare. Fifth Avenue is further handicapped by being the traditional course for New York’s periodic noisy parades, which not only stop all traffic on the street but leave it strewn with garbage, refuse, half-eaten hot dogs, discarded noisemakers and paper hats. Then, too, there is the fact that for a long stretch of upper Fifth Avenue the pungent animal stench from the Central Park Zoo permeates the living rooms of some of New York’s wealthiest people. Despite all this, the east side of Fifth Avenue between Sixty-first and Ninety-sixth Streets remains one of New York’s most desirable addresses.

  South of the park, New York’s most elegant stores—Saks, Tiffany’s, Gucci, Elizabeth Arden and so on—have been established on the east side of Fifth Avenue, mysteriously bolstering the East Side mystique. (An exception is Bergdorf-Goodman, which is on the Avenue’s west side; when the late Edwin Goodman opened his emporium there, he was warned that he was putting his store on the wrong side of the street where “no one wants to shop.”) Two almost identically appointed hotels face each other on opposite sides of Fifth Avenue—the Gotham on the west side and the St. Regis on the east. The St. Regis is fashionable, the Gotham is not. Even the New York Telephone Company, in the days before it began its relentless switch to an all-digit system, seemed to endow East Side telephone exchanges with grander-sounding, old-family names—TEmpleton 8, BUtterfield 8, REgent 7, ELdorodo 5, RHinelander 4, BEekman 4, and so on. To West Side exchanges went less flossy, more prosaic prefixes such as CIrcle, LEhigh, UNiversity and SUsquehanna.

  The most subtly pervasive differentiation, however, between the East Side and the West has been the fact that the West Side has long been considered “very Jewish.” In a sense—and in the sense that New York itself is very Jewish—it is. In the nineteenth century, New York society (with the exception of August Belmont, who “passed”) was markedly non-Semitic. By the early twentieth century, with hundreds of thousands of Russian and Polish Jews pouring into the city as a result of czarist pogroms, society became quite anti-Semitic. Even the older established German-Jewish banking families, a number of whom had built mansions on Fifth Avenue, looked askance at their “unwashed” co-religionists from Eastern Europe. And so, faced with the snobbishness of the East Side, where they were unwelcome, upwardly mobile East European Jews tended, as other immigrants had done before them, to settle on the West Side, bringing with them their traditional emphasis on education, culture and the arts.

  The West Side was rapidly becoming New York’s cultural center, but this fact in itself was a drawback to the area in the minds of some New Yorkers. To some people a close proximity to culture was offensive. New Yorkers have long placed a high priority on privacy—the quest for privacy amounts almost to an urban paranoia—and culture inevitably involved the coming and going of the public, as visitors streamed in and out of theaters, museums, schools and churches. Culture attracted out-of-towners, tourists, strangers, children, crowds.

  Not to everyone’s taste was the idea of living next door to public places, along with the people who ran and supplied them. Today, the stamp of culture on the West Side, with Lincoln Center as its focal point, is more pronounced than ever. The difference between the two sides of town is apparent at a glance. Along Columbus Avenue on an average balmy evening, throngs of people stroll on their way to and from theaters, concerts, lectures, restaurants. Across town, along the quiet stretches of Fifth and Park Avenues, and on the streets between, people come and go in limousines and taxis; there is virtually no pedestrian traffic after dark. Behind their closed shutters and drawn curtains, East Side residents have sealed themselves within lives that are sheltered from the street—locked-up, private.

  In the twenty-five years between 1885 and 1910 the West Side had become a neighborhood bristling with luxury apartment houses. Dozens followed the Dakota’s lead—the Graham Court, the Chatsworth, the Langham, the Manhasset, the Hendrik Hudson, the Prasada, the Kenilworth, the Apthorp, the Alwyn Court, the Turin and the Lucania to name just a few—while wealthy East Siders continued to live in private town houses. But the phrase “luxury apartment house” remained, in a social sense, something of a contradiction in terms. Luxury was not the equivalent of fashionability, and the proud and snobbish East Side was not going to be tricked into thinking that it was. The West Side had become a land where people lived in layers. It was a land of prosperous immigrants. It was a place where people rented, rather than owned, their homes—a world of public housing versus private. The men who lived at the Dakota might be presidents of banks and manufacturing companies, but they were still, to society’s way of thinking, “in trade,” and therefore associated with the working class.

  Finally, in addition to the social, there was the inescapable economic factor. Fashionability in New York did have a lot to do with cost, and everyone knew that West Side land had always been less expensive than East Side land. (The effect was circular: lower cost of land meant decreased fashionability, and vice versa; in the end, every New York story is a story of the price of real estate.) Everyone knew that one of the attractions of West Side apartment living was that for much less money, one could inhabit much more space. The corollaries to this were obvious: One lived on the East Side if one could afford the expensiveness of it, on the West Side if one couldn’t quite; one lived on the East Side by choice, on the West Side out of necessity.

  It was not until after 1910 that expensive apartment houses b
egan to be built in any number on the East Side. That was the year that the noisy, smoke-belching locomotive lines running into Grand Central Terminal were electrified, and the forty acres of unsightly railroad yards and track that ran along Fourth Avenue were covered over and paved. The result was Park Avenue—a wide, straight street that stretched northward to the horizon and had a parklike mall running down its center. With the trains gone, builders immediately began developing Park Avenue as a prime East Side residential address. Two blocks over, upper Fifth Avenue also benefited from the disappearance of the trains, and grand apartment houses began going up along the east flank of Central Park as well. These years prior to World War I accounted for 563 Park Avenue (1910), 635 Park Avenue (1912), 960 Park Avenue (1912), 410 Park Avenue (1914), 820 Fifth Avenue (1916) and 907 Fifth Avenue (1916), many of which remain among New York’s most fashionable addresses today. By then the population of Manhattan Island had grown so staggeringly, along with the cost of land, that tiered living was the only practical answer. And the new East Side apartment houses were elevated to instant fashionability because, after all, they were on the East Side.

  The new East Side buildings were noticeably different from the older West Side buildings, however, in at least two ways. Architecturally, they were much more restrained, their exteriors almost austere, less gaudily ebullient than West Side buildings, more in keeping with the East Side’s brownstone primness and propriety and aversion to show. Also, the new East Side buildings were not christened with exotic names. The practice had not gone out of fashion, exactly; it was just that it seemed “too West Side.”

  Chapter 6

  Snobs in Reverse

  The Dakota’s First Families—the F.F.D.’s, as they sometimes referred to themselves—were a predictable mix of an aspiring few (who might one day decide to elevate their status by moving to an East Side address) and a comfortable majority who were perfectly content with who they were and where they lived, and who simply ignored East Side snobbery. Gustav Schirmer’s son, for example—a grown man when his family moved into the Dakota—would marry and settle his family on the East Side, first on Gramercy Park and later on Murray Hill. Other families like the Steinways would refuse to be swayed by fashion and would remain loyal to the Dakota for two generations.

  Very quickly the Dakotans managed to develop a reciprocal snobbishness and sense of exclusivity about their particular principality on the Park and the acre of real estate upon which the Dakota rested. Dakotans often congratulated themselves for having the soft morning sunlight with which the building was blessed, and for escaping the fierce afternoon sunlight with which Fifth Avenue was cursed. A frequent comment heard in those days was, “It’s so windy on Fifth Avenue!” (Though why Fifth Avenue should be windier than Central Park West is anyone’s guess.) Though squatters’ shacks—at least in the beginning—were scattered on all sides about the hems of the Dakota’s lacy skirts, their presence was explained away with the comment that they gave the neighborhood “a pleasant rural air.” Another pronouncement that became popular at the Dakota was, “Fifth Avenue takes a turn at Seventy-second Street, crosses the Park to the Dakota, and then goes back East again.” But of course Fifth Avenue didn’t do that, and it was all an attempt at an illusion. Central Park West was not Fifth Avenue, nor would it ever be. In their hearts of hearts Dakotans knew that the Dakota had been built as an imitation of the rich New York life, not the real thing. The Dakota was designed to convey the impression that, though one was in an apartment house, one was really in a mansion. But it fooled no one (no New Yorkers, anyway), and this the Dakotans knew.

  Dakotans today continue to be more than a little defensive about their address and the ambiguous status of the neighborhood. The evening crowds on the sidewalks of Columbus Avenue are brought forth as a plus—there is a sense of safety, they say, in numbers, whereas one would feel frightened walking alone at night on a deserted East Side street. “At night,” they say, “the muggers and the burglars are all working on the East Side. No one would want to hurt us over here, because this is where the muggers live.” The neighboring side streets may be a little dingy but, loyal Dakotans insist that in this very fact they find a certain cozy charm.

  Paul Goldberger, for example, who is the architectural critic for the New York Times and, though a recent tenant, a thoroughly converted Dakotan, speaks of the “pleasant sleaziness” of the neighborhood. “I like to walk west to Columbus Avenue and then down to Lincoln Center,” he says. “All sorts of funny and interesting shops and boutiques are springing up like the ones along First and Second Avenues.”

  There are also in the neighborhood a great many small, family-run businesses—drug stores, meat markets, bakeries, food stores, fruit and vegetable shops and delicatessens, not to mention a wide variety of ethnic restaurants. “There’s no sense of neighborhood on the East Side,” Goldberger says. “Here, there is. The shopkeepers get to know you, and everyone smiles and waves at one another. It sounds silly to say that the West Side is friendlier than the East Side, but it’s true.”

  Paul Goldberger has Jo Mielziner’s former bachelor digs. “When I bought my apartment in 1976 it was really in terrible shape, which was odd. You’d think that a famous set designer wouldn’t have let his own place get so run-down. The kitchen was really primitive. To me, the thing that’s special about the building is that it’s the only exclusive, expensive and social building that has everything from big twenty-room spreads down to small studios and little rooms that have to share a bath. Still, the building and the address are not quite socially acceptable. It exists in a kind of social limbo. It’s a cross between a SoHo loft and a Fifth Avenue apartment house. If you’re a basic, boring WASP, you wouldn’t live here. And anyone who wouldn’t want to live in this building because it’s on the West Side, we just wouldn’t want living here.”

  George Davison-Ackley, a wealthy lawyer who has flung together two large Dakota apartments for his own bachelor quarters, says, “When I first moved here, and invited people to parties, I’d put One West Seventy-second Street on the invitations. East Side friends used to phone with regrets, just because they didn’t want to come to the West Side. So I started putting ‘The Dakota’ on my invitations. People never regret now. They come to see my apartment and the building, just because it’s the Dakota. Do you know that I have friends who actually keep score of how many Dakota apartments they’ve been inside?” In other words, Dakotans feel about the Dakota much the way, as it has been said, Bostonians feel about Boston: They believe in the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of the Dakota.

  Still, to East Siders there will probably always be something a little comic about the West Side. Like New Jersey, which is also funny to New Yorkers, the West Side is the butt of all the jokes. Even when the Dakota was informally christened the Dakota, it was done in a sense of fun-poking. But because any neighborhood, whatever its shortcomings or inconveniences, becomes a section of similarly moneyed and similar-minded people who prefer to live with their own kind, the West Side has survived all the ridicule. Where a person lives becomes a habit, usually a pleasant one, and whether an address is considered fashionable or not is simply a matter of taste. In New York, the West Side has attracted those who were willing to gamble, to take chances, to risk being considered offbeat. To live on the West Side took, and takes, a creative, pioneering view of life—qualities one often associates with the peculiarly Jewish élan.

  Today, easily half the people who live in the Dakota are Jewish. This was by no means always so. In the early days the building did not welcome Jews at all. The Majestic, across the street, became known as “the Jewish building.” The Dakota’s anti-Semitic policy probably stemmed directly from Edward Clark himself, and may have had something to do with Clark’s loathing of Isaac Singer and his allegedly Jewish heritage. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, when social anti-Semitism was particularly rampant in New York and elsewhere, it was said that there were no Jews in the Dakota. Then
one slipped in, a Mrs. Erich, a member of the distinguished Lehman banking family. She got by the screeners, it is assumed, because no one guessed that Erich could be a Jewish name. When it was discovered that, indeed, a Jew lived in the building, people said, “We do have Jews in the building—a perfectly lovely Jewish person.”

  Those days, happily, have more or less passed, though they did not pass all that long ago. Henry Blanchard has been active on the Dakota’s board since 1961. He says, “I never wanted to have anything to do with admissions policy. I remember once there was a board meeting up in the Jacksons’ apartment, and I was getting a little bored with all the talk about elevators. Suddenly, C. D. Jackson turned to me and said, ‘How do you feel about Jews in the building? How do we know who’s Jewish and who isn’t?’ I said I certainly didn’t care. I said, ‘Why ask me?’ I thought it was very odd, because C. D. Jackson was Jewish himself, though he never made a point of it. The name was originally Jacobson—his family had the Jacobson Marble Company. But, I suppose, working for Henry Luce, whose father was a Protestant missionary, it was better not to be Jewish.…”

  “Today, we’ve got a perfect New York melting pot—Jews, WASPS, and now with Roberta Flack we’ve got our black.” says Paul Goldberger. Miss Flack, of course, did not come into the building without a certain amount of huffing and puffing on the parts of some people. And some people have noticed that over the years the building has never had any black employees. Today, there is even an Arab in the Dakota—Princess Mona Faisal, who, when asked to give her occupation on a Dakota questionnaire, put down “Saudi Arabia.”

  Pauline Pinto is a strikingly beautiful redhead—Alabama-born, a former actress now working as a psychiatric social worker, divorced from a Spanish businessman, living alone in the Dakota with her three young sons, two by Mr. Pinto, the third by a previous marriage. The walls of her apartment are all covered with sleek vinyls in beiges and dark browns. Mirrors shimmer everywhere. At Pauline Pinto’s dining table one sits on long, low sofas covered with oyster-colored velvet. The apartment has, among other luxuries, a sauna. Sitting in a long, green Moroccan caftan, sipping a Scotch Mist, Mrs. Pinto seems the epitome of New York chic and glamour as she talks of what it is like to be beautiful, rich, single, and living in Manhattan.