Life at the Dakota

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  At the time, however, Quinlan was not long out of law school. He realized that he himself knew little about real estate law. But he also suggested that Jackson, a magazine publisher, knew even less and that Ernest Gross, whose field was international law, might also be out of his depth in real estate. What Quinlan proposed was reasonable enough. He suggested that a disinterested outside counsel be brought in—someone who was an expert in the field of real estate and, in particular, cooperatives—to answer three general questions: Did the Dakota have to become a cooperative, or was there another solution? If becoming a cooperative was the only answer, what rights did the tenants who did not want to join the cooperative have? And if it became a cooperative, what were the best terms that could be arranged? Quinlan suggested a real estate lawyer named Lewis M. Isaacs, a former chairman of the New York City Bar Association, and considered an authority on cooperative apartments.

  C. D. Jackson’s response to this suggestion was to summon Quinlan to his apartment, “rather in the fashion he’d use to summon a copy boy up to his office,” says Quinlan. “He sat me down, and said, ‘Now just what are you trying to do? What are your real motives in this? What do you expect to get out of this?’ I felt insulted, and I told him so.” Mrs. Jackson employed a somewhat different tactic. Encountering Quinlan’s mother in a hallway, Grace Jackson said to Grace Quinlan, “Your son is such an interesting young boy.” The two Graces smiled thinly at one another and parted.

  By June 29 a considerable head of steam had been built up and a full meeting of the building was called. For this, Bill Quinlan appeared with Lewis Isaacs, whom he had hired on his own. From a psychological standpoint this may have been a mistake, because it was the first time that an unknown outsider had been brought into the proceedings, and to the highly charged Dakotans any outsider seemed to be coming from the enemy camp. Suddenly the arguments from Quinlan and those who backed him began to seem not only harebrained but arrogant and hostile. The meeting began stormily.

  Then C. D. Jackson asked for the floor. Jackson was a man well versed in the uses of politics and oratory. He had made his way upward through the corporate jungle of Time, Inc., and was one of Henry R. Luce’s right-hand men. (He had done so, furthermore, against no small handicap because, as it was mentioned earlier, C. D. Jackson was Jewish, and few Jews had been able to achieve positions of importance in Mr. Luce’s empire.) Mr. Luce particularly admired Jackson’s ability as a public speaker, for Luce himself often became inarticulate and ill-at-ease behind a lectern.

  In a voice heavy with emotion, Jackson began with a recital of the parlous events the building had endured during the preceding months—how, late one Friday afternoon on December 16, 1960, Mr. William J. Zeckendorf (Jackson pronounced the name with loathing) had made an offer to the Clark Foundation, had given the Foundation until Monday noon to accept it, and had planned to tear their precious building down; how, moving quickly, he and Gross had met with Louis Glickman, who had agreed to make the Foundation a better offer—out of his own pocket—and had been able to get the Dakota’s death sentence postponed. Now Glickman was in the final stages of turning the building into a cooperative, and all his noble work was being undermined and undone by William Quinlan. Tears welled in his eyes as he spoke, and Louis Glickman quietly dabbed at his cheeks with a white handkerchief. It was Jackson’s finest moment, and when he finished, the meeting rose to its collective feet and cheered.

  An angry-faced Mr. Quinlan then asked to speak. He was greeted by jeers, boos, hisses and catcalls, along with cries to “Make it short!” He sat down without a further word. Then Ernest Gross stood up to make his own stirring speech, in which he concluded, “Each of you—each and every soul in this room—must make up his or her own mind whether or not to cross the Rubicon!” This was greeted with more cheers, and in a frenzied scene of shouting, yelling, jeering, stamping, chair-banging, with motions being made, seconded and withdrawn, the June 29 meeting broke up.

  By July 10 more than the required 35 percent of the tenants had agreed in favor of the cooperative plan. But as late as mid-September Bill Quinlan was still articulating his objections, refusing to buy his apartment, refusing to move out, still talking about squatters’ rights—as he would go on doing until, in the end, he faced the fact that squatters’ rights did not apply. On October 12 a “gala party” was announced, held in the Dakota’s courtyard, and all the tenants and new stockholders in the building were invited. In a gracious gesture the builders of the Mayfair Tower next door were also invited. For the occasion all the staircases and window ledges of the building were decorated with lighted candles. The party was black tie. Cocktails were served at the Henry Blanchards’, and dinner was at Mrs. Davenport West’s. Zachary Scott, arriving late, rushed upstairs to get into his dinner jacket. People sat on floors and on the stairs, and at the end of the evening—since it was nearly a year since the Christmas Crisis had occurred—a huge birthday cake to the Dakota was brought out, sprouting a single candle.

  A month later, on November 15, 1961, the Dakota made its formal transfer from the Glickman Corporation into the hands of the stockholders of the Dakota, Inc. And the Quinlans began making preparations to move out.

  There would be other empty apartments now besides the Quinlans.’ The Dakota, which had been so proud that it had never had to advertize or hang out an “Apartments Available” shingle, now found it practical to do so. The new board of directors ruled against a shingle, but it did agree to advertise. The Dakota’s first ad, in December 1961, did its best to be both persuasive and dignified. It read:

  THE DAKOTA

  NUMBER ONE WEST 72ND STREET

  FACING CENTRAL PARK

  THE NEW YORK TRADITION THAT IS

  NOW A COOPERATIVE

  Because it is The Dakota, it is a residence of established worth. Because it is The Dakota, it is the original rather than an attempt at a revival. Because it is The Dakota, it is a tradition in elegance that remains unique in New York’s social history. At long last, the great iron gates are open again to apartment seekers. Apartments of impressive size, each with its own master-pieces of decoration. You are invited to inspect the few apartments still available, by appointment with the agent.

  Though the Dakota was now indeed officially a cooperative, there were a few loose ends. There was the question, for example, of what to do with the empty, cavernous dining room on the ground floor. Now that every penny counted, the old dining room seemed a particularly flagrant example of wasted space. There was interest on the part of the Explorers’ Club to acquire the dining room as a meeting place, but the tenants were reluctant to accept the in-and-out traffic of strangers and outsiders that a club house in the building would involve.

  Designer Ward Bennett, meanwhile, had a novel idea for creating an apartment where none had existed before. In the pyramid-shaped central gable that rose above the roof, which had previously been a storage area, Bennett proposed to insert a north-facing skylight and to design a novel living space. The result was a dramatic rooftop aerie with views in all directions. Within the pyramid he built a four-room duplex, the two levels connected by a spiral staircase. The base of the Dakota’s massive central flagpole now extends upward through the center of Bennett’s dining-room table up through his ceiling. On windy days his dining room creaks like a ship at sea.

  But other problems were less easily solved. Most Dakotans had never ventured above the seventh floor. After all, there was no need to. Floors eight and nine, in the original plan, had been designed to contain a great many tiny servants’ rooms, laundry rooms, storage rooms and attics, but the eighth and ninth floors were not at all alike. The eighth floor had become a kind of social buffer zone between the luxuries of the seven floors below and the austerities of the ninth floor. Several attractive apartments had been created on the eighth floor, including those of Rex Reed, Sheila Herbert, Edward Downes and David Marlowe, but much of this floor consists of single rooms, without kitchen or housekeeping facilities, connected b
y a maze of hallways. The ninth floor, on the other hand, is nothing but cells, many of them without windows, and is almost relentlessly dreary. On the ninth floor one felt as though one had left the Dakota and New York completely, and had stepped into the passageways of some strange, gone-to-seed hotel in the British Midlands. Bare light bulbs dangled from broken sockets. Plaster sagged from long-ago leaks. The bare pine floors were embedded with decades of dirt. And yet for all this, it seemed that quite a number of people were living in some of the unappetizing spaces on both eight and nine.

  Over the years the cubicles on the Dakota’s top two floors had accumulated what could only be described as leftover people. Some were former retainers of families who had died or, in a manner reminiscent of The Cherry Orchard, had moved away and forgotten to take their servants with them. Ambassadors, particularly from politically volatile Portugal, had had a way of being assigned to New York and then being called home. When they arrived they brought their servants with them, and when they were recalled—usually in haste—the servants were often left behind, or chose to remain in the land of golden opportunity. In the upper garrets of the building, a sizable Portuguese-speaking population had managed to collect. The top two floors were sometimes redolent with the pungent smells of Portuguese peasant cuisine, as olive-skinned women in kerchiefs and aprons carried steaming dishes through the narrow corridors between their rooms and several primitive communal kitchens where they cooked. Some of those people lived rent-free.

  The eighth and ninth floors had also attracted a number of young unmarried gentlemen who, for very little rent, had taken single rooms. Many of these young men had theatrical ambitions—as actors, dancers, chorus boys—and had been drawn to the Dakota by the fact that it was known as an address of stars. Often these young men had roommates who changed with some frequency. Others were former roommates whose sponsors had moved out and who had been left to fend for themselves.

  Moreover, over the years the Dakota had gained a certain reputation for inducing longevity among its tenants, and a number of the residents of floors eight and nine were far from the full bloom of youth. There was old Jimmy Martin, for example, who had once sung and danced for Flo Ziegfeld; after an accident in which his eye had been injured by a piece of flying scenery, he had worked as a window washer and later had become a valet for Mr. Frances La Farge when the La Farges lived at the Dakota. But the La Farges had long ago left the Dakota and had moved to a retirement community in Arizona. Jimmy Martin, no longer needed, stayed on in his attic room, surviving on occasional checks from Mr. La Farge.

  Then there was Mrs. Fenton Maclay, also elderly and unwell (for many years the housekeeper-companion for old Miss Leo, the building’s most notable eccentric), who shared garret space with her son Robert. In similarly cramped quarters—a former laundry room with a small unventilated closet for a kitchen—lived the ill and aging Browning sisters, Miss Edna and Miss Adele, spinster daughters of the founder of the Browning School, which had educated the Rockefeller brothers. The Brownings had been born in the Dakota in the early 1890’s.

  All these were people who, if evicted, would have absolutely no place to go and who, it began to seem, had indeed acquired some kind of squatters’ rights. The building, in what appeared to be its infinite kindness and tolerance, had found it simpler to let these strays and leftovers remain where they were. In fact, at the time the “tradition in elegance” became a cooperative in 1961, no one had the slightest idea of who—or how many—inhabited the cubbyholes on eight and nine. Furthermore, considering the confusing nature of the relationships that existed up there, and the mind-boggling labyrinth of corridors and passageways that connected them all, there was no easy way to find out. Just as New York had its congested Lower East Side, the Dakota had its floors eight and nine.

  The occupants of the lower seven floors were too busy congratulating themselves on saving the building to give too much heed to the status of the attic dwellers. But even for the more affluent First Class passengers on the S.S. Dakota there were problems. Inevitably, in the musicalchairs process, there had been slip-ups. For example, one tenant, Mrs. Allyn Bloeme, had never been served with the proper legal papers to purchase her apartment, and it had accidentally been sold to Frederick Victoria, the antiquary, who had planned to move into Mrs. Bloeme’s place and then sell his own. Alas, he discovered that Mrs. Bloeme was still the statutory tenant of her apartment, fully protected under the old rent-control laws, and that there was no way she could be legally evicted. Nor would Mrs. Bloeme volunteer to move out. She saw no reason to. For the next ten years Mr. Victoria would be in the unhappy position of having to pay the large—and steadily growing larger—monthly maintenance charges on Mrs. Bloeme’s apartment while she, as his legal tenant, continued to pay her modest controlled monthly rent to him. It was not until 1976 that Mr. Victoria was able to sell Mrs. Bloeme’s apartment to her—and at the 1961 price, a discouraging $5000. She, then, was able to sell her apartment for $68,288.

  On one of several visits to his unwanted tenant, in a futile attempt to get Mrs. Bloeme to change her mind, Freddie Victoria noticed that one wall of her apartment was covered with a collection of gold discs, rather like the gold and platinum records that musical performers receive when their albums have sold a certain number of copies. But Mrs. Bloeme’s discs were smaller than record discs. When Mr. Victoria asked about them, Mrs. Bloeme explained that the discs were trophies won by her son, who was World Frisbee Champion.

  “I think that’s rather appropriate to the Dakota,” says Mr. Victoria a little grimly, “that, in addition to everything else we have had the World Frisbee Champion in the building. It could only happen here.”

  *Curiously, considering the difficulties Mr. Glickman had obtaining a mortgage, he mistakenly remembers an entirely different mortgagor. “I got it from two Catholic fraternal orders in Chicago,” he says. “One was the Knights of Columbus. The other, I think, was the Knights of Pythias.”

  Chapter 12

  The Old-Timers

  Everyone agreed that something had to be done about old Miss Leo. There was great speculation about her actual age. In 1966 she said she was ninety-four, but some said she was really a hundred and three. Probably at that point even Miss Leo did not know for sure. No one knew much else about Miss Leo, for that matter. Where had she come from? What had brought her to the Dakota? What did she live on? All anyone knew was that she lived in one of the largest apartments in the building, seventeen rooms on the ground floor, and had lived there longer than most Dakotans could remember.

  One seldom saw Miss Leo. She hardly ever went out, and never had anyone in to her apartment. But when she did appear, her appearance was memorable—a tiny, shriveled woman with dyed red hair, more rouge and paint and eyeshadow than it seemed her little face could hold, wearing picture hats, turn-of-the-century chiffon dresses whose hems trailed on the floor, bedecked with rings, bracelets, necklaces and brooches; she caught the eye.

  Freddie Victoria spotted Miss Leo one blizzardy night. She was huddled in the archway outside the Dakota’s gate, waiting in the drifting snow for a taxi that was clearly never going to come. Freddie asked her if he could be of assistance. “My poor brother is trapped in his office because of the storm,” she explained. “I’m trying to get a taxi to go and collect him and bring him home.” Freddie Victoria’s car was parked nearby, and he offered to drive her to her brother’s office. “That would be very kind,” Miss Leo said. She gave him an obscure address on the far West Side in an area of abandoned docks and warehouses.

  In the car Miss Leo said, “My poor brother works all day in his office. He’s an inventor, you see. All day long he invents things.” When Victoria located the address—from the outside it looked like a derelict packing shed—there was Miss Leo’s elderly brother standing in the doorway waiting. Victoria then drove both Leos back to the Dakota. It was one of the few direct encounters anyone in the building had had with them.

  The next morning a case of D
om Perignon champagne was delivered to Freddie Victoria’s door.

  The older Miss Leo got, the odder she became. A neighbor named Katz became concerned about a persistent banging on pipes in his dining-room wall, and blamed the Quinlans’ children for the disturbance. When the Quinlan children were proven innocent, Mr. Katz had the entire wall taken out but was unable to locate the source of the banging. Eventually it was discovered. It was Miss Leo, next door, banging on the wall with her cane. She had already hammered a hole eight inches deep in the masonry. She passed her time that way, she said. She was persuaded to tack a piece of foam-rubber padding on her banging wall.

  Miss Leo had an obsession about germs, and wore plastic Baggies on her hands to protect them from contamination. One of few outsiders ever permitted to enter her apartment was a plumber, called in to repair a broken pipe. The plumber found his work considerably impeded by the fact that Miss Leo insisted on following him about, wiping down everything he touched with Lysol. Gradually, Miss Leo moved into a world of dream. Her apartment was unusual in that it had its own stairway to the basement. One night, the night porters were startled to see a pale apparition moving slowly through the shadowy arches and were sure for a moment that it was another ghost. But it was only Miss Leo, singing happily to herself. She was stark naked.

  Originally, Miss Leo and her bachelor brother had shared the big apartment with their mother. But Mother had departed long ago, and now it was just Miss Leo and Brother. No one ever discovered what Brother’s “inventions” were, but he had a conspicuous hobby. He collected medieval suits of armor, swords, lances and maces. “The collection is priceless,” Miss Leo used to say. “It is the most comprehensive collection of armor in the world. One day it will all go to the Metropolitan Museum.” Long before, one of Miss Leo’s favorite carriage horses had died, and she had had the animal stuffed, mounted and placed in her drawing room. He had then been fitted with a full suit of equestrian armor, and a suit of human armor was placed astride him, brandishing a lance. The stuffed horse and its rider were visible through Miss Leo’s Seventy-second Street windows and became objects of curiosity to passers-by. After a while it became common to identify the Dakota as “the building with the stuffed horse in the window.”