Life at the Dakota

by Birmingham, Stephen;

Where else the bounty of an age

  Where space was undivided?

  Where else the stately Otis cage

  By gentlewomen guided?…

  FROM “Ballad of the Dakota”

  Chapter 13

  Nuts and Bolts

  Like small towns and large cities everywhere, now that the Dakota was a fiscal entity of its own, no longer able to rely on Clark benevolence, one of the biggest problems the building faced was how to pay for the services it offered. What it had cost to staff and maintain the Dakota had never seemed to matter to the Clarks at all, and when the new resident-owners looked at the figures they came as something of a blow. In 1961, for example, the building had forty-five full-time employees, including three resident employees, or roughly one employee for every two tenant families—a crew-passenger ratio that had once been the boast of the old Queen Mary. To be sure, these people individually didn’t earn much in salaries—salaries seemed to have been frozen, like the rents, at an 1880’s level—and were making only $64 to $108 a week. Still, their wages added up to an annual payroll of about $225,000 a year, which seemed a staggering sum. The number of staff, it was decided, would have to be slashed by about one half.

  It was a difficult and painful moment. Dismissing an old and trusted employee is never a pleasant task, and many of the Dakota’s staff had never worked anywhere else, had grown old along with the tenants, considered the Dakota their home as well and were more like old family friends. The Dakota’s maids and porters had baby-sat for Dakota families in their spare time, had run special errands, had moonlighted as butlers, bartenders and canapé-passers at Dakota parties. Still, in the name of economy, something had to be done, and the Dakotans consoled themselves with the thought that, after all, these people would have their pensions to live on.

  So it was still another blow when the Dakotans discovered that the Clark family had never instituted any sort of employee pension or retirement plan at all. Nor had the Clark Foundation. Once more, the Dakotans appealed to the Foundation on the employees’ behalf.

  American charitable foundations, it has often been pointed out, may be in the business of dispensing large sums of money to the needy and the deserving, but in terms of the people who work for them they are notoriously tight. The Clark Foundation turned out to be no exception. When it was brought to the Foundation’s attention that these longtime employees had served the family and the Foundation well and deserved some sort of pension, the Foundation huffed and puffed. For weeks it dragged its heels, claiming that it had “no obligation” to the Dakota’s staff. The Dakota again approached Stephen Clark’s widow who, though she had no decision-making power, agreed to lend her influence to the cause. Finally, and with great reluctance, the Foundation agreed to establish a pension fund. It did so very begrudgingly and not at all graciously, writing to the Dakota’s board that, though it had “no legal responsibility” to take care of the employees, it would “in light of its charitable purposes” do so, provided such employees had “served faithfully” fifteen years or more. At the time, fourteen of the Dakota’s staff had been with the building fifteen years or longer; eight had served twenty-five years or more; twenty were over sixty years old, and nine were over sixty-five.

  The first to have to go, of course, would be the Mary Petty elevator ladies in their bombazine dresses. True, the elevator ladies, like Miss Leo’s stuffed horse in the Seventy-second Street window, had been one of the building’s enduring trademarks. Over the years the ladies had formed what amounted to their own little private club, and in their hours off they liked to gather in one of the basement rooms for tea and then read each other’s tea leaves. The doyenne of these women was Adela T. Ward, by then in her eighties, who bore a marked resemblance to Queen Victoria. But by automating and electrifying the elevators, the building would save $30,000 a year in labor and $16,000 a year in steam.

  In order to automate the elevators, the building now had to deal with the bureaucracy of New York City building, elevator and fire inspectors. The Dakota had supposed that even though the elevator ladies would have to go, the fanciful openwork mahogany elevator cages could be saved. They were the oldest residential elevators in New York. Also, they were most curiously engineered and operated on a system that involved, of all things, the radiators in individual apartments. The building was still heated by the original steam radiators, which were built under windowsills. The radiators operated on a conventional two-pipe system, but with a third, added line: under each radiator in the building was a metal pan to catch drippage, and from all the pans a mare’s nest of drainage lines ran down through the Dakota’s innards to the cistern in the basement. This cistern also collected rainwater from the roof through another network of drains, and this was the water that provided the elevators’ hydraulic power. Arcane though this plumbing arrangement sounds, it had worked successfully for nearly eighty years.

  To be sure, the elevators were extraordinarily slow, but they were also exceptionally beautiful examples of almost-lost cabinetmakers’ and millworkers’ arts, each detail meticulously hand carved, and they were genuine antiques. Architecture expert Paul Goldberger still insists that the old cages could have been saved. But a variety of city inspectors pronounced them unsafe at any speed (though they had operated without mishap for nearly eighty years) and decreed that if the elevators were to be automated, “modern” cages must be installed. Though Jo Mielziner did his best in designing the new cages to recreate the spirit of the old ones—reproducing the bronze Indian heads on the paneled walls—Dakotans were as sad to part with their elevator cages as they were to part with the ladies. The new elevators, it turned out, were as slow or even slower than the old, and were much more erratic in terms of stopping on wrong floors.

  When the old elevator cars were removed, the C. D. Jacksons asked for one of them. The Jacksons placed it in an archway between two rooms of their apartment where, with its little benches, it became a sitting alcove. Susan Stein thought she might use one of the cabs in her apartment too, and her father, MCA head Jules Stein, said, “If they’re free, take two.” So Susan Stein and her movie-producer husband, Gil Shiva, now have two elevators side by side in their apartment. The Shivas use the elevators as their bar, and twenty to thirty people can sit comfortably inside them. With the three old elevators being put to such imaginative uses, there was a sudden scramble for the fourth one, which, inexplicably, suddenly could not be found. Somehow, the fourth elevator had made its way out of the building. How this happened, or where it went, has never been determined.

  New York, meanwhile, was rapidly moving into the age of air conditioning. But at the Dakota, a building that was designed to resist changes of any sort, air conditioning turned out to present especially difficult problems. Apartments could be centrally air conditioned, but this was expensive and involved lowering ceilings, which Dakotans were loath to approve. Window units could be installed, but defenders of the building’s aesthetics considered these unsightly, and besides, they dripped water on the building’s façade and on the heads of passers-by on the street below. One of the earliest chairmen of the Dakota’s board of directors was Admiral Alan Kirk, a military man and decidedly a traditionalist. One of the first tenants to apply to the board for permission to install an air conditioner was Freddie Victoria, and Admiral Kirk’s response was, “I don’t have air conditioners. Why should anyone else?”

  An alternative to window units was through-the-wall air conditioning. These systems were less obtrusive since they fitted flush against the exterior walls of the building but they required the removal of masonry, some of it richly ornamental. Freddie Victoria applied again for a through-the-wall unit, pointing out that his apartment faced the back of the building where such an installation would be well away from public view. Once more his request was denied. Throughout the early 1960’s arguments about air conditioners continued, and tempers soared with the thermometer in a battle between modernists and preservationists. Meanwhile, several tenants went ahead
and installed through-the-wall units anyway, and some window units sprouted, particularly from windows at the rear of the building.

  In 1969 the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission officially declared the Dakota a city landmark. In its designation the Landmarks Commission said, “The Dakota … is one of the earliest and most distinguished apartment houses in the United States … Overlooking the northern end of Central Park, the Dakota simultaneously affords its residents a magnificent view of the Park and presents an impressive appearance to passers-by. Its richly varied skyline makes this building a prime example of late nineteenth-century picturesque eclecticism … With its massive load-bearing walls, heavy interior partitions and double-thick floors of concrete, it is one of the quietest buildings in the city.…”

  The Dakotans were initially delighted; they had, in fact, actively sought the landmark designation. Believing, rightly or wrongly, that they had helped the building narrowly escape the wreckers’ ball, the Dakotans believed that now that they were a landmark, the building would be preserved until the end of time. Besides, living in a landmark seemed to carry such cachet. A small bronze plaque was affixed to one of the Dakota’s Seventy-second Street cornerstones attesting to its special, hallowed status.

  But the Dakotans soon discovered that being a landmark was a mixed blessing, to say the least. Yes, the designation conveyed no small amount of intangible prestige to the address. But the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission offered no guarantee whatever that the building would be perpetually “preserved.” The Landmarks Commission had no budget from which to offer funds for the preservation of old buildings, nor did being a landmark entitle an old building to any sort of special tax relief. What it meant was that no exterior changes to the Dakota could be made without the commission’s approval. Ward Bennett could never have created his dramatic pyramid-shaped apartment with its two-story-high slanting skylight had he not done so before the building was declared a landmark. Furthermore, the Landmarks Commission could do little to prevent the Dakota’s eventual sale to a developer who might want to tear down the building and replace it with a modern, more efficient structure. If such a situation were to arise, the Commission would have just one year in which to find a buyer who was willing to preserve the building. Failing that, the Commission would have no choice but to allow the building’s sale to the developer.

  Other old apartment houses—including 810, 834 and 960 Fifth Avenue, and the San Remo and the Beresford on Central Park West—had been offered landmark status by the Commission and had resisted the temptation to accept it. So had the Osborne, at 205 West Fifty-seventh Street. In many ways, theirs was the more sophisticated decision. For the Dakota, it soon turned out, being a landmark was more of a burden than a boon. (In recent years some New Yorkers have begun to think of the Landmarks Commission’s activities as a series of dreadful jokes; in 1979, for example, there was outrage among certain of the city’s citizenry when the Commission designated as a landmark the subway kiosk at the corner of Seventy-second Street and Broadway.)

  The Dakota now had to deal with the Commission on every detail concerning its exterior, and the Commission was just another division of New York City’s bureaucracy with a foundation mentality. Among others, the question of air conditioners persisted. Once more, Freddie Victoria, a gentleman of persistence and also a man who believed in going by the rules, petitioned the Landmarks Commission for permission to install a through-the-wall unit, pointing out that there were already seven such units in the building. Once more, permission was denied. He next tried pleading his case in the press; he told the New York Times that he could not afford central air conditioning and that he felt that window units, which many Dakotans now had, obstructed light and views and sometimes required original windowpanes to be destroyed. “What is the point of having landmark preservation if one cannot have creature comforts,” he wanted to know, “and if there are no benefits from the stigma of its hardships?”

  Beverly Moss Spatt, the Commission’s chairman, replied that “in general” her agency would “not permit through-the-wall units where any architectural element will be destroyed.” Mrs. Spatt added that she would not have permitted the existing units if she had been chairman when they were installed. Taking Freddie Victoria’s side, Lauren Bacall was more outspoken. The Landmarks Commission’s attitude, she said, was “absolutely asinine. There is nothing as ugly as a window air conditioner. Unless we are going back to the Middle Ages, we should make living in the city as practicable and as palatable as possible in this age of electronics.”

  Freddie Victoria then tried another tactic and asked the Commission to let him install Thermo-Pane glass in his windows. Thermo-Pane, he felt, would help insulate his apartment from the summer heat as well as the winter cold, thereby cutting his fuel consumption and conserving energy. He pointed to the fact that his bedroom windowsills were already rotting from rainwater that was seeping in around ill-fitting windowpanes. The bureaucratic response from the Commission to this request was bizarre: “If the original architect had wanted Thermo-Pane glass in the windows, he would have installed them with Thermo-Pane.”

  Now Betty Bacall decided to throw herself full force into the battle to cool her apartment. Since no one in the building now had more experience in dealing with the Landmarks Commission than Freddie Victoria, she went to him for advice. Freddie agreed to take her case to the Commission. When Freddie appeared at the Commission’s offices at 305 Broadway, he explained that he had come on behalf of another Dakota tenant who wished to install through-the-wall air conditioning in her apartment. The commissioner looked bored and unreceptive to the idea. “The tenant is Miss Lauren Bacall,” Freddie said, and suddenly the commissioner looked more interested. After riffling through some files of landmarks regulations, the commissioner said hesitantly, “Will I get to meet Miss Bacall?” Freddie assured him that Miss Bacall would be happy to discuss the matter with the commissioner, and suggested that the commissioner “drop by for drinks with her on Thursday.”

  Before meeting with the commissioner, Freddie Victoria advised Miss Bacall to dress for the occasion in her sultry, sexy, movie-star best, and when the commissioner arrived on Thursday he was not greeted by the earthy, salty, sardonic and self-mocking woman—New York housewife and mother of three who usually tossed an old sweater over her blouse and slacks when she went out to walk her dog in the park—that the Dakotans knew as a neighbor. He was greeted instead by a radiant Lauren Bacall, the Hollywood Legend. She received permission to install her through-the-wall unit. To be sure, there were a few strings attached. She had to agree to save and store and catalogue and label all the bricks and stone removed to make way for her air conditioner, and to promise that if she ever vacated the apartment she would either restore the façade to its original condition or else secure an agreement from the new purchaser that he or she would do so.

  But she got her air conditioner—much, needless to say, to the disgruntlement of other tenants in the building who did not happen to be Lauren Bacall, and who continue to complain about how Miss Bacall got her air conditioner. Freddie Victoria, for instance, is still without air conditioning and still has rotting, leaking windowsills.

  The Landmarks Commission quickly became the Dakota’s albatross, and the ironies of the situation were not lost on the Dakotans. Earlier, various city agencies had insisted on condemning the splendid old elevator cabs as “outmoded,” and had forced the building to install modern ones. Now here was another city agency that was refusing to let them modernize anything at all. In 1973 the Dakota’s board decided that the building’s intricate roof was badly in need of repair. Slates had loosened and fallen off. The copper trim had come loose and, in some places, had corroded. There were leaks. Cast-iron chimney caps had broken off and finials and statuary needed attention. A roof is obviously an exterior detail, and so the Landmarks Commission’s approval was needed before any work could be undertaken.

  The Commission was nothing if not solicito
us in the matter. It pored over the Dakota’s original plans and brought in experts and technicians from a variety of fields—architectural, structural and historical. It spent months inspecting the roof, and when all the outside studies had been gathered and collated and cross-indexed, the Commission came up with its recommendation: a full restoration was what was needed. It would cost about a million dollars, which would amount to an average assessment of roughly $10,000 for each of the building’s tenant families. Collectively the Dakotans groaned. Ultimately, and only after a great deal of heel-dragging, the Commission agreed to a more modest patch job—one that would only cost about $160,000.

  But the roof was only the beginning. The new elevators were already in need of repair, and so was the central plumbing system. Altogether, an additional $500,000 was needed to attend to these urgent matters, and no one knew where the money was to come from.

  Some Dakotans argued that through the Landmarks Commission city funds should be made available to keep up at least the exterior of the old building. Restaurateur Warner LeRoy says, “I’m a great believer that the city should keep up the façades of landmarks. If the façade of the Dakota were sandblasted, it would be absolutely fantastic, one of those things that would keep the city alive.” But Commission chairman Beverly Spatt, while conceding that the tenant shareholders couldn’t afford to spend the kind of money needed, said that if funds were granted for the Dakota “then maybe two hundred other requests would come in, and I don’t think the city is prepared to handle such a situation.”

  Others suggested that a tax abatement would help give the building funds with which to do its own restoration. Economists pointed out that as the maintenance and operating costs of a building rise, a building becomes a less attractive place to live. In a spiral of rising costs the building could “succumb to success,” and would eventually have to be sold to a developer and destroyed—the very thing the Landmarks Preservation Commission was designed to prevent.