Life at the Dakota (11 page)

After Mrs. Astor's death in 1908 no real New York social leader came forth to fill her place. In fact, New York had no real arbiter of
comme il faut
until 1922, when Emily Post's
Etiquette
was published.
*
Though
Etiquette
became a national bible of manners, the setting of
the book is very much New York. The famous Post characters—the aristocratic Wellborns, Oldnames, Titheringtons and Kindharts—are all New Yorkers. So are the ostentatious Miss Millions, the penny-wise Miss Smallpurse, the haughty Mrs. Toplofty and the somewhat raffish Mr. and Mrs. Worldly and Bobo Gilding. Some were even identifiable. (Bobo Gilding reminded many people of fun-loving Willie K. Vanderbilt.) No Gildings, Oldnames or Smallpurses lived at the Dakota, though Mrs. Post made at least one condescending allusion to West-Siders in her book, calling them “the new Spendeasy Westerns.” This was a good general description of the Dakota's tenants. Though not as rich as the Belmonts, Vanderbilts or Goulds, the early Dakotans were families of men who had made money—first-generation money.

The first actor did not move into the building until the late 1930's. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man named William Henry Pratt, whose professional name was Boris Karloff. At the time there was a feeling in some quarters of “There goes the neighborhood.” (“The building's going theatrical, but it doesn't know it yet,” said Miss Adele Browning.) Boris Karloff's good friend Basil Rathbone lived just down the street, and the two sinister-looking men made an awesome pair when they strolled together in the park—it was Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein. Mr. Karloff liked to tell a sad tale. Every Halloween, he used to say, he set out a bowl of candy for the building's trick-or-treaters. But no children ever rang his bell. They were too frightened of the heavy-lidded, wired-jaw monster he played in the movies.

Long before the arrival of Boris Karloff, however, there were members of the first Dakota families who felt that the building had hit upon sorry times, and that the Dakota—and New York in general—just weren't what they used to be. By 1932, for example, Miss Cordelia V. Deal had lived at the Dakota for nearly fifty years. She had moved into the building with her parents when it opened and now, a spinster in her eighties, she lived alone with an attendant. “Everything now is in the
moderne
style,” she complained to an interviewer at the time. Miss Deal pointed out William Eichhammer, the Dakota's head painter,
who had been with the building as long as she. Mr. Eichhammer had painted the walls for the original tenants in beautiful frescoes, friezes and French tints. “Now he's painting everything over, in plain white, because everybody wants
moderne
.”

Miss Deal was obviously a voluble woman as she recalled the old days. “During the summers the building was empty,” she reminisced. “Everybody went away, to Long Island, or Westchester, or the Adirondacks, or the Jersey Shore. If you went to Long Island, the husbands didn't stay behind. The whole city would be empty in the summers. Now if people go away, it's just a weekend. Goodness me, what kind of a summer is that? When I was a girl, I never
knew
what it was like to perspire, because in hot weather we were always at some cool shore place. People went to Europe for the summers, too, and each family had its favorite boat. In the country there were dress-up parties for the children. The country was very formal then. Women wore long dresses and pearls for picnics. People with children went to Atlantic City, too, at any time of the year, even in January, because Atlantic City was good for your health. Goodness me, every time I had a sniffle I was whisked off to Atlantic City to get the ocean breezes and the good sea air. The place to stay was the Marlborough-Blenheim.

“I remember there was something called ‘The Ladies' Mile,' which ran down Broadway from Twenty-third Street to Eighth. That was where the ladies shopped, in their long ‘walking dresses' every afternoon. The ladies had to pick up their skirts to cross the street, and gentlemen stood on the street corners to catch peeks of ladies' ankles. A. T. Stewart and Company was there, and Arnold Constable, and Lord and Taylor. But for quality, Altman's was the best. Later came Siegel-Cooper, on Sixth Avenue and Nineteenth Street. In the center of the store was a huge fountain with a statue at the center like the Statue of Liberty, all lit with colored lights. All around were little tables and chairs where they served ice-cream sodas that were the talk of the town. It was the place where everyone met. Everyone said, ‘Meet me at the Fountain,' and it meant Siegel-Cooper's.

“People were politer then, it seems to me. Mothers went for tea at Sherry's, and the children had hot chocolate. Young men sent young ladies candy from Sherry's. It came in lovely lavender tin boxes, and you saved the boxes to keep your toiletries and love letters and other treasures in. There was so much more service then. The manicurist came to the
house. The hairdresser came once a week to wash my mother's hair. If she were going to a ball, she came to
dress
her hair. The chiropodist came to the house. The dressmaker came to the house. People have taken to using colored people for servants now, but in those days they were always white. The maids were Irish or German, and the coachmen were usually Scotch, for some reason. Goodness me, we had a cook, a laundress, a chambermaid, a governess and a coachman, and we were not all that rich. For a while, Father had a valet. I remember when automobiles were a big issue. Some people refused to give up their horses. Father's first car was a 1905 Winton that opened from the back. There were no school buses. Fathers would drop the children at school on their way to the office. The Benjamin School was for girls, and Robert Louis Stevenson was for boys. Collegiate, Horace Mann and Ethical Culture were for intellectuals, which wasn't a very fashionable thing to be.

“When Mother and Father moved to the Dakota, it was brand new, and some people said they thought it was too ‘flashy.' But we loved it because of the Park. Every Sunday, we went riding in the Park, and the ladies rode sidesaddle. We went for picnics in the Park, and in the winter there was a pond for skating with a little house where you changed into your skates, and a boy who put your skates on for you. When you came in from the cold, they served hot chocolate in the little house. It cost a penny. Goodness me, looking back it seems to me as though I grew up on hot chocolate. In the summer the whole family would take the night boat to Albany. You left in the evening and arrived in the morning. It wasn't considered ‘fitting' to take your chauffeur on the boat with you, so the chauffeur drove up and met you in Albany with the car. Then we drove on to Lake Placid. That was just for August. In July we went to the Jersey Shore. There was a song I remember—

Why do they all take the night boat to Albany?

That's what's been puzzling me.

They say they go there just for the ride,

But all the same they travel at night …

“Nobody talked about crime. Nobody talked about security. Here at the Dakota no one bothered to lock apartment doors. There was some
talk I remember about bribery and corruption in the city government, particularly during the Boss Tweed period. I remember that Mother and her friends would have tea and talk about men and their mistresses. It seemed every man had a mistress. This was considered perfectly acceptable, as long as the mistress wasn't a member of one's own ‘set.' I remember hearing Mother say that one man at the Dakota had his mistress right here in the building.
That
was considered shocking. We were told never to speak to that woman, to that man, or to that man's wife.”

Of course Miss Deal was talking about changes in the city's style. In substance, the Dakota had changed not all that much. “Moderne” might have become the vogue, and people might be painting over frescoes, but Miss Deal was still one of the oldest living Dakota loyalists and would only depart, unwillingly, a few years later through the Seventy-third Street door.

For people like Miss Deal—in addition to the service and extraordinary cubic footage which the Dakota offered—the most attractive aspect of the Dakota's changelessness was the fact that, while the cost of everything else in the city of New York was going up, the cost of living at the Dakota had stayed just about the same. No one had given much thought to the dollars-and-cents reason for this, but it had a lot to do with the adoption, in 1913, of the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution authorizing taxes on the net incomes of individuals, and the progression principle, which was introduced five years later. By 1933 the Dakota was losing some $300,000 a year, and to the accountants who managed Edward S. Clark's huge estate the Dakota had become an interesting tax write-off.

The Dakota, however, in its dreamy way, had begun to believe that the low rents were maintained out of sentiment, out of some sort of humanitarian feelings that flowed from Mr. Clark in far-off Cooperstown. This seemed the easiest explanation for such gentle treatment. After all, the building had begun to accumulate a number of elderly people, such as Miss Deal, who lived on fixed incomes, and who could raise the rent on tenants like that? Rents were often arbitrarily arrived at and could be subject to negotiation. Once, when a long-time tenant, a Mr. Hartenstein, was undergoing financial reverses, the building's
management came to him and said, “Please don't move out—we'll lower your rent.”

In 1931 the building's manager was Mr. George P. Douglass, and when Mrs. Charles J. Quinlan was looking at an apartment that year, Mr. Douglass told her that the rent would be $4,000 a year. Mrs. Quinlan remarked that her husband might find that a trifle high. Mr. Douglass smoothly replied, “Why don't your husband and I have lunch, and we'll discuss it.” This, it might be remembered, was in one of the worst years of the Great Depression. While foreclosures and evictions were taking place all over the country—in farm communities in Nebraska and in luxury lakefront properties in Chicago—the Dakota complacently continued to take care of its own.

Mr. Douglass was succeeded by Mrs. Elise Vesley as the Dakota's “lady managerette,” and to her fell the task of screening prospective tenants. Her methods were whimsical, to say the least. When Ward Bennett, now a successful designer, was a struggling young sculptor looking for a place to live in the late 1940's, he learned that single rooms, which had formerly been servants' rooms, were occasionally available under the slanting eaves of the Dakota's eighth and ninth floors. He approached Mrs. Vesley for an interview. At the time, Bennett had become involved with Vedantism, the Eastern religious cult that was being promoted in the United States by Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda, and for his interview he happened to be carrying an Isherwood-Prabhavananda volume that he had just borrowed from the library. Mrs. Vesley, who, if she chose, could be quite frosty, was exceptionally cordial to Mr. Bennett. She showed him a room that she offered to let him have for forty dollars a month, including breakfast and maid service. Mr. Bennett then asked Mrs. Vesley if she would like him to supply references. “No references necessary,” said Mrs. Vesley, and tapped the Isherwood book. Mrs. Vesley, it turned out, was one of the leaders of the Vedantist movement in New York.

Mrs. Vesley had undergone a deep personal tragedy. Her handsome young son, the apple of her eye, one day had been struck down by a truck on Seventy-second Street, just in front of the Dakota, and killed. She never quite got over that and, as a result, was a bit peculiar and was always partial to the handful of children who were then in the
building. One of her projects was trying to maintain the Dakota's roof garden in its battle against the elements, and she also considered herself an authority when it came to matters of decorating. When a tenant decorated an apartment in a manner she disapproved of, she let the fact be known, which did not make her universally popular in the building. In addition to Vedantism, Mrs. Vesley believed in psychokinesis, and claimed that with the power of her mind she could move large objects. Once a tenant returned home from a holiday to find his living-room furniture completely rearranged. When he complained to Mrs. Vesley, who naturally had access to all apartments, she insisted that she had not been in. She had, however, been thinking about the poor arrangement of the furniture, and she admitted that the furniture might have been rearranged psychokinetically from her office.

With World War II came rent control, which fixed the Dakota's pleasantly low rates. But rent control, which made it difficult to raise rents, did not eliminate—at the Dakota, at least—the possibility that rents could be negotiated downward. When an antiques dealer, Frederick Victoria, and his wife were expecting their first baby, they went to the Dakota and Mrs. Vesley, looking for a larger apartment. Though they admired the apartment Mrs. Vesley showed them, the Victorias confessed that they could not afford the rent. Something about the Victorias had clearly struck Mrs. Vesley's fancy because she immediately said, “Then you can have it for whatever rent you're paying now.”

Though the Dakota had never offered anything longer than a one-year lease, the matter of leases was another that was treated somewhat casually. When the Henry Blanchards moved into their large fifth-floor apartment in 1954, the building's management cheerfully went about repainting and decorating to the Blanchards' specifications. Some time later, when all this was done, the management said to the Blanchards, “By the way, we haven't given you a lease yet. Do you intend to stay?”

Considering the pleasant coziness of the management-tenant relationship, it was not surprising that, from the beginning, the Dakota gained an astonishing record of tenant loyalty. Ninety percent of the building's original tenants remained there until they died, and in 1934, on the building's fiftieth birthday, two of the original tenants were still in residence—Miss Deal, in four rooms, and Mr. Maxwell D. Howell, in nine.