Life at the Dakota (15 page)

On Sunday of the crucial weekend, four men—Gross, Jackson, Grimm and Glickman—sat down to lunch at the then all-male Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, and quickly got down to business. Yes, Louis Glickman was interested. He knew the Dakota well. He had a number of friends who lived there. He agreed that the Dakota was a landmark, unique to New York, and should be saved. He was also particularly interested in the Dakota's parking lot which adjoined the building's west side, and which occupied nearly as much acreage as the building itself.

The parking lot had originally contained the building's private tennis and croquet courts. It had also been the site of a rose garden, and the roses had done particularly well, apparently because the garden was planted above the Dakota's steam boiler room, sunk in the soil beneath. There had also been a grassed play area, suitably fenced, for tenants' children, and a private grassed run for tenants' dogs. During World War I, Dakotans had turned a plot of this land under and had planted peas, potatoes, asparagus, carrots, cauliflower and lettuce in their own patriotic little victory garden, “to help our country in its time of need.”

In the early days of the Dakota, west-facing apartments—even though the west side of the building contained the basement service entrance—were in great demand not only for the garden view but because turn-of-the century women liked to sit in their windows overlooking the tennis courts to observe, for example, which ladies wore short skirts and which gentlemen removed their shirts.

By 1960, however, the rose garden and the tennis courts were just a romantic memory shared by a few old-timers. During the Depression, in order to supply the building with more revenue, this entire area had been converted to the more mundane use of parking cars. At the time, Mr. Stephen Clark, accompanied by his uniformed chauffeur carrying a lap robe, had personally visited his tenants to convey the sad news, saying, “In New York, all good things must go.” During the 1960 Christmas Crisis his words echoed ominously.

Mr. Glickman wanted to be sure that if the building were sold, the parking lot would go with it. He was assured that it would. He then came up with a proposition. Glickman proposed to offer the Clark Foundation $4,600,000 for the property, slightly more than the $4,500,000 that had been purportedly offered by Zeckendorf. Glickman, who was then in a position to do so, would offer the Foundation cash.
He would then arrange for mortgage financing and set up a procedure whereby the Dakota's residents could buy individual apartments back from the Glickman Corporation for a total price of $4,800,000—a profit to Glickman of a mere $200,000—thus turning the building into a co-operative, owned by tenant shareholders. To Messrs. Gross and Jackson, $200,000 seemed a modest price to pay. There seemed to be very little time in which to find another savior, and here was Louis Glickman, with cash, offering immediate salvation. The details of making the building a co-operative could be worked out over the long months ahead, but Louis Glickman was the bird in the hand.

Louis Glickman also wanted the parking lot, but to Gross and Jackson, in their agitated state, this seemed the easiest of things to give up. They agreed that if the deal went through, the parking lot would be Glickman's. The two men returned to another anxious gathering of tenants and announced that a man had come forth to help them save the building, and that his name was Louis J. Glickman.

Considering the number of strange occurrences that have punctuated the Dakota's long history, it is not surprising that the story of the Christmas Crisis of 1960 should contain a puzzling mystery of its own. The mystery revolves around two questions. The first: Was the Dakota, despite the certainty of its tenants during those anxiety-ridden days, ever really threatened with demolition? And the second: What were the precise roles of the two New York real estate men, William J. Zeckendorf and Louis J. Glickman?

What is certain is that on Monday morning following the Plaza lunch Mr. Glickman offered the Clark Foundation $4,600,000 cash for the Dakota and the parking lot. The Foundation accepted Glickman's offer, and Glickman, as he had promised to do, embarked upon the long process—it would take the better part of the following year—of selling the building back to the tenants as a co-operative, keeping the parking lot for himself. This he was soon able to sell for $2,000,000 to the Mayfair Corporation, which quickly drew up plans to erect a twenty-seven-story apartment tower where the rose gardens had been and where ladies and gentlemen of another era had played tennis and croquet. The Mayfair Tower, of course, would throw the entire west flank of the Dakota into permanent shadow, to the dismay of all Dakotans with west-facing apartments.

Though there were still misgivings in the building—some tenants felt that they could not afford to buy their apartments, while others knew that maintaining their apartments as co-operatives would cost them far more in monthly charges than they had paid in rents—there was still the undeniable relief that Glickman had saved the Dakota from the grasp of Mr. Zeckendorf and his wreckers' ball.

Time plays tricks on memories to be sure, but at least one Dakota resident has an entirely different recollection of what happened. According to Mrs. Henry Blanchard it was not Mr. Zeckendorf who announced he was buying the building and going to tear it down but
Mrs.
Zeckendorf. Winifred Cecil Blanchard and her husband are well-respected, if not commanding, figures at the Dakota. He has been called the building's unofficial nursemaid and she, a former operatic soprano of some note (and before her marriage to Blanchard, the Baroness Mazzonis di Pralafera) is still, despite a lingering illness, an ample, cheerful woman of easily elicited opinions. “I remember it perfectly,” she says. “Mrs. Zeckendorf came up to me and said, ‘My husband has just bought your building, and he's going to tear it down.' That was when we all panicked.”

Mrs. Zeckendorf denies that she ever made such a remark.

Mr. William Zeckendorf has since died, but Mr. Louis Glickman is still alive and very much in the real estate business. Today Mr. Glickman says, “Bill Zeckendorf was never involved
at all.
Not in any way. He was never in the picture, not even for a minute. People may think he was because he and I had put together a couple of deals before that, and people associated my name with his, and vice versa. What's more, there was
never
a question of tearing the building down. It just wouldn't have been feasible. The building is built like the Rock of Gibraltar. It would have cost more to tear it down than the property was worth. The people at the Dakota came to me because the Clark Foundation wanted to sell it and they needed my know-how to help them turn it into a co-op. They were babes in the woods. I helped them pull it off.”

But if there was “never a question” of tearing the building down, and if William Zeckendorf was “never involved,” then who made that Friday telephone call to Ernest Gross, saying he was Zeckendorf, the “new landlord,” with the thinly veiled threat of demolition? One cannot question the honesty nor the memory of Ernest Gross. Perhaps
the Christmas Crisis, the whole panic, was engineered by someone else as part of a deception, a hoax on someone's part to get the building disposed of in a hurry.

To confuse matters even more, Grace Jackson, C. D. Jackson's widow, today has yet another set of recollections about the crucial events of December 1960. According to Mrs. Jackson, Mr. Zeckendorf called Mr. Jackson, not Mr. Gross, to say, “I'm your new landlord.” Furthermore, Grace Jackson blames the whole crisis on the shilly-shallying tactics of Matthew S. Ely & Company, the real estate firm that had been handling the building. “We'd asked the Ely people to make an offer to the Clark Foundation long before Zeckendorf called C. D., told him he'd paid his earnest money, and was going to close the deal the following Monday morning. Later, Ely explained that he'd never submitted our bid because he knew he couldn't match Zeckendorf. After that we got rid of Ely.” In a story that now has more versions than
Rashomon,
it is possible that the actual truth will never be known.

Experts in the field of New York real estate, meanwhile, point out that William Zeckendorf would not have had the $4,500,000 he allegedly offered to buy the Dakota in 1960. By that year the affairs of Zeckendorf and his company, Webb & Knapp, were already becoming hopelessly tangled. Zeckendorf had by then vastly overextended himself, and had begun his long toboggan ride to eventual disgrace and the bankruptcy courts.

But if Zeckendorf was indeed involved, it might have been as a “front” for someone else. By 1969 he had taken to doing a bit of this—pretending to be interested in a property in order to soften the market for another buyer, or to inflate the price for a seller. But in the Dakota's case, if he was fronting for someone, whom was he fronting for? The Clark Foundation? Certainly the Clark Foundation wanted to divest itself of the Dakota promptly, if necessary to the first bidder, and the Foundation had never shown much interest in what would happen to the building. Louis Glickman? Glickman and Zeckendorf had indeed worked together on deals in the past, and both were known for putting together deals of Byzantine complexity.

As for the Dakotans themselves, human beings, in times of crisis, often tend to create their own myths, monsters, demons and ghosts out of their collective fears. At the same time, people usually prefer to believe that they are their own heroes, that they are in control even as
they are being controlled by circumstances. Twenty years later William Zeckendorf is still the one most often cited as the villain who forced the Dakota to decide whether or not to become a co-operative on such short notice. To others the villain was Glickman, and even those who view him as a savior are quick to add that he was a savior who had his price. In the minds of a few people the shades of Zeckendorf and Glickman have become blurred and are indistinct from one another.

A few things are certain. In the jungle of New York real estate, lambs often unwittingly lie down with lions. If the Dakotans, the lambs, had possessed the shrewdness and technical ability to co-op the building themselves, they would have saved themselves a lot of money. If the Clark Foundation, a charitable institution, had been charitable enough to help the Dakotans in their time of need and to assist them in turning their building into a co-op, the Dakotans would have saved money and the Foundation would still have made money—on the parking lot, if nothing else. Louis Glickman, in the process of turning the Dakota into a co-operative, made $2,200,000.
*

New York, in other words, has long been a city of deals, trades and traders—a city constantly and often chaotically changing itself, tearing itself down and rebuilding itself on a gamble or a dare, never satisfied or certain that it is finished or, more often, that the ultimate financial risk and chance for gain has been achieved. In New York very little happens without someone—not necessarily the good guys—making money. It is a city, as a result, of reprieves and commutations of sentences, through each of which there is money to be made. In keeping with New York's special personality, Louis Glickman gave one special building another in a long series of reprieves, as well as made for himself—as he puts it with no small amount of pleasure—“one sweetheart of a deal.”

He had also, in his own eyes at least, redeemed himself in the eyes of New York's artistic community. But that seems to have been secondary. What counted was the deal.

*
Edward Clark had paid $200,000 for the land in 1877. When Louis Glickman was able to sell roughly half this land in 1961 for $2,000,000, it was clear that the value of West Side real estate had increased by 1,000 percent in a little more than eighty years.

Part Three

CO-OPERATIVE: “WITH OTHERS IN A COMMON EFFORT”

So long as people in the Park

Can point to the Dakota,

Blessed be the name of Stephen Clark

By his devoted quota
—

Blessed be the name of Stephen Clark

By his devoted quota!

FROM
“Ballad of the Dakota”

Chapter 11

After the Crisis

At The Dakota no one paid too much attention to what had been the fate of the earlier luxury apartment houses that had preceded it on the New York scene. The Stuyvesant had been successful for a while, but as the Irving Place neighborhood deteriorated the Stuyvesant lost favor and was converted into a rooming house. In 1957 it was razed. The more ambitious building at 121 Madison Avenue was gutted and stripped of its balconied façade in 1940, and its sumptuous duplexes were divided into two- and three-bedroom apartments. Though the building still stands, it offers no clue to its former social pretensions. The Spanish Flats, though the apartments were luxurious, was not an economic success. It was torn down in 1927, and the only reminder of it is the Navarro Hotel, not far from where the Flats once stood, named after the Flats' architect. By 1905 West Twenty-third Street was no longer fashionable, and the Chelsea Apartments was converted into a full-scale commercial hotel. Oddly, though the neighborhood is somewhat seedy, the Chelsea is still a popular stopping-place, particularly for visitors from Europe who find
its Old World, Edwardian charm comfortingly familiar.

At the Dakota, meanwhile, there had been occasional shivers of alarm about the building's future prior to the Christmas Crisis of 1960. Most of these anxious moments involved what a new Clark landlord might, or might not, want to do with the building. In the hierarchy of Clarkdom, Stephen C. Clark had been preceded as owner of the Dakota by his older brother, Edward Severin Clark, the very young man who had inherited the half-completed Dakota in 1882. Edward Severin Clark had been a shy, withdrawn child, and he grew to be a shy, withdrawn and gentle man. As an infant, he had been dropped by his nurse on a stone floor, and the damage to his legs had never properly been corrected. He walked with a pronounced limp. He preferred country to city life, and spent most of his time at Fenimore Farm, his estate in upstate Otsego County, where his friends affectionately referred to him as “Severino,” and where his employees respectfully addressed him as “the Squire.” He rarely visited the Dakota; when he did he usually stayed in one of the second-floor guest rooms. His huge sixth-floor apartment remained empty, its furniture under sheets and its Baccarat chandeliers in bags. His stays in the city were so brief that he did not feel it worth the trouble to take the big apartment out of its wraps. Nor did he ever seriously consider renting it. The fact that one of the largest spaces in the building produced no income seemed of no concern to him.