Life at the Dakota (16 page)

Perhaps because of his physical affliction, Severino Clark never married, and he devoted himself to philanthropies, among them a gymnasium and a hospital that he gave to Cooperstown. And since his apartment building never operated in the black, perhaps the Dakota could be added to his list of charities as well. He was proudest of his prize herd of Guernsey cattle, part of what was considered a model dairy farm. Most Dakotans had never met Severino Clark. After writing out their monthly rent checks to him, Edward S. Clark was forgotten.

Reassuringly, the rents were hardly ever raised. From time to time, from far off Cooperstown, polite suggestions came down from Severino Clark to the Dakota's manager:

Regarding the management of the dining room and kitchen for the coming season I would say, that while I do not wish to criticize Justin, or those who
were under him, I do feel that it will be for the best interest of all concerned to have an entire new force in that department, also the same as to the dining room, with the exception of Jean, who I would like to install in the second position and also to act as my waiter. However, if you find that this does not work satisfactorily it can easily be remedied later. I would also like to retain the baker, unless you have some good reason for making a change, for his work has always been most satisfactory; the rolls he makes have always been especially liked by my mother … it is not my wish to hamper you in any way with the management, as the responsibility rests with you.

In 1907 Clark commented on “the trouble we have experienced with noise from the dining-room pantry in washing the china,” and suggested that “perhaps a vestibule on the pantry side might prove sufficient.” The manager, Mr. Knott, replied that the passage between the dining room would be fixed, and added, “I may decide that it will be better to use that pantry for simply silver and glass and do all the dishwashing downstairs.” Dealing with help in those pre-union days was never a problem, as Mr. Knott informed Mr. Clark: “Whatever we do with the kitchen will be with the distinct understanding that the slightest dissatisfaction ends the time of the individual and possibly means a clean sweep.” Mr. Knott added that a laundry girl had fallen while stepping out of one of the elevators, but that the accident had been “by what seems to have been her own carelessness … Nothing broken except possibly a rib.” As for the young man who had been operating the elevator, “We discharged the boy.”

In other words, the stewardship of Edward Severin Clark remained kindly, paternalistic and distant, and few people who lived at the Dakota during those years had ever laid eyes on him. Then, in 1933, Severino Clark died, and left the building to his younger brother Stephen. Rumors immediately spread that the new owner had plans to sell it or tear it down. These fears, however, quickly turned out to be unfounded, and Mr. Douglass, then the building's manager, was able to reassure the tenants that Stephen Clark had “not the remotest intention” of razing the Dakota, remodeling it in any way, or selling off the protective rectangle of land containing the gardens and croquet and tennis courts (though it would not be long before he would decide to turn this acreage into a parking lot.) “Mister Stephen,” Mr. Douglass announced, “will entertain none of the offers which have caused
us consternation in past weeks. He has so informed me in person.”

The building, which was about to celebrate its fiftieth birthday, would stand for at least another fifty years, said Douglass. With this good news a celebratory luncheon was given in the Dakota's dining room, with speeches and solemn toasts of felicitation and congratulation to the apartment building and its continued good health. Responding to a special toast that was raised to him, Mr. Douglass was almost moved to tears. “I wish,” he said, “that I could express—that I could say a little more—about how deeply I feel about all this.”

The situation in 1960 and 1961 was considerably more complex. The practice of turning rental buildings into co-operatives was still a relatively new one, and one which many of the tenants did not understand at all. In any building it is a complicated process, and in the Dakota's case—with so much nostalgia and emotionalism involved on the part of so many high-powered and temperamental people—it was even more complicated. To begin with, 35 percent of the tenants had to approve of the co-operative plan for it to go through. For another thing, money had to be raised, if the plan went through, by which individuals could purchase their apartments from the Glickman Corporation. Louis Glickman, meanwhile, was having money problems of his own.

“I'd closed the deal with the Clark Foundation with my own cash, you see, because of the time factor,” Mr. Glickman says. “The Foundation wanted cash, and they wanted it right away—otherwise, no deal. I'd had no time to get any mortgage financing.” Getting a mortgage, Glickman had supposed, would be easy. He had counted on obtaining financing from one of the many New York banks or insurance companies, but when he went forth to get it he encountered a chilly atmosphere. The Dakota, the banks felt, was just “too old.” It was an idea whose time had passed. The services of an outside appraiser were called upon and the appraisal, when it was completed, contained the most discouraging news imaginable: The land on which the Dakota stood, plus the parking lot, was valued at $3,800,000. But the building itself was assigned to have “no value.” This, said the appraiser, was because the Dakota was “basically outmoded both in exterior appearance and interior design … and because the building operates at a loss, and would do so even without rent control.” To give their precious building “no value” was, to the Dakotans, to inflict it with the most heartless insult imaginable.

The team of Messrs. Gross, Jackson and Glickman even tried to approach the Clark Foundation again for a loan—even one as small as $500,000 would be appreciated. The Foundation replied, somewhat frostily, that it preferred to keep its capital “in liquid condition.” At the time Louis Glickman, out of pocket some $4,600,000, was, as he remembers it, “not a very happy man.”

Nor were the Dakotans happy. Without some sort of mortgage financing, which at the conclusion of the process would have been passed along to the co-operative, the tenants could not possibly afford to buy the building back from Glickman. And without financing Mr. Glickman would find himself the landlord-tenant of a seventy-five-year-old building that was losing money at an alarming rate. Finally, the Glickman Corporation had been turned down by every major New York bank and insurance company. Indeed, it looked as though the whole co-operative idea was about to fall through. At one emotional tenants' meeting during that uncertain period, both Ernest Gross and C. D. Jackson announced that if the plan failed, they would “leave the country” and “forever.”

Mr. Glickman then consulted another New York real estate firm, Charles F. Noyes & Company, which suggested that he might do better shopping for a mortgage out of town, where the Dakota and its special problems were not as well known. Glickman turned to Chicago where, to his great relief, he found a mortgagor in the First National Bank of Chicago, which was acting as trustee for the General Motors Salaried Employees Pension Fund.
*
With this loan Glickman got his cash back, as well as a viable mortgage that he could pass along to the Dakota at the conclusion of the negotiations.

Next began the lengthy process of assessing and pricing individual apartments and selling them to their tenants. Now the New York banks were in a more helpful mood. In April 1961 the Chase Manhattan Bank offered to help tenants with one half of their purchase costs, and at an interest rate of just 3 ½ percent for two years. This was good
news. A polling of tenants was started to determine which tenants wanted to buy and which did not. But suddenly there were unexpected difficulties in what was called “the musical chairs problem.”

It was, indeed, a case of musical apartments. A number of Dakotans, understandably, had decided that they did not want or could not afford to buy their apartments, and they began making plans to move elsewhere. Others wanted to buy apartments, but not necessarily the ones they were living in at the time. Some wanted more space, some wanted less. Plans were conceived whereby walls would be cut through in order to annex adjoining rooms from other apartments, while still others wanted to divide certain larger apartments and turn them into several smaller ones. No one, it suddenly seemed, was entirely happy with the space he or she was being offered, and throughout the early summer of 1961 there was a great deal of bickering among the Dakotans, as well as a certain amount of wheeling and dealmaking as tenants haggled among themselves over concessions and trade-offs of apartments and pieces of apartments. Over this confused situation Ernest Gross, C. D. Jackson and Louis Glickman did their best to maintain some sort of order. Mr. Glickman worked on an apartment-pricing formula based on cubic footage, view, number of bathrooms, general condition and other matters. When prices were quoted there was more unhappiness. “A lot of people squawked,” Glickman recalls, “but believe me I got them very reasonable prices.” Indeed, by today's New York prices the Dakota's prices do seem reasonable. For seven rooms with two baths and three fireplaces, a typical price was $45,000. Lauren Bacall's fourth-floor spread facing the Park was priced at $53,340. The smallest flats—one-bedroom, one-bath, nonhousekeeping units that had been guest rooms on the second floor—were priced at $4,410.

But there was sudden consternation in the building when the New York
Times
published an article about the new Mayfair Tower that was to be erected next door, above what had been the parking lot. The
Times
described the project as a “middle-income development.” This, to the Dakotans' way of thinking, sounded as though the immediate neighborhood would be drastically downgraded. Their proposed investments in the building would be damaged if the block slithered down to “middle income.” Hastily, Mr. Glickman assured a tenants' meeting that the
Times
had its facts all wrong, as in fact it had.

Still, despite these setbacks, the building moved steadily toward its
goal of becoming a co-operative and toward the necessary approval by 35 percent of the tenants. Thirty percent had approved, then 31. In June, however, a loud dissonant voice was suddenly heard. It belonged to one William J. Quinlan, a young lawyer who had been a resident of the building for thirty-one years, “since age one.” In a fourteen-page, single-spaced typewritten memorandum, Mr. Quinlan objected to the way almost everything was being handled. He seemed to feel that there was an alternate way by which the tenants could keep their apartments without turning the building into a co-operative. Mr. Quinlan's notion seemed to be that the tenants could hold onto the building by exercising squatters' rights.

At the meeting that was quickly called to discuss the Quinlan uprising, Ernest Gross announced that he found the Quinlan memo “a confused document,” and suggested that it be ignored. But it was not to be that simple. Mr. Quinlan had already gathered powerful supporters in the building, including Mr. Joseph J. Noble, another lawyer, and Jo Mielziner who, among other things, was one man in the Dakota whom nearly everyone liked. Presently Mr. Quinlan was calling tenants' meetings of his own, conspicuously not inviting Gross, Jackson or Glickman to attend them. All through June the Quinlan momentum gathered while the Dakota's original rescue team struggled to hang on to the reins. The new co-operative, technically a venture “with others in a common effort,” was beginning to seem more like a rout.

William Quinlan, a tall, ruggedly built bachelor, lived with his widowed mother in a third-floor apartment. He had grown up in the Dakota in an era when he and his brother and sister were virtually the only resident children; they had amused themselves with hide-and-seek in the building's basement, and with a game involving lobbing ice cubes from their apartment window into the courtyard fountains. Bill Quinlan had no small amount of sentimental attachment to the building, but he and his mother were not a part of the building's unofficial power structure, as Gross and Jackson were. Gross and Jackson, Quinlan felt, were reacting to the building's situation too emotionally, almost hysterically, and were being high-handed and even haughty in assuming their roles as leaders. “They took the stance that the Dakota had to go co-operative,
or else,”
Quinlan recalls today. “They resented anyone who questioned their authority, or who suggested that there might be some sort of solution other than the one they wanted. They presented
it as a take it or leave it situation. I've lived long enough to know that nothing in life is take it or leave it.”

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, co-operatives—to answer three general questions: Did the Dakota
have
to become a co-operative, or was there another solution? If becoming a co-operative was the only answer, what rights did the tenants who did not want to join the co-operative have? And if it became a co-operative, 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 co-operative 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.