Life at the Dakota (19 page)

During World War II, Adele Browning served as an air-raid warden for the building, and she still likes to go up and down the long corridors of the eighth floor, checking on the security of everything. And she demonstrated her independence during the filming of
Rosemary's Baby.
“There were lights and cameras all around the building,” she recalls. “I was coming home from an errand, and the policeman said to me, ‘Lady, you'll have to go in through the basement.'” The officer may not have been able to tell from Miss Adele's appearance that he was addressing a woman of substance and culture. Like many older people, Miss Adele tends to dress in the same sort of costume day after day—a buttoned, brown wool skirt, several layers of sweaters topped by a woolen vest, woolen athletic socks over her stockings, and house slippers. Also, she has little time to spend at the hairdresser's. In any case, the policeman was unprepared for the very determined, self-assured and erect little lady who confronted him and, in that strong, well-bred voice said, “I will
not
go in through the basement. I live here. I was born here. This is my
home.
I will enter my home through my front door.”

She was allowed in through the front door.

Miss Anne Ives is still another kind of Dakota old-timer—a nonagenarian with a career. Miss Ives is an actress and, at ninety-two, manages to supplement her pensions by doing television commercials. With her petite figure, her carefully coifed white hair, her creamy-pink complexion and arresting purple eyes she could pass for a woman in her early seventies. Her looks make her the ideal candy-box-top grandmother type for television. Anne Ives is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (called the Sargeant School in her day) and, among other things, has played with Henry Fonda in
Point of No Return,
with Irene Worth in
Hedda Gabler
and in various stock companies in Stockbridge and Abingdon. For years she was a Sunday Bible-story lady on radio in Washington, D.C., and her most recent stage performance was as the little old lady in
Tobacco Road,
which she did in Lake Forest and for which she received a special award. Most
recently, however, it has been television commercials.

“My AT&T commercial has been doing very well in terms of residuals,” she says. “My Birdseye I did three years ago and that keeps coming back. My yogurt comes back, and I expect a lot from my cat food. I've done a couple of print ads, but the money is in television.” Compared with the Brownings, Miss Ives, who moved to the Dakota in 1954, is a newcomer, and her relative affluence permits her to live on a somewhat grander scale. Her one-room-with-bath apartment is on the second floor facing seventy-second Street, one of the former guest rooms that were set aside for visiting friends of tenants. She was able to buy this space with no difficulty when the building became a co-operative. Her room has high ceilings, a fireplace, and is furnished in dainty antiques. A handsome Oriental rug is on the floor, and her bathroom is painted royal purple, a color she also favors in clothes because it matches her eyes. To be sure, her kitchen is also her clothes closet, but from it she is able to prepare dinners for friends and, besides, “I get asked out a lot.”

The main difference in the building that Miss Ives has noticed over the years is that, “When I came here the people were all the age that I am now—now I'm one of the oldest ones here. There are so many young people here now, so many more children. But I don't feel old. I'm in excellent health. My mother lived to be ninety-four. One thing I have noticed, though, as I get older is that I spend a lot of time at my window, looking out at the street. People are always stopping across the street to look up at this old building, and sometimes they see me, and sometimes I get a little wave. I always wave back. Not long ago a fire truck came by, and the fireman who was standing at the end of the ladder was right at the level of my second-floor window. He passed my window and saw me standing there, and he smiled and waved. I smiled and waved back. He was almost close enough to reach out and touch.”

Miss Ives never married. “That's my sad story,” she says. “I was going to, but it didn't work out.” With a smile, she adds, “As it happened, he never married either. As far as family goes, I'm almost the last leaf on the tree. I have one niece who lives in Rhode Island, but, my goodness, my niece is in her seventies! But I have my career. I've always worked, and with what I have now I'll be able to live comfortably here for the rest of my life.”

In contrast to Adele Browning, who tends to feel unsafe on the eighth floor (“We have to keep our door locked and bolted all the time”), Miss Ives has no feelings of insecurity in the building. “My room isn't air conditioned,” she says, “but because it faces south, I never get direct sun beating in. On warm days, I just open my window and open the door, and a nice little breeze comes through.” To indicate that she is “at home,” and would welcome visitors, Miss Ives places a bowl of fresh flowers on a little table just outside her door.

Among her social activities she has her membership in the Twelfth Night Club, a women's theatrical group that meets weekly in the annex of the Woodward Hotel at Broadway and Fifty-fifth Street, and which recently celebrated its eighty-seventh birthday. “It was formed as a club for ‘nice young ladies of the theater,'” she says, “but not long ago we looked around and saw that we were all women of about my vintage. Since then, we've brought in a number of nice young ladies. We put on one-act plays, once a week.”

Only one small annoyance grieves Miss Ives at the moment. “A few months ago, I was a little bit unwell. It was nothing serious, just a little thing, and I'm quite fine now. But you know how this business is. The gossip travels so fast. The word got out—Anne Ives is sick, Anne Ives is on her last legs. I stopped getting calls from agents and producers for commercials. Well, I intend to go on working as long as I can remember lines. So now what I've got to do, now that I'm better, is go around ringing doorbells again to let the industry know that Anne Ives is alive and well and ready for more jobs. In fact, I'm thinking of having a little dinner party and inviting the agents and producers over, just to show them how alive and well and ready for jobs Anne Ives is.”

Part Four

BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER

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?”