Life at the Dakota (21 page)

When the city commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted to design the park, it displayed a rare genius and sensitivity. Hardly ever before in the history of the United States had the principles of art been applied to the embellishment of nature or the landscape in a public park. Olmsted laid out walks, fountains, lakes, formal gardens, five miles of bridle paths, vistas, great grassy areas and a wide quarter-mile-long Mall leading into the park from its main entrance at Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. Other sections were left wild and wooded with a ground cover of wildflowers. As one of the great landscape artists of the century, Olmsted went on to design Prospect park in Brooklyn, Morningside and Riverside parks in Manhattan, Fairmont Park in Philadelphia, South Park in Chicago, Mount Royal Park in Montreal and the campus of Stanford University in California. But he always considered Central Park his most important achievement.

The Park's effect on the social habits of New Yorkers was immediate and profound. For one thing it brought the city's rich and poor together for the first time. To be sure, in those decorous days the sense of class differences was deeply ingrained, and the rich and the poor, when they entered Central Park—the rich in their smart carriages and the poor on bicycles or on foot—maintained respectful distances. Before the completion of Central Park it had been unthinkable for a lady to ride horseback in the city. Well-bred ladies rode, but only in the privacy of their country places. Just ten years earlier Fanny Kemble had scandalized the city by riding her horse down Broadway. But then Fanny was an actress, and a certain amount of unorthodox behavior was
expected of her. Now all that was changed, and for a lady to ride her horse in the Park—accompanied, of course, by her groom or riding master—was suddenly
comme il faut.
The fashionable riding hour for ladies was in the morning, before breakfast. That was when scores of society women trotted out in their gray face veils, high-buttoned jackets and long riding skirts, riding sidesaddle or “the Queen's seat” as it was called. Members of
real
society, of course, had their own private stables. But the Dakota, not to be outdone, maintained a stable for tenants at Broadway and Seventy-third Street, two blocks away.

In good weather a feature of New York life became the afternoon carriage parade, between four and five o'clock, along the Mall. For this, everyone turned out—the old rich, the
nouveaux
and members of the demimonde. Throngs of curious onlookers and tourists lined the entrance to the Mall to observe this unique phenomenon and to catch glimpses of Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Vanderbilt in their elegant carriages. One could also usually spot this or that famous actress of the day, a celebrated courtesan or two, and Josephine Wood, the mistress of New York's most expensive fancy-house. One of the snappiest equestrian outfits belonged to the notorious Madame Restell, society's most popular abortionist. The seats of her barouche were covered with rabbit fur, her tack was of sterling silver, her coachmen wore gold epaulets and on her horses' heads were cockades of ostrich plumes.

Status was conveyed by the sort of carriage one drove. The Old Guard enclosed themselves behind the closed and curtained doors of the broughams. Landaus, which could be either closed or opened to display their occupants in their finery, were for the more daring and sophisticated. The young smart set, along with ladies with “evening occupations” and others whose social credentials were less than impeccable, flaunted their fashionable outfits and hairdos in open barouches and victorias. The dogcart never managed to gain much fashionability. This curious vehicle with two parallel seats, one facing front and one facing rear, was what Mr. C. F. Bates of the Dakota drove, another indication of the Dakota's independence from the dictates of society.

The Central Park Mall, it was soon decreed, was the one place in New York where proper young ladies and gentlemen could stroll without a chaperone. At the end of the Mall was the lake, and here the young people met their friends and formed boating parties or fed the swans. Also at the head of the Mall were the Casino restaurant and the
band pavilion where, on Wednesday and Saturday evenings in fine weather, concerts were presented. The wealthy arrived for these performances in their carriages, and listened from the Casino terrace near the “carriage concourse.” The non-carriage trade rented folding chairs or sat on the grass.

In winter the lake and the pond at Fifty-ninth Street quickly made skating the most popular cold-weather pastime for rich and poor alike. When the public horse carts and omnibuses sported colored flags it meant “The ball is up in the Park”—a balloon that was raised to indicate that the ice was safe for skating. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers flocked to Central Park to waltz and figure skate on the park's frozen waters. At night the ice was lighted with calcium lamps to illuminate the Currier and Ives scene.

When Frederick Olmsted was laying out the Park, it was assumed that all sides—north, east, south and west—would one day be lined with the mansions of millionaires. By 1910, however, this had not happened. On Central Park West the Dakota had set the pace, and this wide thoroughfare was now lined with large apartment houses, presenting much the same skyline as it does today. On Central Park South, as Fifty-ninth Street had been renamed, apartment buildings had also risen. Central Park North, 110th Street, was where the squatters had moved as the city (and, indeed, the creation of the Park itself) had relentlessly pushed its poor northward as well as southeastward into the Lower East Side. The poor occupied a kind of a no man's land, or buffer zone, between lower Manhattan and Harlem, which had become a middle-class (and predominantly white) suburb. A small black colony had formed along Seventh Avenue, between Thirty-first and Thirty-eighth streets, in the heart of what is now the Garment District; it was not until after World War I that Harlem began to blossom as the largest black city in the world. In the early 1900's if one lived in Harlem, one did one's shopping along 125th Street, Harlem's main artery, and Harlemites had few reasons to venture downtown.

Only along Fifth Avenue—“The Queen of Avenues”—had the millionaires consented to build their private palaces. By 1899 the mansions along Fifth Avenue had become a tourist attraction of major proportions, and these houses of the rich were touted to sightseers that year in a full-page article in the Sunday
Tribune.
Headlined, “Houses at Which Visitors to the Metropolis Look With Interest,” the
Tribune
story contained not only photographs of some of these houses but went on to list, in what would be considered very questionable journalistic practice today, the names and addresses of some two hundred rich New Yorkers under a subcaption, “Names of the Owners of Homes Along Fifth Avenue Where New York's Millionaires are Domiciled.” Ten years later the idea of apartment living on Fifth Avenue was still repugnant.

By 1910 New York was effectively out of the Gaslight Era, and this was the year that the first luxury apartment building was erected on the Park's Fifth Avenue flank. Designed by McKim, Mead and White, it was a grand, twelve-story granite affair, built around a central court, at 998 Fifth Avenue, facing the Park on the corner of Eighty-first Street. The vast floor-through apartments offered, in addition to the customary living rooms and dining rooms, octagonal salons and reception rooms thirty-six feet long. Each apartment had eight master bedrooms and nine maids' rooms. Unlike the generation-older Dakota, bathrooms abounded. Each apartment had ten, each with what was then the world's most modern plumbing.
*

For all its amenities, 998 Fifth Avenue was not an immediate success. Renting it was painfully slow, and it was clear that members of New York society were still unwilling to live under the same roof as others, even when they were people of their own kind. Then the rental agent, the young Douglas L. Elliman, hit upon a novel idea. If one member of Old Guard society could be persuaded to move into 998, perhaps others would follow. Elliman approached Senator Elihu Root, very definitely Old Guard, and offered him a cut rate—a $25,000-a-year apartment for only $15,000 a year. Root was sold, gave up his big brick town house at Seventy-first and Park, and moved into 998. One by one, others of Senator Root's social circle joined him at the Fifth Avenue address, and Mr. Elliman's successful real estate career was launched.

Still, Fifth Avenue did not experience the apartment-building boom that Central Park West had undergone earlier. The next apartment
house on Fifth Avenue did not appear until 1916, and it was not until the halcyon years of the 1920's that Fifth Avenue began to become the apartment-lined street that it is today.

The rest of New York, meanwhile, was changing with incredible speed. By 1910 New York and the entire country had entered the era of internal combustion. Mass production of automobiles had begun in 1900, and at an automobile show held at the old Madison Square Garden that year, more than fifty makers of “horseless carriages” displayed their models to enthusiastic audiences. The new cars were steered with tillers, like boats, had to be started with cranks and, like the carriages they were replacing, featured a great deal of brass to polish. Still, the following year at an Automobile Club meet in Long Island, one of these contraptions reached the astonishing speed of a mile a minute. At the Dakota, Mrs. Steinway refused to buy a horseless carriage; Mr. Bates, however, bought a Simplex, becoming the building's first auto-owner.

By 1910 the population of New York had jumped to over two and a half million, and the horse population had declined to 108,036, as more and more Scottish coachmen were being trained as chauffeurs. Electricity had eliminated the dirty and noisy steam locomotives. Gasoline-powered taxis and buses—including the exciting new double-deckers (introduced from France) on Fifth Avenue—were rapidly replacing the horse-drawn public carts and omnibuses. In 1900 tunneling for the first New York subway had begun. Four years later, following the mayor's ribbon-cutting ceremony, thousands of New Yorkers poured into the subway for the thrilling trip from City Hall Station up to Grand Central, then west to Times Square, and finally to the suburban reaches of 145th Street. For months afterward New Yorkers would spend their days off underground, riding back and forth on the nickle ride. One by one, the old elevated lines would disappear, to be replaced by the subway system.

Ladies who observed the laws of fashion still spent their weekdays carrying out the elaborate ritual of dropping calling cards. But now a much more exciting and efficient way of communicating with one's friends and neighbors had presented itself—the telephone. In 1880 not one in a thousand New Yorkers had owned one of these new devices, but by 1910 one out of ten New Yorkers had a phone, and the shroud of telephone and electric lines above the streets threatened to shut out the
sun as effectively as the elevated trains. Along with the subway, the popularity of the telephone made New York seem suddenly much smaller and easier to reach. Gossip traveled with amazing speed over the telephone. As in any social ritual, rules were quickly established—the hours for telephoning were in the morning between eight and noon, and a woman considered herself unfit for afternoon shopping or other household chores until her morning telephoning was completed. The average New York woman, it was reported, “looked absolutely drawn through a knothole” when she emerged from her telephone duties.

Meanwhile, though some people bemoaned the loss of the horse-drawn carriages, others pointed out, with a certain amount of truth, that Central Park now provided a refuge for some of New York's beloved horseflesh. Horseback riding in the Park was still enormously popular, and horses that had once pulled carriages in the streets were now stabled on or just off the Park for early morning and weekend recreation.

Frederick Olmsted may have been wrong in his vision of what sort of residences would one day surround the Park, but in other ways he was remarkably foresighted for his time. He was concerned, in addition to the Park's design, with its having ethnic harmony. He worried about security and about inevitable problems in sanitation, care and maintenance. He wanted the Park to be accessible to all and yet, at the same time, aloof and distant—not
too
accessible. Aware of New Yorkers' feelings about privacy, he wanted the Park to be a private sort of place as well as a public one, where privacy could be enjoyed. He wanted the Park to be a special place, to be entered with pleasure but also with a certain amount of respect and a touch of awe. For this reason Olmsted did not design a park that could be entered from any point along the street. He surrounded it with a high stone protective wall, pierced by carefully placed entrances. It was to be open at all times, but to create the impression, psychologically, that the Park was a particular province of its own, a little effort was required to get inside it. The device of the wall was intended to give New Yorkers an extra sense of
appreciation
of their Park, and extra pride in it.

Today, on a summer weekend afternoon, when Dakotans—and other Park-facing New Yorkers—look out, they do not just see a great green
rectangle of trees, grass and shimmering water, though all that is still there. They also see great throngs of people funneling into the Park through one or another of its entrances—one of which directly faces the Dakota. In their new, co-operative spirit of understanding and love, it was natural that the Dakotans, who had come to think of themselves as a particularly sensitive band of people, should begin to focus their concerns on their immediate environment, which included the Park. But there was more to it than that. Just as the “Dakoterie” on West Seventy-second Street had become very possessive about their building, they had also become very possessive about Central Park. It was
their
Park, and, just as the Dakotans were a bit elitist in their feelings toward their address, they were also elitist in their sentiments toward the Park. As they watched the invasion of their sometimes scruffily dressed fellow New Yorkers on the average Saturday and Sunday, the Dakotans began to wonder whether Mr. Olmsted's vision of the Park had been usurped or even lost.