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Authors: Stephen; Birmingham

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Up in the southeast corner of the third floor, Frederic and Suzanne Weinstein have left intact all the architectural and decorative details that were there when they moved in but, like the Scott Severnses, they have chosen to furnish the apartment in a severe, contemporary style. A woven-to-order rug in an abstract design provides the only real color in the living room, a long sectional sofa, also custom-made to fit the room, is covered in a light coffee-colored fabric, and the walls are painted flat white. Adding to the feeling of airy lightness in the Weinsteins' apartment is the fact that the Weinsteins prefer to keep their white walls bare of art or any other decoration. “We wanted the rooms themselves to be the only decorative statements,” Suzanne Weinstein says. Everything else is subordinated to the rooms' scale.

The largest apartment in the Dakota belongs to restaurateur Warner LeRoy, the son of movie director Mervyn LeRoy and the nephew of all the Warner brothers. Originally, the LeRoys' apartment consisted of only ten large rooms on the sixth floor, but when another apartment of the same size became available on the floor immediately above, the LeRoys bought that one too. They persuaded the building to let them construct a staircase between the two apartments, giving them the Dakota's only duplex, unless one counts Ward Bennett's split-level pyramid on the roof, the Novaks' basement studio, and the various sleeping-lofts and balconies that have been inserted between floors here and there. The LeRoy apartment, as might be expected, has been decorated in a theatrical style that one might call Hollywood High Camp, featuring Tiffany glass chandeliers like the ones used to adorn LeRoy's popular restaurant, Maxwell's Plum. The LeRoys have become the building's most ambitious host and hostess, and toss four or five
big parties a year for as many as two hundred guests, plus numerous smaller dinners. To help her bring these large entertainments off, Kay LeRoy, a cook of some note, has a kitchen—or kitchens, really, since the kitchen area consists of several rooms—furnished with all the latest equipment, all of it hotel-size. In fact, Mrs. LeRoy got into a bit of trouble early in 1978 when it was learned that she was preparing certain dishes in her kitchen for the Tavern on the Green, another of her husband's restaurants just down the street. This, it seemed, violated some city health code. In addition to kitchens that a luxury hotel might envy, the LeRoy apartment also contains a screening room for movies.

Though not the largest, certainly the most spectacular apartment in the Dakota belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Peter Nitze. Peter Nitze is a lawyer and chairman of the board of Nitze-Stagen & Co., Inc., financial consultants. He is also a descendant of Harry Pratt who, along with a man named John D. Rockefeller, helped put together Standard Oil. His grandmother Pratt was New York's first woman alderman. The Nitze apartment on the sixth floor contains the building's largest room, the colonnaded salon measuring 24 by 49 feet with twin facing fireplaces at either end, originally intended as a ballroom. The Nitze apartment was the “bachelor flat” of Edward Severin Clark, and the ballroom is said to be a facsimile of a similar room in the old Clark mansion off Washington Square. Later it became the C. D. Jacksons' apartment. The Jacksons divided it, and part of it became the apartment of Edward R. Murrow. When the Nitzes bought it, they undivided it and as a result now have two kitchens. In addition to the kitchens and the ballroom there are some fourteen other rooms, but that is only counting the rooms that have windows. In all, there are eight working fireplaces.

The Nitzes undertook a complete restoration, as opposed to a renovation, of the apartment. Generations of paint were stripped from doors, moldings and paneling, uncovering the original mahogany and heavy brass hinges, which even had brass plates to conceal their screws. In the process of stripping one heavy door, the restorer asked Peter Nitze, “Do you really want this door put back into its
original
condition?” Certainly, said Nitze. The workman than pointed out what appeared to be traces of sterling silver in the corners of the panels; the panels had originally been edged with silver. The Nitzes stopped short
of replacing the silver trimmings. Grace Jackson had taken one of the old elevator cages and placed it in a vestibule, intending to later install it as a powder room. The Nitzes kept the elevator where it was, and use it as a cozy setting for childrens' tea parties. Though it is the only part of the apartment that was not there in 1884, the Nitzes feel that the elevator belongs there for sentimental reasons.

Other tenants have been less scrupulously respectful of the Dakota's innards. The traditionalists who deplore sleeping lofts are somewhat at cross-purposes with Paul Segal, the architect, who has lived at the Dakota since 1969. Segal is a red-headed, enthusiastic and immediately likable young man, and has helped redo a number of Dakota apartments. He supervised the renovation of Paul Goldberger's new apartment, helped the Ellmans divide Miss Leo's old place into two apartments and helped Michael Wager create an apartment out of his end of that division. He oversaw the renovation of the Wilbur Rosses' apartment and designed a superkitchen for John and Yoko Lennon. He was also responsible for the renovation of the Bernard Rogers' apartment (the dust from which filtered up into the Weinsteins' place on the floor above).

In the process of this work, Paul Segal has familiarized himself with every nook and cranny of the Dakota, from the basement crawl spaces to the mazelike corridors of the eighth and ninth floors, and to the narrow walkways on the roof. He once won a bottle of Scotch on a bet with a fellow Dakotan who said that it was not possible to walk completely around the building through the various eighth-floor hallways. It was possible, and Paul Segal showed his neighbor how to do it through what amounted to a secret door. Also, in the process Paul Segal has gained the unofficial title of the Dakota's “house architect.”

Paul Segal's architectural style is very contemporary, and though he boasts that he has “never completely gutted” an apartment, he has brought a number of apartments up to date. He favors sleeping lofts and had one built in his own apartment, though it is used as a study and not for sleeping. The construction of a mezzanine, with a curved balcony extending over the living room, was part of Segal's design for the Bernard Rogers' apartment. Planned as a library-study, the mezzanine certainly added floor space, though it cut the ceiling height in half. Segal's design was considered sufficiently innovative to be given a four-page color spread in
House Beautiful
in 1978.

But purists in the building, Frederic Weinstein in particular, feel that some of Paul Segal's designs are seriously eroding the building's inner personality. Weinstein has watched sadly as one by one venerable interior details have disappeared—the corridor globes on the second floor replaced by more “modern” fixtures, the steady removal of old mantelpieces, doors, cornices, the growing pile of architectural detritus in the basement. Weinstein raises another question in terms of the Segal renovations. To renovate an apartment according to the building's Hoyle, all plans must be approved by the outside architectural firm of Glass & Glass. They must then be approved by the building's board of directors. Finally, building permits must be obtained and specifications reviewed by whatever city inspectors are involved. When the C. D. Jacksons divided their apartment they had to tear down and rebuild the wall three times before the city inspectors were satisfied with it.

Paul Segal, meanwhile, is a member of the building's board and has served two separate three-year terms. He has, however, been very scrupulous about not participating in those architectural and remodeling decisions which involve his own work or his recommendations. In fact, Segal makes a point of physically absenting himself during many of these discussions.

Frederic Weinstein clearly does not approve of Paul Segal's architectural style and insists that this has nothing to do with the fact that Segal's renovations on the floor below inconvenienced him.

Weinstein later commented: “In my opinion the Dakota stands as a tragic landmark to a skin-deep conception of landmark conservancy. While its façade is now protected, throughout its history renovations of apartments have been undertaken which in some cases have permanently distorted the interior architectural context and ambiance of the building. I am not a blind antiquarian sentimentalist. Reasonable and functional renovations have been and are necessary adaptations to each era and have kept the Dakota a living building rather than a museum piece. But there is a distinction between this kind of renovation and profound, irreparable and irreversible surgery. Paris and London, while also experiencing grave landmark crises, have so much more margin for error. In Europe, buildings like the Dakota, while not commonplace, are nevertheless not uncommon.”

Weinstein went on to say, “The Dakota is a poignant document precisely because we all subsist in a society here which perpetually
erases itself. We have so much more to lose because we have so much less to begin with. I believe there is still time to practice landmark conservancy from the skin inwards. Not as a matter of antiquarian preciousness. The Dakota's survival as the Dakota is itself at stake—survival as something more than a gutted interior with a quaint façade.

“I say all this without any criticism intended of my fellow tenants of previous eras or those living here now. Everyone who has lived here respects this building and is captive to it and to its ineffable presence. And I'm fully aware that I've entered the shapeless and inscrutable area of taste as well as those vast ambiguities relating to the rights of the individual to create a personal environment against the somewhat fragile rights of the society to preserve its heirlooms. Unfortunately, perhaps tragically, which is where I began, great buildings do not share a protected status along with great canvases and great poems.”

Frederic Weinstein is by nature a worrier. Though his fiftieth birthday is behind him, he is attempting to embark on a new career as a writer, and he frets that he may be getting too late a start. Fortunately, he has his coolly beautiful, long-legged, level-headed wife to offset his worrying side. When Freddie Weinstein worries aloud, Suzanne Weinstein just gives him a long, slow, sideways look with her enormous eyes, and Freddie responds with a little smile. Freddie worries about the Dakota, and its future.

“If this building is a microcosm of New York,” he says, “then the Dakota's board is a microcosm of a microcosm. There's always the feeling that the board is ‘out to get' everybody.

“There are a lot of strange folk here, a lot of people who indulge in what I call ‘quotation mark' behavior—people acting cute, campy, ditsy and quaint. This used to be a place where people could breathe. Now we have what I call the Beachboy Syndrome—the fact that on an average Saturday night half the building seems to be in drag. The smell of marijuana and poppers wafts under the doorways, and you hear the falsetto echo of laughter in the halls, like sparrows chirping in the niches. There are people like Leonard Bernstein, who are true celebrities, versus people who are playing at being celebrities, playing at being gay. New malignancies have crept in, like this theory of rolling indebtedness that the building seems to operate on. The place is rife with improprieties, and everybody is winking at what goes on. It's part of what is happening in New York, of course, but shouldn't the Dakota
be above all that? It's acquiring the quality of a keep, or fortress—it's a prison, and it's captured all of us.

“There's hostility from within. Suzanne just went on the board and asked if she could serve on the Aesthetics Committee. She's a member of the Victorian Society and interested in preservation. Ruth Ford said, ‘No outsiders on the Aesthetics Committee.' She seems to think of herself as a kind of Madame Pompadour.

“Some people are very withdrawn. There's Virginia Dwan, for example, who used to have a famous gallery. No one really knows Virginia. She's very rich, radical and chic, and her whole apartment is like a vast art gallery, full of beautiful things. She's been in the building a little longer than we have, but it wasn't until a month ago that we had her in for tea.

“Meanwhile, everyone is circling around and sniffing each other, and each person seems to be leading some secret life. There's a Chaucerian aspect to life here—a
Canterbury Tales
quality.… We live at the Tabard.…”

Disrespect for the building—that is considered a cardinal sin at the Dakota. But respect and disrespect become fuzzy terms when one is dealing with individual tastes, preferences and needs, and when, as in the operation of Central Park, one is trying to run a facility as a model democracy that will keep everybody happy. One tenant who certainly took a different “path” in renovating her seventh-floor apartment was Roberta Flack. She wanted ceilings lowered, walls removed, mantels and moldings ripped out. Her plans were initially rejected by the board.

She and her architect then agreed to modify their plans for the ambitious renovation, and work proceeded. There was a great deal of backing and filling between Miss Flack and the board and, even after the work was finished, the controversy continued. Some tenants claimed that walls and moldings had been removed, which her architect promised would be saved. Roberta Flack feels she went along with everything the building required of her. In any case, although legally the Dakota's board could require Miss Flack to undo the renovation, it obviously has not done so.

Miss Flack is a famous star—one gold record after another, and now a platinum one. One does not give orders to famous stars. For another thing, she is black—the first and, to date, the only black tenant in the
building. The Dakota is a little touchy on the subject of blacks. Miss Flack's application to come into the building in the first place was not exactly greeted with universal cheering. But what was the Dakota to do? In their modern mood of democracy, communication, tolerance and love—to a group of people who had reacted with horror to the thought that the Dakota should discriminate against homosexuals—it was unthinkable that the building should appear to bar anyone on the basis of race.

BOOK: Life at the Dakota
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