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Authors: Stephen; Birmingham

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BOOK: Life at the Dakota
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Boiled Sweet Potatoes Mashed Potatoes Parisian Potatoes

French Peas Asparagus Plain Spinach Squash

Pineapple Pudding, Sauce Madère Washington Pie

Apricot Tartelettes Petits Fours Chocolate Eclairs

Port Wine Jelly, Glace Fantaisie

Stilton, Roquefort and American Cheese

Fruit in season

Coffee

The old menu politely listed no prices for any of the above delicacies, but it did note: “Dishes ordered not on Bill of Fare will be charged extra.”

Eighty years later, almost to the day, the Dakota dining room was the Gyora Novaks' apartment and the month of February 1978—which could be considered fairly typical nowadays—showed that the Dakota's tenants' maintenance payments were in arrears in the aggregate sum of $21,912.45. Twenty-one tenants—roughly a quarter of the building—had not paid their February maintenance at all. Eighteen others had made only partial payments. The individual arrearages for
February ranged in size from $1.95 (doubtless someone's careless error) to $2,260.56. In other words, the building was trying to operate and maintain itself on a fiscal basis that would boggle the mind of even a professional accountant.

How long can such a state of affairs continue, and what ever can be done? At the same time, an eleven-room, three-and-a-half bath apartment was for sale at an asking price of $312,000, and another had just been sold at $10,000
above
the asking price. In the topsy-turvy world of New York real estate, the Dakota is a topsier, turvier place than most.

“The best thing about living here is that they don't hassle you about not paying your maintenance,” says Pauline Pinto. “I mean, they know they'll get it
eventually.
You can live here and do unconventional things
and
not pay your maintenance. Right now I'm writing an analysis of President Carter's welfare plan—it's not like reading Kafka or Rilke or William Gass. The public knows
nothing
about Carter's welfare plan. It makes me feel that I'm in a minority, writing about the poor, working at a mental-health center. The Pintos are an old Sephardic Jewish family from Morocco, but I'm a WASP with plenty of money. I feel estranged, I feel different—I feel there's a wave length I'm not on. I feel ambivalent, like a cop-out, because I'm rich—
and
a liberal—there's a feeling of guilt. Here I am in my beautiful apartment at the Dakota, writing about poverty. Still, I feel better here than I would on Park Avenue. It's better for my conscience.…”

The rich, it has often been pointed out, are funny about money. In San Francisco the late Mrs. Adolph B. Spreckels, after giving away more millions than she could remember to create the Palace of the Legion of Honor and to other art museums, was approached by a member of the Legion of Honor staff. The staff had organized a softball team, which proposed to call itself the A. B. Spreckels Memorial Baseball Team, in honor of Mrs. Spreckels's late husband. The team, however, had found itself about fifty dollars short of the money it needed to buy uniforms. Could the Legion of Honor's wealthy benefactress help out?
“What?”
cried the outraged Mrs. Spreckels. She flung open her reticule and poured its contents—lipstick, emery boards, matches, a few coins, a handkerchief—on the table. “Where do you expect
me
to get fifty dollars?” she wanted to know. “You people have got my skin. Now you want my guts!”

The rich, as Pauline Pinto indicates, are often quite cavalier when it comes to paying bills. In Locust Valley, Long Island, for example, one woman routinely goes through her morning mail in bed with her breakfast tray. Anything that appears to be a bill she simply stuffs under her mattress. Only when the pile of bills reaches a size to threaten her sleeping comfort does she pull them all out and ship them to her husband's secretary for payment.

The rich, furthermore, are provided with certain privileges when it comes to bill paying—privileges which are denied to ordinary mortals. If one is rich enough, one can arrange with the telephone company and the utilities concerns to pay one's bills once a year instead of the more boring and time-consuming once a month. But the trouble is that many rich people fail to grasp the difference between AT&T, which can afford such liberal credit, and the corner drug store, which cannot. A number of years ago, for instance, the pretty Berkshire Hills around Williamstown, Massachusetts, began attracting a number of rich people, including Mrs. Alta Rockefeller Prentice, Mrs. Lillian Sanford Procter (Procter & Gamble) and Mr. and Mrs. William H. Vanderbilt; later came such successful folk from the literary and theater worlds as Sinclair Lewis, James Gould Cozzens and Cole Porter. The town's tradespeople, it was suggested, should be delighted with the important new infusion of money, but, as it turned out, they were far from sanguine about it all. True, their sales figures jumped appreciably, but so did their amounts of accounts receivable. The same problem besets Park Avenue florists who get thousands of dollars' worth of business from their carriage trade, while they hover on the brink of bankruptcy waiting to be paid. The Dakota has the same problem with some of its wealthy tenants.

Meanwhile, it has long been apparent that one of the great financial—as well as social—drains on the Dakota has been represented on the eighth and ninth floors.

As recently as 1973—a dozen years after the building became a co-operative—there were still a few rooms on the top two floors that tenants would not vacate, or buy, even though the rooms were technically owned by other people. In 1977 there was a serious effort to co-op the eighth and ninth floors, and it was stipulated that these rooms could only be purchased by people who already had apartments in the building. About $100,000 was realized from the sale of rooms on eight and
nine—a rather small drop in the bucket for a building whose monthly operating budget is $130,000. The maintenance charges, meanwhile, for some of the smallest rooms—many of which are without windows—had to be set low, as little as forty dollars a month in some cases. And so the top two floors, which represent roughly 22 percent of the Dakota's available floor space, account for less than 4 percent of its monthly income.

One recent notion that has been proposed has been to turn the eighth and ninth floors into a series of luxury duplexes. To do this, of course, the Dakota would have to buy back the various rooms that it sold to tenants in 1977. Then the two floors would have to be completely renovated, and the new duplexes resold.

The idea would seem to have some merit. It could all be done within the limits proscribed by the Landmarks Commission, without tampering with the building's façade. To carry out such a scheme, of course, a number of things would have to happen. Some provision would have to be made for the oldsters—for Jimmy Martin, Mrs. Maclay, the Browning sisters. Most important, however, would be the Dakotans themselves, who would have to back the idea, unanimously, in
spirit.
The Dakotans would have to act together, as a family, as a community. Unanimity of spirit, however, has not exactly been an outstanding characteristic at the Dakota.

A certain amount of human lethargy and apathy would have to be overcome. Many Dakotans take the attitude that, though the cost of living in their building keeps going up, Judgment Day is not
quite
here. Perhaps the fact that the building closes its books $20,000 in the red each year isn't all
that
bad. The building continues to amortize its mortgage, “rolling it over,” as the accountants say, with cheaper dollars, thanks to inflation. It is not like Christmas of 1960, they say. And they are right. There is no real cause for panic. But for economic pessimists there might be cause for a certain amount of nervousness.

Such an ambitious undertaking as the duplexes would have to come out of a sense of real need and immediate urgency—a feeling that unless something is done and done soon, their building will sink and the Dakotans will lose everything they own. This crisis mentality has not emerged yet, though such pessimists as Frederic Weinstein feel that some sort of crisis is very close at hand.

A strong leader would have to take the Dakota's helm to carry out
such an ambitious plan, a benevolent despot who would run things—a Franklin D. Roosevelt who would lead the country out of the Great Depression.

But then the final question arises: Where would the Dakota, which has a small working capital, find the necessary hypothetical three-and-a-quarter-million dollars to implement such a scheme? A case could be made for the fact that there is a difference between mortgage financing and redevelopment financing. The 1972 refinancing was undertaken for different reasons. A new loan would be for building something that would increase the building's revenues and add to its value.

But because no real crisis yet exists, the Dakota sails on into the wind with business as usual, and the eighth and ninth floors remain in the same state as they have always been.

There is an important difference between buying a co-operative apartment a condominium. When buying a condominium one buys one's living space, and only one's living space, outright, and gets a deed and title to it. Costs of maintaining common areas—hallways, roofs, plumbing and so on—are shared by everyone in the building. A co-operative, on the other hand, is a corporation with shares of stock to sell. The Dakota is owned by the Dakota, Inc., and when buying an apartment one buys a certain number of shares of Dakota stock based more or less on the apartment's cubic footage. Furthermore, one does not get a deed to a co-operative apartment; one gets a lease from the corporation—in the Dakota's case, a lease for forty years, with a six-month “escape” clause.
*
In other words, owners of co-operatives like the Dakota do not legally “own” their apartments, but they do own their buildings, which condominium owners do not.

Co-operative ventures are considered far riskier than condominiums because, theoretically, if 90 percent of a co-operative building
defaulted, the entire burden of maintaining the building, paying its taxes and its mortgage, would have to be borne by the remaining 10 percent. For this reason co-operatives are particularly choosy about whom they take in as tenants. Financial requirements are extraordinarily stringent. Quite often cash is required to pay for a co-operative apartment. Condominiums are comparatively easy to buy and can be financed the way houses can.

New Yorkers, living in a financial city and accustomed to buying and selling stock, are partial to co-operatives. In the Middle West and West—where more psychological importance is attached to having a deed as proof of one's ownership of property—condominiums are much more popular. Socially, too, a vast difference exists between the owner of a co-operative and the owner of a condominium. Condominiums, with their connotations of Miami Beach and retirement communities in Arizona, are considered much more middle class. To own a “co-op” is sophisticated and chic; to own a “condo” is not.

But the Atter-all-I-own-the-building syndrome, which co-op owners tend to develop, can lead to problems other than the Sin of Pride. With each tenant believing that the building is “his,” each tenant has his own ideas as to what should be done with it, and how the building should present itself to the world. That such attitudes should prevail at the Dakota is no surprise. Different people have different ideas about what the Dakota's priorities should be—if, somehow, money should appear with which to attend to them.

For example,
Rosemary's Baby
may have made the Dakota nationally famous, but that may have been a mixed blessing. The motion-picture company selected the Dakota for its dark, gloomy, forbidding exterior appearance, and not for the large, airy, sunny apartments within. Associating it with the movie, many people feel that from the outside the Dakota looks rather sinister—a place to be avoided at all costs. At the height of the movie's popularity it was not uncommon for audiences to scream when the Dakota's grim image first flashed upon the screen.

And yet the sinister appearance of the Dakota's façade is simply the result of years of compounded dirt. It has never been cleaned, and needs a face-washing badly, or so some people think. A faction in the building, led by the Shivas, periodically campaigns for cleaning at least
two sides of the building—the sides facing Seventy-second Street and Central Park.

It would be wonderful, the cleaning enthusiasts say, if the Dakota's bricks could be returned to their original pale jonquil-yellow color and the cornerstones to their original rich reddish brown. But questions remain as to how best to accomplish this. Traditional sandblasting, it is feared, could seriously weaken the mortar between the bricks and stones, and the entire building might have to be recaulked and repointed. A steam-cleaning method, developed in Europe, was successfully used to clean a number of old buildings in Paris, but apparently New York grime is different from the grime of Paris and does not respond to the European treatment.

Moreover, there are those in the building who like the Dakota's blackened façade and feel that this is part of the building's special character, just as the sooty streets of Edinburgh give that city a special look and feel. The building carries its stains with pride, the anti-cleaning group feels, the way an old fighter carries his scars.

And while the cleaning and anti-cleaning factions debate, there is again the problem of money. Estimates to clean the Dakota have run as high as half a million dollars, and the longer the building waits to be cleaned, the higher the cost will no doubt go. If the cost of cleaning were equally divided among the ninety-odd tenant families, the cost would be roughly $5,500 per family. Some people would be willing to chip in that much, but others are not.

Still, despite its chronic shortage of ready cash, the Dakota's future seems reasonably secure. Even Gordon Greenfield, from his new location on the East Side, says, “As long as the building retains its cachet as an address for famous and successful people, it will survive. It doesn't have much old money, and it doesn't have much big money, but a lot of people who live there make a lot of money. As long as there are people who can afford to live there, the Dakota's future isn't bleak. Of course, as maintenance costs get higher, people with less money may be squeezed out and they'll have to be replaced with people with money. The people on the eighth and ninth floors may be squeezed out eventually, and then the building will have to do something about those floors, to make them attractive to rich people. The building may well become a building exclusively for the rich. But after all, that's what the Dakota has always been all about—apartments for the affluent. That
was old man Clark's original idea. The building was built to appeal to snobs, and it still has the cachet and snob appeal. Of course if there ever were to be a serious recession, the building would be in trouble—in worse trouble, probably, than the more stable expensive buildings on the East Side, simply because the money at the Dakota isn't as stable as East Side money. It's a bit too heavily weighted toward show business and restaurants, businesses which are the first to suffer in a recession. I sold my apartment to Peter Yates, a movie director. As a businessman I don't foresee any serious recession in the near or even middle future. But fifty years from now, who can say? Nobody has a crystal ball.”

BOOK: Life at the Dakota
12.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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