Life at the Dakota (34 page)

Gordon Greenfield, upon whom the Dakota turned its back, still thinks, despite his sanguine outlook, that he could have run the building better than it is being run today. “I'm sorry to hear that they have a problem with arrearages,” he says. “In my day, we were always very strict about collections.”

*
If a tenant must default on his lease, he must give the corporation six months' written notice. He thereupon loses all privileges and rights to the apartment, and his shares in the building revert to the corporation. When the documents of incorporation were being drawn up, someone scribbled nervously in the margin beside this clause, “Is this standard?” It is an indication of the state the building would be in if tenants started exercising their escape clauses in large numbers.

Chapter 22

Faith

The octogenarian Miss Cordelia Deal once said, “My family moved to the Dakota because Father knew Mr. Edward Clark. Father said, ‘Anything that Edward Clark's behind is sure to be successful.' We rented our apartment before the building was finished, and Mr. Clark let us change certain things. We didn't move up here because it was fashionable because, goodness me, it wasn't fashionable. It was too special. Fashionable to me implies conformity, and the Dakota didn't conform to anything in the city at the time. Some people want to be in fashion, and some people don't care. We didn't care. I used to read about Mrs. Astor's parties, and I thought they sounded rather silly, all the same people over and over again. I used to see Mrs. Astor in her carriage, and she looked like a very silly woman to me. There were stories about her, that once she got on a bus and the driver passed the fare box to her. She said, ‘No thank you, I have my own charities.' What a silly thing to say, if the story's even true. What would Mrs. Astor have been doing, getting on a bus? We called those people ‘the butterflies.' We laughed at them. We thought of ourselves as—well,
solider. We weren't interested in fashion, but we were interested in form. Goodness me, Mother used to worry about whether or not it was good form to pick up an olive with a fork. That's what's missing nowadays, if you ask me. Good form, and good manners. Now everybody's doing everything in the
moderne
style because they say it's chic. They say the Dakota has gotten very chic. In my day we didn't worry about what was chic. We worried about form.”

That was said in 1932, and it is interesting to note that Mr. Greenfield believes in 1978 that cachet—a quality of elitism—and not merely chic, is what must be maintained if the Dakota is to survive. Others, of course, have different notions of what the Dakota's life-giving ingredient must be. Some are proudest of the building's ethnic coziness—the fact that Jews, Arabs and WASPs live more or less peacefully under the same roof. And there is the generational coziness—the number of children at the courtyard parties, and the fact that when Albert and Gillian Maysles attend building meetings they bring their small daughter Rebekah with them. Paul Goldberger maintains that the building will endure because is is “a true democracy.” But democracy and elitism would seem to be quite different concepts, at least on the surface.

It is certainly true that at the moment the Dakota is a perfect example of contemporary New York chic. And so, in pondering the Dakota's future, it might be helpful to consider what New York chic consists of—particularly since New York has become the standard for chic all over the country.

The West Side, for example, is not New York fashionable, but it is New York chic. The fashionability that was planned for it never came to be, and it remains the wrong side of the tracks. In New York it is not fashionable, but it is chic, to look for good goods at bargain prices, and that is what West Side apartments offer—more space for less money (though the Dakota's peculiar economics make it sort of an exception.) Everything is cheaper on the West Side. A 46-ounce can of tomato juice costs 89 cents at an East Side Gristedes, only 75 cents at Fine & Shapiro's Delicatessen on West Seventy-second Street. Dinner at an elegant West Side restaurant, such as the dining room of the Hotel des Artistes, will cost less than a smilarly appointed establishment on the East Side.

In New York it is chic for people who have money to live in close
proximity to people who are poor. To be sure, if the Dakotans were to ring the doorbells of some of their near West Side neighbors, they wouldn't much like the looks of some of the people who answered the door. Some of their neighbors would turn out to be bright young professionals, men and women living together with or without benefit of clergy, many of them industriously restoring and remodeling nineteenth-century houses and apartments in formerly run-down neighborhoods. But they would also encounter people in
yarmulkes,
sporting phylacteries, people who spoke Spanish or broken English and whose apartments smelled of cabbage and garlic. Nor would Dakotans enjoy spending an afternoon sipping pop with Jimmy Martin in his tiny, untidy upstairs room. Still, it is somehow comforting to know that such people are there, in the abstract, nearby, without having to come into contact with them. One feels superior—elitiest—toward such people, but just having them there makes one feel democratic.

In New York it is chic to have money, but not too much money. Big money, inherited money, and old money are not particularly chic, though some people who have this sort of money manage to act as if they are chic. Rockefellers are not chic. Estee Lauder, whose family origins are an impenetrable mystery, is chic. Eugenia Sheppard is chic because of the power of her pen. In her syndicated column she reports on who goes where and with whom wearing what. She and Earl Blackwell, who is her closest friend, constitute a mighty axis of New York social power. Rex Reed is New York chic for similar reasons.

The John Lennons are not chic. It is chic to go around town on a motorcycle, the way Paul Segal does, and it is not chic to travel, old-money style, in chauffeur-driven limousines, the way the Lennons do. The Lennons may think it is chic, or funny, to enter and alight from their limousines in blue jeans, but they can't have it both ways. They merely seem odd. Besides, the Lennons have not done much of anything in recent years, and the man who helped revolutionize twentieth-century music now seems to have settled into the ways of the
haute bourgeoisie.

Anyone working at a high-paying, exciting job is chic. but the job must be risky. Sculpture is chic, but owning a monument works is not chic. Photographers are always chic. Running a restaurant is chic, but owning a wholesale-food business is not chic. Writing novels and plays is chic, and so is writing advertising copy because of the high-risk factor
in the advertising business. Actors and actresses are chic, particularly when they are out of work. Paul Goldberger himself is an example of New York chic. His comments on architecture (a chic subject) are read by thousands of people each week.

If Mr. Greenfield considers the Dakota less “stable” than certain old-money East Side buildings, it is because so many Dakotans have deliberately chosen unstable callings, with uncertain rewards, subject to the whims of an unpredictable economy. And so, if the Dakota is a democracy, it is a democracy of an elite, a democracy of chic. As Wilbur Ross, president of the corporation, a man whose income is subject to the vagaries of the international money market, puts it, “We get some of the most literate crank letters of any company in town.” Can such a democracy survive and carry the old building through another troubled century? It has certainly become a more unwieldly democracy—the endless meetings, the proliferating committees—than it was in the days when Gordon Greenfield ran it with a more autocratic hand. And yet it survives.

The Dakota is often compared with London's Albany—like the Dakota, an anomalous island of luxury and privilege in the bustling business heart of Picadilly. (Unlike the Dakota, Albany does not allow children or any pets larger than a budgerigar.) Albany is more than fifty years older than the Dakota, and it has survived.

The Castle of Montmort, rising and falling against the horizon, has survived for hundreds of years under the stewardship of a single ducal family. It would be pleasant to think that the Dakota could also survive as a democracy of chic, a democracy of hard-driving and successful New York egos. But chic is subject to the whim of fashion and change. Perhaps in the end something more than chic or cachet will be required—something quite irrational, like faith—faith in this peculiar address, faith in this peculiar city.

New York remains a city—like London, Paris, Rome and Madrid—where the wealthy still find it pleasant to spend the majority of their time, and where the not-so-wealthy still have faith in the tantalizing possibilities of success and in what E. B. White has called “the queer prize” of privacy. Like San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston, New York is a city where the well-to-do are happy to reside in an urban setting. Interestingly, all these cities are harbor or waterfront cities, and New York has not lost its peculiar harbor
mentality. Cities that face the water face risks, for what is more uncertain than the vagaries of the waves? Water is an ancient symbol of trade, and New York is a city of traders and risk-takers—gamblers whose choices are guided by sheer faith.

New York is still a city where success is the main industry—a one-company town in a sense, a city of aspiration. New York is not a city like Cleveland or Detroit, cities which the rich have pretty much abandoned and left to the poor. Nor is New York a city like Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta or Los Angeles, where almost everyone lives in a suburb. In Manhattan, more and more luxury apartment houses keep going up. They succeed, and their towers seem to symbolize the city's constantly renewing faith in itself as a residence. Between the towers the old Dakota snuggles, shoulders hunched against the parade of progress, as though keeping its own particular, private faith.

New York, like the rest of the country, has entered what has been called the Era of the Self, the Me Decade, the laid-back age of laziness and self-indulgence and Looking Out for Number One. This attitude has affected some Dakotans' notions about their property as well, given them a what-the-hell, I own it, why not? sort of stance. There is a perceptible feeling of Nobody's-going-to-tell-
me
-what to do: This is my house, and I'll do with it what I please, and to hell with what the neighbors think. Considerateness is equated with conformity, and, heaven forbid, nobody wants to be called a conformist. In this mood it is easy to shrug off as inconsequential the systems, like those of the Dakota, that were designed to protect us. In this frame of mind it is easy to ignore—or refuse to acknowledge—the obligations that go with property and position, even though there is something quite self-destructive in this attitude. It is easy to forget that buildings can commit suicide too.

At the Dakota, this problem may be even more acute than in ordinary buildings because the Dakota does not think of itself as an ordinary building. So many celebrities live there that it easy for everyone who lives there to think that he or she is a celebrity or, at the very least, a celebrity
manqué …
and is entitled to the full star treatment and perquisites … is licensed to display star temperament with foot-stamping, tantrum-throwing shouts of, “Shoot the scene my way or I'll walk off the set.” Too much of this sort of thing could spell the Dakota's doom.

The Dakota has always managed to reflect shifting New York attitudes through the generations. It has always been a sign of the times. Today's young New Yorkers are a self-conscious generation, working terribly hard at being genuine and real, at being a part of what is trendy and arty and radically chic. To some people the Dakota today seems to have become a building, as Dorothy Parker put it, of “Authors and actors and artists and such” who “never say nothing and never say much.” At a gathering of such young Dakotans, the very air seems jagged with competition and one-upmanship. If this sort of mood were to prevail, the Dakota could easily become what New York City is to some people—a nice place to visit, but one wouldn't want to live there.

At the Dakota today the feelings about the possibilities of the building's future are a curious mixture of concern and blind faith—the kind of faith that leads villagers to live comfortably on the sides of volcanoes, to build houses and swimming pools along the San Andreas fault and in the burning hills above Benedict and Laurel Canyons. The Dakota has always been there, they say. Therefore, it will always be there—though the chances are probably more than fifty-fifty that it won't.

Dakotans, it sometimes seems, live in a kind of dream. In 1970 a novel by Jack Finney called
Time and Again
was published, which used the Dakota as its principal setting.
Time and Again
involved a science-fictional journey backward in time and, in the process, several facts got a bit twisted. (The time of the novel was a year before the Dakota was even built, for example.) To some people the Dakotans today are living in a similar world of fiction, make-believe and magic. At every board meeting new and more fanciful suggestions for “improving” the Dakota are proposed—a rooftop garden with pergolas and trees and shaded walks, a swimming pool, a private night club, and—again and again—the matter of the expensive and much-needed face cleaning. In the end, all the fine notions prove too impractical, too expensive, or both, and nothing comes of them. To the outside observer the building grows darker and dingier as the years speed by.

Of course the kind of rich the Dakota attracts today—that high-intensity, high-profile variety of rich—is not known for fiscal astuteness. These are not Rockefellers or Vanderbilts or Astors who amass huge fortunes and store them away in unshatterable trusts for future unborn generations. The Dakota's rich are the kind who install saunas and Jacuzzi whirlpool baths, buy Rolls-Royces and summer places in
the Hamptons and, at the same time, have trouble paying both the maintenance and the milkman. Faith supports them, rather than intelligence or foresightedness.