Life at the Dakota (4 page)

One of the first New Yorkers to realize that “nice” people of slender means might provide a market for a special sort of housing was the aristocratic Mr. Rutherfurd Stuyvesant. His father, Lewis Rutherfurd, had been an astronomer and scholar, but his mother was a descendant of the last Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, and so when the Stuyvesant fortune passed to her son, Stuyvesant Rutherfurd reversed his name to suit his circumstances. Stuyvesant embarked upon a daring experiment. In the late 1860's he hired Richard Morris Hunt, the
architect of the
Tribune
Tower and the first American to graduate from the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, to convert a row of town houses on Eighteenth Street, near Irving Place, into “French flats.” The resulting apartment house was called the Stuyvesant, and was a five-story walk-up with two apartments to a floor. As had long been the case in Europe, the best apartments were on the ground, or “principal” floor, and there was even a concierge at the front door. Each apartment in the Stuyvesant contained about seven-and-a-half rooms and, though each boasted such amenities as high ceilings, a pair of wood-burning fireplaces (one in the parlor, one in the dining room) and—the ultimate luxury—its own bathroom, the rooms were rather small and not particularly sunny, and the manner in which the apartments were laid out was crude and inconvenient. All the “indecent propinquities” that Mrs. Wharton had noted were observable—chambers visible from parlors—and all the rooms were connected by a narrow, twisting, sunless hallway. The lone bathroom was located closer to the tiny servant's room than to the three master chambers, and there were other shortcomings. There were hardly any closets (New Yorkers, after all, were used to armoires), and kitchens were placed at a considerable distance from dining rooms and even further from the dumbwaiters and service stairs.

Still, despite all this, and to everyone's surprise, the Stuyvesant was an immediate success, and all of its apartments were rented before the renovation was completed. “It seemed incredible,” as Lloyd Morris put it in
Incredible New York,
“that young people of the highest genealogical merit would consent to dwell in a building which, after all, was only a superior version of the tenements inhabited by the poor.” And another observer was pleasantly surprised to find that the list of the Stuyvesant's tenants “produced a very old Knickerbocker sort of effect upon the outside mind.” It was noted, however, that residents of the Stuyvesant were careful to refer to their homes as
apartments,
not “flats.”

Once Mr. Stuyvesant had demonstrated that apartment living could be made appealing, if not to the rich-rich, at least to the respectably well-to-do and the middle-class prosperous, other builders cautiously began to follow his example. In the late 1870's plans for three more luxury apartment buildings were being drawn up, each of them more ambitious than the Stuyvesant. The first was 121 Madison Avenue at the foot of fashionable Murray Hill. Each two floors of this building,
when it was completed, contained five duplexes of seven, eight or nine rooms. Again, each apartment had only one bath, though the servants' rooms were supplied with wash basins and given a toilet to share. Next came the Spanish Flats, so named after its Spaniard builder, Juan de Navarro, on Seventh Avenue between Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth streets. The Spanish Flats was an eight-building apartment complex, with thirteen apartments to a building. Entering a Flats apartment, one would find an 18- by 25-foot reception foyer, a 22- by 28-foot drawing room, a dining room of nearly the same size, a slightly smaller library, a large kitchen with a butler's pantry, four bedrooms with fireplaces, roomy closets and, again, a single bath. For servants, there were cells in the basement. The stigma of the term “flats” still remained, however, and the Spanish Flats was soon renamed the Central Park Apartments.

The third important building of the era was the Chelsea, at 222 West Twenty-third Street, then one of the most fashionable addresses in town. But the Chelsea was more an apartment hotel than an apartment house, since most of its suites had no kitchen facilities. Tenants were expected to use the restaurant-dining room on the ground floor.

All these developments were being watched with considerable interest by Edward Clark. There were other matters that he had also been watching closely. When the maps of the lines and the grades of the West Side street system were filed by the Central Park commissioners in 1868, there was a great West Side real estate boom. Eighth Avenue, it was predicted, on the west flank of the park, would become a street of millionaires' mansions outdoing even Fifth Avenue in spectacle and grandeur. West End Avenue, it was asserted, would one day become a magnificent shopping street, and an even grander future was predicted for Riverside Drive, the beautifully winding parkway that had been laid out, addressing the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades, between Seventy-second and One Hundred Twenty-fifth streets. Between 1868 and 1873 the price of land north of Fifty-ninth Street and west of Central Park increased by more than 200 percent. But then the speculative boom in West Side land was put to an end by the Great Panic of 1873, and the value of West Side land decreased sharply, though some building activity continued on the East Side.

In 1877 there was renewed interest in the possible future of West Side properties. That was the year the American Museum of Natural
History was completed, after three years of building, on the west side of the park between Seventy-seventh and Eighty-first streets. This was taken as an omen that the upper West Side would one day be a citadel of culture for New York's billowing aristocracy, and that other great museums, monuments and schools would follow. Columbia University was already planning to move uptown and to turn the steep ridge of land called Morningside Heights into a “civic Acropolis.” It was in 1877 that Edward Clark made his initial move and, taking advantage of still-depressed real estate prices, purchased two acres of land from August Belmont for $200,000 and began to plan his building.

Clark's building was to be the most opulent and lavish and at the same time tasteful that New York had ever seen, far outdoing any apartment house that then existed anywhere in the world in splendor of detail, size and scale of its apartments, and costliness of its appointments. Its interiors would replicate, and even surpass, the mansions of Goulds, Vanderbilts, Astors and Goelets. When he broke ground in 1880 his budget—an even million dollars—was unprecedented, and he had not gone far before he decided to pour yet another million into the project. From the beginning such extravagance was denounced as foolishness by both his business associates and his fellow clubmen. It would never work. The apartments would never rent. Friends urged him to give up his concept of a residential building and to turn it into a hospital or an asylum. The fact was simply that New Yorkers would never want to live that far uptown—not “nice” New Yorkers, anyway. “You may attract a few purse-proud nabobs from the world of trade,” warned one friend. “You are building for them, sir. But not for the gentry!”

Mr. Clark, it would turn out, was hoping to attract a clientele somewhat different from the gentry.

Another friend commented, with some sarcasm, that, in putting up a building so far north and so far west of civilization, Mr. Clark might just as well be building in Dakota, which was then still a territory and not yet a pair of states. Clark, who was not without a sense of humor, rather enjoyed the metaphor. He instructed his architect to make the most of it, and the building's design was embellished with certain Wild West details—arrowheads, ears of corn and sheaves of wheat in basrelief on the building's interior and exterior façades. Above the building's main portico a carved stone Indian head in bas-relief would be
placed, gazing sternly out at West Seventy-second Street, as the building's trademark.

Originally, Edward Clark had planned to call his building the Clark Apartments. But now, as the vast edifice slowly arose in the middle of what did indeed seem a prairie setting of great, untenanted plains, New Yorkers were simply calling it “Clark's Folly.” And so, in a gesture of airy defiance to the critics and skeptics and naysayers, he announced that its name would be the Dakota.

*
Though he failed to mention it, Mr. Strong himself owned 10,000 shares of Kenzula Petroleum.

*
This was a thinly veiled slur at Mrs. Astor's arch rival, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, whose new mansion was under construction at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street.

Chapter 3

Clark and Singer

Edward Clark had learned a great deal about American tastes and attitudes, and how to shape and change them, from selling, of all things, sewing machines.

Oddly enough, though servants were still relatively cheap in the United States in the nineteenth century, they were becoming increasingly hard to find. In 1882, the
Century
magazine had complained that.

The liberty and equality idea has converted a large proportion of our lower classes into would-be ladies and gentlemen, who put up with domestic servitude as a repugnant chrysalis state, preliminary to the winged bliss of perpetual idleness. A servant who is willing to be called a servant, who looks forward to servitude as a life-work, is almost unheard-of nowadays. Any honest effort to correct this assumption so common in our lower classes, to teach them the true dignity of work, and to train them in habits of industry, and cleanliness, and intelligent labor, should meet with the fullest sympathy.

There was, in fact, already an effort underway in New York to train people to think like servants. In 1877 Miss Emily Huntington had established the Kitchen Garden Association; “Kitchen Garden” was Miss Huntington's little play on the word kindergarten, because, in her association's program, small children were taken from “the poorest classes; the little waifs and strays of humanity who crowd the door-steps and alley-ways of the most squalid streets,” and were taught not to read and write but how to do housework. Miss Huntington's was a six-month course. First the tots were taught how to use matches and build a fire with charcoal or coal. Next came the learning of “games … dear to the heart of every little girl, such as scrubbing, ironing and folding clothes, tending the door, etc., etc.” The course progressed with instruction on how to polish silver and china, how to wait on table, how to wash dishes, how to sweep, dust, make beds and polish furniture. At the end of the course, “A good situation is promised to them at twelve years of age if they have learned their lessons well.” By 1881 nine hundred and ninety children were enrolled in the Kitchen Garden in New York alone, and Miss Huntington was expanding her operation to other cities.

Meanwhile, faced with the growing servant problem, more and more women were turning to a wealth of new mechanical gadgets and devices to help them with their household chores. But one home appliance that had not at all caught on was Elias Howe's invention, the sewing machine. For one thing, the machines were bulky, expensive and always breaking down. But there was another, more important psychological reason for womens' aversion to sewing by machine. Sewing was women's work, without question. Wealthy women sewed for pleasure and relaxation; they tatted, did embroidery, crochet and crewel work, and needlepoint. Poorer women sewed out of necessity, darning and mending their childrens' and husbands' socks and under-things, sewing buttons on shirts, and turning hems on handkerchiefs and tablecloths. For a poor unmarried woman, being a seamstress was one of the very few available occupations that were respectable and honorable. But the point of a woman and her sewing was that it was done by hand, with her needle and her thread, her thimble on her finger and her work arrayed prettily on her lap. The idea of sewing with a machine, which involved treadles, pulleys, knobs and gears, was actually repugnant to Victorian women, and to men. Sitting at a
machine looked—well, mannish. Sewing machines were not
comme il faut
with women of any American social class.

Of the background of the man whose name today is synonymous with the home sewing machine, Isaac Merritt Singer, very little is known. It is likely that the family was originally Jewish, and that the family name in Germany, from whence Isaac's father emigrated, was Reisinger, a common German-Jewish name. At the age of twelve Isaac Singer ran away from home, and for the next forty years of his life he was an itinerant unskilled laborer, often unemployed. For a while he had dreams of becoming an actor and headed something called the Merritt Players (eschewing the name Singer, perhaps because of its Jewish sound), a traveling acting troupe that made its way around the east with performances of Shakespeare for rural audiences. But the Merritt Players soon disbanded because, it seemed, no one could get along with Isaac Merritt Singer.

He was tall, handsome and muscular, but he had a foul mouth and a violent temper. After his brief acting career he worked at various odd jobs, none of them for very long because he so quickly managed to alienate or offend his employers. Singer also launched what was to be his most impressive career—as a womanizer and polygamist. At one point, he was married to five women, none of whom was aware of the existence of the other four, and was supporting as many as six mistresses on the side. Though he apparently beat, abused and otherwise mistreated his women, they seemed magnetized by him and by what must have been his imposing sexuality. The numbers of offspring from his various unions began to mount. Once, having just married a new wife, Singer decided that it might be prudent to shed himself of the previous one. He visited her with the aim of getting her to agree to a divorce, and only succeeded in getting her pregnant with another child.

There were many patented mechanical sewing devices by 1851 when, by sheerest accident and luck, Isaac Singer happened to become involved with them. Singer had, at this point, spent most of his untidy life more or less as a vagrant, marrying women, giving them babies and supporting himself with odd jobs as an unskilled laborer. Then, one day when he was working in a Boston machine shop, a Lerow & Blodgett sewing machine was brought in for repairs, and the job of fixing it was given to Singer. Suddenly, it was as if some long-buried resource in
Singer's mind burst to the surface and flashed like a comic-strip light bulb above his head. Within twelve hours he had made a sketch of a better machine, and eleven days later he had built one. It produced an even, single-thread chain stitch that no other machine had ever been able to achieve before.