Life at the Dakota (6 page)

One other thing that Clark had noticed selling sewing machines was that the class system in America had changed drastically since the Civil War. There were no longer just two classes in America—the miserable poor and the wealthy few. There was now a huge middle class, and even that was divided into a number of different economic strata. There were rich and successful New Yorkers, like the Clarks themselves, who had never been invited to one of Mrs. William Astor's balls. There were many New Yorkers, like the Clarks, who lived on Fifth Avenue near the Belmonts and who had never been asked to one of August Belmont's famous dinners. There were many men and women who could afford sable lap robes in their landaus who were not part of the Four
Hundred, and who, like Clark (though not, of course, his wife), had stopped caring.

Furthermore, if despite the efforts of Miss Huntington and her Kitchen Garden classes, the servant class was indeed disappearing from America, the Dakota was designed as a hedge against that very possibility. As the mansions and town houses grew too costly to maintain and too difficult to staff, there would be the Dakota, with its own maintenance and housekeeping staff and private dining room. Edward Clark, in other words, seemed to have sensed that New York had already entered its era of upholstery. He had learned to work around class and the power structure, and had discovered that New York's power source was somewhere other than in the ritualized world of Mrs. Astor. He was designing a building for a new class of New Yorkers of means much like his own.

Edward Clark had not needed to be very shrewd to also notice something else. By the 1880's New York was on its way to becoming the largest and most important city in America. In less than ten years the city's population had doubled, climbing to one and a half million. Men who, a generation earlier, had headed for the California gold fields in search of riches were now streaming back into Manhattan as the island of golden opportunity. At the same time, 150,000 immigrants from Europe were arriving in America each year, and most of these were settling in New York City. Within another ten years it seemed likely that the population would double again. Already the city's water supply had become inadequate, though an engineer named Benjamin Church was at work on plans for an aqueduct that when completed would pour an additional 300,000,000 gallons of water daily into the city from upstate reservoirs. As the city grew it had nowhere to grow but northward, uptown. Seventy-second Street and Eighth Avenue might have seemed inconveniently remote in 1880, but within ten years, as Clark correctly guessed, it would not.

Today, when New York has become a city bristling with luxury apartment buildings, when it no longer matters, socially, whether or not one lives in an apartment house—and when Manhattan has become an island of apartment dwellers with only a handful of families remaining in private residences—Edward Clark seems to have been blessed with remarkable foresight. At the time, asked by a reporter from the
Tribune
whether he was a little “nervous” about the risks involved in
his costly and seemingly experimental venture, Mr. Clark's reply was characteristically brusque: “I am not.”

When asked why a man sixty-nine years old, who had spent most of his life manufacturing and selling small household appliances, should suddenly at the end of his career fling himself into the construction of a major building, Mr. Clark replied, “To make money.”

*
A Capitalist Romance: Singer and the Sewing Machine
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977).

*
The most famous of Isaac Singer's illegitimate sons was the dandified Paris Singer, who for many years was the dancer Isadora Duncan's principal lover. Paris Singer, with his friend Addison Mizner, was also responsible for transforming Palm Beach from a sleepy Florida sandpit into a dazzling resort for the very rich. There are various versions of how this happened and how the huge, fanciful Mizner houses got to be built. According to one, Mizner, who had never designed anything before and was also hard of hearing, was grumbling about having nothing to do. “Why don't you take up archeology?” said Singer. Mizner clapped his hands and said, “Architecture! I'd love to try that!” According to another story, both men were in Palm Beach and complaining of boredom. Singer said to Mizner, “What would you like to do most?” Mizner looked around at the small frame houses that comprised the settlement and said, “I'd like to build something big, that wasn't made of wood, and paint it yellow.” A third version blames Palm Beach indirectly on Isadora who, it is said, was having a fling with a handsome young gym instructor. Disconsolate, Paris Singer brooded until he hit upon the idea of creating a new Palm Beach as a substitute for the attentions of his faithless mistress. Paris Singer, meanwhile, had an illegitimate child of his own by Miss Duncan.

Chapter 4

The Architect

The style of the Dakota's architecture has been officially labeled German Renaissance. But it has also been called other things, such as Victorian Château, Victorian Kremlin, Brewery Brick, Pseudo-European and Middle European Post Office. In other words, to use a term much favored by architects, it is “eclectic.”

The architect whom Edward Clark chose to design his building, Henry Hardenbergh, went on to achieve a national reputation as a designer of elaborate hotels—among them the old Waldorf-Astoria and the Plaza in New York, the Willard in Washington and the Copley Plaza in Boston. In later years he would come to take himself with great seriousness. Described by a contemporary as “Napoleonic in stature,” he was diminutive, and to overcome this he took to placing his office desk and chair on a platform so that visitors would have to look up at him. He was also quite voluble, and in a 1906 interview with Sadakichi Hartmann in
The Architectural Record,
Mr. Hartmann noted with some satisfaction that for every twenty words of questions, Mr. Hardenbergh would respond with two hundred words of answers.
Mr. Hartmann commented on Hardenbergh's “wiry” physique and his “shrewd eyes,” and also noted, “This man knows what he is about … I thought to myself, I am sure he deserves the reputation he has of
having a roof on every house he builds,”
meaning, perhaps, that Hardenbergh was known for completing every task he undertook. When Clark selected him in 1879, however, Hardenbergh was still relatively unknown, and quite young—only thirty-two. To an earlier interviewer, in 1883, when the Dakota was still unfinished, Hardenbergh confessed that he was “still trying to find himself.”

Despite his youth, Henry Hardenbergh was most definitely a gentleman of the Old School and was descended from a New York family which had been among the city's earliest settlers. The first Hardenbergh arrived in what was then the Dutch colony of Nieu Amsterdam in 1644, some three years before the arrival of Governor Peter Stuyvesant. Henry Hardenbergh's great-great-grandfather, the Reverend Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh, had been a founder of Rutgers College. After studying under the architect Detlef Lienau, considered one of the nineteenth-century masters of the German Renaissance and Beaux Arts styles, young Hardenbergh designed and supervised the construction of a library and chapel for his great-great-grandfather's college. One of his first New York assignments was to design the Vancorlear Hotel, which used to stand at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street. Though they were of different generations, and though Edward Clark and Henry Hardenbergh did not move in quite the same New York social circles, it was Hardenbergh's grandiose execution of the Vancorlear that first drew him to Clark's attention as an architect. The Vancorlear was a transient hotel that consisted only of suites. What Clark had in mind was an apartment house that would be run like a hotel. He hired Hardenbergh and told him, in effect, that the sky was the limit. Hardenbergh, sensing that this was to be his first important building—one that could make his reputation—decided to take a no-holds-barred approach.

What emerged from his drawing board was nothing if not ambitious. What Hardenbergh designed was essentially a huge, hollow cube, roughly as tall as it was long and wide. To this basic structure were added elaborate embellishments—ledges, balconies, decorative iron railings and tall columns of bay windows climbing eight stories high. A tall, iron-gated archway, flanked by iron planter urns provided the
main carriage entrance from the Seventy-second Street side of the building and led into an H-shaped interior courtyard, designed as a carriage turnaround. In the center of the courtyard Hardenbergh placed two stone fountains, each spouting a dozen iron calla lilies. The courtyard led to a more modest arched entrance on the building's Seventy-third Street side, which was planned as a servants' entrance. (The building had not been open long, however, before servants complained that the Seventy-third Street entrance was not convenient. It was then decreed that this gate be kept permanently locked, to be opened only for funerals. Over the decades the “undertaker's gate,” as it came to be known, has been opened about once a year.)

The capstone of the building, however—the climax, the icing on the fantastic birthday cake—was the two-story-high roof, or, more accurately, succession of roofs. The Dakota's roofs did indeed resemble a miniature European town of gables, turrets, pyramids, towers, peaks, wrought-iron fences, chimneys, finials and flagpoles. The roof was shingled in slate and trimmed with copper, and it was peppered with windows of every imaginable shape and size—dormer and flush, square, round and rectangular, big and small, wide and narrow. Nestled among all this, Hardenbergh designed a railed rooftop promenade with gazebos and pergolas and canopied sunshades. The courtyard below would also be circled with an awninged promenade.

The original specifications of the building called for “Suits [sic] of Apartments for fourty [sic] two families besides Janitors.” Hardenbergh had originally designed the interior space so that each of the seven main floors would contain six apartments, described in the building records as “French flats,” roughly the same in size and layout. But Edward Clark had begun renting apartments in his building-to-be to friends, acquaintances and other interested tenants long before the building was completed, thus giving future tenants the opportunity to select the size, variety and the number of rooms they needed. This meant that Harbenbergh's floor plans for the building changed almost daily, as apartments were enlarged and divided to suit tenants' wishes. Walls came down and doorways were created as the architect tried to fit individual apartments together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In the beginning he had planned to place the largest apartments on the lower two floors. This was because elevators were still something of a novelty and not entirely trusted (in contrast to today, when the higher the
apartment is, the more desirable it is considered to be). Also, Hardenbergh reasoned that lower-floor living would seem more familiar to New Yorkers who were accustomed to living in town houses. The eighth and ninth floors were to be used exclusively as laundry rooms, service and storage rooms, and servants' rooms. Then Hardenbergh hit upon the idea of turning the second floor into hotel-style guest rooms that could be rented to tenants to put up out-of-town friends. And in each of the four corners of the eighth floor he designed four smaller apartments. When Hardenbergh finally finished juggling rooms and spaces, there were sixty-five apartments in the Dakota, ranging in size from four to twenty rooms.

Scale and massiveness were stressed throughout the building. Many apartments had drawing rooms that measured 20 by 40 feet and bedrooms that were 20 by 20. In the sixth-floor apartment Hardenbergh designed for the owner (Clark thought he could popularize upper-floor living by putting himself near the top), was the building's largest room—a ballroom-sized drawing room 24 feet wide and 49 feet long, with a fireplace at either end and ceilings graced by a pair of Baccarat crystal chandeliers. The Clark apartment also contained seventeen other “chambers.” Because Clark wanted floor-to-ceiling windows, these were given to all the other sixth-floor apartments to provide exterior symmetry. In all the apartments wood-burning fireplaces abounded (the Clark apartment had seventeen), and in the beginning the fireplaces plus coal-burning stoves in the kitchens provided the building's only heat. Wood and coal were delivered to the apartments daily, and the ashes from the fires of the day before were daily swept out. Gas was used only to light the chandeliers. Still under construction when the building opened was the subterranean boiler room beneath the lot next door, which would eventually provide steam heat and would also contain dynamos for generating “electric illumination.” Because he foresaw further development in the neighborhood, Clark specified that the Dakota's boilers be big enough to supply heat to all the blocks from the north side of Seventieth Street to the south side of Seventy-fourth Street between Eighth and Columbus avenues. For his new neighborhood, Hardenbergh designed what amounted to a miniature Consolidated Edison, and for a number of years it served as just that.

Hardenbergh's plans specified that the foundation was to be laid on “solid rock,” and foundation walls were to be from three to four feet
thick. The thickness of the exterior walls of the first floor was 24 to 28 inches, the second through fourth floor, 20 to 24 inches, the fifth and sixth floors, 16 to 20 inches, and above the sixth floor, 12 to 16 inches. The walls were tapered in this fashion to give them added strength. The floors themselves were three feet thick, arched and beamed and braced with brick and concrete. Between each layer of brick flooring, like a thick sandwich spread, was placed a layer of Central Park mud, which had been dug up in the park's landscaping process—for soundproofing as well as fireproofing. Fireproofing was an obsession with Hardenbergh because, for aesthetic reasons, he wished to eschew fire escapes. All partitions within the building were of brick and fireproof blocks. The ceilings on the ground floor were fifteen and a half feet high. With each successive floor, ceilings were lowered imperceptibly until, on the eighth and ninth floors, where the help were to live, they were a mere twelve feet high.