“But Not for the Gentry”
By 1880, New York had passed beyond the Age of Innocence, of which Edith Wharton wrote, and had entered what James Truslow Adams called the “Age of the Dinosaurs.” In it, fortunes were being made on a scale that had never before been imagined and that were difficult even for the men who made them to comprehend. Twenty-five years earlier there had not been more than five men in the United States worth as much as five million dollars, and there were less than twenty who were worth a million. Now, however, the New York Tribune would report that there were several hundred men in the city of New York alone who were worth at least a million, and a number who were worth at least twenty million. The money, furthermore, was being made from sources never before heard of—from steel mills, steam engines, oil from the Pennsylvania hills, and all manner of mechanical inventions from machine guns to washing machines.
To the Old Guard of New York, the impact that all the new money was having upon the city was deplorable. George Templeton Strong, a diarist of the period, bemoaned the “oil-rich shoddy-ites” from out of town who had descended like an invasion upon New York* and wrote:
How New York has fallen off during the last forty years! Its intellect and culture have been diluted and swamped by a great flood-tide of material wealth … men whose bank accounts are all they rely on for social position and influence. As for their ladies, not a few who were driven in the most sumptuous turnouts, with liveried servants, looked as if they might have been cooks or chambermaids a few years ago.
With money was supposed to come respectability, and all at once there was emphasis on being “in society.” New York society was the subject of much attention in the newspapers, which fulsomely covered the banquets, fancy dress balls and quadrilles tossed by the likes of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Lispenard Suydam, Mr. and Mrs. Columbus Iselin, Mrs. Brockholst Cutting, and Mr. and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. There were no motion picture or television stars then to capture the imagination of the public, nor were there any stage actresses who were considered really “respectable,” and so every new-rich parvenue—and every shopgirl—had her favorite society figure whose doings she followed vicariously, whose life she longed to emulate, and whose perfumed circle she dreamed of entering.
But entering society was not easy. Society in 1880 was firmly delineated by Mrs. William Astor and her chief lieutenant, Ward McAllister, and her list of the “Four Hundred” New Yorkers who, supposedly, were as many as she could conveniently fit into her ballroom. (When Mrs. Astor’s list was eventually published, it turned out to contain only three hundred and four names.)
To get into society, it seemed, required more than money and the ability to surround oneself with the luxurious trappings of money. There was a new and important ingredient called taste. Good birth, which was so important a standard in English and European society, could not be purchased by newly rich New Yorkers, but good taste could. In 1870, Charles L. Tiffany had opened his splendid new store on Union Square, which had quickly become the bellwether of taste. In fact, as the New York Post solemnly advised its readers, Tiffany’s was “a school for taste” for those New Yorkers who needed such an education. Tiffany’s was an immediate success.
Good taste implied good breeding, which meant good manners, correctness in all things. In a popular play of the era called Fashion, a character with social pretensions named Mrs. Tiffany, a former milliner whose husband has struck oil, declared, “Forget what we have been, it is enough to remember that we are of the upper ten thousand!” But more than forgetting the past was involved; the past had to be covered by a new veneer of polish, and a flurry of books and manuals appeared—how-to books on “etiquette” and “comme il faut” and “proper social usage.” To judge from some of the social “dos” and “don’ts” published in this period, many people needed to be elevated to comme il faut from a fairly primitive state.
One etiquette writer, for example, scolded, “What an article is a spittoon as an appendage to a handsomely furnished drawing room!” And another advised guests at a dinner party against “shaking with your feet the chair of a neighbor”—an activity whose purpose is hard to imagine. It was also suggested that “ladies should never dine with their gloves on unless their hands are not fit to be seen.” If a lady should make an “unseemly digestive sound” at table or “raise an unmanageable portion to her mouth,” the proper reaction was to “cease all conversation with her and look steadfastly into the opposite part of the room.” While at table, advised one writer, “all allusions to dyspepsia, indigestion, or any other disorders of the stomach are vulgar and disgusting. The word ‘stomach’ should never be uttered at table.” The same writer cautioned that “the fashion of wearing black silk mittens at breakfast is now obsolete.” Decorum while traveling had to be observed, and when traveling alone, ladies should “avoid saying anything to women in showy attire, with painted faces, and white kid gloves … you will derive no pleasure from making acquaintance with females who are evidently coarse and vulgar, even if you know that they are rich.”
Men of the era were also instructed in the rules of delicacy; one etiquette manual commented that “The rising generation of young elegants in America are particularly requested to observe that, in polished society, it is not quite comme il faut for gentlemen to blow their noses with their fingers, especially when in the street.” The gentlemen’s habit of chewing tobacco also created problems. “A lady on the second seat of a box at the theatre,” wrote one social critic, “found, when she went home, the back of her pelisse entirely spoilt, by some man behind not having succeeded in trying to spit past her.” And an English visitor had been surprised to see none other than John Jacob Astor remove his chewing tobacco from his mouth and absent-mindedly trace a watery design with it on a windowpane.
When a French critic reported that it was the custom, in crowded New York omnibuses and elevated trains, for gentlemen who were already seated to let ladies perch on their knees, the New York newspapers angrily denounced this report as a piece of fiction. But these papers themselves were often critical of New Yorkers’ manners, and the Herald took society to task for “loud talking at table, impertinent staring at strangers, brusqueness of manners among the ladies, laughable attempts at courtly ease and self-possession among the men—the secret of all this vulgarity in Society is that wealth, or the reputation of wealth, constitutes the open sesame to its delectable precincts.”
Where one lived and how one lived in New York was also a matter of comme il faut, and that was what made Edward Clark’s plan to build a large luxury apartment house in the far reaches of the upper West Side seem so preposterous. Society would never place its sacred imprimatur on that part of town. No less an authority than Ward McAllister (or Mr. Make-a-Lister, as he was sometimes called) had declared that he could not bother “to run society” north of Fiftieth Street.*
West Seventy-second Street was not only far north of society’s imaginary boundary line, it was also far west of it. The perimeters of Central Park had already been laid on the city’s maps, but Eighth Avenue (not yet renamed Central Park West), the park’s western border, was still a dirt road. Though Mr. Clark’s expensive building would face the park, that section of the park had not yet been landscaped or developed. In the park, opposite and all around Mr. Clark’s building site, lived squatters in shacks built of roofing paper and flattened tins—shanties without plumbing or heat, whose owners kept pigs, goats, cows and chickens that grazed and foraged among the rocky outcroppings. Those deplorable hovels and their unlovely occupants would be Mr. Clark’s next-door neighbors.
Society in London, Paris, Rome and Madrid had been living in apartments for years, but New York was not Europe. New York gentlemen would never live “on shelves under a common roof,” and apartment houses, like the gaudy hotels, were regarded as architectural inducements to immorality. There was even more to it than that. Apartment living implied a sleazy and suspicious transiency. In those days, as Lloyd Morris pointed out, “Failure to own your own home was a confession of shabby antecedents or disreputable habits.”
The fact that the poor of New York were tenanted in the miserable railroad flats merely added to the stigma of apartment living. But more than that, to the sensibilities of Victorian New Yorkers there was something very Parisian, and therefore naughty about the thought of having bedrooms (euphernistically called “chambers;” the word “bedroom was considered as vulgar as the word “stomach”) on the same floor as the floor where one dined and entertained. Discreet staircases were expected to separate public from private rooms. Edith Whaton writing of a somewhat earlier era, had described a certain elderly new York lady whose
burden of … flesh had long since made it impossible for her to go up and down stairs, and with characteristic independence … had … established herself (in flagrant violation of all the New York proprieties) on the ground floor of her house; so that, as you sat in her sitting room … you caught … the unexpected vista of a bedroom …
Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fiction … such as the simple American had never dreamed of. That was how women with lovers lived in wicked old societies, in apartments with all the rooms on one floor, and all the indecent propinquities that their novels described.
These attitudes toward single-floor living had remained unchanged. But things had been happening in New York that the highest reaches of society may not have noticed. For one thing, with all the new money that was pouring into the city, New York had become easily the most expensive American city in which to live. Most hard-pressed—since they appreciated the niceties—were the city’s genteel, well-educated professional people of moderate means. A house in a respectable, if not affluent, neighborhood could not be rented for less than eighteen hundred dollars a year. A woman who considered herself a lady felt it essential to have at least three in staff. The Irish cook cost from eighteen to twenty dollars a month. A chambermaid, usually also Irish, cost from twelve to fifteen dollars monthly and a nurse for the children, usually French or German, cost about the same. The costs of living had escalated alarmingly. Butter was fifty cents a pound, compared with thirty-five cents or less elsewhere in the country. Eggs were fifty cents a dozen, sugar was sixteen cents a pound, chicken was twenty-five cents a pound and beef was thirty-five cents a pound. A family with an income of six thousand dollars a year—well above the median American income of the era—found itself having to watch pennies. The dinner party, meanwhile, had become a fixed New York institution, and well-bred New Yorkers were expected—almost required—to do a certain amount of entertaining, and to do so on a modest income had become something of a hardship.
Adding to the cost of everything was the fact that New York was becoming a very crowded city. As early as 1870, an angry reader wrote to the New York Times, demanding to know why the city was keeping empty land in Central Park “while the middle classes are being driven out of the City by excessive rents.” Indeed, it was upon the middle class that the squeeze was most extreme. Of the million people in New York, half the population lived in 40,000 houses of between five and fifty rooms. The other half lived in just 20,000 dwellings, mostly consisting of one room. In addition, more than 24,000 immigrants from Europe and Ireland were crammed into 8,500 basement cells without heat, light, ventilation and, of course, plumbing. New York was threatening to become a city of the enormously rich and the desperately poor.
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.