Snobs in Reverse
The Dakota’s First Families—the F.F.D.’s, as they sometimes referred to themselves—were a predictable mix of an aspiring few (who might one day decide to elevate their status by moving to an East Side address) and a comfortable majority who were perfectly content with who they were and where they lived, and who simply ignored East Side snobbery. Gustav Schirmer’s son, for example—a grown man when his family moved into the Dakota—would marry and settle his family on the East Side, first on Gramercy Park and later on Murray Hill. Other families like the Steinways would refuse to be swayed by fashion and would remain loyal to the Dakota for two generations.
Very quickly the Dakotans managed to develop a reciprocal snobbishness and sense of exclusivity about their particular principality on the Park and the acre of real estate upon which the Dakota rested. Dakotans often congratulated themselves for having the soft morning sunlight with which the building was blessed, and for escaping the fierce afternoon sunlight with which Fifth Avenue was cursed. A frequent comment heard in those days was, “It’s so windy on Fifth Avenue!” (Though why Fifth Avenue should be windier than Central Park West is anyone’s guess.) Though squatters’ shacks—at least in the beginning—were scattered on all sides about the hems of the Dakota’s lacy skirts, their presence was explained away with the comment that they gave the neighborhood “a pleasant rural air.” Another pronouncement that became popular at the Dakota was, “Fifth Avenue takes a turn at Seventy-second Street, crosses the Park to the Dakota, and then goes back East again.” But of course Fifth Avenue didn’t do that, and it was all an attempt at an illusion. Central Park West was not Fifth Avenue, nor would it ever be. In their hearts of hearts Dakotans knew that the Dakota had been built as an imitation of the rich New York life, not the real thing. The Dakota was designed to convey the impression that, though one was in an apartment house, one was really in a mansion. But it fooled no one (no New Yorkers, anyway), and this the Dakotans knew.
Dakotans today continue to be more than a little defensive about their address and the ambiguous status of the neighborhood. The evening crowds on the sidewalks of Columbus Avenue are brought forth as a plus—there is a sense of safety, they say, in numbers, whereas one would feel frightened walking alone at night on a deserted East Side street. “At night,” they say, “the muggers and the burglars are all working on the East Side. No one would want to hurt us over here, because this is where the muggers live.” The neighboring side streets may be a little dingy but, loyal Dakotans insist that in this very fact they find a certain cozy charm.
Paul Goldberger, for example, who is the architectural critic for the New York Times and, though a recent tenant, a thoroughly converted Dakotan, speaks of the “pleasant sleaziness” of the neighborhood. “I like to walk west to Columbus Avenue and then down to Lincoln Center,” he says. “All sorts of funny and interesting shops and boutiques are springing up like the ones along First and Second Avenues.”
There are also in the neighborhood a great many small, family-run businesses—drug stores, meat markets, bakeries, food stores, fruit and vegetable shops and delicatessens, not to mention a wide variety of ethnic restaurants. “There’s no sense of neighborhood on the East Side,” Goldberger says. “Here, there is. The shopkeepers get to know you, and everyone smiles and waves at one another. It sounds silly to say that the West Side is friendlier than the East Side, but it’s true.”
Paul Goldberger has Jo Mielziner’s former bachelor digs. “When I bought my apartment in 1976 it was really in terrible shape, which was odd. You’d think that a famous set designer wouldn’t have let his own place get so run-down. The kitchen was really primitive. To me, the thing that’s special about the building is that it’s the only exclusive, expensive and social building that has everything from big twenty-room spreads down to small studios and little rooms that have to share a bath. Still, the building and the address are not quite socially acceptable. It exists in a kind of social limbo. It’s a cross between a SoHo loft and a Fifth Avenue apartment house. If you’re a basic, boring WASP, you wouldn’t live here. And anyone who wouldn’t want to live in this building because it’s on the West Side, we just wouldn’t want living here.”
George Davison-Ackley, a wealthy lawyer who has flung together two large Dakota apartments for his own bachelor quarters, says, “When I first moved here, and invited people to parties, I’d put One West Seventy-second Street on the invitations. East Side friends used to phone with regrets, just because they didn’t want to come to the West Side. So I started putting ‘The Dakota’ on my invitations. People never regret now. They come to see my apartment and the building, just because it’s the Dakota. Do you know that I have friends who actually keep score of how many Dakota apartments they’ve been inside?” In other words, Dakotans feel about the Dakota much the way, as it has been said, Bostonians feel about Boston: They believe in the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of the Dakota.
Still, to East Siders there will probably always be something a little comic about the West Side. Like New Jersey, which is also funny to New Yorkers, the West Side is the butt of all the jokes. Even when the Dakota was informally christened the Dakota, it was done in a sense of fun-poking. But because any neighborhood, whatever its shortcomings or inconveniences, becomes a section of similarly moneyed and similar-minded people who prefer to live with their own kind, the West Side has survived all the ridicule. Where a person lives becomes a habit, usually a pleasant one, and whether an address is considered fashionable or not is simply a matter of taste. In New York, the West Side has attracted those who were willing to gamble, to take chances, to risk being considered offbeat. To live on the West Side took, and takes, a creative, pioneering view of life—qualities one often associates with the peculiarly Jewish élan.
Today, easily half the people who live in the Dakota are Jewish. This was by no means always so. In the early days the building did not welcome Jews at all. The Majestic, across the street, became known as “the Jewish building.” The Dakota’s anti-Semitic policy probably stemmed directly from Edward Clark himself, and may have had something to do with Clark’s loathing of Isaac Singer and his allegedly Jewish heritage. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, when social anti-Semitism was particularly rampant in New York and elsewhere, it was said that there were no Jews in the Dakota. Then one slipped in, a Mrs. Erich, a member of the distinguished Lehman banking family. She got by the screeners, it is assumed, because no one guessed that Erich could be a Jewish name. When it was discovered that, indeed, a Jew lived in the building, people said, “We do have Jews in the building—a perfectly lovely Jewish person.”
Those days, happily, have more or less passed, though they did not pass all that long ago. Henry Blanchard has been active on the Dakota’s board since 1961. He says, “I never wanted to have anything to do with admissions policy. I remember once there was a board meeting up in the Jacksons’ apartment, and I was getting a little bored with all the talk about elevators. Suddenly, C. D. Jackson turned to me and said, ‘How do you feel about Jews in the building? How do we know who’s Jewish and who isn’t?’ I said I certainly didn’t care. I said, ‘Why ask me?’ I thought it was very odd, because C. D. Jackson was Jewish himself, though he never made a point of it. The name was originally Jacobson—his family had the Jacobson Marble Company. But, I suppose, working for Henry Luce, whose father was a Protestant missionary, it was better not to be Jewish.…”
“Today, we’ve got a perfect New York melting pot—Jews, WASPS, and now with Roberta Flack we’ve got our black.” says Paul Goldberger. Miss Flack, of course, did not come into the building without a certain amount of huffing and puffing on the parts of some people. And some people have noticed that over the years the building has never had any black employees. Today, there is even an Arab in the Dakota—Princess Mona Faisal, who, when asked to give her occupation on a Dakota questionnaire, put down “Saudi Arabia.”
Pauline Pinto is a strikingly beautiful redhead—Alabama-born, a former actress now working as a psychiatric social worker, divorced from a Spanish businessman, living alone in the Dakota with her three young sons, two by Mr. Pinto, the third by a previous marriage. The walls of her apartment are all covered with sleek vinyls in beiges and dark browns. Mirrors shimmer everywhere. At Pauline Pinto’s dining table one sits on long, low sofas covered with oyster-colored velvet. The apartment has, among other luxuries, a sauna. Sitting in a long, green Moroccan caftan, sipping a Scotch Mist, Mrs. Pinto seems the epitome of New York chic and glamour as she talks of what it is like to be beautiful, rich, single, and living in Manhattan.
“My husband and I got this apartment in 1967 or 1968 because we were thinking of separating. This looked like our apartment in Madrid, it reminded us of Europe. The building lends itself to the Edwardian style. I still keep an apartment in Madrid. I don’t know why. I’m attached to it, and I don’t know what to do with it.
“The East Side is a cliché. I used to live on the East Side, on Seventy-first between Fifth and Madison. I went to all the right places—P.J. Clarke’s and Michael’s Pub. But here, I see people who look like me every day. It’s healthy. If you’ve ever been in the art world, you want to be a star. My cousin directed Saturday Night Fever—it was his first success. Now I’m trying to catch up with my cousin. I feel the New York pressure terribly. I do more in ten days than most of my friends will do in a year. My friends are writers, book people, people who come through, friends from California—a terrific variety of friends. Right now I’m going out with a psychiatrist. I go to Nan Kempner’s parties. I like to be with people who are doing things.
“I’m interested in a theater group called the Performing Garage—I think it’s beautiful. I’m interested in the Organic Theatre from Chicago. I’m interested in the Theater of Cruelty—neorealism takes energy, you know. As a single woman I don’t feel bad going out alone. In Spain they would call you a puta if you went out alone. I said to a woman the other day that I lived on the West Side. Her eyebrows went up. I said, ‘I won’t be a cliché.’”
It has always been assumed that the people who lived at the Dakota were somewhat different from other fashionable New Yorkers. “My family nearly died when I said I was moving to the West Side,” says Mrs. Davenport West, a doctor’s widow in her eighties, who moved into the Dakota in the 1920’s—she no longer remembers the exact year. Mrs. West is something of an anomaly in a building of anomalies. She is not a bit Bohemian but is a proper Social Register type who says, modestly, that her father “thought there was a future in New York real estate and that it might grow,” and thereupon acquired quite a lot of it. Actually, though like many Dakotans her late husband was of the high-income, professional working class, and though Mrs. West is not the sort of woman who would say so, she is one of the wealthiest people in the building. She was a Phelps, an heiress to the Phelps Dodge Industries fortune, grew up on a huge estate in New Jersey and still maintains a summer place in Harwich Port, on Cape Cod, called “Malabarra,” which rivals the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port in terms of size and luxury. Mrs. West’s father was a noted yachtsman, the first man to circumnavigate the globe in a private sailing vessel. In her Dakota apartment Mrs. West keeps a small collection of precious antique clocks. A man from Tiffany’s comes once a week to wind them.
In the 1920’s, Mrs. West recalls, there was a shortage of good apartments on the East Side. “My husband said, ‘Why don’t we try the West Side?’ and I said, ‘Well, why not?’ Of course it was our second choice.” The Wests looked at the Dakota, liked what they saw, and took the apartment in which Mrs. West still lives. “People said, ‘How can you stand it?’” Mrs. West says. “My friends told me we’d hate it, moving over there, with all those bourgeois, nouveau people. They told me that they were sure they’d never see me again. But the building was so nice. Before we moved in, my friends came over, one by one, to see what kind of Hell’s Kitchen we were living in. They said, ‘Well, the apartment is nice,’ as though they hated to admit that it could be, but then they’d always add, ‘But Dorothy—it’s the West Side! How could you?’ Of course they meant the neighborhood, and of course the neighborhood was a little crummy.”
For all the crumminess, Mrs. Davenport West has no intention of ever leaving her large apartment, which she “thinks” has seven rooms and knows has three bathrooms and four working fireplaces.
And yet if the building today is a “melting pot” it is one in which the contents have not quite melted. The Dakota pot seethes and boils with ingredients that have not quite come together, and feuds and rivalries and jealousies and factions abound. Some people, for example, feel that, among other things, the Dakota itself has been divided along an East Side-West Side axis. “The people who live on the sunny side [the east] are entirely different from those who live on the shady side [the west, which is now permanently in the shadow of the Mayfair Tower Apartments],” says Sheila Herbert, a young advertising woman who grew up in the Dakota and, like a number of “Dakota babies,” ended up with her own apartment there. Sunny-siders, Miss Herbert feels, are more sunny-dispositioned, more outgoing and gregarious, give more and better parties, have done splashier things in terms of decorating their apartments. The John Lennons, Roberta Flack and the flamboyant restaurateur-entrepreneur, Warner LeRoy, are all examples of sunny-siders. Shady-siders are more quiet and reserved, more conservative and staid, less given to party-going and party-tossing, and socializing with their neighbors. Mrs. West is a shady-sider.
Miss Herbert may have a point. But there is more to it than that.