The Panic of 1960
New Yorkers, New Yorkers like to say, pull together in times of crisis. They are magnificent at rising to difficult occasions. In a blizzard they reach out to help the aged lady cross the street. In a transit strike New Yorkers with automobiles offer lifts to strangers. In a blackout they emerge to help direct traffic and open up their houses to the hapless and the stranded. New Yorkers have learned to cope with life’s worst vicissitudes, and this nil admirari attitude, they say, is one reason why New York considers itself a city of survivors. Only the fittest make it here. The unfit, having tried and failed, go home to Peoria, where they do just fine. The notion that New York is a community of success is perhaps the greatest source of the New Yorker’s immense self-pride.
We are not talking here of Harlem, or of the Bronx, or Queens, or Brooklyn or Staten Island. These remain, Rand-McNally notwithstanding, foreign places. New York—the New York that counts—consists only of the lower two thirds of Manhattan Island, and some might limit the New York territory to an even smaller strip of real estate than that—to the blocks immediately east, south and west of Central Park.
By 1960 the Dakota had become a survivor in itself—New York’s oldest standing luxury apartment dwelling, a city showplace for nearly eighty years. Its very appearance—that block-long crenelated façade of weather-stained yellow brick and chocolate-colored stone, surrounded by a dry moat—was no longer technically beautiful but was imposing, not to say daunting. If New York had become a city of expanded egos, the Dakota had become a building designed to swell the ego even more. Its very scale seemed to boost and bolster a sense of self-importance among those privileged to call the Dakota home. From within its apartments, vast by contemporary standards, with their lofty ceilings, their floor-to-ceiling windows, one could feel in command of the city. New Yorkers had long been known for their ability to retreat, tortoise-fashion, within the protective shells of their homes, but the carapace of the Dakota was now the thickest one in town. The Dakota had become a fortress within a fortress, and this lent its residents a feeling of instant superiority. There was, after all, nothing left in New York quite like it, nor was there anywhere else in the country. It had become a little like an exclusive suburb. It had the pomp and circumstance of Shaker Heights and Grosse Pointe, the glamour of Beverly Hills, the self-satisfaction of the Main Line, but though there were similarities to all these “good addresses,” the Dakota was more so.
Living at the Dakota has also been described as like living in a small European village; at least one tenant says he half expects to see the women of the building gathered at the courtyard fountains to do their wash. For years, however, it was more like living in a small, private kingdom, each apartment a separate duchy with its ruling lord and lady.
Though there was no real precedent for the Dakota, it seemed to fill, from the moment it opened its doors, a particular New York need. New Yorkers, to a greater degree than residents of most large cities, are obsessed with privacy, and the Dakota was designed for this—to insulate and protect privacy, as well as nourish the egos it sheltered. In New York, neighbors are neighbors only in a rather special sense, and there is the distinct feeling that too much urban familiarity breeds discontent and that proximity breeds distrust. The massiveness of the Dakota’s construction and design was such that those who lived there would never have to endure the discomfitures so commonly associated with apartment living today—the sounds of children’s footsteps running on the floor above, the noise of a domestic argument next door, the smell of someone’s cooking permeating the elevator shafts. Each tenant was provided with a place of splendid isolation from all the others. In this hothouse atmosphere, egos increased in size to championship proportions, developed idiosyncrasies, whims, quirks, fetishes, peculiarities, temperaments and tempers.
There were almost daily indications and reminders that those who lived at the Dakota were people of particular importance. For one thing, in addition to other blessings, for years Dakotans seemed to be given special consideration in terms of what it cost. Nowhere in New York could so much cubic footage be had for so little rent—ten rooms for $500 a month, for example, and seventeen rooms with six bathrooms and eight working fireplaces for $650. In 1884 these Dakota rents had seemed substantial. But the astonishing thing was that by 1960 they had risen hardly at all.
Then there was the caliber of the people who, at one time or another, all lived inside the principality—seemingly a cross-section of New York City leadership. At least three foreign ambassadors—the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Finnish—lived at the Dakota along with the French Minister of Cultural Affairs. There had been the distinguished Schirmers and Steinways. Other celebrated tenants have included the likes of Boris Karloff, Eric Portman, Judy Holliday, Jose Ferrer and his wife Rosemary Clooney, Zachary Scott and his wife Ruth Ford, Jo Mielziner, Sidney Kingsley, Marya Mannes, Theresa Wright, Gwen Verdon, Arthur Cantor, Robert Ryan, Fannie Hurst, Paul Gallico, Marian Mercer, Carter and Amanda Burden, Judy Garland, Susan Stein Shiva, opera singer John Brownlee, Kent Smith, Betty Friedan, fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard and her husband Walter Millis, William Inge, Syrie Maugham, John Frankenheimer, Ted Ashley, Jack Palance, Gregory Ratoff. Admiral Alan G. Kirk represented the military at the highest level, and C. D. Jackson, the publisher of Time, represented publishing. Later were to come Lauren Bacall, Rex Reed, photographers Peter Fink and Hiro Wakabayashi, ex-Mrs. Paul Simon, Dotson Rader, restaurateurs Larry Ellman and Warner LeRoy, the Leonard Bernsteins, filmmaker Albert Maysles, Roberta Flack, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. If, in other words, New York were considered to be the capital of American art, culture and fashion, the Dakota seemed to be the Capital of the capital. As such, it seemed almost sacred—inviolable, impregnable, invulnerable.
Therefore, considering the amount of hubris the building had generated among its tenants over the years, it was with considerable shock that on the afternoon of Friday, December 17, 1960—while the rest of New York was going about its business of pre-Christmas shopping—the residents of the Dakota learned that their special status was about to come to an abrupt end and that they might have to face a life as ordinary mortals. That was when Mr. Ernest A. Gross, then one of the building’s most distinguished residents, an international lawyer and three-time delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, was sitting in his Wall Street office and a call came through from William J. Zeckendorf who, though he later fell from grace, was then the unquestioned czar of New York real estate and who, in the years since World War II, had been busily reshaping the Manhattan skyline. “I want to introduce myself,” said Zeckendorf to Gross. “I’m your new landlord.” Ernest Gross froze. Though Mr. Zeckendorf’s telephone call was by way of a greeting, it also conveyed in no uncertain terms a warning to Gross and his fellow Dakotans. Whenever William Zeckendorf acquired an old, unprofitable building like the Dakota on a choice piece of land, he razed it and erected in its place a shiny tower of steel and glass which was a modern model of efficiency and economy. “Buildings like the Dakota don’t make sense in New York anymore,” said Mr. Zeckendorf. Immediately, Ernest Gross called his friend and Dakota neighbor, C. D. Jackson, and apprised him of the situation. Zeckendorf had the Dakota, and he was preparing to tear it down. Some ninety families would lose their treasured homes.
That something of this sort might one day happen was not entirely unexpected. Tenants of the Dakota had been watching, with some apprehension, as the building’s owner, Stephen C. Clark, passed his seventy-fifth birthday and moved toward his eighties without committing himself as to what his plans for the building’s future might be. The Dakota had now belonged to the Clark family for three generations. Everything the Dakotans had they owed to the benevolence—and extravagance (or perhaps nonchalance)—of the Clarks. There had been the building’s famous services, for example. When the Dakota first opened its doors to rental tenants in 1884, it had a full-time operating staff of 150 people. In addition to the customary elevator men and women, doormen, janitors and porters and watchmen, there was a resident housekeeper who supervised a staff of resident maids. There was a resident laundress with her own laundry staff, and laundry was picked up at individual apartments in special wicker baskets and returned washed, ironed, darned and mended and with buttons sewn on, each piece separated with a sheet of pink tissue paper. There was a gentlemen’s tailor in the basement. There was a house carpenter, two house painters, a house cabinetmaker, a house electrician, plumber and glazier. Before the days of the automobile, there had been Dakota stable boys to handle visiting carriages and a separate Dakota stables two blocks away for tenants’ horses, landaus and coupés.
On the ground floor of the Dakota proper there was a full office staff operating under a “lady managerette” and a paging system whereby individual tenants could notify the front desk of their needs and wishes. The Dakota even had a baronial private dining room, with its own captains and white-gloved waiters, just for tenants and their guests. Each afternoon a printed menu was discreetly slipped beneath each apartment door so that tenants, if they desired, could phone down to Miss Kay, the dining-room managerette, and specify their orders for dinner in advance. Here, for $1.50, one could select, to quote from a 1907 bill of fare:
Caviar Oysters
Celery Salted Almonds Olives
Cream of Asparagus
Broiled Spanish Mackerel
Pommes Parisienne Cucumbers
Partridge, Fantaisie
Potatoes soufflées Peas
Champagne
Lettuce and tomato en surprise
Neopolitan ices Gâteaux assortis
Café
Napkins and tablecloths were of the heaviest linen. Silver was of such heavy plate that even today such pieces of the original set as have been salvaged show no sign of wear. Goblets and finger bowls were of stained glass. In each of the four passenger elevators, a silver tray was placed for messages, mail and calling cards.
As the twentieth century progressed, of course, more and more of these lovely little services began to disappear. The laundry and tailoring and housekeeper and maid service went first. Not long after World War II, the dining room—which had never been a profitable or really practical operation—closed for good. The front-office staff was reduced to four, and by 1960 the building’s entire staff was down to only forty-five. Still, for New York this was a high staff-to-tenant ratio, and that the building had been kept up as well as it had was, in large part, thanks to the Clark family.
As Stephen C. Clark entered his twilight years the Dakota became very solicitous of the family. Stephen and Susan Clark, who lived across the Park in East Seventieth Street, were frequently invited to dinners by various of the Dakota’s distinguished tenants, all of whom were eager for some hint of what would happen to their building when the inevitable happened to him. It was perhaps not exactly a coincidence that, in March 1959, Architectural Forum, a Luce publication, published a lengthy photographic essay extolling the architectural splendors of the Dakota. Lest the Clark family fail to be impressed by the article, C. D. Jackson had the photographs put together in a twenty-two-page album inscribed “To Stephen Clark with the compliments of C. D. Jackson and the editors of Architectural Forum.” Marya Mannes, already a well-known author, lecturer and critic, showered Mr. Clark with a series of charming little verses, each calculated to convey to him how much his tenants loved him, and his building, and how certain the tenants were that he, or someone just like him, would always care for them.
She need not have wasted her ink, nor should the others have wasted their dinner invitations, their birthday cards or their thoughtful little Christmas gifts. When Stephen Clark died, in September 1960, there was an anxious wait for news of his will. Then it was learned that Clark had not left the Dakota, which he had owned outright, to his children or grandchildren. He had left it instead to the Clark family’s foundation. At first this seemed well and good, though there was a certain nervousness in the building since dealing with the caprices of a foundation, or committee, is not the same as dealing with an individual. What the tenants of the Dakota did not realize, however, was that under New York State law a foundation cannot operate or own an unprofitable property. And, by 1960, the Dakota was not operating at a profit if, indeed, it ever had.
As far as Ernest Gross was able to ascertain that Friday evening, Mr. Zeckendorf had not become the Dakota’s landlord—yet. What Zeckendorf had done, it seemed, had been to make the Clark Foundation an offer of $4,500,000 to buy the building. He had made his offer at five o’clock on Friday and had given the Foundation until noon the following Monday to accept or reject it. The Foundation had indicated its willingness to accept, or so Mr. Gross was told, and Zeckendorf had already advanced a certain sum in what, in real estate parlance, is called “earnest money.” In his hastily arranged meeting with C. D. Jackson, Gross pointed out that the Dakota only had two and a half days—over a weekend, at that—to come up with a matching or perhaps better offer.
A hasty meeting of Dakota tenants was called, in which Gross and Jackson attempted to explain the nature of the catastrophe, the disaster, that was at hand. All sorts of people whom nobody had seen before came out of the woodwork. Lauren Bacall, newly widowed and who had come into the Dakota only recently, sat on a table and shouted unprintable curses at all involved; she had just finished decorating her apartment at some expense. Beside her sat Judy Holliday, in tears; she had already been pronounced ill of incurable cancer and wanted to die in the building she considered home. Even old Miss E. Bruce Leo, who had not set foot outside her eighteen-room apartment in years, appeared in a picture hat and a long, trailing gown. Some said Miss Leo was already a hundred and two, and she had become the Dakota’s Madwoman of Chaillot. (Among other oddities, she kept a stuffed horse in her parlor.) “I will not be put out of my house! I will not be put out!” Miss Leo kept shouting. Almost everyone shouted, cursed, stamped, sobbed and pounded their chairs on the old dining room’s inlaid marble floor. The meeting had started in confusion, and quickly it became chaotic. Order was impossible, and when the meeting broke up it was not so much adjourned as dispersed as an angry, violent mob. Ernest Gross and C. D. Jackson returned to the Jackson’s apartment for drinks and to ponder how, if at all, the Dakota might be saved.
What Gross and Jackson had discovered that night was that New Yorkers, in times of crisis, do not necessarily pull together. At that December meeting, everyone in the Dakota was pulling for himself, for his or her own precious place of residence. Sometimes, in times of crisis, people need a leader or captain, and co-captains were what Gross and Jackson decided that night to be. The sizes of the egos involved in the Dakota were such that they had to be brought under some firm command if anything at all were to be accomplished. The Dakota had often been called New York’s answer to Grand Hotel. It might, more aptly, have been compared with Ship of Fools or the Orient Express. Though there had never been, as far as is known, any actual murders at the Dakota Apartments, there had been a number of odd, untidy doings. All had had to do with the capricious and unruly egos of the Dakota’s passengers. Like a great ship, the Dakota had developed creaks and sighs and moans. Nevertheless, there had been compartments in which many people passed their days; there were stewards and porters—whose palms needed periodically to be greased—to care for their needs, and there had been someone continuously passing through to collect the fare. On board the Dakota some had been traveling grande luxe, in First Class accommodations, others had settled for Cabin Class, and still others had been in steerage. But now that it had been abandoned by the Clark family, the Dakota was a ship without a pilot, and, like the great luxury liners of the past, it seemed doomed.
And yet, there were special problems. The Dakota was, after all, a part of New York City. All around it the restless seas of New York had seethed and surged and battered the Dakota’s tarnished sides. Those who called the Dakota home should have been more anxious about those seas because, for years, everything that had happened to the city of New York (and was to happen in large cities throughout the country) happened, in microcosm, to the Dakota. The building had come to represent everything that was pleasant and rewarding about life in New York, but it also reflected everything about New York life that was threatening, frightening and uncertain. Every battle or crusade that the city had undergone had also been confronted, on a smaller scale, at the Dakota. But no one had noticed much of this. The Dakota had been regarded by its residents as a charming anachronism, one that would never change. Now the Dakotans were discovering the truth of the ancient axiom that nothing is more certain than change—and they cared for this discovery not at all.
As in any old structure, there had been strange, recurrent scuttlings—“mice in the walls.” The Dakota’s mice were both real and figurative—tiny creatures that had been nibbling and gnawing at the Dakota’s famous underpinnings of respectability, security, pride and doughty longevity. Behind the Dakota’s stern, implacable façade—the buff-colored brick, the carved Nova Scotia freestone trimmings, the niches, balconies and balustrades with spandrels and panels and cornices of terra cotta, the friezes and finials and gargoyles and oriel windows—changes had been taking place. Now Dakotans would have to face up to their existence, and swallow a bit of pride.
One of the traditions at the Dakota had long been the annual gathering of tenants, at Christmas time, to sing carols in the building’s spacious inner courtyard. The singing was traditionally followed by hot buttered rum, cookies and sandwiches in the large fifth-floor apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Blanchard, who were among the building’s long-time residents. It was a time, once a year, when neighbors made at least a show of being neighborly, but for this sort of thing to happen once a year was considered quite sufficient. Celebrity tenants such as Miss Bacall, whom one scarcely saw during the balance of the year, made brief, gracious appearances, and the mood of these gatherings was generally polite and friendly. But the band of carolers that gathered in the chilly court on Christmas Eve of 1960 was edgy, nervous, frightened, confused by agitated rumors and speculation. But, for the first time, the distinct and disparate personalities who shared a roof at 1 West Seventy-second Street had something in common: uncertainty and fear of what was about to happen.