Dust
Frederic Weinstein was furious. He and his wife had just returned from a holiday and, entering their apartment, found their rugs, furniture and books covered with a thick film of plaster dust. It had apparently filtered up through the chimney and spewed out of the Weinsteins’ fireplace, the result of extensive renovations being done by the Bernard Rogers’ in apartment 21, immediately below the Weinsteins. Dust wasn’t all of it. Within an hour of their homecoming, plumbers from the floor below advised the Weinsteins that, as a result of a pipe that had burst during the renovation of 21, the Weinsteins would be without cold water for an indefinite period and that in order to correct the situation it might be necessary to tear up part of the Weinsteins’ bedroom floor. Eventually, the problem was solved from below, without requiring such drastic measures. But Weinstein composed a cross letter to Wilbur Ross, the board’s president, about the situation and, as was his right, submitted a house-cleaning bill to the Dakota.
One of the many reasons why tenant maintenance costs keep going up is that the Dakota is required to pay many such bills, for which the Dakota maintains an expensive insurance policy, and the bills are often to correct the various unpleasant and unexpected side effects of someone’s renovation. In his letter Frederic Weinstein raised an interesting question: Just how much interior renovation to the Dakota was, in the long run, a good idea? Just how much pounding away at the building, how much tearing down of walls, should be permitted? The Landmarks Commission prohibited any alteration to the building’s exterior, but it had no jurisdiction over whatever inner surgery individual tenant-owners wished to perform. There was more involved here than just aesthetics. It was possible that, as more and more tenants removed and rearranged the building’s bones and other organs, the Dakota’s shell might eventually collapse. This actually happened to one heavily renovated building in Boston, though there were extenuating circumstances. One sub-zero day during the renovation a fire broke out in the building. The fire brigade was called and drenched the building with its hoses. After the fire, building inspectors pronounced the building’s exterior sound, and the interior renovation continued through the winter. Then, on the first warm day of spring the building caved in. What had been holding it up, it seemed, was ice.
At the Dakota the renovation of apartment 21 involved the removal of a partition. Before that was done, Suzanne Weinstein swears, her apartment never trembled when the Eighth Avenue subway rolled by underneath. Now it does. Floors that didn’t use to squeak now squeak.
In the Dakota’s basement caves are stacked all sorts of interior architectural details that have been removed from Dakota apartments in a long series of renovations. There is a roomful of old doors, another of moldings, another of cornices, another of mantelpieces, another of hardware. They are intended to be labeled and catalogued, indicating from which apartment each item originated, so that, if some future tenant wished, these details could be restored. But in the dampness of their basement morgue, many fine pieces are crumbling into rot and decay. Items, too, have had a way of disappearing, as one of the old elevator cages disappeared. If an apartment is being restored, one is not supposed to go to the basement and just take a pretty door. But this has happened. Like most old buildings, the Dakota has had a long series of superintendents, and there is always the suspicion that at various times superintendents have been tempted to sell certain items. A while back a truck filled with old mantels was seen departing from the Dakota’s basement service entrance. Where these pieces of cabinetwork were bound, no one knew, but it is quite certain that they never came back.
Frederic Weinstein and others—for he is not alone in his sentiments—feel that the time has come to call a halt to renovations that require structural or near-structural changes in the building. Modernizing kitchens and bathrooms is one thing, these people feel (one basement room is filled with nothing but old bathtubs and sinks). But ripping out walls is quite another. Weinstein is painfully reminded of “the virtual collapse of the White House during the Truman Administration as a consequence of generations of uncoordinated renovation.”
But Dakotans like Weinstein were also concerned about matters other than the fact that repeated renovations—involving removal and relocation of walls and beams and ceilings—might eventually weaken the building’s skeleton to the point where it would topple. There was also the knotty question of aesthetics and taste. Architectural purists at the Dakota were nervously reminded of the “desecration” that was committed upon such buildings as 910 Fifth Avenue. That gracious Italianate apartment house was put up in 1920 and then, in 1959, was completely gutted and stripped to its steel skeleton, losing in the process its handsome friezes, cornices and balustrades. What stands at 910 Fifth Avenue today has been called a “dreadful parody” of what the building once was. At the Dakota the building’s elaborate interior details were part of its special history and its special character. Some renovations were so extreme that they violated the Dakota’s history, raped its character. Where did interior decoration leave off and desecration begin? Then there was a legal question. Certainly an individual who owns an apartment has certain rights to alter and renovate it to suit his needs, tastes and wishes. But the Dakota was different; it deserved special consideration. It was sacrilege, some people felt, to tamper with the Dakota’s gracious old rooms and their elaborate, Old World details.
A great deal of tampering, meanwhile, had already been done, and many of the building’s interior spaces bore little resemblance to the fin-de-siècle chambers they had once been. In the name of modernization a number of Mr. Hardenbergh’s extravagant and fanciful touches had been removed, and, in some cases, his very concept for the Dakota’s interior had been arrogantly defied. It had occurred to some tenants, for example, that if a big room could be divided vertically, it could also be divided horizontally. If one had a fifteen-foot ceiling, why not build a loft, or platform, with stairs leading up to it, thus creating an additional room under the ceiling. One of the first people to do this was Betty Friedan, who was then married and who decided to build sleeping platforms for her children. This was innovative, but it turned one high-ceilinged room into two low-ceilinged ones. Was this right, aesthetically? Instead of a sense of space one achieved a sense of claustrophobia. Was this right, morally, to do to the Dakota? If one didn’t want the Dakota’s high ceilings, perhaps one should live somewhere else. If one wanted lofts, why not build them in Greenwich Village? Mrs. Friedan also did other things, such as paint over marble fireplaces, which struck her neighbors as sacrilegious. But a number of people copied her sleeping-loft idea.
By the mid-1970’s the building became aesthetically divided between the traditionalists, who wanted to preserve the old details, and the revisionists, who wanted to change things around. One tenant painstakingly, and at great expense, had the woodwork in her apartment stripped of the layers of paint that had accumulated over the years, and taken down to its original, natural golden glow. But when she sold her apartment the new owner promptly covered the old wood-work with paint again. One of the building’s many committees was the Aesthetics Committee, which deplored such doings, but with no real power to enforce its aesthetic standards, all it could do was cluck its tongue when they occurred.
Lauren Bacall is decidedly on the side of the traditionalists, and her apartment, which she has decorated herself, recalls the stately apartments on the Avenue Foch in Paris. She has furnished it with antiques. “Furniture has to be old and good,” she says. “I love French Regency, Provincial, and pieces from India and Morocco. When it comes to decorating, I prefer to do it myself. I have never been able to find a decorator I could communicate with in terms of me.” In her front hallway a chest from Damascus houses a collection of Oriental monkeys, along with opaline and old pewter pieces. Her apartment, the traditionalists say, is what a Dakota apartment ought to look like. So is Leonard Bernstein’s. In fact, Bernstein’s late wife was so in favor of turning back the clock that for years she waged an unsuccessful campaign to have the electric street lamps outside the Dakota replaced with gas fixtures.
Freddie Victoria, as would be expected of a man who deals in art and antiques, has carefully preserved his sculptured-plaster “birthday cake” ceilings, and one of the remarkable features of his living room is the way he has treated his windows. At a glance they seem to be framed with festoons of flowing silk. But the effect is trompe l’oeil, and the “draperies” are not draperies at all but lambrequins made of hand-carved and painted wood—executed by craftsmen in his own shop. The apartment also contains Mr. Victoria’s extraordinary collection of antique clocks—some seventy in number and all in perfect working order—including a spectacular clock chandelier (one must stand beneath it and look upward to read its face). The clocks tick and chime peacefully throughout the apartment.
Judy and Gyora Novak straddle the fence somewhat between the traditionalist and revisionist point of view, but most Dakotans feel that the Novaks have treated their apartment splendidly, considering what they had to work with. When they bought the building’s old dining room on the ground floor it lacked baths, a kitchen, closets, and even walls where it opened from the public corridor. The marble floor of the big main room had been layered with so many years of wax that it was almost black. The Novaks had the marble cleaned and restored to its original white, with a colored border. From what were pantries and storage rooms, the Novaks created a kitchen-pantry, a guest bathroom, and a combination library-guest room off the main room. What was originally the “little” dining room, designed for private parties, became the Novaks’ bedroom, with a master bath, dressing room and closets.
At Philip Johnson’s suggestion, the walls of the apartment were upholstered in oyster-white carpeting to deaden the sound of the subway below and to provide a soft backdrop for the Novaks’ paintings and sculpture. The mahogany doors and coffered ceiling, which had been of a light-brown color, were cleaned and rubbed a black-brown to avoid casting reddish reflections on the paintings, and the old brass hardware was blackened to avoid glitter. All glossy surfaces were toned down. The white marble floor was given a no-gloss finish, and a non-shiny finish was applied to the snuff-colored leather with which the benches, sofas and dining chairs were covered. Modern touches included big globe lighting and can-shaped spotlights that are adjustable on ceiling tracks. Outside light is controlled by adjustable vertical louvers of heavy oyster-colored fabric at the windows. From the main apartment a staircase leads down to an area the Novaks reclaimed from the Dakota’s basement. This includes a small reception room for Mr. Novak’s clients, and a huge, white-walled studio lit by powerful lights, where Gyora Novak sculpts, paints, and designs jewelry and mens’ clothing.
Upstairs, on the sixth floor, Dr. and Mrs. Scott Severns have retained their apartment’s original amber-colored mahogany doors, moldings, window frames, its heavy brass hardware, fireplaces, parquet floors and carved ceilings. Otherwise the Severns’ decor is starkly modern. The long, wide living room is sparsely furnished, dominated by a grand piano from which Mrs. Severns gives occasional lessons. A huge abstract painting, some twenty feet long and ten feet high, covers one wall. The room is furnished with Mies van der Rohe’s famous Barcelona chairs, but Mrs. Severns likes to point out that “the really comfortable pieces” were designed by Philip Johnson, who happens to be her brother. (The apartment also affords a view of a new Philip Johnson building across the park.) The Severns’ library is called the Andy Warhol Room, and its walls are hung only with paintings by the artist—the Marilyn Monroe, the Jackie Kennedy, the poppy pictures and so on. One room that Mrs. Severns has not chosen to modernize is her kitchen. Though large and comfortable, it is decidedly old-fashioned.
To Theodate Johnson Severns the Dakota’s connotations will always be romantic. Mrs. Severns is a small, peppery person with boyishly cut gray hair, an emphatic manner, and a collection of Siamese and Abyssinian cats. “The Blanchards called me in late August of 1961,” she says. “They said, ‘Come, come quick, there’s an apartment available.’ I came, and I brought Scott with me. I had been married before, and it hadn’t worked out. I hadn’t really thought much about getting married again. I looked at the apartment, and it seemed enormous. Everything was painted a hideous elephant gray. I thought, how can I ever fill this up with furniture? I said no, no, it’s just too much apartment for me. Then Scott looked at me and said, ‘Who said you had to take it alone?’ And he handed me the deed to apartment sixty-four. We were married three days later—to take advantage of the long Labor Day weekend.
“It had been Emmett Hughes’s apartment. The Andy Warhol room was a bedroom which he had rented out to a paying guest. There are so many reasons why we love living here. It’s more than just the space and the four-inch thick doors. It really is like one big family. Oh, we have our little spats and differences. But even when we fight we fight like a family. No one entertains without including some of the Dakota neighbors—that’s something that never happens in most New York buildings. The other day we had a party for Virgil Thomson. First there was a screening of a film in Warner LeRoy’s movie room. Then everyone came back for cocktails and dinner here. It’s a real community.
“Of course we pay for it. We pay more maintenance than the most expensive rental buildings in the city. It’s a question of: If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it. But it’s a good investment. This apartment has tripled in value since we bought it. But it’s more than that. It’s the funny little things that happen. The other day I got into a taxi and gave the driver my address, and he turned around to me and said, ‘Lady, can I ask you a question?’ I said I’d try to answer. He said, ‘Is it true that in that building they even have fireplaces in the bathrooms?’ And the old people, like the Brownings. The other day I had a note from Adele Browning, and it was written on the back of a 1914 letter. There’s a sense of continuity here, a sense of life, a sense of fertility. Take the Novaks’ parrots, for example. The Novaks have some rare parrots which, they were told, would never lay eggs in captivity. They never did lay eggs, until the Novaks moved here. When they got to the Dakota, the parrots started laying eggs right away! It’s something in the air.…”
Downstairs, on the first floor, in what is roughly 60 percent of what was once Miss Leo’s old apartment, the Larry Ellmans have chosen to go the traditionalist route, keeping the original details and covering walls with rich fabrics, decorating with antiques to create a turn-of-the-century mood. Larry Ellman, however—the former owner of Longchamps and now the proprietor of the Cattleman Restaurant—has gone all out on his kitchen, fitting it with every modern appliance conceivable. Next door, in the remainder of what was Miss Leo’s apartment before the Ellmans divided it, actor Michael Wager occupies the Dakota’s only “maisonette” apartment, with its own private entrance from the courtyard. Wager, too, is a traditionalist, decorating with antiques and covering his walls with Fortuny fabric to create an effect, as he puts it, of “instant Old Money.”
Princess Mona Faisal, whose father founded the Arab League, is married to Mohamet Faisal, the son of Saudi Arabia’s king. She and her brother Issam Azzam share a large Dakota apartment that is all done in pale desert colors and is considered one of the loveliest and most peaceful in the building. Some think it amusing to note that Michael Wager, an ardent Zionist whose father headed the Chaim Weizmann Institute, lives directly below the Arab princess.
When King Faisal was visiting the United States, the story goes, there was no time on his schedule for a personal call on his son and daughter-in-law, but the king was driven past the Dakota. “Ah,” he said, looking up at the building, “I see that my son has bought a castle.” Of course the story may be apocryphal. Many Dakota stories are.
Up in the southeast corner of the third floor, Frederic and Suzanne Weinstein have left intact all the architectural and decorative details that were there when they moved in but, like the Scott Severnses, they have chosen to furnish the apartment in a severe, contemporary style. A woven-to-order rug in an abstract design provides the only real color in the living room, a long sectional sofa, also custom-made to fit the room, is covered in a light coffee-colored fabric, and the walls are painted flat white. Adding to the feeling of airy lightness in the Weinsteins’ apartment is the fact that the Weinsteins prefer to keep their white walls bare of art or any other decoration. “We wanted the rooms themselves to be the only decorative statements,” Suzanne Weinstein says. Everything else is subordinated to the rooms’ scale.
The largest apartment in the Dakota belongs to restaurateur Warner LeRoy, the son of movie director Mervyn LeRoy and the nephew of all the Warner brothers. Originally, the LeRoys’ apartment consisted of only ten large rooms on the sixth floor, but when another apartment of the same size became available on the floor immediately above, the LeRoys bought that one too. They persuaded the building to let them construct a staircase between the two apartments, giving them the Dakota’s only duplex, unless one counts Ward Bennett’s split-level pyramid on the roof, the Novaks’ basement studio, and the various sleeping-lofts and balconies that have been inserted between floors here and there. The LeRoy apartment, as might be expected, has been decorated in a theatrical style that one might call Hollywood High Camp, featuring Tiffany glass chandeliers like the ones used to adorn LeRoy’s popular restaurant, Maxwell’s Plum. The LeRoys have become the building’s most ambitious host and hostess, and toss four or five big parties a year for as many as two hundred guests, plus numerous smaller dinners. To help her bring these large entertainments off, Kay LeRoy, a cook of some note, has a kitchen—or kitchens, really, since the kitchen area consists of several rooms—furnished with all the latest equipment, all of it hotel-size. In fact, Mrs. LeRoy got into a bit of trouble early in 1978 when it was learned that she was preparing certain dishes in her kitchen for the Tavern on the Green, another of her husband’s restaurants just down the street. This, it seemed, violated some city health code. In addition to kitchens that a luxury hotel might envy, the LeRoy apartment also contains a screening room for movies.
Though not the largest, certainly the most spectacular apartment in the Dakota belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Peter Nitze. Peter Nitze is a lawyer and chairman of the board of Nitze-Stagen & Co., Inc., financial consultants. He is also a descendant of Harry Pratt who, along with a man named John D. Rockefeller, helped put together Standard Oil. His grandmother Pratt was New York’s first woman alderman. The Nitze apartment on the sixth floor contains the building’s largest room, the colonnaded salon measuring 24 by 49 feet with twin facing fireplaces at either end, originally intended as a ballroom. The Nitze apartment was the “bachelor flat” of Edward Severin Clark, and the ballroom is said to be a facsimile of a similar room in the old Clark mansion off Washington Square. Later it became the C. D. Jacksons’ apartment. The Jacksons divided it, and part of it became the apartment of Edward R. Murrow. When the Nitzes bought it, they undivided it and as a result now have two kitchens. In addition to the kitchens and the ballroom there are some fourteen other rooms, but that is only counting the rooms that have windows. In all, there are eight working fireplaces.
The Nitzes undertook a complete restoration, as opposed to a renovation, of the apartment. Generations of paint were stripped from doors, moldings and paneling, uncovering the original mahogany and heavy brass hinges, which even had brass plates to conceal their screws. In the process of stripping one heavy door, the restorer asked Peter Nitze, “Do you really want this door put back into its original condition?” Certainly, said Nitze. The workman than pointed out what appeared to be traces of sterling silver in the corners of the panels; the panels had originally been edged with silver. The Nitzes stopped short of replacing the silver trimmings. Grace Jackson had taken one of the old elevator cages and placed it in a vestibule, intending to later install it as a powder room. The Nitzes kept the elevator where it was, and use it as a cozy setting for childrens’ tea parties. Though it is the only part of the apartment that was not there in 1884, the Nitzes feel that the elevator belongs there for sentimental reasons.
Other tenants have been less scrupulously respectful of the Dakota’s innards. The traditionalists who deplore sleeping lofts are somewhat at cross-purposes with Paul Segal, the architect, who has lived at the Dakota since 1969. Segal is a red-headed, enthusiastic and immediately likable young man, and has helped redo a number of Dakota apartments. He supervised the renovation of Paul Goldberger’s new apartment, helped the Ellmans divide Miss Leo’s old place into two apartments and helped Michael Wager create an apartment out of his end of that division. He oversaw the renovation of the Wilbur Rosses’ apartment and designed a superkitchen for John and Yoko Lennon. He was also responsible for the renovation of the Bernard Rogers’ apartment (the dust from which filtered up into the Weinsteins’ place on the floor above).
In the process of this work, Paul Segal has familiarized himself with every nook and cranny of the Dakota, from the basement crawl spaces to the mazelike corridors of the eighth and ninth floors, and to the narrow walkways on the roof. He once won a bottle of Scotch on a bet with a fellow Dakotan who said that it was not possible to walk completely around the building through the various eighth-floor hallways. It was possible, and Paul Segal showed his neighbor how to do it through what amounted to a secret door. Also, in the process Paul Segal has gained the unofficial title of the Dakota’s “house architect.”
Paul Segal’s architectural style is very contemporary, and though he boasts that he has “never completely gutted” an apartment, he has brought a number of apartments up to date. He favors sleeping lofts and had one built in his own apartment, though it is used as a study and not for sleeping. The construction of a mezzanine, with a curved balcony extending over the living room, was part of Segal’s design for the Bernard Rogers’ apartment. Planned as a library-study, the mezzanine certainly added floor space, though it cut the ceiling height in half. Segal’s design was considered sufficiently innovative to be given a four-page color spread in House Beautiful in 1978.
But purists in the building, Frederic Weinstein in particular, feel that some of Paul Segal’s designs are seriously eroding the building’s inner personality. Weinstein has watched sadly as one by one venerable interior details have disappeared—the corridor globes on the second floor replaced by more “modern” fixtures, the steady removal of old mantelpieces, doors, cornices, the growing pile of architectural detritus in the basement. Weinstein raises another question in terms of the Segal renovations. To renovate an apartment according to the building’s Hoyle, all plans must be approved by the outside architectural firm of Glass & Glass. They must then be approved by the building’s board of directors. Finally, building permits must be obtained and specifications reviewed by whatever city inspectors are involved. When the C. D. Jacksons divided their apartment they had to tear down and rebuild the wall three times before the city inspectors were satisfied with it.
Paul Segal, meanwhile, is a member of the building’s board and has served two separate three-year terms. He has, however, been very scrupulous about not participating in those architectural and remodeling decisions which involve his own work or his recommendations. In fact, Segal makes a point of physically absenting himself during many of these discussions.
Frederic Weinstein clearly does not approve of Paul Segal’s architectural style and insists that this has nothing to do with the fact that Segal’s renovations on the floor below inconvenienced him.
Weinstein later commented: “In my opinion the Dakota stands as a tragic landmark to a skin-deep conception of landmark conservancy. While its façade is now protected, throughout its history renovations of apartments have been undertaken which in some cases have permanently distorted the interior architectural context and ambiance of the building. I am not a blind antiquarian sentimentalist. Reasonable and functional renovations have been and are necessary adaptations to each era and have kept the Dakota a living building rather than a museum piece. But there is a distinction between this kind of renovation and profound, irreparable and irreversible surgery. Paris and London, while also experiencing grave landmark crises, have so much more margin for error. In Europe, buildings like the Dakota, while not commonplace, are nevertheless not uncommon.”
Weinstein went on to say, “The Dakota is a poignant document precisely because we all subsist in a society here which perpetually erases itself. We have so much more to lose because we have so much less to begin with. I believe there is still time to practice landmark conservancy from the skin inwards. Not as a matter of antiquarian preciousness. The Dakota’s survival as the Dakota is itself at stake—survival as something more than a gutted interior with a quaint façade.
“I say all this without any criticism intended of my fellow tenants of previous eras or those living here now. Everyone who has lived here respects this building and is captive to it and to its ineffable presence. And I’m fully aware that I’ve entered the shapeless and inscrutable area of taste as well as those vast ambiguities relating to the rights of the individual to create a personal environment against the somewhat fragile rights of the society to preserve its heirlooms. Unfortunately, perhaps tragically, which is where I began, great buildings do not share a protected status along with great canvases and great poems.”
Frederic Weinstein is by nature a worrier. Though his fiftieth birthday is behind him, he is attempting to embark on a new career as a writer, and he frets that he may be getting too late a start. Fortunately, he has his coolly beautiful, long-legged, level-headed wife to offset his worrying side. When Freddie Weinstein worries aloud, Suzanne Weinstein just gives him a long, slow, sideways look with her enormous eyes, and Freddie responds with a little smile. Freddie worries about the Dakota, and its future.
“If this building is a microcosm of New York,” he says, “then the Dakota’s board is a microcosm of a microcosm. There’s always the feeling that the board is ‘out to get’ everybody.
“There are a lot of strange folk here, a lot of people who indulge in what I call ‘quotation mark’ behavior—people acting cute, campy, ditsy and quaint. This used to be a place where people could breathe. Now we have what I call the Beachboy Syndrome—the fact that on an average Saturday night half the building seems to be in drag. The smell of marijuana and poppers wafts under the doorways, and you hear the falsetto echo of laughter in the halls, like sparrows chirping in the niches. There are people like Leonard Bernstein, who are true celebrities, versus people who are playing at being celebrities, playing at being gay. New malignancies have crept in, like this theory of rolling indebtedness that the building seems to operate on. The place is rife with improprieties, and everybody is winking at what goes on. It’s part of what is happening in New York, of course, but shouldn’t the Dakota be above all that? It’s acquiring the quality of a keep, or fortress—it’s a prison, and it’s captured all of us.
“There’s hostility from within. Suzanne just went on the board and asked if she could serve on the Aesthetics Committee. She’s a member of the Victorian Society and interested in preservation. Ruth Ford said, ‘No outsiders on the Aesthetics Committee.’ She seems to think of herself as a kind of Madame Pompadour.
“Some people are very withdrawn. There’s Virginia Dwan, for example, who used to have a famous gallery. No one really knows Virginia. She’s very rich, radical and chic, and her whole apartment is like a vast art gallery, full of beautiful things. She’s been in the building a little longer than we have, but it wasn’t until a month ago that we had her in for tea.
“Meanwhile, everyone is circling around and sniffing each other, and each person seems to be leading some secret life. There’s a Chaucerian aspect to life here—a Canterbury Tales quality.… We live at the Tabard.…”
Disrespect for the building—that is considered a cardinal sin at the Dakota. But respect and disrespect become fuzzy terms when one is dealing with individual tastes, preferences and needs, and when, as in the operation of Central Park, one is trying to run a facility as a model democracy that will keep everybody happy. One tenant who certainly took a different “path” in renovating her seventh-floor apartment was Roberta Flack. She wanted ceilings lowered, walls removed, mantels and moldings ripped out. Her plans were initially rejected by the board.
She and her architect then agreed to modify their plans for the ambitious renovation, and work proceeded. There was a great deal of backing and filling between Miss Flack and the board and, even after the work was finished, the controversy continued. Some tenants claimed that walls and moldings had been removed, which her architect promised would be saved. Roberta Flack feels she went along with everything the building required of her. In any case, although legally the Dakota’s board could require Miss Flack to undo the renovation, it obviously has not done so.
Miss Flack is a famous star—one gold record after another, and now a platinum one. One does not give orders to famous stars. For another thing, she is black—the first and, to date, the only black tenant in the building. The Dakota is a little touchy on the subject of blacks. Miss Flack’s application to come into the building in the first place was not exactly greeted with universal cheering. But what was the Dakota to do? In their modern mood of democracy, communication, tolerance and love—to a group of people who had reacted with horror to the thought that the Dakota should discriminate against homosexuals—it was unthinkable that the building should appear to bar anyone on the basis of race.
“She won’t let me come to see her apartment,” Rex Reed says. “She says I’ll hate it.” A lot of others in the building feel just as strongly about Roberta Flack’s apartment. But there is little that they can do about it except sit and quietly wring their hands.
Miss Flack, meanwhile, defends what she has done to her southwest corner of the seventh floor. “I think my apartment is the prettiest one in the building,” she says. “My architect, Myron Goldfinger, is one of the best in the business. When I bought this place in 1976 it was very dark. There was a lot of fancy inlaid wood design and stuff, and a lot of marble basins in the closets—all that had to go. I wanted everything soft white and contemporary, with clean lines, to go with my contemporary Italian furniture.” What Miss Flack liked most about the apartment was that it was big enough to house her Bösendorfer piano—a huge 9'6" concert instrument with four extra keys in the bass register—considered the Rolls-Royce of pianos and worth, according to Miss Flack, between $45,000 and $50,000. “It had to be hoisted up with a cherry-picker, and now there’s no way to ever get it out.” To make room for the piano the partition between the living room and dining room was removed, “though they had to leave one column standing because there was plumbing in it or something.” Ceilings in all the hallways were lowered, and central air conditioning was installed. The entire apartment was wired for an elaborate quadrophonic sound system, and four speakers were built into Miss Flack’s bed. Bathrooms were enlarged—one so that it could hold a marble Jacuzzi whirlpool tub big enough, according to Miss Flack, “for four people to take a bath in, or for two people to have fun in—you know?”
Miss Flack had her kitchen made smaller, “to try to control my passion for cooking—and eating.” Miss Flack admits that the building’s board gave her “quite a hassle” over her renovation plans but insists that now “They’re all my friends.”
One decorative detail in the Flack apartment is the Buddhist shrine in the living room. “But a lot of people have those,” she says. “I don’t worship in front of it as much as I should, but the house is full of Bibles so we’re covered for ghosts.” Miss Flack has not seen a ghost in the Dakota yet, “But I won’t go down in the basement. I believe in extraterrestrial beings, and I’ve had experiences. I saw my grandfather’s ghost once, when I was a little girl. There was this hole in our backyard with a cardboard lid on it, where we dumped the garbage. I was dumping the garbage one day, and I looked up and there was this thing. It was my grandfather’s ghost. He stood looking at me for quite a while. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are ghosts here, too. After all, this building has been occupied by a lot of strong people. They stay, they have memories. They come back.”