THE RISING AND FALLING CASTLE
There is a castle in northern France that rises and falls against the horizon as one approaches it along the highway, driving westward from Épernay. The castle is the ancestral home of the Dukes of Montmort, and the rising and falling phenomenon is caused by the repeated gentle dips and elevations of the roadway. The castle appears on each incline, then disappears with each declivity, then reappears again. It sinks and surfaces many times before one finally reaches it, rather like a ship cresting and then vanishing across a rolling sea. Counting the appearances and disappearances of the Château Montmort is a favorite pastime of small children, as they return home to Paris with their parents after weekend picnics in the Champagne country.
But the curious thing about the rising and falling castle of Montmort is that each time it appears it not only seems larger, it also seems to change shape and form and outline, even color. New turrets appear, new wings, new towers. With each appearance the castle seems an entirely different building, with no relationship to the one the traveler has seen just moments before. In each appearance Château Montmort rearranges itself not subtly but dramatically, as though one had tapped the tube of a kaleidoscope and made the pieces of colored glass compose themselves into an entirely new pattern. The mystery of how the castle tricks and surprises the mind and eye is one of light and landscape and, perhaps, memory, though there is a tale in the region that each view of the castle is a mirage, a ghost, capable of emitting fluctuating, pulsating, changing images of itself, because when one arrives at Montmort at last, the castle is hardly visible.
The rising and falling castle might be a suitable metaphor for the Dakota apartments in New York. Not just because in the course of its nearly hundred-year history the Dakota has had its ups and downs, but because every aspect of the Dakota changes, depending upon the angle from which it is viewed, and also depending upon who is viewing it. No two visions of the Dakota are quite the same, and, because it is a building that has housed and continues to house a number of people, the Dakota has collected more than its share of visions.
Memory is as tricky an instrument as vision, and the Dakota houses many memories, no two quite alike. The Dakota has collected many stories, some of them improbable, many of them contradictory. Many of the Dakota’s tales have strikingly different versions, depending on who is recalling them, depending upon how events were perceived. One cannot, therefore, approach the Dakota in terms of “getting down the facts.” In a sense, the Dakota has no facts to offer, only impressions. So one must approach the Dakota rather as one would enter a fun-house Hall of Mirrors, full of wonder, watching the images and impressions change in shape and size and substance each time they appear.
At the same time, tracing the history of the Dakota and the people who have lived there is a little like examining the past of a small village in New Hampshire, a village which, on the surface, appears to have slept unchanged for a hundred years or more, and yet which, in human terms, has changed constantly. But this is a peculiar little village. For one thing, its neighbors abut each other vertically as well as horizontally. For another, it is a town whose residents have always been, for the most part, rich—at times chic, at times trend-setting, at times foolish, at times eccentric, always interesting.
But, for the most part, rich.