Life at the Dakota Read online

  But if Zeckendorf was indeed involved, it might have been as a “front” for someone else. By 1969 he had taken to doing a bit of this—pretending to be interested in a property in order to soften the market for another buyer, or to inflate the price for a seller. But in the Dakota’s case, if he was fronting for someone, whom was he fronting for? The Clark Foundation? Certainly the Clark Foundation wanted to divest itself of the Dakota promptly, if necessary to the first bidder, and the Foundation had never shown much interest in what would happen to the building. Louis Glickman? Glickman and Zeckendorf had indeed worked together on deals in the past, and both were known for putting together deals of Byzantine complexity.

  As for the Dakotans themselves, human beings, in times of crisis, often tend to create their own myths, monsters, demons and ghosts out of their collective fears. At the same time, people usually prefer to believe that they are their own heroes, that they are in control even as they are being controlled by circumstances. Twenty years later William Zeckendorf is still the one most often cited as the villain who forced the Dakota to decide whether or not to become a cooperative on such short notice. To others the villain was Glickman, and even those who view him as a savior are quick to add that he was a savior who had his price. In the minds of a few people the shades of Zeckendorf and Glickman have become blurred and are indistinct from one another.

  A few things are certain. In the jungle of New York real estate, lambs often unwittingly lie down with lions. If the Dakotans, the lambs, had possessed the shrewdness and technical ability to co-op the building themselves, they would have saved themselves a lot of money. If the Clark Foundation, a charitable institution, had been charitable enough to help the Dakotans in their time of need and to assist them in turning their building into a co-op, the Dakotans would have saved money and the Foundation would still have made money—on the parking lot, if nothing else. Louis Glickman, in the process of turning the Dakota into a cooperative, made $2,200,000.*

  New York, in other words, has long been a city of deals, trades and traders—a city constantly and often chaotically changing itself, tearing itself down and rebuilding itself on a gamble or a dare, never satisfied or certain that it is finished or, more often, that the ultimate financial risk and chance for gain has been achieved. In New York very little happens without someone—not necessarily the good guys—making money. It is a city, as a result, of reprieves and commutations of sentences, through each of which there is money to be made. In keeping with New York’s special personality, Louis Glickman gave one special building another in a long series of reprieves, as well as made for himself—as he puts it with no small amount of pleasure—“one sweetheart of a deal.”

  He had also, in his own eyes at least, redeemed himself in the eyes of New York’s artistic community. But that seems to have been secondary. What counted was the deal.

  *Edward Clark had paid $200,000 for the land in 1877. When Louis Glickman was able to sell roughly half this land in 1961 for $2,000,000, it was clear that the value of West Side real estate had increased by 1,000 percent in a little more than eighty years.

  Part Three

  COOPERATIVE: “WITH OTHERS IN A COMMON EFFORT”

  So long as people in the Park

  Can point to the Dakota,

  Blessed be the name of Stephen Clark

  By his devoted quota—

  Blessed be the name of Stephen Clark

  By his devoted quota!

  FROM “Ballad of the Dakota”

  Chapter 11

  After the Crisis

  At The Dakota no one paid too much attention to what had been the fate of the earlier luxury apartment houses that had preceded it on the New York scene. The Stuyvesant had been successful for a while, but as the Irving Place neighborhood deteriorated the Stuyvesant lost favor and was converted into a rooming house. In 1957 it was razed. The more ambitious building at 121 Madison Avenue was gutted and stripped of its balconied façade in 1940, and its sumptuous duplexes were divided into two-and three-bedroom apartments. Though the building still stands, it offers no clue to its former social pretensions. The Spanish Flats, though the apartments were luxurious, was not an economic success. It was torn down in 1927, and the only reminder of it is the Navarro Hotel, not far from where the Flats once stood, named after the Flats’ architect. By 1905 West Twenty-third Street was no longer fashionable, and the Chelsea Apartments was converted into a full-scale commercial hotel. Oddly, though the neighborhood is somewhat seedy, the Chelsea is still a popular stopping-place, particularly for visitors from Europe who find its Old World, Edwardian charm comfortingly familiar.

  At the Dakota, meanwhile, there had been occasional shivers of alarm about the building’s future prior to the Christmas Crisis of 1960. Most of these anxious moments involved what a new Clark landlord might, or might not, want to do with the building. In the hierarchy of Clarkdom, Stephen C. Clark had been preceded as owner of the Dakota by his older brother, Edward Severin Clark, the very young man who had inherited the half-completed Dakota in 1882. Edward Severin Clark had been a shy, withdrawn child, and he grew to be a shy, withdrawn and gentle man. As an infant, he had been dropped by his nurse on a stone floor, and the damage to his legs had never properly been corrected. He walked with a pronounced limp. He preferred country to city life, and spent most of his time at Fenimore Farm, his estate in upstate Otsego County, where his friends affectionately referred to him as “Severino,” and where his employees respectfully addressed him as “the Squire.” He rarely visited the Dakota; when he did he usually stayed in one of the second-floor guest rooms. His huge sixth-floor apartment remained empty, its furniture under sheets and its Baccarat chandeliers in bags. His stays in the city were so brief that he did not feel it worth the trouble to take the big apartment out of its wraps. Nor did he ever seriously consider renting it. The fact that one of the largest spaces in the building produced no income seemed of no concern to him.

  Perhaps because of his physical affliction, Severino Clark never married, and he devoted himself to philanthropies, among them a gymnasium and a hospital that he gave to Cooperstown. And since his apartment building never operated in the black, perhaps the Dakota could be added to his list of charities as well. He was proudest of his prize herd of Guernsey cattle, part of what was considered a model dairy farm. Most Dakotans had never met Severino Clark. After writing out their monthly rent checks to him, Edward S. Clark was forgotten.

  Reassuringly, the rents were hardly ever raised. From time to time, from far off Cooperstown, polite suggestions came down from Severino Clark to the Dakota’s manager:

  Regarding the management of the dining room and kitchen for the coming season I would say, that while I do not wish to criticize Justin, or those who were under him, I do feel that it will be for the best interest of all concerned to have an entire new force in that department, also the same as to the dining room, with the exception of Jean, who I would like to install in the second position and also to act as my waiter. However, if you find that this does not work satisfactorily it can easily be remedied later. I would also like to retain the baker, unless you have some good reason for making a change, for his work has always been most satisfactory; the rolls he makes have always been especially liked by my mother … it is not my wish to hamper you in any way with the management, as the responsibility rests with you.

  In 1907 Clark commented on “the trouble we have experienced with noise from the dining-room pantry in washing the china,” and suggested that “perhaps a vestibule on the pantry side might prove sufficient.” The manager, Mr. Knott, replied that the passage between the dining room would be fixed, and added, “I may decide that it will be better to use that pantry for simply silver and glass and do all the dishwashing downstairs.” Dealing with help in those pre-union days was never a problem, as Mr. Knott informed Mr. Clark: “Whatever we do with the kitchen will be with the distinct understanding that the slightest dissatisfaction ends the time of the individual and poss
ibly means a clean sweep.” Mr. Knott added that a laundry girl had fallen while stepping out of one of the elevators, but that the accident had been “by what seems to have been her own carelessness … Nothing broken except possibly a rib.” As for the young man who had been operating the elevator, “We discharged the boy.”

  In other words, the stewardship of Edward Severin Clark remained kindly, paternalistic and distant, and few people who lived at the Dakota during those years had ever laid eyes on him. Then, in 1933, Severino Clark died, and left the building to his younger brother Stephen. Rumors immediately spread that the new owner had plans to sell it or tear it down. These fears, however, quickly turned out to be unfounded, and Mr. Douglass, then the building’s manager, was able to reassure the tenants that Stephen Clark had “not the remotest intention” of razing the Dakota, remodeling it in any way, or selling off the protective rectangle of land containing the gardens and croquet and tennis courts (though it would not be long before he would decide to turn this acreage into a parking lot.) “Mister Stephen,” Mr. Douglass announced, “will entertain none of the offers which have caused us consternation in past weeks. He has so informed me in person.”

  The building, which was about to celebrate its fiftieth birthday, would stand for at least another fifty years, said Douglass. With this good news a celebratory luncheon was given in the Dakota’s dining room, with speeches and solemn toasts of felicitation and congratulation to the apartment building and its continued good health. Responding to a special toast that was raised to him, Mr. Douglass was almost moved to tears. “I wish,” he said, “that I could express—that I could say a little more—about how deeply I feel about all this.”

  The situation in 1960 and 1961 was considerably more complex. The practice of turning rental buildings into cooperatives was still a relatively new one, and one which many of the tenants did not understand at all. In any building it is a complicated process, and in the Dakota’s case—with so much nostalgia and emotionalism involved on the part of so many high-powered and temperamental people—it was even more complicated. To begin with, 35 percent of the tenants had to approve of the cooperative plan for it to go through. For another thing, money had to be raised, if the plan went through, by which individuals could purchase their apartments from the Glickman Corporation. Louis Glickman, meanwhile, was having money problems of his own.

  “I’d closed the deal with the Clark Foundation with my own cash, you see, because of the time factor,” Mr. Glickman says. “The Foundation wanted cash, and they wanted it right away—otherwise, no deal. I’d had no time to get any mortgage financing.” Getting a mortgage, Glickman had supposed, would be easy. He had counted on obtaining financing from one of the many New York banks or insurance companies, but when he went forth to get it he encountered a chilly atmosphere. The Dakota, the banks felt, was just “too old.” It was an idea whose time had passed. The services of an outside appraiser were called upon and the appraisal, when it was completed, contained the most discouraging news imaginable: The land on which the Dakota stood, plus the parking lot, was valued at $3,800,000. But the building itself was assigned to have “no value.” This, said the appraiser, was because the Dakota was “basically outmoded both in exterior appearance and interior design … and because the building operates at a loss, and would do so even without rent control.” To give their precious building “no value” was, to the Dakotans, to inflict it with the most heartless insult imaginable.

  The team of Messrs. Gross, Jackson and Glickman even tried to approach the Clark Foundation again for a loan—even one as small as $500,000 would be appreciated. The Foundation replied, somewhat frostily, that it preferred to keep its capital “in liquid condition.” At the time Louis Glickman, out of pocket some $4,600,000, was, as he remembers it, “not a very happy man.”

  Nor were the Dakotans happy. Without some sort of mortgage financing, which at the conclusion of the process would have been passed along to the cooperative, the tenants could not possibly afford to buy the building back from Glickman. And without financing Mr. Glickman would find himself the landlord-tenant of a seventy-five-year-old building that was losing money at an alarming rate. Finally, the Glickman Corporation had been turned down by every major New York bank and insurance company. Indeed, it looked as though the whole cooperative idea was about to fall through. At one emotional tenants’ meeting during that uncertain period, both Ernest Gross and C. D. Jackson announced that if the plan failed, they would “leave the country” and “forever.”

  Mr. Glickman then consulted another New York real estate firm, Charles F. Noyes & Company, which suggested that he might do better shopping for a mortgage out of town, where the Dakota and its special problems were not as well known. Glickman turned to Chicago where, to his great relief, he found a mortgagor in the First National Bank of Chicago, which was acting as trustee for the General Motors Salaried Employees Pension Fund.* With this loan Glickman got his cash back, as well as a viable mortgage that he could pass along to the Dakota at the conclusion of the negotiations.

  Next began the lengthy process of assessing and pricing individual apartments and selling them to their tenants. Now the New York banks were in a more helpful mood. In April 1961 the Chase Manhattan Bank offered to help tenants with one half of their purchase costs, and at an interest rate of just 3 ½ percent for two years. This was good news. A polling of tenants was started to determine which tenants wanted to buy and which did not. But suddenly there were unexpected difficulties in what was called “the musical chairs problem.”

  It was, indeed, a case of musical apartments. A number of Dakotans, understandably, had decided that they did not want or could not afford to buy their apartments, and they began making plans to move elsewhere. Others wanted to buy apartments, but not necessarily the ones they were living in at the time. Some wanted more space, some wanted less. Plans were conceived whereby walls would be cut through in order to annex adjoining rooms from other apartments, while still others wanted to divide certain larger apartments and turn them into several smaller ones. No one, it suddenly seemed, was entirely happy with the space he or she was being offered, and throughout the early summer of 1961 there was a great deal of bickering among the Dakotans, as well as a certain amount of wheeling and dealmaking as tenants haggled among themselves over concessions and trade-offs of apartments and pieces of apartments. Over this confused situation Ernest Gross, C. D. Jackson and Louis Glickman did their best to maintain some sort of order. Mr. Glickman worked on an apartment-pricing formula based on cubic footage, view, number of bathrooms, general condition and other matters. When prices were quoted there was more unhappiness. “A lot of people squawked,” Glickman recalls, “but believe me I got them very reasonable prices.” Indeed, by today’s New York prices the Dakota’s prices do seem reasonable. For seven rooms with two baths and three fireplaces, a typical price was $45,000. Lauren Bacall’s fourth-floor spread facing the Park was priced at $53,340. The smallest flats—one-bedroom, one-bath, nonhousekeeping units that had been guest rooms on the second floor—were priced at $4,410.

  But there was sudden consternation in the building when the New York Times published an article about the new Mayfair Tower that was to be erected next door, above what had been the parking lot. The Times described the project as a “middle-income development.” This, to the Dakotans’ way of thinking, sounded as though the immediate neighborhood would be drastically downgraded. Their proposed investments in the building would be damaged if the block slithered down to “middle income.” Hastily, Mr. Glickman assured a tenants’ meeting that the Times had its facts all wrong, as in fact it had.

  Still, despite these setbacks, the building moved steadily toward its goal of becoming a cooperative and toward the necessary approval by 35 percent of the tenants. Thirty percent had approved, then 31. In June, however, a loud dissonant voice was suddenly heard. It belonged to one William J. Quinlan, a young lawyer who had been a resident of the building for thirty-one years, �
��since age one.” In a fourteen-page, single-spaced typewritten memorandum, Mr. Quinlan objected to the way almost everything was being handled. He seemed to feel that there was an alternate way by which the tenants could keep their apartments without turning the building into a cooperative. Mr. Quinlan’s notion seemed to be that the tenants could hold onto the building by exercising squatters’ rights.

  At the meeting that was quickly called to discuss the Quinlan uprising, Ernest Gross announced that he found the Quinlan memo “a confused document,” and suggested that it be ignored. But it was not to be that simple. Mr. Quinlan had already gathered powerful supporters in the building, including Mr. Joseph J. Noble, another lawyer, and Jo Mielziner who, among other things, was one man in the Dakota whom nearly everyone liked. Presently Mr. Quinlan was calling tenants’ meetings of his own, conspicuously not inviting Gross, Jackson or Glickman to attend them. All through June the Quinlan momentum gathered while the Dakota’s original rescue team struggled to hang on to the reins. The new cooperative, technically a venture “with others in a common effort,” was beginning to seem more like a rout.

  William Quinlan, a tall, ruggedly built bachelor, lived with his widowed mother in a third-floor apartment. He had grown up in the Dakota in an era when he and his brother and sister were virtually the only resident children; they had amused themselves with hide-and-seek in the building’s basement, and with a game involving lobbing ice cubes from their apartment window into the courtyard fountains. Bill Quinlan had no small amount of sentimental attachment to the building, but he and his mother were not a part of the building’s unofficial power structure, as Gross and Jackson were. Gross and Jackson, Quinlan felt, were reacting to the building’s situation too emotionally, almost hysterically, and were being high-handed and even haughty in assuming their roles as leaders. “They took the stance that the Dakota had to go cooperative, or else,” Quinlan recalls today. “They resented anyone who questioned their authority, or who suggested that there might be some sort of solution other than the one they wanted. They presented it as a take it or leave it situation. I’ve lived long enough to know that nothing in life is take it or leave it.”