Life at the Dakota Page 17
By the early 1970’s the Park had become generally unsafe at night. Still, to the dismay of her neighbors, Lauren Bacall routinely walked her dog there, even late at night—though Miss Bacall’s bold stride suggested a woman who might give any muggers a run for their money.
By daylight, meanwhile, the Park had become to some people—well, unattractive. The city, in the person of Mr. Hoving, had begun to boast that Central Park was a “people park.” Indeed it was, and on most good days Central Park was the most densely populated public park of any in the world. The city had also begun scheduling more and more Big Apple Events in the Park, more plays, more operas, more symphony performances, more rock concerts, more ethnic festivals, all of which attracted greater hordes of people. Perhaps the city operated on the theory that in numbers there was safety, but it overlooked the corollary that with so much use, the Park deteriorates. The events in the Park attracted pushcart vendors—some of them licensed, some of them not—who sold everything from toys and balloons and cheap jewelry and post cards to hot dogs, bagels, soft drinks and ice cream. The vendors, on a good day, have managed to turn Central Park into one of the city’s largest commercial centers of the junk-food trade, surely something Mr. Olmsted could never have foreseen. The vendors point out that they carry with them their own containers for used paper napkins and other trash. But food is carried away from their carts, and napkins wind up in the shrubbery, pop cans in the lake. Helium-filled balloons escape from children’s tiny hands and festoon themselves high in the branches of trees, where they hang limply out of reach of the Park’s overburdened sanitation staff.
The electronic age brought with it the transistor radio, and these devices are played, at high volume, throughout the Park, making it at times seem noisier than the streets. (In London, by contrast, it is illegal to play radios in the royal parks—Hyde Park, Green Park, St. James’s Park and Kensington Gardens—and punishable by a £5 fine.)
The Central Park Zoo, though it is not a close Dakota neighbor, has long been something of an embarrassment to the city. Though the Zoo’s indoor-outdoor cafeteria is still a pleasant place to lunch, even the Zoo’s administrators admit that it is one of the worst animal parks in the country. With the exception of the always-playful seals, most of the Zoo’s animals, in their too-small cages and enclosures, look listless and unhappy.
Tall weeds of lethargy and indifference seem to have grown in the Park, a sense of fatalism, and a feeling that nothing can be done. Olmsted’s dream that the Park would be a place that would be entered with a sense of reverence and respect for nature seems far short of coming true. Grassy areas are turned to dirt from the soles of too many sneakers. The great variety of wildflowers that used to bloom there has diminished steadily over the years. Shrubs, plants and flowers are routinely pulled up and carried away. Branches are occasionally snapped from trees for games of stickball, and statues and monuments have been sprayed with graffiti—a practice which, fortunately, seems on the wane. The Park was conceived as a place where New Yorkers could escape from the sounds, tensions and bustle of the city—a peaceful, bucolic interval in the city’s life. At times, though, it seems almost the opposite.
And just when New Yorkers are about to concede that the Park may be “getting a little better,” something dreadful happens. A group of joggers is randomly attacked and bludgeoned by a band of hoodlums wielding bats and clubs and branches torn from trees. When apprehended the young men admitted that they were “out to get faggots,” whom they hated as a breed. While this is an isolated instance, and though the Park is generally considered a much safer place than it was, say, in the 1960’s, it hardly provides the kind of calm it was designed to engender. Meanwhile, maintaining this great natural resource seems to be of low priority in New York City’s scheme of allocating scarce public funds.
To be sure, Frederick Law Olmsted was designing for an earlier generation of New Yorkers. The 1850’s was a genteel, sentimental period in America, and New York was a decorous community of women in gauze dresses holding parasols and young men in polished boots communing with Nature. Olmsted certainly wanted to make his park available to New York’s poor also, but he was thinking of the poor as they were then—polite and respectful to their “betters,” and well-behaved. In the nineteenth century the less well-off tended to emulate the good manners of the wealthy. At the same time the rich were more serene, less edgy, and kinder to the poor. Olmsted lived in an era of the Grateful Poor, while in our more egalitarian age we have the Arrogant Poor, the Demanding Poor. His Park, walled like a medieval city-state, reflects the values of that older, more naïve, all-but-forgotten time, and, like the Dakota, it was really created for the nineteenth-century leisure class. The new egalitarianism—the youth revolt and the black revolt of the 1960’s—and the feeling that everyone deserves his share of whatever public property exists, and has the absolute right to use it as he wishes—are things that Mr. Olmsted would never have understood, much less foreseen.
There may also be something primal in humans’ feelings toward public places. The concept of sharing, as every parent and teacher knows, is a most difficult one to instill in children. At Rutgers, Professor Myra Bluebond-Langner, an anthropologist, recently reported on a study she is making of children between the ages of two and five, showing their “extreme respect for property rights.” In her preliminary findings Professor Bluebond-Langner notes that children’s disputes over private property (“That’s my crayon”) never last as long as those over communal property (“It’s our turn to use the swings.”) The more communal—and populous—a public place becomes, the more difficult it is to share, and the more it becomes a battleground.
Some Dakotans feel that the new egalitarianism of Central Park, which the city has encouraged, represents a perversion of Democracy. Not long ago a band of tenants spent a Saturday afternoon cleaning up the litter from that area of the Park immediately facing them. They succeeded in cleaning the Dakota’s own front yard, which was just the tip of the iceberg and, of course, a few summer days later, the area they had cleaned was just as littered as it was before. Not long afterward, Frederic Weinstein watched from his third-floor window with dismay as a Sunday picnic group tore up a park bench to provide firewood for its barbecue.
Perhaps, some people feel, the trouble is that the city has tried to make the Park too many things to too many people. Perhaps, in this era of specialization, what is needed is a variety of parks, each with its own specialty—a park for rock concerts, another for noisy sports, another for playing transistor radios, and another for nature lovers—for quiet, solitude and contemplation.
A picture postcard that the Metropolitan Museum sells depicts the turn-of-the-century Dakota standing solitarily against the sky. In front of it stretches Central Park in winter, with well-dressed skaters comporting themselves gracefully on the frozen lake. They skate with hands joined—dancers, really—the gentlemen in their tall hats, the ladies in their long skirts and bonnets. Clearly those long-ago folk were enjoying their park, and were also treating it with respect and kindness.
Such scenes in Central Park are not just wistful memories today. The majority of New Yorkers still treasure the Park. On summer evenings, well-dressed people still turn out for symphony concerts and Shakespeare in the Park, often with elaborate picnics spread out before them on the grass. Joggers and cyclists abound, and in warm weather, teams from The New Yorker magazine and other New York publishing houses gather for lunch-hour or after-work baseball games. On winter afternoons and evenings, on the lake and on the pond, in the Wollman and Lasker rinks, hundreds of skaters still create a scene out of Currier and Ives.
It would be impossible not to note that many of the people now enjoying the Park are black and Puerto Rican, reflecting the enormous expansion of Harlem following World War II. Today, New Yorkers tend to think of “Harlem” as anything north of Ninety-sixth Street, where the Penn Central Railroad emerges from its tunnel beneath Park Avenue into the open air. Strictly speaking, h
owever, Harlem was the area between 130th Street and 143rd Street, between Madison and Seventh avenues. In the late nineteenth century, as huge migrations of Russian and Polish Jews flooded into the city, fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, Harlem became primarily Jewish. Russian Jews dominated the 1910 census figures of the area, and next came the Italians, the Irish, the Germans, the English, Hungarians, Czechs and others from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In addition, there were 75,000 native whites, and only 50,000 blacks. Blacks did not arrive in New York in large numbers until after World War I, and, following the lead of the foreign immigrants, they moved to Harlem. Most were from the rural South, and most were poor. As the blacks moved in, the Jews moved out—north into the Bronx or, if they could afford it, to the South Shore of Queens and Long Island.
Following World War II there was a new infusion into Harlem from Puerto Rico, and the new Spanish-speaking arrivals and the older-established black Harlemites made tense and uneasy neighbors. Harlem ceased being a jolly tourist spot which had offered “stompin’” at the old Savoy Hotel and lively black entertainment at the famous Cotton Club. Now it was more like an armed camp, looked on with fear by New York’s white population. Furthermore, the limits of Harlem were bulging southward, particularly on the Upper West Side, down into the West Nineties and West Eighties.
In the 1950’s and 60’s there was a certain sense of panic on the West Side, and a feeling that the West Side would eventually “go black.” (As it turned out, this did not happen, and the West Side is currently enjoying a sort of renaissance—not in fashionability, of course, but in terms of rising rents.) During those uneasy decades, a number of white families retreated to the East Side. The Birch Wathen School, fearful that the West Side would soon be dangerous, moved its headquarters across town. During this period also, the Trinity School on West Ninety-first Street formed an alliance with the upstate Pawling School in Dutchess County, partly as a hedge against being forced out of the neighborhood by an influx of black and Hispanic poor people. (This didn’t happen either, and Trinity and Trinity-Pawling disassociated themselves from each other in the summer of 1978.)
At the Dakota, however, the mood was more serene, and there was no mass exodus from the building. The Dakotans, after all, had more important matters on their minds—preserving their precious parkside principality, their “fortress of delight.” Also, after going co-op, the new mood at the Dakota involved not only love, but a certain longing to turn back the clock. In the elegant old relic of a building, the new commonality contained another important ingredient. It was nostalgia.
Of course some people were more nostalgic about the building than others. And just how nostalgic, in terms of preserving the romantic past, would become the center of another controversy. Some people, it seemed, were treating the Dakota just the way some people treated the Park.
*New Yorkers’ puritanical sensibilities, however, would still not accept the bidet, considered sinfully European. In fact, it was against the law to install a bidet in New York until very recently. Also, for some reason, health laws dictated that all toilet seats must be of the open, U-shaped design and not of closed, oval shape.
Chapter 15
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 D
akota 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.