Life at the Dakota Page 4

  Though the settlement with Howe marked the end of the company’s conflicts with the inventors, it was only the beginning of troubles between Clark and Singer. The two men could not have been more mismatched. Clark tried hard to play the role of a polished, old-family aristocrat. Singer was a bully and a roughneck. Clark was cool and logical, Singer was hotheaded and impulsive. And yet from the outset it was clear that the two men needed each other badly if the Singer sewing machine was to succeed. Singer needed Clark’s business acumen and what would turn out to be Clark’s extraordinary ability as a promoter and salesman, and Clark needed Singer’s suddenly apparent mechanical genius. According to Isaac Singer’s biographer, Ruth Brandon,* “Neither could do without the other, and so for years they were irretrievably and unwillingly bound together … However … at the beginning of their association, each may have asked himself several times whether he had really got such a good deal as all that.”

  As a businessman, Isaac Singer was completely without scruples and, to get what he wanted, thought nothing of resorting to threats and lies. Once, when one of his shareholders, whom Singer wanted to buy out, was taken ill, Singer visited the man at his sickbed, drew a long face and said, “I’ve just talked to your doctor. He thinks you won’t get over this. Don’t you want to give up your interest in the business altogether?” Singer then persuaded the frightened man to sign over his shares for a mere $6,000. The shares were worth at least ten times that amount. Later, when the gullible ex-shareholder recovered, he learned that Singer had never even met his doctor.

  It was not long before Clark and Singer had grown to thoroughly detest each other, and only the mounting success of their sewing-machine business kept them lock-stitched together. Noticing the expanded life-style that Singer and his New York “wife,” Isabella, were enjoying, Clark was once heard to cry, “Curse them! I am making them all rich!” Singer, in turn, frequently muttered, “If anything serious should happen to Clark, by God, I will give the family a tussle for the property.” Once, Singer buttonholed an associate and said, “Have you ever seen Clark with his wig off?” The bemused man replied that he had not, and asked why. “Because he is the most contemptible-looking object I ever saw with his wig off!” said Singer.

  The situation between the two equal partners was not helped by the fact that as far as the Clarks were concerned, their association with the Singer company had become a social anathema. Though Clark and Singer were becoming equally rich, New York society—which never would have accepted the unsavory Mr. Singer or any of his various wives and lady friends—now treated the Clarks as if they were tainted with the Singer curse. Socially, Caroline Clark considered Isaac Singer absolutely beyond the pale, and would not permit him inside her house. Once she told a woman visitor that she “wished Mr. Clark would sell out, and leave the low occupation that he was engaged in, and the nasty brute he was associated with.” Mrs. Clark clearly felt that her husband had left a respectable practice of law, lowered himself into “trade” and into a partnership with a genuine lowlife.

  What Caroline Clark may not have realized was that her husband was becoming the true hero of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and was creating a market—out of nothing—in which one day every American housewife, of every economic level, would want a sewing machine or, as she would call it, “a Singer.”

  Clark embarked upon an advertising campaign that was nothing if not innovative. Who, he reasoned, could be considered a more ladylike person than a clergyman’s wife? Churches, he also realized, inevitably had sewing circles, and if a minister’s wife could be persuaded to try a Singer machine, it was likely that the other ladies of her circle could be similarly persuaded. Writing his advertising copy himself, Clark directed one campaign specifically to churches, offering Singers to ministers’ wives at half price, saying with delightful candor, “Whenever one of our machines is put to use, and especially if it be in a prominent place where numbers of persons have an opportunity of seeing its operation, other sales are sure to be made in the same society or neighborhood. For this reason, it is a matter of importance to us to have one of our Singer machines employed within the circle of each religious society in the United States.” The campaign was so successful that even the widows of clergymen wrote begging for chances to buy half-price machines.

  To potential purchasers who were members of the laity, Clark devised a different advertising tactic. Since the machines were still expensive, he addressed a campaign to husbands—who, after all, would probably be the ones to make the final decisions to buy. He played artfully on masculine guilt over the long hours of drudgery wives spent with their needles and their mending, and how these hours deprived wives of precious time they could otherwise spend with their children, their homes, their husbands and womanly cultural pursuits. “The great importance of the sewing machine,” stated a typical Singer brochure, “is in its influence upon the home; in the countless hours it has added to women’s leisure for rest and refinement; in the increase of time and opportunity for that early training of children, for lack of which so many pitiful wrecks are strewn along the shores of life … in the comforts it has brought within the reach of all, which could formerly be attained only by the wealthy few.” If, in other words, a man was unwilling to buy a sewing machine for his wife, he ought to recognize himself as the cad he was.

  An advertisement of the period depicts a husband coming home from a day at business and saying to his wife that it is far too long since they have shared an evening together. Come, he says to her, put on your prettiest dress and we will go to dinner in a restaurant and then on to a concert. Ah, the poor soul replies, she cannot; she is far too behind in her sewing; seamstresses are hard to get, and expensive, and even with a seamstress one has to spend so much time explaining to the girl what must be done, and supervising her work. The husband smites his brow and says, “I cannot withstand that appeal! I must go and see these Machines! I must have one! Mary, you shall have your evenings, aye, and your afternoons, too, for relaxation and mental culture! I must have been asleep not to have seen through all this before!” Apparently this appeal shamed a sufficient number of husbands because Singer sales continued to climb upward.

  Another of Clark’s innovations was to employ women, always of the most genteel sort, to tour American cities and offer demonstrations showing how quick and easy it was to learn to sew by machine, and how much better were the results. (Singer demonstrators still offer free lessons on the machines today.) Even more important, Clark was one of the first to introduce a totally new selling concept—the installment purchase plan. Buying “on time” had rarely been tried before. Clark found that the system worked as successfully then as it works for the thousands of companies that have copied it since. Finally, though most of Edward Clark’s sales pitches were male-oriented, he was shrewd enough not to overlook appeals to feminine independence and economic liberation. “The great popularity of the machines may readily be understood when the fact is known that any good female operator can earn with them one thousand dollars a year,” said one of Clark’s ads.

  In the twenty years since their 1851 alliance, the hostile partners, Clark and Singer, had both become very rich men. The Clarks had ensconced themselves in a huge mansion off Washington Square, for which Mrs. Clark may have partially forgiven the “nasty brute” whose tinkering was responsible for it all. Isaac Singer’s life continued in its usual disordered style. When Singer died in 1875, all sorts of wives, mistresses and illegitimate children appeared to challenge Singer’s will and lay claims to shares of the millionaire’s estate. The court battles over Singer’s fortune—and the scandalous carryings-on that were revealed during them—made headlines for months, as more and more details emerged about what the New York Herald solemnly called “A Very Ghastly Domestic Story.”

  In his will Isaac Singer acknowledged twenty-five children, only eight of whom were legitimate. And since he had trouble remembering all his childrens’ names—egregiously misspelling them in the will�
�it is likely that he fathered a great many more.*

  To his credit Edward Clark put his personal feelings about Singer aside and came gallantly to the support of Isabella Boyer Singer, the wife with whom Singer had spent most of his final years, in her claim to be the legal widow. Isabella eventually won her case and went on to live a glamorous life in Paris, where she married a duke and became Bartholdi’s model for the Statue of Liberty.

  With Singer’s death Clark became president of the Singer Company and, freed from the burden of his unpleasant partner, found himself with time to devote to other money-making projects. One of these was his unprecedented apartment house, whose design he had entrusted to one of the most exciting young architects in New York.

  “Clark’s Folly,” however, despite all the ridicule and head-shaking it evoked, was not undertaken as a flight of fancy, nor was Edward Clark endeavoring to build a monument to himself, as some people assumed. He saw the Dakota, purely and simply, as a business investment. Life at the Dakota, he was convinced, could be sold to the New York public through the same selling techniques that had sold Singer sewing machines all over the world. Like a sewing machine, the Dakota would offer convenience, a short-cut route to opulent living with none of the problems of upkeep, and at a fraction of the expense that went with owning a private house. Like a sewing machine, the Dakota would offer “leisure for rest and refinement” and “comforts … which could formerly be attained only by the wealthy few.”

  Clark was now approaching seventy and had grown more than a little cynical about the public and what it wanted. The public could be made to want anything, if it were sold to them the right way. But one thing the public did seem to want in 1880 was to emulate high society and the way high society lived. Very well. The Dakota would provide such emulation. The Dakota was designed to convey the impression that, though one might be living in an apartment house, one was really living in a mansion. The Dakota would be an imitation of the rich-rich New York life—not the real thing, but a mirror image, an illusion. There were plenty of New Yorkers, Edward Clark figured, who would pay for that. For that, they would even sacrifice a good address.

  One other thing that Clark had noticed selling sewing machines was that the class system in America had changed drastically since the Civil War. There were no longer just two classes in America—the miserable poor and the wealthy few. There was now a huge middle class, and even that was divided into a number of different economic strata. There were rich and successful New Yorkers, like the Clarks themselves, who had never been invited to one of Mrs. William Astor’s balls. There were many New Yorkers, like the Clarks, who lived on Fifth Avenue near the Belmonts and who had never been asked to one of August Belmont’s famous dinners. There were many men and women who could afford sable lap robes in their landaus who were not part of the Four Hundred, and who, like Clark (though not, of course, his wife), had stopped caring.

  Furthermore, if despite the efforts of Miss Huntington and her Kitchen Garden classes, the servant class was indeed disappearing from America, the Dakota was designed as a hedge against that very possibility. As the mansions and town houses grew too costly to maintain and too difficult to staff, there would be the Dakota, with its own maintenance and housekeeping staff and private dining room. Edward Clark, in other words, seemed to have sensed that New York had already entered its era of upholstery. He had learned to work around class and the power structure, and had discovered that New York’s power source was somewhere other than in the ritualized world of Mrs. Astor. He was designing a building for a new class of New Yorkers of means much like his own.

  Edward Clark had not needed to be very shrewd to also notice something else. By the 1880’s New York was on its way to becoming the largest and most important city in America. In less than ten years the city’s population had doubled, climbing to one and a half million. Men who, a generation earlier, had headed for the California gold fields in search of riches were now streaming back into Manhattan as the island of golden opportunity. At the same time, 150,000 immigrants from Europe were arriving in America each year, and most of these were settling in New York City. Within another ten years it seemed likely that the population would double again. Already the city’s water supply had become inadequate, though an engineer named Benjamin Church was at work on plans for an aqueduct that when completed would pour an additional 300,000,000 gallons of water daily into the city from upstate reservoirs. As the city grew it had nowhere to grow but northward, uptown. Seventy-second Street and Eighth Avenue might have seemed inconveniently remote in 1880, but within ten years, as Clark correctly guessed, it would not.

  Today, when New York has become a city bristling with luxury apartment buildings, when it no longer matters, socially, whether or not one lives in an apartment house—and when Manhattan has become an island of apartment dwellers with only a handful of families remaining in private residences—Edward Clark seems to have been blessed with remarkable foresight. At the time, asked by a reporter from the Tribune whether he was a little “nervous” about the risks involved in his costly and seemingly experimental venture, Mr. Clark’s reply was characteristically brusque: “I am not.”

  When asked why a man sixty-nine years old, who had spent most of his life manufacturing and selling small household appliances, should suddenly at the end of his career fling himself into the construction of a major building, Mr. Clark replied, “To make money.”

  *A Capitalist Romance: Singer and the Sewing Machine (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977).

  *The most famous of Isaac Singer’s illegitimate sons was the dandified Paris Singer, who for many years was the dancer Isadora Duncan’s principal lover. Paris Singer, with his friend Addison Mizner, was also responsible for transforming Palm Beach from a sleepy Florida sandpit into a dazzling resort for the very rich. There are various versions of how this happened and how the huge, fanciful Mizner houses got to be built. According to one, Mizner, who had never designed anything before and was also hard of hearing, was grumbling about having nothing to do. “Why don’t you take up archeology?” said Singer. Mizner clapped his hands and said, “Architecture! I’d love to try that!” According to another story, both men were in Palm Beach and complaining of boredom. Singer said to Mizner, “What would you like to do most?” Mizner looked around at the small frame houses that comprised the settlement and said, “I’d like to build something big, that wasn’t made of wood, and paint it yellow.” A third version blames Palm Beach indirectly on Isadora who, it is said, was having a fling with a handsome young gym instructor. Disconsolate, Paris Singer brooded until he hit upon the idea of creating a new Palm Beach as a substitute for the attentions of his faithless mistress. Paris Singer, meanwhile, had an illegitimate child of his own by Miss Duncan.

  Chapter 4

  The Architect

  The style of the Dakota’s architecture has been officially labeled German Renaissance. But it has also been called other things, such as Victorian Château, Victorian Kremlin, Brewery Brick, Pseudo-European and Middle European Post Office. In other words, to use a term much favored by architects, it is “eclectic.”

  The architect whom Edward Clark chose to design his building, Henry Hardenbergh, went on to achieve a national reputation as a designer of elaborate hotels—among them the old Waldorf-Astoria and the Plaza in New York, the Willard in Washington and the Copley Plaza in Boston. In later years he would come to take himself with great seriousness. Described by a contemporary as “Napoleonic in stature,” he was diminutive, and to overcome this he took to placing his office desk and chair on a platform so that visitors would have to look up at him. He was also quite voluble, and in a 1906 interview with Sadakichi Hartmann in The Architectural Record, Mr. Hartmann noted with some satisfaction that for every twenty words of questions, Mr. Hardenbergh would respond with two hundred words of answers. Mr. Hartmann commented on Hardenbergh’s “wiry” physique and his “shrewd eyes,” and also noted, “This man knows what he is about … I thought to myself
, I am sure he deserves the reputation he has of having a roof on every house he builds,” meaning, perhaps, that Hardenbergh was known for completing every task he undertook. When Clark selected him in 1879, however, Hardenbergh was still relatively unknown, and quite young—only thirty-two. To an earlier interviewer, in 1883, when the Dakota was still unfinished, Hardenbergh confessed that he was “still trying to find himself.”

  Despite his youth, Henry Hardenbergh was most definitely a gentleman of the Old School and was descended from a New York family which had been among the city’s earliest settlers. The first Hardenbergh arrived in what was then the Dutch colony of Nieu Amsterdam in 1644, some three years before the arrival of Governor Peter Stuyvesant. Henry Hardenbergh’s great-great-grandfather, the Reverend Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh, had been a founder of Rutgers College. After studying under the architect Detlef Lienau, considered one of the nineteenth-century masters of the German Renaissance and Beaux Arts styles, young Hardenbergh designed and supervised the construction of a library and chapel for his great-great-grandfather’s college. One of his first New York assignments was to design the Vancorlear Hotel, which used to stand at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street. Though they were of different generations, and though Edward Clark and Henry Hardenbergh did not move in quite the same New York social circles, it was Hardenbergh’s grandiose execution of the Vancorlear that first drew him to Clark’s attention as an architect. The Vancorlear was a transient hotel that consisted only of suites. What Clark had in mind was an apartment house that would be run like a hotel. He hired Hardenbergh and told him, in effect, that the sky was the limit. Hardenbergh, sensing that this was to be his first important building—one that could make his reputation—decided to take a no-holds-barred approach.