Life at the Dakota Read online

  Mr. Douglass was succeeded by Mrs. Elise Vesley as the Dakota’s “lady managerette,” and to her fell the task of screening prospective tenants. Her methods were whimsical, to say the least. When Ward Bennett, now a successful designer, was a struggling young sculptor looking for a place to live in the late 1940’s, he learned that single rooms, which had formerly been servants’ rooms, were occasionally available under the slanting eaves of the Dakota’s eighth and ninth floors. He approached Mrs. Vesley for an interview. At the time, Bennett had become involved with Vedantism, the Eastern religious cult that was being promoted in the United States by Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda, and for his interview he happened to be carrying an Isherwood-Prabhavananda volume that he had just borrowed from the library. Mrs. Vesley, who, if she chose, could be quite frosty, was exceptionally cordial to Mr. Bennett. She showed him a room that she offered to let him have for forty dollars a month, including breakfast and maid service. Mr. Bennett then asked Mrs. Vesley if she would like him to supply references. “No references necessary,” said Mrs. Vesley, and tapped the Isherwood book. Mrs. Vesley, it turned out, was one of the leaders of the Vedantist movement in New York.

  Mrs. Vesley had undergone a deep personal tragedy. Her handsome young son, the apple of her eye, one day had been struck down by a truck on Seventy-second Street, just in front of the Dakota, and killed. She never quite got over that and, as a result, was a bit peculiar and was always partial to the handful of children who were then in the building. One of her projects was trying to maintain the Dakota’s roof garden in its battle against the elements, and she also considered herself an authority when it came to matters of decorating. When a tenant decorated an apartment in a manner she disapproved of, she let the fact be known, which did not make her universally popular in the building. In addition to Vedantism, Mrs. Vesley believed in psychokinesis, and claimed that with the power of her mind she could move large objects. Once a tenant returned home from a holiday to find his living-room furniture completely rearranged. When he complained to Mrs. Vesley, who naturally had access to all apartments, she insisted that she had not been in. She had, however, been thinking about the poor arrangement of the furniture, and she admitted that the furniture might have been rearranged psychokinetically from her office.

  With World War II came rent control, which fixed the Dakota’s pleasantly low rates. But rent control, which made it difficult to raise rents, did not eliminate—at the Dakota, at least—the possibility that rents could be negotiated downward. When an antiques dealer, Frederick Victoria, and his wife were expecting their first baby, they went to the Dakota and Mrs. Vesley, looking for a larger apartment. Though they admired the apartment Mrs. Vesley showed them, the Victorias confessed that they could not afford the rent. Something about the Victorias had clearly struck Mrs. Vesley’s fancy because she immediately said, “Then you can have it for whatever rent you’re paying now.”

  Though the Dakota had never offered anything longer than a one-year lease, the matter of leases was another that was treated somewhat casually. When the Henry Blanchards moved into their large fifth-floor apartment in 1954, the building’s management cheerfully went about repainting and decorating to the Blanchards’ specifications. Some time later, when all this was done, the management said to the Blanchards, “By the way, we haven’t given you a lease yet. Do you intend to stay?”

  Considering the pleasant coziness of the management-tenant relationship, it was not surprising that, from the beginning, the Dakota gained an astonishing record of tenant loyalty. Ninety percent of the building’s original tenants remained there until they died, and in 1934, on the building’s fiftieth birthday, two of the original tenants were still in residence—Miss Deal, in four rooms, and Mr. Maxwell D. Howell, in nine.

  Between 1884 and 1929 there was not a single vacancy at the Dakota. Then the stock market misbehaved badly, and this had its effect on the Dakota as it did on other buildings in New York. At the time of the Crash the towering Majestic Apartments was under construction across the street, on the site of the old Majestic Hotel. Earlier, a careful survey of New York tastes in apartments had indicated that suites ranging in size from eleven to twenty-four rooms were what New Yorkers wanted most, and the Majestic’s floor plans had been drawn up to suit this preference. Now the plans were hastily redrawn to provide apartments of two to fourteen rooms. At the Dakota the Great Depression did not cause many tenants to move out. It did, however, cause a number of tenants to pull in their horns, and quite a few of the larger apartments were divided into smaller units during this period. But the vacancies these divisions created had a way of being filled immediately, and there was nearly always a waiting list for them. Through it all, the building never advertised and never hung out a sign.

  And how the building’s owners, the Clarks, pampered the Dakota and its tenants! Once, while a Dakota tenant was away for the summer, a pipe burst in his ceiling and water destroyed an entire panel of antique wallpaper. The wallpaper was irreplaceable, but the Dakota’s private painting crew was brought in. Painstakingly, they reproduced the wallpaper’s intricate pattern by hand in paint—so perfectly that when the tenant returned he was unable to notice any difference.

  Tenant loyalty was also based on more powerful, almost mystical, forces. The building seemed to inspire among its residents a kind of wild, irrational passion that approached religious fervor. Those who worshiped at the Dakota’s altar were not just tenants but followers, members of a sect. The Dakota, while it might never be a symbol of New York class, became a symbol of a New York cult. From the beginning the building seemed to take on a human personality—and a quirky, almost demented one at that. One did not live at the Dakota long before it could be sensed that here was not an ordinary apartment house but a living, breathing Presence, a wild lover whose behavior could neither be explained nor predicted but whose embrace one craved regardless. Things were always going wrong. Ceilings leaked, pipes burst, plaster fell. Tiles perpetually slithered from mansard roofs, and in the nooks and crannies of the building’s eaves, dormers, gables, finials and balconies, a larger-than-usual proportion of New York’s pigeon population found convenient addresses. The wood-burning fireplaces worked, but they often, mysteriously, spewed their smoke into someone else’s apartment, even though no known connections existed between individual flues. From the earliest days, putting the Dakota back together was a continuous, daily operation and yet—because it was the Dakota, a Presence, not a thing—the Dakota was mended, patched, coddled and cared for with the kind of desperate, distracted emotion that a parent reserves for a permanently sickly or retarded child. It would not be possible, a psychiatrist might say, for a group of otherwise sensible people to have a love-hate relationship with a giant piece of not-very-good Victorian architecture. With the Dakota, it was possible.

  The building never did make a great deal of sense. It cost a fortune to heat. A modern efficiency expert would have found the Dakota a model of total inefficiency. Much of the interior, from the gabled attics to the enormous basement, was simply wasted space. The interior courtyard was wasted, valuable real estate. The layouts of the apartments themselves were not at all clever. Space was squandered in long, snaking corridors and hallways. Some rooms had huge windows, while others had no windows at all. Doorways opened upon other doorways. Kitchens were placed half a block away from dining rooms. And yet the random, senseless quality of the building was what the Dakota’s residents loved most about it. In the end, though there was no building in New York remotely like it, the Dakota, to its worshipers, seemed a particular symbol of the city. The Dakota could have happened nowhere else.

  *Mrs. Post had helped bring about the downfall of Colonel Mann. Her husband had been guilty of an indiscretion, had been approached by the Colonel and confessed to his wife that a large sum was required to keep it out of print. True to her code, Emily refused to be blackmailed and notified the police, who arrested Mann’s lieutenant as the money was being passed to
him. Later, the Posts were quietly divorced.

  Chapter 8

  Spooks

  As the cult of the Dakota grew and flourished, as the building aged, and as more and more of the first families made their quiet way out the Undertaker’s Gate, it is perhaps not surprising that the building should have acquired its share of ghosts. Long before Roman Polanski used the Dakota’s exterior for his film Rosemary’s Baby, there were rumors to the effect that the building was the scene of all sorts of strange, eerie, supernatural goings-on.

  In Ira Levin’s novel, the apartment house in which most of the action takes place was not called the Dakota, but was made to sound very much like it. When the movie crew arrived the Dakota again became quite a tourist attraction. And while one of the film’s goriest scenes—a suicide—was being shot, the carriage entrance and courtyard were used. For several days a mangled and bloodied “corpse” lay in the courtyard, in full view of startled passers-by, many of whom thought the mannequin was a real person.

  Some wags have nicknamed the Dakota “the Dracula” because of its ominous and forbidding appearance, and a number of the building’s employees insist that the building is haunted. Chatting with a doorman one rainy night while waiting for a cab, Rex Reed confided that one of the Dakota’s former residents he would most like to have known was the late Boris Karloff. (Mr. Reed thinks that he has Boris Karloff’s old apartment, but he is wrong.) The doorman lowered his voice and said, “He’ll be back—wait and see.”

  Aside from this sort of thing, there have been other odd happenings within the building that are harder to explain. Jo Mielziner, for example, was one man who was particularly devoted to the Dakota, and he kept scrapbooks of bits and pieces of Dakota history. He often said he suspected there were “spirits” in the place. He died in 1976 outside the Dakota’s door, in a taxi, on his way home from a visit with his doctor. For several weeks after his death, queer things went on in the building’s cavernous basement. Tenant Wilbur Ross, a banker, was summoned suddenly to the basement by a frightened porter who reported that a heavy snow shovel, which had been hanging properly against a wall, had all at once flung itself twenty feet across the room and landed in the middle of the floor. Later, neatly stacked plastic bags of garbage that had been waiting to go out by the service door similarly flew into the center of the room. Mr. Ross himself, an American representative of the House of Rothschild and a man one would not expect to be impressed by spiritualist phenomena, insists he saw a heavy metal bar make the same uncanny journey through the air and land a short distance from his feet. When he tried to lift the bar it was too heavy for him. During this same period one of the four ancient service elevators, manually operated affairs requiring cables and pulleys, suddenly began to rise from the basement level of its own accord. It took four strong men, wrestling at the cables, to bring it down again. In time these manifestations ceased, but it was widely assumed that they had something to do with Jo Mielziner’s impatience with his new whereabouts.

  Then, just as New York has had its Mad Bomber and its Son of Sam, the Dakota for a period had its Mad Slasher or, as he was sometimes called, the Phantom of the Dakota. The Mad Slasher seemed primarily intent upon vandalizing the cages of the new automatic passenger elevators that had been recently installed. He gouged deep, violently angry slashes into the paneled elevator walls. He could not have had anything to do with the ghost of Jo Mielziner because Mielziner himself had designed the new elevators and had been very proud of them. The slashes appeared high up on the elevator walls, so they could not have been inflicted by a child, and the cuts were so deep that a person of some strength seemed indicated. New slashings appeared week after week; the perpetrator had to be someone within the building. Rumors flew as to who it might be, and neighbors looked at neighbors with heightened suspicion. At the same time, strange piles of shredded paper were found in the ninth-floor corridors, as though someone were trying to start a fire. Then, one afternoon, a full gallon can of paint fell—or was hurled—from the rooftop into the courtyard below, narrowly missing a tenant who was walking through. The can exploded on the pavement. No painting had been going on on the roof at the time. Now the suspicion turned to fear. Was there a murderer in their midst? Volunteers posted themselves, hidden with field glasses, to try to catch the Phantom at his work. Though they managed to observe various private diversions in their neighbors’ apartments, they noted nothing untoward. Then, as suddenly as the Slasher’s activities had begun, they stopped. No clue as to who the Slasher might have been has ever been uncovered, though there remain, not surprisingly, a number of theories.

  Writer Rex Reed had his own unsettling experience. Shortly after moving into his eighth-floor five-room apartment, he and his decorator, Richard Ridge, began extensive renovations. The work was nearly completed. None of the workmen who had been in the apartment smoked, Reed himself was out for the evening and his apartment was presumably empty. And yet, somehow, a pile of shavings and scraps just inside his front door caught fire. The fire was discovered, but by the time it was put out smoke and water damage required the apartment to be redone from scratch. “It was horrible,” he says. “When I came home, I thought, ‘Welcome to the Dakota!’ My God, this place really is haunted.” The cause of the fire was never determined.

  The Dakota’s elevators have always occupied a special place in the building’s history. When first installed they were original Otis hydraulics and they were the first elevators in New York to be placed in a residential building. For years they were operated by a team of Mary Petty-type, white-haired Irish ladies who wore dresses of black bombazine—a fabric unheard-of since the turn of the century—relieved with touches of white lace at the wrists and collars. Even after the elevators were automated in the early 1960’s, they made their journeys between floors with agonizing slowness and had a persistent habit of stopping at the wrong floors.

  An odd report once came from a group of men who were doing some interior painting in the building. A beautiful little blond child had suddenly appeared in the corridor, wearing high white stockings, patent-leather shoes with silver buckles and a dress of yellow taffeta that seemed to come from another century. She was bouncing a red ball. “It’s my birthday,” she said and, still bouncing her ball she disappeared down the corridor. The description of the little girl in the yellow dress matched no child then in the building, and she has never been identified. Not long after that, one of the painters slipped from a scaffold and fell through a stairwell to his death, and the little ghost girl was regarded as a messenger of ill omen.

  For years Mrs. Henry Blanchard was convinced that the Blanchards’ fifth-floor apartment was haunted. All sorts of strange rumblings, creaks and mutterings seemed to emerge from the vicinity of her pantry. Finally, however, a plumber convinced her that these noises were caused by air bubbling in the water pipes behind the plaster. “I’m a little disappointed,” says Mrs. Blanchard, “to find out that my ghost was air.” On the other hand, Frederic Weinstein, a writer, and his wife Suzanne are not at all certain that the noises they hear in their third-floor apartment have a natural explanation. In their dining room they often hear footsteps, restless pacings back and forth. Weinstein, furthermore, has noticed that, though he is usually not clumsy, an unusual number of accidents have befallen him in the dining room. He has tripped and fallen, skidded on floors and rugs, slipped from stepladders, had chairs slide out from underneath him. The accidents keep happening, just as the sound of footsteps continues to be heard. Not long ago Frederic Weinstein had a most curious experience. He was walking home to the Dakota and, before crossing the street, paused to look up, as apartment dwellers often do, at the windows of his apartment, which faces both Seventy-second Street and the Park. He was startled to see, through the windows of his living room, an enormous crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling, ablaze with light. He checked the windows again, counted the floors. It was obviously his apartment; no other apartment occupies that particular third-floor corner. And ye
t he knew that his apartment contained no crystal chandelier, nor had it as long as he had lived there. Of course when he got upstairs the crystal chandelier had gone. But there was, as there had been from the time the Weinsteins had taken the apartment, a round nipple protruding from the center of the living-room ceiling from which, once upon a time, a chandelier of some sort had clearly hung.

  If it had not been for these weird events, Frederic Weinstein would have paid little heed to another odd thing that happened in his apartment not long ago. He had been playing a Ouija-board-type game with his children—one that involved lettered tiles that spelled out the board’s answers. During the course of the session the spirit-messages appeared to be coming from a little girl. When he and the children had finished with the game, Weinstein stacked the lettered tiles neatly and put them on a bookshelf. Several days later, however, he discovered that two of the tiles had made their way into pockets of one of his suits. A third turned up in his eyeglass case. As he withdrew them, one by one, the letters were “I,” “C” and “U.” This, he feels, was intended to convey to him that someone in the apartment was saying, “I see you.” It is, he assumes, the same party that is causing him to stumble in his dining room.

  One of the most bizarre supernatural experiences at the Dakota involves the John Lennons. The Lennons have become the Dakota’s Mystery Couple, though when they first expressed an interest in the building, there was no small amount of resistance to them. They were assumed to have an unconventional life-style. It was feared that they would have large, noisy parties with music and amplifiers. As a result of some drug-related charges in England, there had been a period when the United States State Department had wanted John Lennon out of the country, and there were those at the Dakota who felt the same way about him. But after moving into the Dakota the Lennons kept to themselves, gave few if any entertainments and expressed a wish for absolute privacy. At the same time, when they emerge from the building in their unusual costumes (Lennon in blue jeans, a long black cape, a Mexican sombrero, often sucking a baby’s pacifier; his stocky little wife, also in jeans, in one of a variety of fright-wig hairdos) and step into their His and Hers chauffeur-driven silver limousines, they are a bit conspicuous. In their disguises, however, the Lennons are seldom recognized on the street and are usually dismissed as run-of-the mill New York eccentrics.