Life at the Dakota Quotes

“London had had a subway system since 1863, but New York had not yet gone underground for at least two reasons. For one thing, New York was built on solid rock, and tunneling through the Manhattan schist presented enormous engineering obstacles. For another, during the years when “Boss” Tweed had the city in his grip, Tweed and his “ring” controlled the surface transportation lines and wanted no competition.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“undertaken”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“Described by a contemporary as “Napoleonic in stature,” he was diminutive, and to overcome this he took to placing his office”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“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.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“We didn’t move up here because it was fashionable because, goodness me, it wasn’t fashionable. It was too special. Fashionable to me implies conformity, and the Dakota didn’t conform to anything in the city at the time.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“buying a condominium one buys one’s living space, and only one’s living space, outright, and gets a deed and title to it. Costs of maintaining common areas—hallways, roofs, plumbing and so on—are shared by everyone in the building. A co-operative, on the other hand, is a corporation with shares of stock to sell. The Dakota is owned by the Dakota, Inc., and when buying an apartment one buys a certain number of shares of Dakota stock based more or less on the apartment’s cubic footage.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“Tilden’s Extract. It cost six cents for half an ounce and could be purchased at any drug store in the city. It was recommended for “over-wrought hostesses,” who were advised to take a small dose before receiving guests or going out to dinner, to prepare them for the “rigors” of the evening ahead. Tilden’s was pure extract of hashish.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“were hitched at mangers filled with hay. Strapped to the flanks of each horse was a table. Guests, in formal riding attire, mounted their assigned horses and were served course after course of food by waiters dressed as grooms. From the shoulders of each horse, meanwhile, were slung two saddlebags, each filled with ice and bottles of champagne. As they dined, the guests sipped champagne through”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“LeRoy got into a bit of trouble early in 1978 when it was learned that she was preparing certain dishes in her kitchen for the Tavern on the Green, another of her husband’s restaurants just down the street. This, it seemed, violated some city health code. In addition to kitchens that a luxury hotel might envy, the LeRoy apartment also contains a screening room for movies.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“The largest apartment in the Dakota belongs to restaurateur Warner LeRoy, the son of movie director Mervyn LeRoy and the nephew of all the Warner brothers. Originally, the LeRoys’ apartment consisted of only ten large rooms on the sixth floor, but when another apartment of the same size became available on the floor immediately above, the LeRoys bought that one too. They persuaded the building to let them construct a staircase between the two apartments, giving them the Dakota’s only duplex, unless one counts Ward Bennett’s split-level pyramid on the roof, the Novaks’ basement studio, and the various sleeping-lofts and balconies that have been inserted between floors here and there. The LeRoy apartment, as might be expected, has been decorated in”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“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.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“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.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“In good weather a feature of New York life became the afternoon carriage parade, between four and five o’clock, along the Mall. For this, everyone turned out—the old rich, the nouveaux and members of the demimonde. Throngs of curious onlookers and tourists lined the entrance to the Mall to observe this unique phenomenon and”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“The park took nearly ten years to build and cost over nine million dollars, a staggering sum in those days. By the end of the Civil War, most of the work on the park had been completed, though the problem of squatters’ shacks—particularly in the park’s northern reaches—would continue for a number of years.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“Because it is The Dakota, it is a residence of established worth. Because it is The Dakota, it is the original rather than an attempt at a revival. Because it is The Dakota, it is a tradition in elegance that remains unique in New York’s social history. At long last, the great iron gates are open again to apartment seekers. Apartments of impressive size, each with its own master-pieces of decoration. You are invited to inspect the few apartments still available, by appointment with the agent.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“The Dakota, which had been so proud that it had never had to advertize or hang out an “Apartments Available” shingle, now found it practical to do so. The new board of directors ruled against a shingle, but it did agree to advertise. The Dakota’s first ad, in December 1961, did its best to be both persuasive and dignified. It read:”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“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.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“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.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“At least three foreign ambassadors—the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Finnish—lived at the Dakota along with the French Minister of Cultural Affairs. There had been the distinguished Schirmers and Steinways.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“Between 1884 and 1929 there was not a single vacancy at the Dakota. Then”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“The West Side had become a land where people lived in layers. It was a land of prosperous immigrants. It was a place where people rented, rather than owned,”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“Many Schirmer parties overflowed into the Steinway apartment, and vice versa. A number of these entertainments were musical in nature, and every important composer or performer who passed through New York was entertained at dinner by the Schirmers, and visiting artists were always eager to step next door to try out one of Mr. Steinway’s new pianos. Once the Schirmers gave a dinner for the composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who was passing through on an American concert tour. After dinner, thinking that Tchaikovsky”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“Mr. Gustav Schirmer, the great music publisher.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“There were the Steinways, for example (ironically,”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“(In the Clark apartment doorknobs and plates and hinges were overlaid with sterling silver.) There were inlaid marble floors, wrought-iron staircases, walls wainscoted in rare marbles and choice hardwoods, bronze lamp fixtures and railings in the elevator lobbies.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“turning the second floor into hotel-style guest rooms that could be rented to tenants to put up out-of-town friends. And in each of the four corners of the eighth floor he designed four smaller apartments. When Hardenbergh finally finished juggling rooms and spaces, there were sixty-five apartments in the Dakota, ranging in size from four to twenty rooms.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“The eighth and ninth floors were to be used exclusively as laundry rooms, service and storage rooms, and servants’ rooms.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“Walls came down and doorways were created as the architect tried to fit individual apartments together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“The original specifications of the building called for “Suits [sic] of Apartments for fourty [sic] two families besides Janitors.” Hardenbergh had originally designed the interior space so that each of the seven main floors would contain six apartments, described in the building records as “French flats,” roughly the same in size and layout. But Edward Clark had begun renting apartments in his building-to-be to friends, acquaintances and other interested tenants long before the building was completed, thus giving future tenants the opportunity to select the size, variety and the number of rooms they needed.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“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.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address