Life at the Dakota Read Online Free Page A

newspapers angrily denounced this report as a piece of fiction. But these papers themselves were often critical of New Yorkers’ manners, and the Herald took society to task for “loud talking at table, impertinent staring at strangers, brusqueness of manners among the ladies, laughable attempts at courtly ease and self-possession among the men—the secret of all this vulgarity in Society is that wealth, or the reputation of wealth, constitutes the open sesame to its delectable precincts.”
    Where one lived and how one lived in New York was also a matter of comme il faut, and that was what made Edward Clark’s plan to build a large luxury apartment house in the far reaches of the upper West Side seem so preposterous. Society would never place its sacred imprimatur on that part of town. No less an authority than Ward McAllister (or Mr. Make-a-Lister, as he was sometimes called) had declared that he could not bother “to run society” north of Fiftieth Street. *
    West Seventy-second Street was not only far north of society’s imaginary boundary line, it was also far west of it. The perimeters of Central Park had already been laid on the city’s maps, but Eighth Avenue (not yet renamed Central Park West), the park’s western border, was still a dirt road. Though Mr. Clark’s expensive building would face the park, that section of the park had not yet been landscaped or developed. In the park, opposite and all around Mr. Clark’s building site, lived squatters in shacks built of roofing paper and flattened tins—shanties without plumbing or heat, whose owners kept pigs, goats, cows and chickensthat grazed and foraged among the rocky outcroppings. Those deplorable hovels and their unlovely occupants would be Mr. Clark’s next-door neighbors.
    Society in London, Paris, Rome and Madrid had been living in apartments for years, but New York was not Europe. New York gentlemen would never live “on shelves under a common roof,” and apartment houses, like the gaudy hotels, were regarded as architectural inducements to immorality. There was even more to it than that. Apartment living implied a sleazy and suspicious transiency. In those days, as Lloyd Morris pointed out, “Failure to own your own home was a confession of shabby antecedents or disreputable habits.”
    The fact that the poor of New York were tenanted in the miserable railroad flats merely added to the stigma of apartment living. But more than that, to the sensibilities of Victorian New Yorkers there was something very Parisian, and therefore naughty about the thought of having bedrooms (euphernistically called “chambers;” the word “bedroom was considered as vulgar as the word “stomach”) on the same floor as the floor where one dined and entertained. Discreet staircases were expected to separate public from private rooms. Edith Whaton writing of a somewhat earlier era, had described a certain elderly new York lady whose
    burden of … flesh had long since made it impossible for her to go up and down stairs, and with characteristic independence … had … established herself (in flagrant violation of all the New York proprieties) on the ground floor of her house; so that, as you sat in her sitting room … you caught … the unexpected vista of a bedroom …
    Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fiction … such as the simple American had never dreamed of. That was how women with lovers lived in wicked old societies, in apartments with all the rooms on one floor, and all the indecent propinquities that their novels described.
    These attitudes toward single-floor living had remained unchanged. But things had been happening in New York that the highest reaches of society may not have noticed. For one thing, with all the new money that was pouring into the city, New York had become easily