Life at the Dakota Read Online Free Page B

the most expensive American city in which to live. Most hard-pressed—sincethey appreciated the niceties—were the city’s genteel, well-educated professional people of moderate means. A house in a respectable, if not affluent, neighborhood could not be rented for less than eighteen hundred dollars a year. A woman who considered herself a lady felt it essential to have at least three in staff. The Irish cook cost from eighteen to twenty dollars a month. A chambermaid, usually also Irish, cost from twelve to fifteen dollars monthly and a nurse for the children, usually French or German, cost about the same. The costs of living had escalated alarmingly. Butter was fifty cents a pound, compared with thirty-five cents or less elsewhere in the country. Eggs were fifty cents a dozen, sugar was sixteen cents a pound, chicken was twenty-five cents a pound and beef was thirty-five cents a pound. A family with an income of six thousand dollars a year—well above the median American income of the era—found itself having to watch pennies. The dinner party, meanwhile, had become a fixed New York institution, and well-bred New Yorkers were expected—almost required—to do a certain amount of entertaining, and to do so on a modest income had become something of a hardship.
    Adding to the cost of everything was the fact that New York was becoming a very crowded city. As early as 1870, an angry reader wrote to the New York Times, demanding to know why the city was keeping empty land in Central Park “while the middle classes are being driven out of the City by excessive rents.” Indeed, it was upon the middle class that the squeeze was most extreme. Of the million people in New York, half the population lived in 40,000 houses of between five and fifty rooms. The other half lived in just 20,000 dwellings, mostly consisting of one room. In addition, more than 24,000 immigrants from Europe and Ireland were crammed into 8,500 basement cells without heat, light, ventilation and, of course, plumbing. New York was threatening to become a city of the enormously rich and the desperately poor.
    One of the first New Yorkers to realize that “nice” people of slender means might provide a market for a special sort of housing was the aristocratic Mr. Rutherfurd Stuyvesant. His father, Lewis Rutherfurd, had been an astronomer and scholar, but his mother was a descendant of the last Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, and so when the Stuyvesant fortune passed to her son, Stuyvesant Rutherfurd reversed his name to suit his circumstances. Stuyvesant embarked upon a daring experiment. In the late 1860’s he hired Richard Morris Hunt, thearchitect of the Tribune Tower and the first American to graduate from the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, to convert a row of town houses on Eighteenth Street, near Irving Place, into “French flats.” The resulting apartment house was called the Stuyvesant, and was a five-story walk-up with two apartments to a floor. As had long been the case in Europe, the best apartments were on the ground, or “principal” floor, and there was even a concierge at the front door. Each apartment in the Stuyvesant contained about seven-and-a-half rooms and, though each boasted such amenities as high ceilings, a pair of wood-burning fireplaces (one in the parlor, one in the dining room) and—the ultimate luxury—its own bathroom, the rooms were rather small and not particularly sunny, and the manner in which the apartments were laid out was crude and inconvenient. All the “indecent propinquities” that Mrs. Wharton had noted were observable—chambers visible from parlors—and all the rooms were connected by a narrow, twisting, sunless hallway. The lone bathroom was located closer to the tiny servant’s room than to the three master chambers, and there were other shortcomings. There were hardly any closets (New Yorkers, after all, were used to