Read Online Life at the Dakota by Stephen; Birmingham - Free Book Online Page A

of people journeyed uptown to look at the new wonder of the city, and hundreds of requests for apartments in the Dakota poured in. But it was too late. The Dakota was already fully rented. It had not even had to advertise.
    Not only was the completed building a commanding presence on the city skyline, but it also afforded its tenants extraordinary views. Bizarre though it seemed, the location Edward Clark had chosen for his folly had rare advantages. It was on one of the highest points of land in Manhattan. From the Dakota’s upper windows one could see the entire island and much of the surrounding countryside as well. To the east, across Central Park with its picturesque castle and lake, was the museum and the Mall, and beyond all that it was possible to see the blue waters of Long Island Sound and the hills of Brooklyn. From the west the view was equally panoramic and took in the Hudson River, the Palisades and the distant Orange Mountains of New Jersey. When the famous Hudson-Fulton Ship Parade was held from New York Harbor up to Albany, Dakotans could watch much of its course from their roof. To the north lay the hills of Tarrytown, and to the south one could admire the steeples and church spires of lower Manhattan in an era when God had not yet been replaced by Mammon in the city’s order of priorities. One could also see the tall towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, Governor’s Island, the green tip of Staten Island and the waters of Lower New York Bay. As the Daily Graphic remarked with wonderat the time, “Every prominent landmark in the landscape can be discerned from this location, and the great buildings of the lower city are as prominently marked as if the sightseer were floating over the island in a balloon.” In those days it was not difficult for New Yorkers to remember that they lived in a seaport. Today, of course, nearly all these stirring views have become obscured by New York progress.
    The article in the Graphic went on to comment that the Dakota “guaranteed to the tenants comforts which would require unlimited wealth in a private residence.” This, of course, was the key to the building’s immediate popularity. One could live like a king at the Dakota without paying a king’s ransom to do so.
    The rents, which Edward Clark had set before his death, seemed more than reasonable for the period. A ten-room apartment could be leased for three thousand dollars a year, and tenants wrote out their monthly rent checks to one “Edward S. Clark.” At first, some people were not sure who, exactly, Edward S. Clark was, since the original Edward Clark had used no middle initial. The terms of Edward Clark’s will were complicated, and since the estate was vast there were many individual bequests. In terms of the Dakota, however, the will was quite specific. Clark had not left the building to his son, Alfred Corning Clark, whose interests were art and music, and did not include real estate. Edward Clark had skipped a generation and left the building to his grandson and namesake, Edward Severin Clark.
    The news that he had become the proprietor of the Dakota and the possessor of an enormous apartment with a ballroom-sized drawing room—as well as the boss of one of New York’s most flamboyant architects—must have bewildered Edward Severin Clark. When he fell heir to the Dakota he was only twelve years old.

Chapter 5
    East Side, West Side
    In a way, the fact that the stewardship of the Dakota had passed to a little boy may have amounted to one of the very first in a long series of reprieves that would be granted to the building over the years. Young Edward Severin Clark and his family were already comfortably rich from Singer Sewing Machine Company stock. Their financial affairs were in the hands of bank trustees and lawyers, and they had moved into a social world—denied to the founder of the fortune and his wife—in which the making of mere money was