At The Dakota
I recently heard a story about a group of friends who were out walking around New York City and how they came upon and marveled at the Dakota Apartment Building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The Dakota is the best known of New York City’s iconic Gilded Age luxury apartment buildings. The friends’ descriptions of the location and the Renaissance Revival exterior echoed my memories.
References to earlier times when the building stood on its own — completed in 1884, then surrounded by farmland and grazing livestock – led me to recall the interior. I have spent a good part of my adult life there, working for several of the tenants, some quite famous.
I grew up in the city. It is familiar to me. I am not intimidated by the scale or numbers that can be overwhelming to some of us. And that part of the city — the Dakota, the Park, Strawberry Fields — is as familiar to me as the sand on Lobsterville Beach on Martha’s Vineyard where I live now. I returned to the city in 1984 after living in Europe for eight years, mainly in Malta, a beautiful, small island nation, working on yachts, maintaining, sailing and delivering them here and there around the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic. My three island homes suggest I must be attracted to island life, two islands of which are about the same size, though Manhattan is much smaller.
New York is an expensive place in which to live and I needed a job. I was always reliable and hardworking, though completely lacking — given the nomadic nature of my youth — in any formal education or credentials. But I was good with my hands, with tools, and willing to put in the hours. Through a connection with a family friend, I made a call to a firm doing “historic restoration.” Three craftspeople — Jim, Peter and Vince — formed the company called Traditional Line, at the time installing Period Rooms at the Metropolitan Museum. I was hired.
The Dakota was built to very high standards. The quality of the woodwork is exceptional and unique to a city now filled with concrete, glass and drywall. There is ash trim in the bedrooms, halls and kitchens, quarter-sawn white oak in the dining rooms, all of which face the beautiful interior courtyard. You will find the finest Honduran mahogany in the formal living rooms and libraries, where ten-foot tall, intricately carved fireplace mantles dominate the space. The floors comprise a maze of quartered and rift sawn oak, ash and cherry. The ceilings are fourteen feet high on the first floor.
The Sixties obsession with decorating with paint generated a lot of work for us. One tenant on the seventh floor, overlooking the park — the widow of a renowned musician — once told me that she wished she hadn’t painted everything white. Oh well.
So I stripped a lot of paint — and later, upon becoming a principal in the firm and eventually the President (a title which simply indicated that I did everything myself), I restored a number of the larger apartments in the building to their former 19th-century glory. We also completed specialized projects for the building’s management when they needed things carefully removed for access to 120-year old plumbing and other parts of the infrastructure.
The original kitchens in the Dakota are lovely. Not fancy, they are functional, with simple cabinets and surfaces meant to be used. There was no open plan for socializing, the lady of the house did not entertain there, and guests stayed out. One of the apartments was filled with photos and memorabilia of the unit’s famous couple (he died in 1957 — but she was still lively and just as strikingly handsome as during the moment on film when she asked, “You know how to whistle, don’t you?”). We were tasked to take her kitchen cabinets down from the walls to access a main water line which was leaking. So I met briefly with her and we scheduled the work to be done during her absence the following week.
A week later, I received a call on the morning she returned. She shouted, demanding that I appear immediately. I was in the building anyway and ran up the back service stairs and rang the bell. This formidable and regal legend opened the back door and asked, “Why the hell hasn’t the work been done! You’re incompetent and unreliable!” She threatened to demand that my entire company be thrown out of the building. “Why,” she asked, her voice raising again, “hasn’t the work been done?”
I was taken aback, standing just inside the service door — she hadn’t invited me all the way in — so I answered, confused, but then with some confidence, and with just a hint of smugness, “All the work has been completed. Your kitchen was completely taken apart, pipes replaced, walls fixed and painted, cabinets re-installed — all done just as we had discussed.”
She took a step back and took a good look around, suddenly comprehending that everything was back in place perfectly, seemingly undisturbed. Then a wry smile transformed her face — she couldn’t help herself – and, in that silky, husky voice, she said, “Then get the hell out.”