Talking Walls

By Annalyn Swan

LIFE AT THE DAKOTA: NEW YORK'S MOST PECULIAR ADDRESS by Stephen Birmingham Random House; 241 pages; $12.50

No one who saw Rosemary's Baby is likely to forget the fortress that housed the satanic gathering. In real life, however, the forbidding turrets and gables guard one of the oldest, ritziest and most famous apartment buildings in Manhattan. It is the Dakota, behind whose 2-ft. -thick brick walls live such celebrities as Lauren Bacall, Roberta Flack, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who own some 28 rooms throughout the Dakota and who once held a seance to commune with departed tenants. Other famous occupants have included Leonard Bernstein, Judy Holliday and Boris Karloff, plus several purported house ghosts. The Dakota is just the haunt, then, for Stephen Birmingham, who has made a living off the rich ("Our Crowd," The Right People. The Grandees) and famous (Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis).

A $1 million apartment house was considered a folly in the 1880s, when Entrepreneur Edward Clark broke ground west of Central Park at 72nd Street. Rich New Yorkers had never favored apartment living. The site was also so far north and west of fashionable society that it was nicknamed the Dakota after the remote Western territory. Yet Clark went ahead with his ersatz castle, variously described as German Renaissance and Victorian chateau. The architecture and appointments, as Birmingham puts it, were meant to "convey the impression that, though one might be living in an apartment house, one was really living in a mansion."

The illusion succeeded. Between 1884 and 1929, there was not one vacancy in the monumentally ostentatious building. It had inlaid marble floors, a rooftop promenade with gazebos, an English baronial dining hall and a uniformed staff of 150. But then the Dakota was no more extravagant than the age in which it was built. Although the building looked out over a vista of squatters' shacks in Central Park, society's reigning Four Hundred might spend $200,000 on a single ball.

Birmingham's Dakotiana contain many anecdotes, including one about Tchaikovsky, who thought that the entire building belonged to Music Publisher Gustav Schirmer. "No wonder we composers are so poor," he wrote in his diary. "Mr. Schirmer is rich beyond dreams. He lives in a palace bigger than the Czar's!" There was also old Miss Leo, who lived in a 17-room apartment with her favorite carriage horse, stuffed and mounted, and Princess Mona Faisal, who, when asked her occupation, wrote "Saudi Arabia."

As usual, Birmingham has a good ear for the beau jest and a breezy way with the gossip of the upper crust. Yet his observations can be cloying, as when he fussily distinguishes Class (usually confined to Manhattan's East Side) from Chic (the stars and artists on the West Side). "In New York it is chic to have money, but not too much money" is the sort of meaningless throwaway line that mars Birmingham's social profiles. His book is nonetheless diverting -- except where the Dakota's future is concerned. Economically, the building seems doomed: an appraiser in 1960 found it "basically outmoded both in exterior appearance and interior design." He estimated that the land was then worth $3.8 million, but could find no value in the building. It has always run at a loss; much of its interior is wasted in meandering corridors and cul-de-sacs. Birmingham gives the Dakota only a fifty-fifty chance of survival. It would be a shame to see it go. "Paris and London, while also experiencing grave landmark crises, have so much more margin for error," says Frederic Weinstein, one concerned tenant. "We have so much more to lose because we have so much less to begin with. "

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