In the late 1960s, when my father was just starting Ken’s Home Improvements, the contracting business he decided to get up and running now that he had a young son *cough* he relied on recommendations to get his first customers.
An early break came when someone recommended him to New York Times film critic Rex Reed.
Reed was by then one of the nation’s top critics, a bestselling author, and he had landed himself an apartment in The Dakota, the landmark Manhattan building on Central Park West. It would later become infamous as the home of John Lennon, when he was shot in front of it in 1980.
The Dakota is hard to describe. How many apartment buildings do you know that have their own Wikipedia entry, complete with a list of notable residents and cultural references?
It’s the only building I can think of that’s had the distinction of being jarringly out of place not once, but twice.
When The Dakota first opened in 1884, the building stood in what was then still considered the northerly reaches of Manhattan. There were farms and trees, and not much else. Indeed, that’s where the name supposedly comes from; when Singer Sewing Machine magnate Edward Clark first announced his plans to build a luxury building all the way up on W. 72nd St., someone supposedly sneered, “That’s practically Dakota!”
To fully understand this apocryphal story, you have to remember that this was so long ago that there weren’t yet two Dakotas, north and south. There was just one Dakota Territory out on the Great Plains, thus the name The Dakota.
Nowadays, however, The Dakota seems out of place for the exact opposite reason. Still something from of a different time, it is now an artifact of a bygone age instead of a futuristic showpiece. An ornate, gabled stone building with balustrades and terracotta spandrels, for decades it has been surrounded by much taller structures that leer over it, The Dakota facing Central Park like a stooped old man staring at a photo album.
Perhaps it’s fitting that The Dakota has completed its circle of singularity. After all, the entire structure is melange of uniqueness, a lavishly asymmetrical honeycomb.
As a Gilded Age luxury building, each apartment in The Dakota was built to custom design for the original inhabitants. Thus, unlike most buildings where every floor has an identical hallway, The Dakota is more like a tangled labyrinth, a multi-storied hedge maze turned to stone. It has elevators in unexpected places.
When my father first went to work for Rex Reed, the flamboyant Texas film critic and the hard drinking Carolina tradesman bonded over both being Southern transplants. They reminisced over the lost charms of Dixie, such as Dr. Pepper, which was then still difficult to procure in the Big Apple. Rex Reed being Rex Reed, he would have it shipped to New York by the crate.
Reed also had a baby zebra skin rug, a wall-length closest full of only shirts, and more records than you could possibly imagine, most of which, my father explained to me, were shipped to him for free since he was a critic. I know all this because in the early 1980s, my father brought me along to paint Reed’s apartment. By then I was in high school and working for my father regularly during winter and summer breaks.
It was at Rex Reed’s apartment where I first saw cable TV. All I remember was live coverage of an empty Congressional chamber.
During the two weeks we painted Reed’s apartment, I occasionally had nightmares about getting lost in The Dakota’s twisting hallways. Back inside the apartment, the vacant eye holes in the baby zebra skin rug freaked me out. During lunch, I would stare at it and wonder why someone would kill a baby zebra.
One Christmas, when I was about 11, Reed sent our family an enormous metal bucket filled with three different flavors of popcorn. My kid sister and I were in heaven, carting the bucket all around the apartment and munching liberally, until she fell in the bathroom and cut her mouth on the rim. Our mother immediately insisted on throwing it out.
In my closet, I still have a maroon Playboy Magazine football jersey with little Playboy bunnies on the sleeves, a promotional item Reed gave my father as a gag, and which my father duly passed on to his then-adolescent son.
At one point, Reed recommended my dad to a neighbor in The Dakota who needed a little work done. Lauren Bacall wanted to do something about a bunch of brass objects in her possession that had begun to take on a dull patina. Reed had just the man for her.
My father and Betty, as I learned her friends called her, spent an afternoon drinking martinis and polishing brass.
And I honestly can’t imagine a cooler piece of family lore than that.
There was also the shock and pride of finding out she was a Jewish girl from the Bronx (her real name was Betty Perske). I was half-Jewish and from the Bronx. Jewish girls from the Bronx weren’t supposed to get their big break after appearing on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, marry Humphrey Bogart, become Hollywood screen legends, and end up in The Dakota.
I never met Bacall, but news of her passing today, at the age of 89, sparked all those memories of the building that flaunts time, much like Bacall herself did, marrying a man a quarter-century her senior, and then building a career that seamlessly spanned nearly seven decades.
So here’s to Betty from the Bronx, who made it to The Dakota, and who taught the world how to whistle.