Books: Talking Walls

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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 séance 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."