Quotes from Stephen Birmingham

A great many people go after success simply for the shiny prizes it brings...And nowhere is it pursued more ardently than in the city of New York.

What is known as success assumes nearly as many aliases as there are those who seek it.

A broken heart is better than a whole one where love has never crept in.

London had had a subway system since 1863, but New York had not yet gone underground for at least two reasons. For one thing, New York was built on solid rock, and tunneling through the Manhattan schist presented enormous engineering obstacles. For another, during the years when "Boss" Tweed had the city in his grip, Tweed and his "ring" controlled the surface transportation lines and wanted no competition.

Still, New York in the 1880's had become a city of mad, entrepreneurial schemes, many of which didn't work. Into this mood of hectic speculation and crazy chance-taking, Mr. Clark's scheme fitted perfectly. It was an era of folly. Building the Dakota

New York in the 1880's was already a city that seemed to have made up its mind that whatever existed was dispensable and replaceable, provided some more profitable use could be found for it.

Harlem was the area between 130th Street and 143rd Street, between Madison and Seventh avenues. In the late nineteenth century, as huge migrations of Russian and Polish Jews flooded into the city, fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, Harlem became primarily Jewish. Russian Jews dominated the 1910 census figures of the area, and next came the Italians, the Irish, the Germans, the English, Hungarians, Czechs and others from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Blacks did not arrive in New York in large numbers until after World War I, and, following the lead of the foreign immigrants, they moved to Harlem. Most were from the rural South, and most were poor. As the blacks moved in, the Jews moved out—north into the Bronx or, if they could afford it, to the South Shore of Queens and Long Island.

Isabella eventually won her case and went on to live a glamorous life in Paris, where she married a duke and became Bartholdi's model for the Statue of Liberty.

Like a sewing machine, the Dakota would offer convenience, a short-cut route to opulent living with none of the problems of upkeep, and at a fraction of the expense that went with owning a private house.

The public could be made to want anything, if it were sold to them the right way. But one thing the public did seem to want in 1880 was to emulate high society and the way high society lived. Very well. The Dakota would provide such emulation.

In fusty Boston and austere Charleston, for instance, society never dined in public. But in New York society had discovered the restaurant, and the fashionable gathered at Niblo's and Delmonico's for dinners and even floor shows. The daring drank wine, and the less daring mixed a little wine with their milk.

Moses Lazarus, father of Emma, had been a founding member of the Knickerbocker Club, New York's second-most exclusive. The Sephardim made the most of their entrenched position, and, if German Jews found the gentiles in New York society indifferent, they found the Sephardic Jews almost unapproachable.

The great Sephardic families of New York, many of them descended from the St. Charles arrivals, include the Hendrickses, the Cardozos, the Baruchs, the Lazaruses, the Nathans, the Solises, the Gomezes, the Lopezes, the Lindos, the Lombrosos, and the Seixases.

He was a curiosity at first, as many in that part of the country had never seen a Jew before. Numbers of people came from the country round about to see him, and he related in his old age of an old Quakeress who said to him, "Art thou a Jew? Thou art one of God's chosen people. Wilt thou let me examine thee?" She turned him round and round, and at last exclaimed: "Well, thou art no different to other people.

The old differentiation between the German "uptown" Jew and the Russian of the "Lower East Side" has become a difference between the "quiet, cultivated Wall Street type" and the "noisy, pushy, Seventh Avenue type"—who do not mix any more easily than oil and water. And out of all this has come the impression that Jews "dominate" both these fields in the city.

The Roosevelts, Bayards, Van Cortlandts, and Rhinelanders were in the sugar-refining business.

Brevoorts and Goelets were ironmongers, and the Schermerhorns were ship chandlers.

At least three foreign ambassadors—the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Finnish—lived at the Dakota along with the French Minister of Cultural Affairs. There had been the distinguished Schirmers and Steinways.

In his gold-and-white ballroom at 881 Fifth Avenue he held, for years, his famous New Year's Eve parties.

The West Side had become a land where people lived in layers. It was a land of prosperous immigrants. It was a place where people rented, rather than owned

Edward Clark had paid $200,000 for the land in 1877. When Louis Glickman was able to sell roughly half this land in 1961 for $2,000,000, it was clear that the value of West Side real estate had increased by 1,000 percent in a little more than eighty years.

The park took nearly ten years to build and cost over nine million dollars, a staggering sum in those days. By the end of the Civil War, most of the work on the park had been completed, though the problem of squatters' shacks—particularly in the park's northern reaches—would continue for a number of years.

For seven rooms with two baths and three fireplaces, a typical price was $45,000. Lauren Bacall's fourth-floor spread facing the Park was priced at $53,340. The smallest flats—one-bedroom, one-bath, nonhousekeeping units that had been guest rooms on the second floor—were priced at $4,410.