Quotes from Stephen Birmingham

The Dakota, which had been so proud that it had never had to advertize or hang out an "Apartments Available" shingle, now found it practical to do so. The new board of directors ruled against a shingle, but it did agree to advertise. The Dakota's first ad, in December 1961, did its best to be both persuasive and dignified. It read:

In good weather a feature of New York life became the afternoon carriage parade, between four and five o'clock, along the Mall. For this, everyone turned out—the old rich, the nouveaux and members of the demimonde. Throngs of curious onlookers and tourists lined the entrance to the Mall to observe this unique phenomenon and

Solomon Loeb, at his wife's insistence, had come to New York from Cincinnati and, though not on a par with the Seligmans' operations, his Kuhn, Loeb & Company was becoming an important investment banking house. In Philadelphia the Guggenheims were not doing at all badly. Meyer Guggenheim had

also introduced another controversial feature—an elevator, described as a "perpendicular railway intersecting each story." Theretofore, elevators had been installed only in a few of the taller office buildings.

The building was built to appeal to snobs

it wasn't fashionable. It was too special.

Isabella Boyer Singer, the wife with whom Singer had spent most of his final years, in her claim to be the legal widow. 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. With

We weren't interested in fashion, but we were interested in form. Goodness me, Mother used to worry about whether or not it was good form to pick up an olive with a fork. That's what's missing nowadays, if you ask me.

The public could be made to want anything, if it were sold to them the right way.

Between 1884 and 1929 there was not a single vacancy at the Dakota. Then

objects. Added to the trauma of moving

How New York has fallen off during the last forty years! Its intellect and culture have been diluted and swamped by a great flood-tide of material wealth … men whose bank accounts are all they rely on for social position and influence.

New York law required that shipowners guarantee that each immigrant passenger would not, upon arrival, become a candidate for public welfare.

Caroline, furthermore, was wan, pale, and dreamily beautiful, an exquisite creature who wept bitterly when she was told that families "of wretched poor" lived south of Canal Street, which was why her coachman would not drive her there.

The new arrivals from Eastern Europe were ragged, dirt-poor, culturally energetic, toughened by years of torment, idealistic, and socialistic.

Lower Fifth Avenue and Washington Square were already sprouting palaces of brownstone and marble. Though there was still no Central Park to give Fifth Avenue a garden view for much of its length, that wide thoroughfare running up the spine of Manhattan was already becoming the city's best residential address.

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

In 1884, the year that the Dakota was completed, the architect Richard Morris Hunt had put the finishing touches on a huge new building on Park Row to house Whitelaw Reid's New York Tribune. The Tribune tower soared an unprecedented eleven stories into the sky and was topped by a tall campanile, but it was not to be New York's tallest building for long. A year later Bradford Lee Gilbert designed the Tower Building, to be erected at 50 Broadway.

There had been Seligmans in Baiersdorf for over a century. Theirs had been a family name long before Napoleon had decreed that Germany's Jews no longer needed to be known as "sons" of their fathers' names—Moses ben Israel, and so on. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tombstones in Baiersdorf's Jewish cemetery recorded the upright virtues of many of David's ancestors, all named Seligman ("Blessed man" in German).

Gilbert, in a panic, rushed downtown and climbed to the top of his building to see how it was doing. All night long the winds raged, and the Tower Building didn't even tremble. It remained standing until 1913, when it was demolished.

Gothic style, and had always admired the old Fletcher house on Seventy-ninth Street and said, "If I ever build a house, I want the architect of that house to design it." The architect of the Fletcher house was C. P. H. Gilbert and, when he had his property, Felix hired him. It was to be quite a house that Mr. Gilbert designed. The ground floor was to contain a large entrance hall with an adjoining "etching room," to house Felix's

New Yorkers suffered from what a modern psychologist would label a poor self-image. New Yorkers who cared about such matters, and who had visited such European cities as London, Paris and Rome, were the first to admit that New York was becoming a not very pretty city and disparaged (according to a contemporary account) "this cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without … porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness.

Some of these families paused long enough to pick up the German language and to take German names. (In future generations, in New York, it would become a matter of some importance whether such and such a Jewish family, with a German-sounding name, had been a true native German family, like the Seligmans, or a stranger from the east, passing through.) Swelled by immigrants from the east, the Jewish population in Western Europe more than tripled during the nineteenth century.

New York seemed capable of creating everything but a style of its own.