Quotes from Stephen Birmingham

David's final words to his son were a tearful entreaty to observe the Sabbath and the dietary laws. Fanny's final gesture was to sew one hundred American dollars into the seat of Joseph's pants.

But some strange sea change had taken place. He was no longer August Schönberg but August Belmont, the French equivalent of Schönberg (meaning "beautiful mountain"). As August Belmont, furthermore, he was no longer a Jew but a gentile, and no longer German but, as people in New York began to say, "Some sort of Frenchman—we think.

When asked why a man sixty-nine years old, who had spent most of his life manufacturing and selling small household appliances, should suddenly at the end of his career fling himself into the construction of a major building, Mr. Clark replied, "To make money.

Described by a contemporary as "Napoleonic in stature," he was diminutive, and to overcome this he took to placing his office

It is a social accent that is virtually the same in all American cities, and it is actually a blend of several accents. There is much more to it than the well-known broad A. Its components are a certain New England flatness, a trace of a Southern drawl, and a surprising touch of the New York City accent that many people consider Brooklynese

New York, in the late nineteenth century, was also an astonishingly dirty city for a variety of reasons. Only about half of New York's families had bathrooms; the rest were served by outhouses. The Saturday-night bath had become a national ritual, but brushing one's teeth was unheard of. By 1885, some 250,000 horses—pulling carts, carriages, trolleys and public omnibuses—jammed New York's streets.

New York horses were driven until they expired, and as many as a hundred horses collapsed daily in the streets. It was often a matter of days before the carcasses could be hauled away, and the odor of decaying horseflesh added its own pungency to the city air. In the 1880's, meanwhile, New Yorkers were only beginning to get used to the luxury of paved streets in certain areas. Forty-second

Twenty-five years earlier there had not been more than five men in the United States worth as much as five million dollars, and there were less than twenty who were worth a million. Now, however, the New York Tribune would report that there were several hundred men in the city of New York alone who were worth at least a million, and a number who were worth at least twenty million.

Clark's building was to be the most opulent and lavish and at the same time tasteful that New York had ever seen, far outdoing any apartment house that then

Walls came down and doorways were created as the architect tried to fit individual apartments together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In

Sephardic Lazaruses, Nathans, and Hendrickses. It had also had August Belmont, and it now had his sons—August, Jr., Oliver, and Perry—and it had at least one acknowledged German Jew, the banker Adolph Ladenburg.

turning the second floor into hotel-style guest rooms that could be rented to tenants to put up out-of-town friends. And in each of the four corners of the eighth floor he designed four smaller apartments. When Hardenbergh finally finished juggling rooms and spaces, there were sixty-five apartments in the Dakota, ranging in size from four to twenty rooms.

During the summers the building was empty," she reminisced. "Everybody went away, to Long Island, or Westchester, or the Adirondacks, or the Jersey Shore. If you went to Long Island, the husbands didn't stay behind. The whole city would be empty in the summers. Now if people go away, it's just a weekend. Goodness me, what kind of a summer is that?

The British public schools have become, so to speak, the property of the British public, through alumni who have given themselves to England. But American private schools have remained for the most part "private." And, in the tradition of American private enterprise, which believes that a share of the profits should be plowed back into the corporation, American prep school alumni have given largely to the treasuries of their alma maters.

In the summer the whole family would take the night boat to Albany. You left in the evening and arrived in the morning. It wasn't considered 'fitting' to take your chauffeur on the boat with you, so the chauffeur drove up and met you in Albany with the car. Then we drove on to Lake Placid.

There were probably less than one thousand Jews in America by the end of the eighteenth century.

In the Clark apartment doorknobs and plates and hinges were overlaid with sterling silver.) There were inlaid marble floors, wrought-iron staircases, walls wainscoted in rare marbles and choice hardwoods, bronze lamp fixtures and railings in the elevator lobbies.

It was a world, in other words, that gave equal weight to modesty and dignity as to pomp, comfort, and splendor.

Beginning with roughly a hundred acres (before he had finished he had added another three hundred), Mr. Lawrence decided to build a town. When his contractor asked him where to put the streets, Lawrence looked at the cow paths meandering up and down the hills and said, "Why not make the streets follow the cow paths?" And so, following the rules of bovine common sense, there the streets are for Mr. Mumford to admire.

LeRoy got into a bit of trouble early in 1978 when it was learned that she was preparing certain dishes in her kitchen for the Tavern on the Green, another of her husband's restaurants just down the street. This, it seemed, violated some city health code. In addition to kitchens that a luxury hotel might envy, the LeRoy apartment also contains a screening room for movies.

Anything of even mildly antiquarian or historic interest was the target of destruction, and anyone who deplored the way the city was remaking itself from a sleepy seaport into a bustling capital of finance was regarded as a hopeless sentimentalist.

Joseph's gift to Babet was considered one of the decorative "musts" of the day—a gold-plated rolling pin, designed to show that its owner "no longer made her own bread, but was financially able to endure the strain of purchasing ready-made loaves at the grocer's.

seventeen rooms with six bathrooms and eight working fireplaces for $650. In 1884 these Dakota rents had seemed substantial. But the astonishing thing was that by 1960 they had risen hardly at all. Then

In 1883, when finishing touches were being applied to the Dakota, the Brooklyn Bridge opened to great civic fanfare, after thirteen years in the building.