Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [854]
Clark delivered the latter in grand fashion in his Dakota Apartments (1884). “Dakota” was synonymous with distance and wealth—gold having been discovered in the far-off territories in the 1870s—and Clark’s monumental Renaissance palace, looming over Central Park at 72nd Street in splendid isolation, embodied both. The ninestory structure by Henry Hardenbergh boasted a cour d’honneur manned by a concierge and an interior courtyard large enough to accommodate a carriage turnaround. Occupants of the fifty-eight suites (which ranged from four to twenty rooms) had access to hotel-style amenities, a wine cellar, a large dining room for private parties, and additional rooms under the mansard roof for Irish cooks and coachmen. It was fully rented by the day of its completion, peopled not with millionaires or fashionables (not a single tenant made the Social Register in 1887) but prosperous professionals and businessmen, many of them associated with the arts.
The Dakota Apartments, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 7, 1889. As affluent residents flocked to the West Side, the shanties quickly disappeared. (General Research. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
The Dakota fixed the West Side’s character not only in spawning a rash of westernnamed buildings—the Wyoming, Yosemite, Nevada, and Montana—but in helping draw the affluent to town houses that went up along the avenues (some with suitably upgraded names: Eleventh became West End Avenue in 1880; Eighth became Central Park West in 1883). No chocolate brownstone uniformity here, but rather individualized, eclectic, historical styles, jumbling together Jacobean, French Gothic, and Dutch Renaissance. Indeed McKim, Mead, and White touched off a Dutch Colonial revival in 1885, with their row houses on West End and 83rd, and soon the area resembled a new New Amsterdam. Better still, by 1893 (King’s Handbook of New York City reported)—while the Four Hundred were not in evidence—the West End locale had become “to a certain extent fashionable,” so much so that “even society countenances it.”
MANHATTAN RENAISSANCE
To decorate their interiors—the term “interior decoration” dates from the late 1870s—the wealthy patronized local artists as well as local architects, commissioning craftsmen to design walls, windows, and woodwork. The flood of orders fostered formation of a small, interlocking network of artists whose work gave luster to the city’s, and the elite’s, cultural reputation. Indeed the rich generated such a swirl of activity that they half convinced themselves, in the words of one artist, “that the days of the Italian Renaissance were revived on Manhattan Island.”
The Vanderbilts, again, were among the foremost patrons, with Cornelius II assembling a platoon of artists to decorate his mansion. For glasswork he turned to John La Farge. The New York-born son of a cultivated French family, La Farge had studied in France, where he’d been inspired by impressionists, Japanese prints, and stained glass. On his return he invented (and patented) an opalescent glass and produced fabulous windows and ceiling panels. For sculptural details Cornelius turned to La Farge’s friend and collaborator, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Son of a French father and Irish mother, Saint-Gaudens too was brought up in New York, where he studied at Cooper Institute before attending the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and now provided Vanderbilt with Renaissance ornamental motifs.
Vanderbilt also employed the firm of Associated Artists, formed in 1879 by