The website for 432 Park Ave.,
the tallest residential spire in the Western Hemisphere and latest
Manhattan investment for the super rich, boasts the building’s
amenities: a billiards room, a spa, and apartments with marble panels
and extraordinary views. Sounds great. Too bad another New York icon has
had those beat … for the past 131 years.
The Dakota, located on
the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West, was one of the first
luxury apartment buildings in New York and certainly the most lavish.
The list of features included in historian Andrew Alpern’s coming book, The Dakota: A History of the World’s Best-Known Apartment Building, would
make the average New Yorker weep: tennis courts, marble staircases,
oak- and mahogany-paneled dining rooms, 14-foot ceilings, ornate
fireplaces, and, of course, those Central Park views. The book is loaded
with original floor plans, historic images of the interiors, and
profiles of the building’s many notable residents through the years.
Source: Princeton Architectural Press via Bloomberg
irony is that when the building was completed in 1884, unlike 432 Park
Ave., it wasn’t meant for the super rich—it was built and marketed to
the aspirational upper-middle class. The first recorded list of
residents mentions stockbrokers, lawyers, dry goods manufacturers, and a
Mr. Albert Griesbach, whose stated occupation was “linens.” Rents
ranged from $1,000 to $5,600 per year.
(The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator goes
back only to 1913, when $1,000 was equivalent to $24,000 in today’s
dollars.) In a reversal from the present day, the first seven floors
were originally designed for the building’s residents, while the eighth
and ninth floors—hotter, harder to get to, and, as a result of the
pitched roof, cramped with low ceilings—were reserved for staff
apartments.
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