The Dakota’s Back 40

A The developer Edward Clark clearly had a comprehensive vision for his properties on the Upper West Side, beginning with the Dakota. What a pity that no one has any evidence of what it was!

Born in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1811, Clark entered a partnership with Isaac Singer in 1848, and the Singer sewing machine was very, very good to him. In the mid-1870s he began building in downtown Cooperstown, perhaps to bolster the area, which was losing farmers to the Midwest.

In the late 1870s he started buying properties on the Upper West Side of New York, then essentially vacant land. Then he built not only the Dakota, but two rows of houses on West 73rd, from Central Park West to Columbus, and from Columbus to Amsterdam.

That he saw all three projects as part of a unified effort is not in doubt: he used the same architect, Henry Hardenbergh, built them all for income rather than sale, linked them to a common artesian well, and supplied the 73rd Street houses with electricity from a central power plant. Clark died in October 1882, two years before the Dakota was completed, and his son Alfred built a 145-horse boarding stable on Broadway, but after that the estate mostly sat on its lands.

Views of the rear yard of the Dakota, where the 36-story Mayfair Towers now stands, are fragmentary, showing in the early years just turf behind a simple picket fence. In all the extensive coverage of the Dakota project, the yard is rarely mentioned, although there are occasional references to a “garden” or “park” for the use of residents of the Dakota and the 73rd Street row houses. In the center were openings for the Dakota’s underground power plant.

But Clark did leave a clue, a big one: he left the wall facing the yard unornamented, as if he envisioned another apartment house going up on the land.

By 1950 the property was a parking lot, still owned by the Clark family, and in 1961 they determined to get out of the real estate business. To the dismay of the Dakota’s tenants, the developer Louis J. Glickman bought the building and the parking lot. The New York Times said it was likely that the Dakota would be razed, so the city’s “largest single apartment house” could go up on the site.

Although possible, it would have been difficult to evict so many tenants, especially since a high number were well connected. Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards Jr., Ward Bennett, Eugenia Sheppard and other prominent tenants were surely alarmed to hear of the plans. Instead, Mr. Glickman sold the building to the tenants after parceling off the rear lot to the developer Max Steinberg.

Mr. Steinberg’s 456-unit apartment house was completed in 1964. “Inside, as well as out, Mayfair Towers provides tenants with distinctive styling,” said an ad in The Times, without going into specifics.

So, the story goes, the Dakota narrowly missed demolition. Or did it? No plans were filed for a new and larger building. Harold Sussman, who worked for firm of Horace Ginsbern, which designed the Mayfair, told me “there was never any discussion of demolishing the Dakota.”

Half-Timbered Mystery

Q What’s the peculiar Tudor-style front on Fulton Street, east of Broadway? ... Lynda Shand, Yorktown, N.Y.

A This little Bavarian fantasy was Whyte’s restaurant, designed by Clinton & Russell and built in 1909. Its half-timbered front is fairly intact, a remarkable if partial survival for such a teeny bit of Alpine picturesqueness. Architects’ and Builders’ Magazine called it “a quaintly attractive little building designed in extremely good taste” in 1910. The second floor, it said, had a “ladies’ restaurant.”

Early photographs seem to indicate the half-timbered facade had large painted panels at each side with murals of peacocks and friezes of farm animals.

Whyte’s was founded by a St. Louis restaurateur, Edward E. White. The spelling discrepancy is sometimes attributed to a typo on the initial stationery; another explanation is that White used the “y” to make his plain vanilla name more distinctive.

Over the years, Whyte’s second-floor dining room hosted many meetings of clubs, associations and alumni, the Seventh Regiment, Princeton and Purdue among them. In her 2000 book “Life So Far: A Memoir,” the activist Betty Friedan recalls that she and other marchers in the Women’s Strike for Equality parade of 1970 ate lunch at what she described as the male-only Whyte’s. A year later, Whyte’s closed. Today the building is home to a Popeyes restaurant, a Lucille Roberts gym and a dollar store.