The two images — the crazed horse, the full-bosomed dreamy woman — stayed with Martin, mingling with a third: the light-blue blond-lashed eyes of Harwinton, under the smooth forehead with its sandy schoolboy’s hair.
“He reminds me of something very up-to-date and efficient,” Martin said to Emmeline that evening, “like a typewriter or an electric circuit.”
“You don’t like him.”
“I don’t dislike him. He interests me. Harwinton is the future.”
“But I don’t have a sense of him. I don’t know what he’s like.”
“But that’s just the point. He isn’t ‘like’ anything. He reminds me of a boy I knew in third grade, William Harris was his name. He was a quiet boy, wrote very neatly, and kept to himself. I remember he wore very tight knee socks. No one disliked him, but no one really liked him either. He moved away the next summer, and when I tried to remember him in fourth grade, I couldn’t remember his face. I couldn’t remember anything he did. I could only remember that he was there.”
“At least he was there. That’s something. I’ll cling to that. Well then. Do you think you’ll hire this Mr. Harwinton?”
“I’ve already hired him.”
“Then you do like him!”
“I don’t dislike him. And one other thing: he takes you in. Those baby-blue eyes never stopped looking at me for a second.”
“Well don’t forget, you interest him. You’re a native, a kid from New York, and he’s from — you said Indiana?”
“That’s what he said: Indiana. Imagine being from Indiana. Where is Indiana?”
“It’s near Alaska,” Emmeline said.
24. The Dressler
THE HOTEL DRESSLER OPENED ON AUGUST 31, 1899, on Martin’s twenty-seventh birthday. Long articles in the major city papers praised the building’s boldness of vision, its structural ingenuity, its ability to overcome sheer massiveness by means of an elegant design that led the eye upward through three major groupings to the two-story mansard roof with its tower, and if one journalist chose to complain that the building was “wasteful,” that the facade was so heavily ornamented that it put him in mind of a gigantic wedding cake, even he felt compelled to acknowledge the exuberance of the Dressler, its sheer delight in itself. Crowds came to stare at the block-long building on Riverside Drive that rose eighteen stories into the air, with a central tower that soared to the height of another six stories; and the management received scores of requests for apartments, requests that were carefully entered on a large waiting list, for all apartments had been rented six months before opening day.
Harwinton had devised a shrewd ad campaign. It was aimed broadly at the middle class, but sought in particular to attract what Harwinton called the expanding middle of the middle class — those people who, having reached a comfortable level of existence, aspired to the trappings of wealth without being wealthy. His central theme was “luxury for the non-luxurious income,” an idea repeated in countless newspaper and magazine ads and in a handsome promotional brochure. But Harwinton also emphasized a second and far more dramatic theme: the location of the Dressler. In doing so he drew on two contradictory ideas. The Dressler, he argued, was a rural retreat, a peaceful outpost far from the clamor of downtown Manhattan, but at the same time the Dressler was located in a new and thriving part of the city, only a short distance from a convenient Elevated station, and even closer to the projected subway station on the Boulevard — was located, in short, in the very path of progress. For it was Harwinton’s belief that every city dweller harbored a double desire: the desire to be in the thick of things, and the equal and opposite desire to escape from the horrible thick of things to some peaceful rural place with shady paths, murmuring streams, and the hum of bumblebees over vaguely imagined flowers. It was the good fortune of the Dressler to be able to attach to itself both these desires, for while on the one hand it could offer to the prospective long-term resident a park and a river, a veritable vision of pastoral retreat, on the other it could offer the thrilling sense of being in the forefront of the city’s relentless northward advance. It simply sat there, waiting for the rest of the city to catch up.
The Dressler itself, as the doubting journalist had pointed out and as Martin readily acknowledged, was a massive contradiction: a modern steel-frame building sheathed in heavily ornamented masonry-walls meant to summon up a dream of châteaux and palaces. Every effort had been made to draw the eye away from the monotony of vertical repetition to interruptive or irregular features, such as the two-story arched entranceways and the group of gigantic statues on the fourth-floor cornice, representing Pilgrims and Indians. Above all the eye was drawn to the elaborate roof, with its corner cupolas, its high chimneys, and its central openwork stone tower supplied with a circular observation platform and topped by an eight-foot finial. But the real battle against symmetry took place inside, where no two apartments were alike and where every public room was designed in a different period style. Even more striking, as several journalists remarked, were a number of odd features never seen before in an apartment hotel. It was noted that among the public rooms of the first two floors — the restaurants, the smoking rooms, the reading rooms, the ladies’ parlors — was a scattering of peculiar rooms that seemed to be there to amuse or instruct. Thus there was a circular theater in which a panorama of the entire Manhattan shoreline continually unwound; a room containing a wigwam, a wax squaw gathering sticks, a young brave hacking a rock with a sharpened stone tool, and a seated chief smoking a long pipe, set against a painted background depicting a riverbank; and a hall called the Pageant of Industry and Invention, which contained working scale models of an Otis elevator, a steam train on an Elevated track, a Broadway cable car, and a steam crane lifting an I-beam, as well as full-scale models of a steam turbine, an internal combustion engine, and an electric generator with a drive pulley. These rooms seemed to some commentators a puzzling intrusion of the museum into the world of the hotel, although most acknowledged the rooms’ festive and instructional nature.
No less puzzling to the journalists were a number of curious developments on the upper floors. At the end of a corridor on the sixth floor a four-room apartment had been transformed into an artificial cave, with narrow dim-lit passageways and a real waterfall. On the fourteenth floor a five-room apartment had become a forest, with thick trunks manufactured to resemble pine and oak, greenish light falling through a roof of thick-leaved branches, and a sudden bright-lit glade of real-looking grass and yellow silk wild-flowers. These playful rooms, which Harwinton had named Relaxation Rooms, gave to the hotel a slightly theatrical flavor, a note reinforced by the Riverview Lobby on the tenth floor. Reserved for the exclusive use of hotel guests, the Riverview Lobby was notable not only for its dramatic view of the Hudson and the cliffs of Jersey, but for its meticulous design in the style of an old-fashioned Victorian parlor, with plenty of fringed and tasseled armchairs and couches, statues of coyly bending nymphs, flower arrangements under belljars, majolica vases, an ormolu clock on the marble mantel shelf, and sepia photographs of unsmiling grandfathers in oval frames.