Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (25 page)

Such features were described, attacked, and praised in newspaper reviews that Martin read carefully and with a certain impatience, for it seemed to him that the writers were leaving something out, something that had nothing to do with hotel architecture or the suitability of cultural attractions to a family hotel, and it was not until a long article appeared in the
Architectural Record
, sharply attacking the New Dressler, that Martin felt his deeper intentions had been understood.

For the writer, after praising certain features of the design, such as the pleasing division of the massive and massively
ornamented facade into three parts marked by string courses, and acknowledging certain technological advances, such as the steam-powered vacuum cleaning system and the filtered cool-air system, in which air was forced by electric blowers over iron coils submerged in icy saltwater, turned his attention to the idea represented by alien elements drawn from such modern institutions as the museum, the department store, and the world’s fair. He noted the large number of theatrical elements—the actors in the twelfth-floor Museum of Exotic Places, the scenery and stage lighting in certain underground levels—which further served to remove the New Dressler from the realm of the family hotel and to give it the dubious, provisional air of a theatrical performance. The writer criticized the New Dressler as a hybrid form, a transitional form, in which the hotel had begun to lose its defining characteristics without having successfully evolved into something else, and he concluded by urging the architect to return to the problems of design posed by the modern multiple dwelling and not to succumb to the temptations of a decadent eclecticism.

Rudolf Arling was incensed by the review, which he called insolent—the corrupt hack, a lackey of the editorial board, deserved to have his neck broken—but Martin, who was uninterested in the writer’s judgment, was struck by the accuracy of his description. The writer had groped his way to the center of Martin’s intention and, without caring for what he found there, had revealed a shortcoming. For if the New Dressler was transitional, it wasn’t, Martin insisted to Emmeline, because he had strayed from the purity of a
traditional apartment hotel, but rather because he hadn’t strayed far enough. He felt grateful to the attacker for revealing an error he would not make again.

“Even so,” Emmeline said, “you’ve got to admit it’s ungenerous. He simply doesn’t take a large enough view.”

“Maybe it’s the hotel that doesn’t take a large enough view,” Martin countered.

Caroline had tensely refused to move to the New Dressler; she seemed alarmed at the prospect of moving anywhere. Even Emmeline had advised against it, arguing that Caroline had grown used to her rooms in the Dressler, that a change of any kind would be jarring and injurious. She and her mother couldn’t of course abandon Caroline and would remain in their apartment in the Dressler, but Emmeline had agreed to join the New Dressler as assistant manager. And Martin, who needed to watch over his new hotel from the inside, took two rooms for himself on the twenty-third floor to serve as an office. Each day he rose in the old Dressler at half past five beside shadowy Caroline, who would not be up for at least another five hours. As he looked at her lying there in the graying dark, fast asleep on her back with her face turned sharply to one side, as though she were straining away from him, she seemed so heavily crushed by sleep that it was as if she could never raise her frail body against it, but must wait until sleep itself rolled from her body and lay wearily watching as, her hair hanging in damp coils about her face, she rose bruised and aching from the twisted sheets. At six Martin walked with Emmeline along the Drive to the New Dressler. There they took
breakfast in a window nook of the dining room with a view of the park and the river. Then Emmeline went to her new office in an alcove of the main lobby, while Martin took the elevator to the twenty-third floor.

Martin spent most of his day inspecting the New Dressler, speaking to staff, and mingling with guests in the seven underground levels. The atmospheric park, with its high trees, its meandering paths, and its melancholy lake, seemed to him a strong improvement over the tame courtyard of the old Dressler, although one day when he overheard a woman complaining that her children were bored he arranged for the installation of a small zoo and a carousel of wooden horses, dragons, and swans. After lunch he liked to walk along secluded paths with Emmeline, who praised the park warmly but refused to hear a word against the old courtyard of the Dressler. He was advancing, he was pushing in a direction, but he mustn’t, she argued, turn his back on any of the steps along the way. For the old Dressler, just as it was, was perfect of its kind, was in fact incomparable—which wasn’t in any sense meant to diminish the glory of the new. Martin tried to argue that it wasn’t a matter of turning his back on anything, but rather of standing with his feet firmly planted, looking straight ahead. Yet he sensed the rightness of her reproach, for in fact he had lost interest in the Dressler as completely as he had in the Vanderlyn—and even now, as they walked in the splendid park, he had intimations of still richer scenes and adventures. Was there then something wrong with him, that he couldn’t just rest content? Must he always be dreaming up
improvements? And it seemed to Martin that if only he could imagine something else, something great, something greater, something as great as the whole world, then he might rest awhile.

In the meantime he made certain, after his early afternoon walks with Emmeline in the underground park, to continue his rounds. Each day he visited one or another of the Vacation Retreats on the fifth and sixth underground levels, questioning guests closely and introducing small improvements, such as maps posted on signboards along the trails of the national park. But his special pleasure was to walk along the brightly lit aisles of all three levels of his well-stocked department store and to follow closely every phase of its operation. He and Rudolf Arling had introduced into the store a number of striking features that Martin hoped would attract customers: shiny glass display cases instead of the oak counters of the old Shopping Arcade, colored lights to create dramatic moods, elaborately designed bowers and grottoes in which fashionable dresses were displayed on wax mannequins, and two electrically operated moving aisles that passed down the center of each block-long level in order to spare customers the exertion of crossing the store. The vistas of glass, the red and blue lights, the beautiful frozen mannequins, the shimmer and glitter of a world behind glass—a world that seemed to reveal itself completely while at the same time it remained tantalizingly out of reach—all this created a seductiveness, a sense of mystery, that reminded Martin of his walks with his mother past the display windows of the big Broadway
stores. Unlike the other levels, which were reserved for guests, the three levels of the department store were open to the public, who were admitted through side-street entrances that led to stairways. Harwinton was conducting a separate ad campaign for the store, which he called “Uptown’s Downtown”; despite its out-of-the-way location, the department store of the New Dressler was attracting crowds of the curious, who usually returned.

In order to satisfy requests for tours of the New Dressler from journalists, prospective long-term residents, and curiosity seekers, Martin organized a staff of female guides in green uniforms with red trim. He himself liked to take people around from time to time, beginning with the roof garden and the seventh underground level, as if to draw a line around his creation. Ascending first to the roof of the New Dressler with its lush landscape of woods and streams, its cave-restaurant set in the side of a wooded hill, its peacocks and tame deer, its water tank and elevator bulkhead cleverly disguised as rustic cottages, he would descend suddenly and dramatically to the labyrinth on the seventh underground level. The labyrinth was a series of winding passages designed to meet the hotel guest’s need for solitude and mystery, where one could wander for hours along dim-lit subterranean paths leading in and out of small rocky chambers supplied with benches. Black streams flowed here and there, a waterfall trickled down a sheer wall, and a number of surprises had been arranged: a narrow opening led to a library with reading lamps and couches, a winding passage went past a replicated Hindu temple, and around
one bend appeared a black lake with an island, on which stood a small teahouse reachable by rowboat.

Beneath the labyrinth lay the true bottom of the New Dressler, the bottom beneath the bottom: the basement. It was a dark realm with many subdivisions, including the electric plant with its dynamos, the steam plant with its boilers, the laundry rooms with their boiling tubs and steam dryers, the ironing rooms, the storage rooms, the employee cafeteria, and the workshops for the large maintenance staff of the New Dressler: the painters, the electricians, the seamstresses, the upholsterers, the silver polishers, the carpenters. In the vast underground world of half-darkness and hissing steam, of hammer-knocks and the rumble of dynamos, Martin liked to walk for hours at a time, observing the machines that gave life to the building, watching the work of the repairmen, speaking with the laundresses, their sleeves rolled to the elbow, their forearms glistening, their faces shiny in the damp warm air.

At the end of the day, Martin walked back with Emmeline to meet Caroline and Margaret for dinner at the old Dressler. After dinner all four would take a turn in the underground courtyard, whereupon Caroline, growing tired, would retire to her rooms, and Martin would return to the New Dressler to speak with the night manager and continue his rounds.

Even as he walked through the world of the New Dressler, observing its operation, hovering, brooding over what he had built, Martin had begun to notice an alcove, a secret shadowy alcove, deep in his mind. Here images were
slowly taking shape, and one day he met again with Rudolf Arling, in the small office with its view of the Brooklyn tower of the great bridge. Arling listened with interest to Martin’s new idea, which kept assuming slightly different shapes, but the preliminary sketches disappointed Martin: Arling, for all his boldness, was still dreaming of a grand hotel, whereas Martin was trying to make him see something quite different. Then one day Arling simply made a leap, it was as if he had put the old way behind him forever, and now the sketches took on a startling quality, as if Martin were seeing his dream harden into shape before him. And Arling had good news. A recent commission of his, an apartment house with an all-too-familiar Beaux Arts exterior and a barrel-vault porte cochère that led to an interior courtyard, had received such favorable attention in the architectural press that he was suddenly in great demand, a fact that would serve Martin well when he approached the cautious Lellyveld. Martin reported his meetings with the architect to Emmeline after lunch as they walked on secluded paths in the subterranean park of the New Dressler, but Emmeline, who listened thoughtfully, showed signs of distraction. She confessed one afternoon that she was concerned about Caroline, whose behavior had recently taken a disturbing turn.

F
OR
C
AROLINE HAD BEGUN TO WITHDRAW FOR
many hours to the sofa in her mother’s parlor, where she lay with an arm thrown over her eyes. This in itself was no special cause for concern, since Caroline had often withdrawn to the family sofa, had in a sense made a career of such withdrawals, while everyone hovered about anxiously and waited for her to return to normal—although in Caroline’s case it might be argued that the normal was precisely this withdrawal to the family sofa. No, what Emmeline found disturbing was Caroline’s reluctance to return to her own bed at night. Margaret practically had to drag her out the door. It was a strain on poor Margaret, who worried continually about the welfare of her daughters, and especially
of Caroline, who needed something to occupy her time but who unfortunately had no strong interests. During the reign of Claire Moore, Emmeline had encouraged Caroline’s sudden attraction to the theater, unreasonably hoping that it would survive Claire Moore’s departure. Even as a girl Caroline had had the habit of starting books and never finishing them, losing interest after the first couple of chapters, sometimes reading right up to the last chapter and then abandoning the book forever. It used to upset Emmeline terribly, all those unfinished stories lying around, like dolls with missing arms. And so in time she had come to think that Caroline’s illnesses were her discovery of a way to occupy her time, although this perhaps sounded harsher than she meant it to be. She had thought that marriage—well, she had given her opinion at the time. And now Caroline was reluctant to leave her mother’s parlor at all, she had even hinted that she would like to sleep on the sofa at night.

“Then let her do it,” Martin said irritably. “For a night or two. If you think it will help.”

Emmeline was uncertain, but said that she would discuss it with her mother that very night. The next morning as they walked up Riverside to the New Dressler, Emmeline reported that perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all for Caroline to sleep on the sofa, for just a few nights, since it was something she seemed determined to do.