Free Life at the Dakota by Stephen; Birmingham Page A

popularity of more than thirty years earlier had all but vanished. (In fact, Billy Budd was not published until many years after Melville’s death.)
    Another celebrated guest of the Schirmers was William Dean Howells, the poet, belletrist and raconteur who, it turned out, could not be invited to the same dinner parties as Mark Twain; the two authors vied so vociferously to upstage each other in terms of story-telling and producing bon mots that they threatened to resort to fisticuffs.Through Howells, the Schirmers were introduced to a thin, intense young novelist named Stephen Crane, whose first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, had still been unable to find a publisher because its contents were deemed too sordid for the tastes of the times. He was now working on a second book with a Civil War setting, to be called The Red Badge of Courage.
    The Schirmers also found stimulating company in some of the prominent political figures of the day, and one of their great friends was Senator Carl Schurz, a former major general in the Union Army, and later Secretary of the Interior under President Rutherford B. Hayes. The Schirmers and the Steinways were good friends, since both families were in the music business and in no way competitors. In fact, both families had emigrated from Germany at about the same time—as a result of the Revolution of 1848—had settled near each other in the West Fifties in New York, and had moved together into the Dakota. Many Schirmer parties overflowed into the Steinway apartment, and vice versa. A number of these entertainments were musical in nature, and every important composer or performer who passed through New York was entertained at dinner by the Schirmers, and visiting artists were always eager to step next door to try out one of Mr. Steinway’s new pianos.
    Once the Schirmers gave a dinner for the composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who was passing through on an American concert tour. After dinner, thinking that Tchaikovsky might be pleased with the view, Mr. Schirmer took him up to the roof of the Dakota and pointed out the park below and the city lights beyond. Tchaikovsky, whose English was limited, misunderstood the whole experience and came away with the impression that the entire Dakota was Mr. Schirmer’s house. “No wonder we composers are so poor,” he wrote in his diary. “The American publisher, Mr. Schirmer, is rich beyond dreams. He lives in a palace bigger than the Czar’s! In front of it is his own private park!” In The Life & Letters of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, by Modeste Tchaikovsky, a letter is quoted in which the composer also speaks of the Schirmers’ “house”:
    Schirmer took us on the roof of his house. This huge, nine-storied house has a roof so arranged that one can take quite a delightful walk on it and enjoy a splendid view from all sides. The sunset was incredibly beautiful … Wesat down to supper at nine o’clock … and … were presented with the most splendid roses, conveyed downstairs in the lift and sent home in the Schirmers’ carriage. One must do justice to American hospitality; there is nothing like it—except, perhaps, in our own country.
    Still, a number of Mr. Schirmer’s relatives thought that the Schirmers had chosen a very peculiar address. Mrs. W. Rodman Fay, for example, who is Gustav Schirmer’s granddaughter, recalls that she was “bundled up in scarves, sweaters, coats, mittens, long woolen underwear and heavy boots” for the carriage ride uptown to see her grandparents for the required ritual of Sunday dinner. “My mother was always sure I’d catch cold going way up there,” she says. “To her, it wasn’t a trip. It was a journey.”
    Others of the building’s early tenants, meanwhile, were ordinary, successful, unartistic businessmen and their families. There was Alexander Kinnan, for example, who was president of the Union Dime