But she paid a high price for any material gain.” She also produced an heir, William Earl Dodge Stokes Jr., whom they called “Weddie.” According to her sister, Rita hated the child and could hardly bring herself to hold him.Īs ground-breaking for the Ansonia approached in the summer of 1899, Rita fled to a beach house in Quogue with her mother and sued Stokes for divorce. (Before the marriage, rumor had it that he liked his women young-very young-and that he had been known to take barely pubescent girls to his stud farm in Lexington, Kentucky, and tie them naked to a post in the barn, where they were forced to watch a stud horse mount a mare as a precursor to his own plans for the night.) Rita’s youngest sister, Mercedes de Acosta, who grew up to become a talented writer (as well as the reputed lover of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich), wrote in her memoir that “when Rita finally decided to marry Will Stokes it was, I believe, because she felt his wealth could open doors….
A thousand guests watched the teenage bride descend the petal-strewn staircase of her family’s townhouse. Within months of their meeting, De Acosta and Stokes married, on January 4, 1895. He’d quietly begun his project years earlier, piecing together 22 parcels of land on the site of the old New York Orphan Asylum, at 73rd Street and the Boulevard.
For his new hotel, Stokes planned a steel skeleton supporting thin exterior walls-at twenty floors topped with a slim nine-story tower, the tallest building in Manhattan. Harper’s Weekly described the Upper West Side of the day as a “desert of rocks and shanties, half-opened and unimproved streets.” The building of the Dakota in 1884 had been a start, but it was essentially a premodern structure, with heavy masonry walls and only nine stories. It was only two square miles-half the size of the East Side-and it seemed cut off from the rest of the city. Still, the West Side above 57th Street was a hard sell when Stokes began building brownstones in 1885. (Stokes was instrumental in influencing the city to pave the Boulevard in 1889, five years before Fifth Avenue.) And he saw an opportunity to build its grandest, biggest building-one that would define this new neighborhood. Stokes believed that the Grand Boulevard-then the name for Broadway, a long-ago Indian trail-would eventually become the most important street in Manhattan, eclipsing Fifth Avenue to become the Champs-Élysées of New York. He was the sort of man who, when his father died in August 1881, contested the will, sued his brother Anson for conspiring to throw him out of the family business, and walked away with a $1 million inheritance.īut his outrageousness had at least one positive turn: It extended to a dynamic vision of New York.
He was one of nine children of Caroline Phelps, the heiress to the Ansonia copper fortune, and James Stokes, a merchant turned banker. In fact, Stokes was “the all-time black sheep” of his prominent family.
#The eyes of ara secret staircase room full
He certainly was refreshing-exuberant, an enthusiastic salesman, full of energy and (said the New York Times) “wild charm,”-but his “not being a slave to conventionalities” might have been something of an understatement. As for Stokes, a 42-year-old real-estate developer, his eccentricities, average looks, and careless dress didn’t seem to hurt his appeal with women. She was Rita Hernandez de Alba de Acosta, the pampered daughter of a Spanish heiress and a Cuban poet, moody and vivacious, and she was only 15 years old, a fact that didn’t cool Stokes’s ardor one bit. He hurried inside to find out who she was. The girl had small rosebud lips, a pert, upturned nose, and long, dark hair piled dramatically on top of her head and was smiling coquettishly at the camera over her right shoulder. One winter day in late 1894, William Earl Dodge Stokes was striding along Fifth Avenue when he spied a framed picture of a beautiful young girl in a photographer’s shop window.
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