BEER Ch. 3 The Deseret

[Monte Davis]

As your Wikipedia link for the Dakota (72nd St and Central Park West) notes,
rather than being named for its [then] northwestern remoteness from other
fashionable apartment buildings, it probably got the name because its
builder liked the sound of it. That said, Pynchon's choice of Deseret -- the
Latter-Day-Saints' name for the territory they wanted to carve out of the
Mexican cession as of 1848 -- seems very likely to be a nod to the popular
story about the Dakota's name, and adds just a pynch of Mormon woo.

As a rider of the Broadway-7th Ave. lRT to my school on 77th St., I used the
79th St. stop just outside the Apthorp twice a day for six years. I remember
only one classmate who lived there, and visited his family's apartment a few
times. The Wikipedia description as "Italian Renaissance Revival... [with] a
three-story rusticated base" is right on; six years later, living in
Florence, I thought often that some of its imposing palazzi on narrow
streets had almost exactly the same spatial presence as the larger Apthorp
looming over its wider streets.    

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l