by Fran Leadon
The bigger, more expensive apartments unfolded like a dream, room after room after room. There always seemed to be another one waiting through the next aperture: parlors, bedrooms, round dining rooms, oval-shaped libraries, hidden servants’ quarters—an urban fantasy of infinite space. It was like that dream many apartment dwellers have, in which they discover an entirely new set of rooms they didn’t know they had. This is mine, too?
THE ANSONIA WAS the pet project of William Earle Dodge Stokes of the wealthy and socially prominent Stokes family. He had eyes set close together, a long nose, a handlebar mustache, and a decidedly eccentric personality: At age forty-three Stokes married nineteen-year-old Rita Hernandez de Alba Acosta, an American shipping heiress of Cuban and Spanish descent. The marriage, predictably, ended in divorce. In 1911 he was shot twice in the legs by vaudevillian Lillian Graham at the Varuna Hotel, Broadway and 80th Street, after he tried to retrieve a packet of compromising love letters. His second marriage, to Helen Ellwood, also ended in divorce, with the ugly details splashed across the front pages of newspapers. He was a wily misanthrope who dumped the Ansonia’s waste, including hot ashes, in a heap on a vacant lot on 79th Street and then laughed it off when neighbors complained.
Stokes owned a stud farm in Kentucky and was the author of a vile tract, The Right to Be Well Born; or, Horse Breeding in its Relation to Eugenics, in which he urged the adoption of horse-breeding techniques in human procreation. Like other eugenicists, he characterized immigrants as “the diseased offscouring of Europe and the Orient” and recommended the sterilization of society’s “defectives.”
“Our pure healthy New England blood can no longer cross with or assimilate the rotten, foreign, diseased blood of ages, which the gates of our immigration laws now swing wide open and allow to flow in upon us,” he fumed.
Stokes detested labor unions, their ranks swelled by recent immigrants, and reserved special scorn for the plasterers, metal lathers, and sheet-metal workers who continually walked out on strike and delayed the Ansonia’s completion. In 1903, Stokes was hospitalized, due, he said, to stress induced by constant negotiations with unions.
But Stokes loved animals and, since he knew a thing or two about breeding, decided to try his hand at farming—on the Ansonia’s roof. Soon there were cows grazing high above Broadway, along with goats, geese, ducks, five hundred chickens, and a pig named Nanki-Poo. A bear cub had the run of the place. The Ansonia’s freight elevators were sized for horses, so that Stokes’s tenants could bring their mounts to the roof for exercise. The rooftop chickens were so productive—maybe it was the fresh air—that Stokes was soon inundated with eggs and began delivering them every morning to his tenants and selling them from a market in the basement. In 1907 the Board of Health finally got wind, perhaps literally, of Stokes’s farm and ejected the entire menagerie.
STOKES DIED IN 1926, but the Ansonia remained in his family until it was finally sold in 1945. Three years later it was sold again, this time to a consortium called, ominously, the Ansonia Holding Corporation. Over the years the company lived up to its name, holding on to the Ansonia but doing little else while, bit by bit, the grandeur of the once-majestic building faded. Robert Reinhart, whose family moved into the Ansonia in 1913, when he was six years old, recalled a childhood spent bicycling and roller-skating down corridors that, with each passing year, grew grimier with age. By the time Reinhart moved out in 1954, much of the Ansonia’s ornamental ironwork had been stripped from its façade, the corner lanterns were missing, the Broadway entry court had been blocked up, and the roof was festooned with television aerials. Gene Yellin, who grew up in the 1950s on 71st Street, near Broadway, remembers childhood afternoons spent exploring the Ansonia’s dank corridors and stairwell with a gaggle of local kids. The building was still full of musicians then, but he never heard a single note escaping through the thick walls.
CHAPTER 27
HARSENVILLE
NEITHER YELLIN NOR ANY OF HIS CHILDHOOD PALS REALIZED their thriving neighborhood of bakeries, delicatessens, candy stores, groceries, bookstores, automats, drugstores, movie theaters, and dry cleaners clustered around the crossing of Broadway and Tenth (Amsterdam) Avenue—like a stage set, really, with the Ansonia and the Sherman Square Hotel as the tattered props of a regal but rundown backdrop—had once been a farm, part of a large tract that had been in the Dyckman family since 1701. Five years after Nicholas Dyckman died, in 1758, Jacob Harsen bought, for a price of £1,210, 94 prime acres of Dyckman’s land. The Harsen farm stretched all the way from the Common Lands at the center of the island west to the Hudson River shore, with the Bloomingdale Road running right through the middle.
Harsen took over Dyckman’s old house, a Dutch-style manse on a hill just west of present-day Tenth Avenue between 70th and 71st streets, and the village that grew up around it eventually included a church, tavern, military academy, grocery and post office, firehouse, and assorted houses, stables, and artisans’ shops straddling the Bloomingdale Road from, approximately, present-day 68th Street to 76th Street. In 1773, Harsen’s nephew, also named Jacob Harsen, inherited the southern half of his uncle’s estate and moved into the old Dyckman house, where he continued his uncle’s role as the de facto village leader.
The centerpiece of what became known as Harsenville was the Bloomingdale Dutch Reformed Church, a small, one-room frame building, painted white, on the west side of the Bloomingdale Road between present-day 69th and 70th streets. Harsen, with help from three other community stalwarts, had founded and built the church on his own land, some 300 feet southeast of his house, in 1805. Eleven years later, a bigger stone church, topped with a bell tower and surrounded by a graveyard within a picket fence, was built on a knoll at the northeast corner of the Bloomingdale Road and 68th Street, facing the river. Pew-holders in the church included lawyer Alexander Hamilton Jr., banker Nathaniel Prime, landowner William Rhinelander, merchants Archibald Gracie and John G. Coster, and Clement Clarke Moore, author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
Community and church were almost completely intertwined, with a small circle of families—Harsens, Hoppers, Havemeyers, Strikers, Beekmans, Somerindykes, Livingstons—serving as elders of both the village and the church. Harsenville was starkly divided by class and race: On Sundays, elders, deacons, and wealthy pew-holders took their places at the front of the church; tradespeople, artisans, and visitors crammed into the middle; and, crowded into six reserved pews and partially blocked from view by two wood-burning stoves, “colored” congregants, many of them the slaves of the church’s most prominent families, sat at the back.
Well after Broadway’s first mile had developed into a modern thoroughfare of shops, theaters, and museums, Harsenville remained a time warp where austere men named Jacob and Ichabod and women named Sarah and Hannah sang hymns to a tuning fork—musical instruments being considered the machines of the devil—and closely monitored their neighbors’ “walk and conversation” for telltale signs of backsliding. (Even under constant surveillance, Harsenvillians were prone to occasional scandals, as when, in 1814, Philip Webbers, a church deacon and pillar of the community, was found to have surreptitiously joined a Baptist church in New York—the equivalent in Harsenville of falling in with pirates in Madagascar. He was excommunicated.)
By the time Jacob Harsen died, in 1835, Harsenville’s population had grown to roughly 2,000 people. But the congregation of its Dutch Reformed Church had shrunk to just twenty-eight families, and the nature of the community was drastically changing. Assessors and street commissioners moved into the area like an invading army. The old farms were cut up into lots, and Irish immigrants soon had the village surrounded with shantytowns, the advance guard of an encroaching city that within a few decades would erase Harsenville from the map.
NO TRACES OF HARSENVILLE remain today, other than the land itself, which still rises and falls between Central Park and the Hudson River in much the same way it did one hundred years ago. And there is Broadway, which reveals in it
s curving trajectory at least an echo of the Bloomingdale Road that once ran through the middle of the village.
When Harsenville is remembered at all, it is because of an odd story that grew up around it concerning French royal fugitives using the village as a sanctuary after fleeing to America during the Reign of Terror in the 1790s. Harsenville historian Hopper Striker Mott, writing in 1908, described the center of this improbable circle as one “Mme. d’Auliffe, dame d’honneur to Marie Antoinette.” “Mme. d’Auliffe” built a house, called “Chevilly” after a suburb of Paris, west of the Bloomingdale Road between 72nd and 73rd streets and just north of the Jacob Harsen farm.
In Mott’s account, at Chevilly “Mme. d’Auliffe” surrounded herself with a memorable cast of French exiles that included Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Simon-Louis-Pierre, marquis de Cubiéres—whom Mott describes as dashing up the Bloomingdale Road on a horse named “Monarque”—and one Colonel August de Singeron. Talleyrand actually did stay three weeks at Chevilly; the others never did. And, as historian Margaret Oppenheimer has recently discovered, “Auliffe” was actually a mispronunciation of “Olive” and the Olive family patriarch, Nicholas Olive, was a wealthy merchant, not a courtier.
A fanciful 1863 print depicting Louis-Philippe guiding his pupils through their lessons in the Teunis Somerindyck house along the Bloomingdale Road.
The most arresting detail of the story is the claim that none other than Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans and future king of the French, showed up in Harsenville with his two fugitive brothers and a valet in tow. Louis-Philippe is supposed to have lived in the Teunis Somerindyck house, on the west side of the Bloomingdale Road between 75th and 76th streets, and, even more improbably, was said to have taught school there.
Louis-Philippe—in paintings, his chubby cheeks, black pompadour, and expansive sideburns give him a passing resemblance to late-period Elvis—did indeed escape from France to America, in 1794, but his base of operations was Philadelphia and he passed only briefly through New York. Throughout his American sojourn Louis-Philippe retained his regal manners—he was once kicked out of an inn in Virginia for insisting that his dinner be served in a private room, away from the rabble—and it’s difficult to imagine the future sovereign reigning over a classroom of pint-sized Harsenvillians.
But the persistent vision of Louis-Philippe at work, struggling like any immigrant, on a stretch of rural highway that was later to become part of Broadway, the most American of American streets, is too good a story to disregard entirely. It’s a classic Broadway scenario—“French King Proves Mettle on Great White Way”—that is as perfect as it is unlikely.
MILE 7
79TH STREET TO 106TH STREET
CHAPTER 28
THE RAVEN OF SPECULATION
EDGAR ALLAN POE MOVED FROM PHILADELPHIA TO NEW York on April 6, 1844, arriving by steamboat amid a downpour. The boat docked at Pier 2, on the Hudson River, and Poe bought an umbrella and set off purposefully through the hectic streets of lower Manhattan while his tubercular young wife Virginia waited on board. Within thirty minutes Poe had rented a room in a boardinghouse on Greenwich Street and returned to the pier to fetch Virginia. Left momentarily behind in Philadelphia were Virginia’s mother, Maria Clemm, whom Poe affectionately called “Muddy,” and Catterina, or “Kate,” the family cat. Poe wrote to Muddy the next morning: All was well, he assured her, the boardinghouse’s coffee excellent.
Poe had tried to make a go of it in New York at least twice before. He had lived there for some fifteen months in 1837–38 and visited again in June of 1842, but it hadn’t worked out either time. Through Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Washington, Poe had consistently made a mess of things, wearing out his welcome, trying his friends’ patience with nonstop begging for loans, starting petty feuds with other authors, alienating potential business partners and, especially, drinking too much. But in New York in the spring of 1844, it looked like the beleaguered Poe might make a fresh start. He had refrained from drink on the trip, he swore to Muddy, and Virginia’s hacking cough had subsided.
Within a week of arriving in the city Poe sold a news story to the New York Sun about a supposed Atlantic Ocean crossing of a hot-air balloon from England to Charleston, South Carolina, in three days; news that, had it been true, would have been hailed as an astounding, unprecedented achievement. But the story wasn’t true; it was a complete fabrication in the tradition of the Sun’s famous “moon hoax” of 1835, when Richard Adams Locke made up a story about the eminent British astronomer Sir John Herschel discovering a race of bat-winged people on the moon using a telescope with a 30-foot-diameter lens. Poe’s balloon hoax was supposed to be a literary calling card, an announcement of sorts that he was back in New York.
It backfired: New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett dismissed Poe’s hoax as “ridiculously put together” and called Sun publisher Moses Yale Beach a “blundering blockhead.” That same day Beach printed a retraction. Poe, unbowed, protested: “There is nothing put forth in the Balloon-Story which is not in full keeping with the known facts of æronautic experience—which might not really have occurred.”
One month later, Poe told poet Nathaniel Parker Willis that he was feeling ill and depressed. His prospects dwindling, he cadged loans from friends and moved Virginia, along with his mother-in-law and cat, to a farm on the Bloomingdale Road between present-day 82nd and 85th streets, some six miles north of the city.
THE FARM BELONGED to Patrick and Mary Brennan and comprised some 200 acres. Poe and family rented rooms on the second floor of the farmhouse, which faced the Hudson River from atop a hill some 300 feet east of the road, on the line of the future 84th Street. The house had been built in two sections: The southern half was taller and had the front door; the northern half included the kitchen. The roof was pitched, and both sections of the house were of wood frame with wood siding; it was in all respects typical of farmhouses of that era and completely unremarkable.
Poe’s room had a fireplace on the north end and a writing table—the Brennans’ daughter Margaret remembered it scattered with books and letters—situated between the front windows. Poe’s view as he worked at his desk consisted of two large shade trees and Brennan’s Pond in the foreground, then the Bloomingdale Road and fields and outcroppings of bedrock beyond it, and, in the background, the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. Margaret Brennan recalled Poe sitting on the ground at Brennan’s Pond, writing, and wandering over to a large outcropping overlooking the Hudson—the broad, flat rock is still there today, near 83rd Street and Riverside Drive—where he sat for hours gazing out at the river.
To make ends meet Poe peddled stories to magazines and filed dispatches for an obscure weekly newspaper, the Columbia Spy of Columbia, Pennsylvania. In the first installment, published May 14, 1844, Poe described the landscape surrounding the Brennan farm, in the heart of what was to become Broadway’s seventh mile.
“I have been roaming far and wide over this island of Mannahatta,” he wrote. “Some portions of its interior have a certain air of rocky sterility which may impress some imaginations as simply dreary—to me it conveys the sublime. Trees are few; but some of the shrubbery is exceedingly picturesque.”
The Brennan farm was still far removed from town then, its solitude punctuated only by occasional horse-drawn wagons and stagecoaches rattling up and down the Bloomingdale Road. It might have made an idyllic writer’s retreat, except that Poe was troubled. That summer he wandered the aisles of Tiffany, Young & Ellis in a daze, transfixed by the sheer volume and variety of the store’s carved ebony furniture, chess sets, paintings, tiles, bronzes, fans, and candlesticks. “The perfumery department is especially rare,” he marveled.
At one point Poe stopped in a tobacco store at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street, gave his name as Thaddeus K. Peasly, and, in exchange for tobacco, wrote a campaign song for a Democratic political organization called the White Eagle Club. He complained about the noise in downtown Ne
w York, the incessant “din of the vehicles” rolling over cobblestones, and whiled away the summer working in fits and starts. “I have . . . rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition,” he wrote James Russell Lowell in July. “Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.”
By September, Poe had withdrawn so thoroughly he compared himself to a hermit and claimed he saw no one other than Virginia and Muddy and the Brennan family. But then came a break of sorts, when Willis hired Poe as an editorial assistant at his fledgling daily newspaper, the Evening Mirror. Stationed at a desk in the corner, Poe cheerfully answered correspondence and wrote unsigned filler, drudgework that made Willis admire Poe for his uncomplaining diligence.
To travel the six miles between the Brennan farm and the Evening Mirror offices at the corner of Nassau and Ann streets, Poe might have taken the Bloomingdale stage, which ran every forty minutes past the Brennan farm down to the corner of Eighth Avenue and 25th Street. Then, for a shilling, he could have transferred to an omnibus of the Knickerbocker Line running down Broadway to within a block of the Mirror. On days when Poe didn’t have the fare, he must have set out on foot, a hike of about two hours assuming a steady, sober pace—and all along Broadway were tempting saloons and pleasure gardens.