by Fran Leadon
MARTIN M. MOLENAOR was born in 1838 in his grandfather’s homestead at Eighth Avenue and 125th Street. By the time he was fourteen he had lived in Manhattan on Bleecker and Elizabeth streets and First Avenue; in Astoria, Queens; in Camptown, New Jersey; in Westchester; and in Kingston, Jamaica. During the Civil War he moved to the Bahamas, where he married Evalina and where their first two children, Montrose and Evelyn, were born. Then the family moved to St. Augustine, Florida, and had three more children, including Wilfred, born in 1871.
In 1872, Molenaor’s brother Andrew visited him in Florida and told him their grandfather’s will had been discovered in a “secret drawer.” In 1878, Molenaor returned to New York with Evalina and the five children, opened a jewelry business on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, and laid plans for the reclamation of his grandfather’s land.
The grandfather, William M. Molenaor, had died in 1812 and his estate, including his land, “good horse and chaise,” “black girl Sarah,” and “black boy Isaac,” was divided between his wife Mercy, a daughter, and three sons. The oldest son was David William Molenaor, Martin’s father, who in the 1820s invested heavily in the Harlem Canal Company. His land had been put up as security to cover the canal company’s debts, and when the company failed much of David’s considerable inheritance disappeared. By 1850, David had lost everything, his occupation on that year’s federal census listed as “None.” (Under “Real Estate” the census enumerator had simply entered a question mark.) He died in 1858.
The gist of Martin M. Molenaor’s claim hinged on the wording of a single clause in his grandfather’s will: “To my eldest son, David William Molenaor, the legitimate heirs of his body or the nearest heirs of his body, I do give and bequeath all my homestead . . .”
Molenaor interpreted that line as meaning that his grandfather had intended to pass on his estate not only to his son but also to his son’s children and their children, the “heirs” of David’s “body.” To Molenaor’s way of thinking, that meant that his father had been granted only a “life interest” in the land, not a clear title, and therefore had had no legal right to sell it. And if he had had no right to sell it, Molenaor figured, then all of his father’s transactions and all subsequent transactions pertaining to the land in question were invalid, and the land must still belong to the rightful heir—none other than Martin Montrose Molenaor.
He was tilting at windmills, of course. The great tragedy of Manhattan’s development in the nineteenth century was how very unfair its division of land had been, the old land grants somehow remaining intact to the benefit of a few wealthy families—the Astors, the Harsens, the Brevoorts, the Rensselaers—who cashed in while the less fortunate majority had to make due with cramped tenements and squatter’s shacks. Periodically someone would materialize to claim ownership of a prime swath of the island, usually part of the Astor estate and usually in the middle of Midtown or the West Side or whichever section of town was booming that year, but they usually gave up after a few thrusts of the lance, their cases remaining in the courts just long enough to remind everyone that their grandfathers hadn’t left them anything, either. But Martin Montrose Molenaor was unusual among the Quixotes of real estate—he simply wouldn’t give up.
In 1916, the Kiowa Realty Company and its president, Emil Fried, owner of five vacant lots at the southeast corner of Broadway and Hillside Avenue, where Molenaor was squatting, sued for eviction. This was precisely what Molenaor wanted—a day in court. Kiowa Realty Company v. Martin M. Molenaor et al. became a test case that was watched carefully by many landowners in Washington Heights, Harlem, and Manhattanville who wished that Molenaor would go away, since his endless claims against their property were beginning to muck up the clear transfer of titles.
The case went all the way to New York State’s Supreme Court, First Judicial District, where Molenaor faced off against Kiowa Realty’s lawyer, Louis Franklin Levy of Eisman, Levy, Corn & Lewine. Legal opinions don’t make for the spiciest reading, but every line of Justice Nathan Bijur’s opinion seethed with exasperation—no doubt he had better things to do with his time—and he quickly swatted down the heart of Molenaor’s argument as if it were a fly buzzing about the courtroom.
“[The defendants], as I understand it, do not contest the general proposition of law,” Bijur wrote, “but hold it inapplicable because, as they construe the will, no estate was devised to David William Molenaor, but . . . only ‘to the legitimate heirs of his body, etc.’ From the standpoint of grammar, they urge that the language should be construed as in the phrase ‘John Jones, his mark,’ and that the devise [the land] should be read as one to the legitimate heirs of the body of David William Molenaor.”
“To this extraordinary construction I cannot give my assent,” Bijur continued, slamming the door shut once and for all. “Altogether, apart from the violence which I think it does to the rule of grammatical construction prevalent at the time of execution and probate of this will, the last will itself is replete with persuasive suggestions of the meaning of the testator to the contrary.”
Bijur then dutifully cited dozens of precedents to back up his opinion that in 1812 William M. Molenaor surely had meant to give his property to his son David William Molenaor, come what may; that the son, as owner, had been entitled to sell it; and that, therefore, Martin M. Molenaor had no claim to the land beneath his shack, nor to the Billings estate across the street or the lots in Harlem and Manhattanville. Bijur ruled in favor of Kiowa Realty.
That should have been the final blow, but still Molenaor held out, his shack sitting undisturbed on its vacant lot. “He sits at evening in the door of his cabin,” Henry Edward Smith wrote in the Pittsburg Press in 1917, “with the shadows of the big apartment houses lengthening toward him, with the hum of the Broadway cars making an inspiring song in his old ears—dreaming his great dream all undismayed.”
IN THE SPRING OF 1921, Molenaor was eighty-four and nearly blind. William F. Norton, a contractor and the new owner of the lot upon which the Molenaors squatted, appeared at the shack’s door and told the family to clear out; he wanted to put up a commercial building on the lot. The Molenaors refused to budge. Norton began excavating anyway, each day coming closer to the shack and each day making the Molenaors angrier and more determined to stay.
Martin Montrose Molenaor’s approximate view of Fort Tryon Hill and the Billings estate (at far left).
“Undermine our home, will you?” Evelyn shouted at the steam shovel operator. “Still, we can only die once and we might as well die defending our home.”
Norton stopped digging just short of the shack, spooked by the possibility that he might injure, or even kill, the Molenaors, who crowed that he had been bluffing all along. But the stress of being threatened with a steam shovel had been too much for Molenaor, Evelyn told New York Herald reporter Eleanor Booth Simmons. He died shortly afterward.
Simmons had visited the shack before, and had glimpsed Molenaor gazing longingly through the shack’s small windows at Fort Tryon Hall across Broadway. “All that . . . is mine,” he told her. “Some day the courts will decide that it is mine, and I shall be one of the richest men in America, richer than John D. Rockefeller Jr., who fancies that he owns that Washington Heights property.”
CHAPTER 46
MR. BARNARD
THE TROUBLE WAS, ROCKEFELLER DID OWN FORT TRYON HALL: He had bought it in 1917 from Billings, who, bored with New York, moved first to Oyster Bay, Long Island, and then to Santa Barbara, California, where he and Blanche died on the same day in 1937. Rockefeller wanted to tear down the Billings mansion and turn the grounds into a public park, but when a group of architects protested, Rockefeller rented out the house to N. C. Partos, a drug manufacturer.
In 1926 the château burned down. The fire started at three in the afternoon, March 6, and burned far into the night. Because of its prominence atop Fort Tryon Hill, the fire was visible for miles: The New York Times estimated that 100,000 people watched it from Washington Heights, University Heights
in the Bronx, and the New Jersey Palisades. Billings’s elaborate system of fire hydrants and pumps failed miserably, its volume and pressure far too low to get water up the hill.
Landscape painter Eric Sloane, who grew up in the neighborhood, remembered exploring Fort Tryon Hall’s roofless ruins, its charred stair ending in open sky. Bicycling around the wooded hills south of Fort Tryon, Sloane befriended sculptor George Grey Barnard, whose studio was on Fort Washington Avenue just south of the Billings estate. At the time, Barnard, a stocky, eccentric character with a shock of unruly dark hair, jutting jaw, and matching ego, was perhaps America’s most preeminent sculptor; the New York Times called him a “human dynamo” and even compared him favorably to Michelangelo.
BARNARD WAS A preacher’s son from Pennsylvania. He was educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and in 1883 went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. Barnard’s big break came when Alfred Corning Clark, the wealthy heir of Edward Cabot Clark, cofounder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company and developer of the Dakota Apartments, commissioned an allegorical sculpture entitled The Struggle of the Two Natures of Man. Included in 1894’s prestigious annual Salon du Champ-de-Mars, the nightmarish Struggle, which depicts one nude Greek figure stepping on another while ferocious, fanged bats materialize between the lower figure’s limbs, put Barnard on the map.
His career seemingly taking off, Barnard married Edna Monroe of Boston in 1895 and moved to New York, where he opened the Washington Heights studio and began teaching courses at the Art Students League. But Barnard struggled and, in dire financial straits, considered quitting his chosen profession. He was saved by an enormous $700,000 commission to complete the sculptures, thirty-three figures in all, for the new Pennsylvania State Capitol building in Harrisburg. He decided to work on the project in France, and in 1903 moved his family to the village of Moret-sur-Loing near Fontainebleau, some two hours southeast of Paris.
“I was getting $2,000 a week,” he remembered ten years later, “and I and my stone cutters and models were encamped in a French village giving over our lives to art completely. Then one week the money didn’t come.”
A month later he was $10,000 in debt. It came out that cost overruns in Harrisburg had gotten out of control, and amid the political firestorm that ensued, Pennsylvania governor Samuel W. Pennypacker cabled Barnard to “come home.” Instead, Barnard stayed in France and continued working on the sculptures. (The Capitol’s architect, Joseph Miller Huston, and four others were ultimately convicted of graft; private donors ultimately financed the statues, which were finally completed in 1911.)
To make ends meet, Barnard bought and sold medieval antiquities, beginning an obsession that would define his life and career. He began by bicycling around the French countryside asking locals if they had ever seen any “old carvings” lying about. As it turned out, they had: For centuries farmers had been repurposing parts of ruined medieval churches and cloisters, including magnificent statuary, for use as scarecrows, pigsty walls, grape arbors, and stones to dam up creeks.
“I went into every cellar and would surprise the peasants by getting on my hands and knees with a candle to look under wine vats,” Barnard recalled. “I found some of my very best Virgins under wine vats.”
Barnard gradually amassed an unsurpassable collection of some seven hundred Romanesque and Gothic antiquities. He sold some of the pieces to support his family and spirited others back to New York, a practice that so angered French authorities one accused him of “stealing the soul of France.” But others praised Barnard for rescuing forgotten artifacts and rekindling interest in France’s extraordinary medieval art.
Returning to New York with his sizable collection of icons, friezes, crucifixes, architectural components (including parts of four cloisters), tapestries, and stained glass, Barnard built a large barnlike brick museum across 190th Street from his Washington Heights studio and put his collection on display. He called the museum the Cloisters and opened it to the public in December of 1914, charging $2 on weekends and $5 during the week. The proceeds, he declared, would benefit the widows and children of French sculptors killed in World War I.
Barnard had become an outspoken peace advocate during the war, and began agitating for the creation of a vast “Acropolis” on Fort Tryon Hill, a sprawling “National Peace Memorial” with its centerpiece a monumental 100-foot-tall and 60-foot-wide “Rainbow Arch” that in Barnard’s conception was to include sculptures of four hundred figures. The peace memorial, Barnard said, would be an “intellectual Coney Island.”
The New York Times once called sculptor George Grey Barnard a “human dynamo.”
Rockefeller, who had commissioned three sculptures from Barnard for his Pocantico Hills estate, was supportive and let Barnard take over the old Billings stable as a studio to begin work on the Rainbow Arch. Rockefeller even offered to underwrite the entire project, but Barnard refused the offer on moral grounds, romantically insisting that funding should come in nickels and dimes from the public. To raise money Barnard put the Cloisters up for sale, and in 1925 agreed to sell his entire collection of medieval art to Rockefeller for $600,000. Rockefeller donated the collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the reconstituted Cloisters opened on May 3, 1926, in its original building next to Barnard’s studio. Barnard was there, greeting guests in a velvet jacket and bow tie.
IN 1930, ROCKEFELLER donated the Billings estate and some adjacent parcels, 56 acres in all, to the city for a public park. The old Billings stables were slated for demolition, and Barnard, evicted, set up a new studio in a nearby abandoned power station and kept working on the peace memorial, which by then had become a quixotic scheme and was never finished. The stables were torn down and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. began designing Fort Tryon Park, which opened in October of 1935.
Rockefeller reserved 4 acres on the north edge of the park, almost exactly on the spot where Margaret Corbin had fought so valiantly in 1776, as the site for a new, larger version of the Cloisters. Intent on re-creating a French monastery, Rockefeller even bought 700 undeveloped, wooded acres on the opposite side of the Hudson and donated them to New Jersey as part of Palisades Interstate Park, so that visitors to the Cloisters could enjoy a view unobstructed by buildings.
Designed by Boston architect Charles Collens, Rockefeller’s Cloisters was built in granite with roofs of red tile. Rockefeller had scoured France for new pieces to augment Barnard’s original collection, although he hadn’t searched in farmyards or knelt in grimy basements the way Barnard had, and his acquisitions, including the magnificent chapter house from the twelfth-century Notre-Dame-de-Pontaut abbey, significantly expanded the scope of Barnard’s original vision.
The original Cloisters at Fort Washington Avenue and 190th Street closed on February 9, 1936, and its title reverted to Barnard. In the ten years since selling his collection to Rockefeller, Barnard had amassed an entirely new stockpile of medieval art, and in October of 1937 he reopened the museum as the Abbaye.
On April 24, 1938, only weeks before Rockefeller’s new Cloisters opened to the public, Barnard died of a heart attack at age seventy-four. His funeral was held in the Abbaye, his coffin surrounded by the statues and crucifixes he had collected in France. Among those paying tribute was Mathilda Burling, president of the Gold Star Mothers, which had made Barnard an honorary member for his peace advocacy. When Rockefeller’s Cloisters opened to the public on a wet Saturday, May 10, 1938, a long line of people waited in the rain to get in. By closing time, well over 4,000 had filed through.
MILE 13
DYCKMAN STREET TO 228TH STREET
CHAPTER 47
LIFE AND DEATH IN INWOOD
JUST PAST THE CLOISTERS, BROADWAY CURLS IN A LAZY ARC to the east-northeast as it begins its initial approach into the Bronx by way of the Broadway Bridge over the Harlem River Ship Canal. Crossing Dyckman Street, which traverses the island along a seismic fault line, Broadway skirts the base of Inwood Hill, where streets turn into staircases—215th S
treet between Broadway and Seaman Avenue is like Montmartre in New York. Seaman, Vermilyea, Sherman, Post, and Nagle avenues bend along with Broadway, so that the entire neighborhood of Inwood doesn’t align with the rest of the city grid and seems in many ways like a separate village.
Well into the nineteenth century the area that became Inwood was virtually uninhabited, and no streets or lanes other than the Kingsbridge Road passed through it. The Dyckman family and a few others farmed the rich bottomland along the Harlem River, where land was so cheap, and in such poor demand, that they practically gave it away. (One tenant’s rent consisted only of one hen per year for seven years.) In 1820, when John Randel Jr. surveyed the area for the Commissioners’ Plan, he catalogued fields, orchards, outcroppings, swamps, and the outlines of Revolutionary War–era redoubts but almost no buildings other than a few small farmhouses, barns, stables, and fishermen’s shacks.
The area began to change after 1851, when the new Hudson River Railroad built a station at Tubby Hook, a knuckle of land protruding into the river at the end of present-day Dyckman Street. Only a thirty-minute ride from the railroad’s terminal at 30th Street and Tenth Avenue, Tubby Hook developed into a suburb of wealthy downtown commuters that in prestige and beauty rivaled Audubon Park and Washington Heights to the south.
In those early years Tubby Hook was remote, sleepy, and informal enough that in the morning the railroad conductor would patiently wait for his regular “Tubby Hookers” to arrive on the platform before departing for the city. Tubby Hook’s residents included cartoonist Joseph Ferdinand Keppler, one of the founders of Puck, Samuel Lord and George Washington Taylor of Lord & Taylor, and James McCreery, founder of the famous Ladies’ Mile department store at Broadway and 11th Street. (McCreery didn’t take the train to work, choosing instead to drive his team of bay horses to his store downtown.) McCreery’s house wasn’t ostentatious, but some of his neighbors’ villas were comically opulent: John F. Seaman’s elaborate “Marble House,” built in 1855, featured twenty-five rooms plus an observatory, swimming pool, solarium, and manicured grounds punctuated with eighteenth-century statuary. Its approach was from the Kingsbridge Road through a gatehouse that was a scaled-down replica of the Arc de Triomphe.