“He looks pretty well again and seems brighter,” wrote Susanna.
The news from home did not improve for long. Over the course of the summer, as Edie and May gaily toured Europe, business at Grinnell, Minturn & Co. began to fall off. Robert and Susanna struggled to keep up appearances, but it became clear the family needed to drastically cut its expenses. Susannah found herself explaining staunchly to her progeny that come fall, economics dictated that they move into a smaller house. The new place was really very sweet, and the important thing was that they were all healthy and would be together.
It is hard to give up on “dear home,” but we must not mind it. When I look back & think how I cared nothing at all about our dear home after our darling little Frankie died, & wanted never to see it again, for a long time, & then look round at all our dear ones (except Frankie) still with us after so much illness, I cannot help but feel most thankful that it is really the house that we have to give up & not one of our dear ones who make our home. So let us all give the house up as cheerfully as we can, with grateful hearts for all our blessings.
The girls returned from Europe to a family thoroughly chastened by the reversal of fortune. Family lore would attribute the worst of the crisis to a nameless “agent in Havana” who absconded with sums of the firm’s money. Perhaps this was but a simplified version told to the children to help them make sense of the situation.
Edith and May were immediately packed off to Canada. The family tried to make the best of their situation, with father and mother referring brightly in their letters to all the interesting experiences their daughters must be having in Quebec. (“How would you like to live in Quebec? Is it cheap? And free from hay fever? These are the two questions I shall always ask in the future!” wrote Susanna.) But the girls must have felt themselves banished from New York City, with Edie’s debut into society essentially on hold.
Then Susanna wrote to Canada with more bad news. It turned out the family could not afford even a small house of their own. The Minturn brood would now shoehorn themselves into the residence of Robert’s parents at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. It was humiliating: at age forty-nine, after a successful career in international shipping, Robert was moving back in with his mother.
Susanna emphasized to her children that the women of the house, Robert’s sister Bessie and his mother Anna, considered themselves put upon for having to help their down-on-their-luck relations. The feathers of the grand dames should definitely not be ruffled any further. “One must just give up all hope of making any of the rooms pretty with our own pretty things,” wrote Susanna. “It is only in giving up all personal wishes that we can get on, & make the thing work. Of course I am very sorry, but there is no help for it. Perhaps in another year we can have a small house of our own.” The family “must make the best of it,” Susanna continued, “and only be thankful we are not living in an old dirty boarding-house.” The girls must be glad for a home “offered to us kindly and generously.”
In an almost cruel note, Susanna sought to find a silver lining in the dark cloud hovering over her daughters: “I fancy, in this case, that as soon as it is known Papa is no longer a rich man, the attentions [of young men] will drop off naturally. This is one advantage of not being well-off, for then a girl knows when attention is really to be valued.”
3. Madison to the River
Murray Hill was Newton Stokes’s birthright, from a patrimony that rose out of a marriage between two of the great fortunes of post–Civil War New York. Since 1830, his family, from the maternal line of Phelps as well as those on the paternal Stokes side, had held title to that priceless piece of Manhattan, 185 acres on the frontier of an exploding metropolis, a bulwark of calm athwart the fastest-growing city in the world. Located to the west of Kips Bay on the East River, Murray Hill physically embodied the Lenape word Mannahatta, “place of hills.” The Lenape themselves called the outcropping “Fire Beacon Hill.”
From the heights of Newton’s childhood domain he could see the chock-a-block structures of the city, stretching beyond Dutch Hill southward. To the west lay a stream called the Kill of Schepmoes, as well as Sunfish Pond, a vernal lake that flooded all the way to Fourth Avenue when it was flushed by spring runoff. On summer days Newton could take his bounding Newfoundland down to beachcomb on the littoral marshes of Kips Bay on the East River. The great black tidal strait was his river.
Even the view belonged to him. Newton’s family’s house stood at the crest of Murray Hill. From his bedroom the boy could sight clear across the river to the rolling, low-slung hills of Brooklyn. No buildings marred the outlook. Barges and sloops slid by on the river, their motions seemingly staged for his private amusement.
As development encroached, engineers marked off the distances for right-angle roads. The Phelpses and the Stokeses responded to the pleasant exigencies of a real estate boom by selling off chunks of their holdings. The view from Newton’s window might lose its clear prospect, and tenements might crop up along the shore, but even into young adulthood he retained the sense that this was all still fundamentally his.
The grandfather who built the estate was a merchant who would rival Edith’s Minturn grandfather in both fortune-building and philanthropy. Beginning in the 1830s, Anson Greene Phelps assembled the property acre by acre, piece by piece. His ambition drove him. While making a fortune shipping cotton and metals, Phelps noticed that the nicer estates in town had East River views and plenty of land. Phelps’s memoir paid tribute to the property’s unassailable privacy: “It would give an idea of the absolute retirement of the roads in the vicinity to say that one of the members of the family and a friend . . . took turns in riding [one day] and went two miles or more without encountering any observation or annoyance.”
The estate came with a house, a stately, Greek-columned “cottage” that since 1805 stood at First Avenue between 30th and 31st streets. This would become the Phelps homestead.
The finest formal gardens in America lined the terraces of the Phelpses’ new residence. A previous occupant, Dr. David Hosack, a man well known in Jacksonian America for having dressed the wounds of the dying Alexander Hamilton after his duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, had created Elgin Gardens, the first botanical garden in the United States, in the then out-of-the-way precincts of present-day Rockefeller Center. Newton’s grandmother Caroline would later recall the property as “a remnant of Paradise,” with choice fruits and flowers, shrubs and trees, a conservatory of rare plants and the scrubbed floor of the basement “paved with white Dutch tiles brought expressly from Holland.” The estate’s impressive former residents and its association with the city’s Dutch heritage, as embodied in those vintage tiles, gave it a high-toned pedigree by the time Phelps took possession of it.
Engineers measured out the city grid as early as 1821. Long before the projected thoroughfares saw traffic, passersby could see the future in white marble slabs that planners placed at each crossroads of street and avenue. With the anticipated invasion of the hordes mapped out incontrovertibly in stone, Phelps sold off pieces of that robust rectangle of land he had acquired over two decades. Lots east of Second Avenue fetched a good price, but those farther inland proved even more valuable, since buyers feared that the waterfront would soon descend into dirt and noise that characterized the downtown shoreline.
At the end of his life, Newton wrote a memoir he titled Random Recollections of a Happy Life, part autobiography, part celebratory paean to childhood past. He described the grid plan as “marking the end of Old New York and the beginning of the Modern City.” As the Phelps land got smaller, the family grew wealthier. By the time Newton reached maturity, the Phelps mansion and its flawless flower beds had been replaced by teeming tenements. Family members, though, moved only a few hundred yards away, staying put in their perch at the crest of Murray Hill, continuing to relish their perspective of New York and its environs from on high.
BY THE TIME he moved to New York from Connecticut, Anson Greene Phelps had earned his fi
rst fortune. He was a descendant of seventeenth-century New England settlers, and his businesses all featured some variation on metals and cotton. Most lucrative was copper, which was becoming essential as telegraph wire and, more mundanely, as rivets on the country’s already ubiquitous blue jeans. Phelps, Dodge & Co. erected a six-story headquarters on Cliff Street, in the East River waterfront district, with retail operations on the ground floor and wholesale merchandise stockpiled on the upper floors. The building had such an imposing and handsome countenance that tourists made it a stop on their itinerary of New York sights.
The company weathered an economic crash that came in 1837. Soon afterward, Phelps, Dodge experienced a literal collapse of its own. In the middle of an ordinary workday, the Cliff Street warehouse hove in and buckled to the ground under its weight of metal products and cotton bales, its front wall peeling into the street. Killed in the disaster were seven ground-floor clerks, including Josiah Stokes, an assistant to Phelps. Young Stokes, it was said, was found among the wreckage grasping a silver pen, as though not even his trip to the great beyond would keep him from attending to the boss’s dictation.
It was left to James Boulter Stokes to soothe the grief of his brother’s intended bride, the boss’s daughter, Caroline Phelps. As it sometimes does, consolation led to romance, and in 1837 Caroline accepted the hand of James Stokes. The man who would be Newton’s grandfather had already seen considerable success in his career, enough to be able to advance Phelps, Dodge a significant loan at around the time the 1837 economic bubble burst.
James’s father, Thomas, had sailed from England to New York in 1798, shrewdly avoiding a yellow fever epidemic by making landfall up the Hudson River at Tarrytown. His stake in the New World consisted of a sapphire ring, a dinner table and a grandfather clock. Most importantly, the ship’s hold contained a legitimate Stokes coat of arms engraved on a silver trencher, a signifier that allowed Thomas entrée into the discriminating parlors of Manhattan. Stokes could also count himself a successful textile merchant, having started by selling uniform cloth to both the British and Continental armies and then branching out to coal and real estate. James Stokes partnered with his father to import cloth in downtown New York, and soon enough he was buying hundreds of thousands of acres of Michigan forest to harvest its timber.
The Phelps and Stokes clans made their union official with the marriage of James and Caroline. The pair chose a site just west of the original Phelps mansion, Caroline’s childhood home, to erect a house of their own, which they called Clifton Cottage. An 1855 daguerreotype shows a clapboard, veranda-enfolded place with a lushly overgrown front yard.
The high-flying yet humble magnate-in-training James Stokes chose not to call his coach to transport him weekdays to his financial-district offices. Instead, his practice was to walk down a country lane to the estate’s East River dock, row himself to the base of Wall Street and proceed on foot to the family’s office building on Cliff Street. His bearing and backbone made him legendary in the neighborhood. The local boys nicknamed him “Stiffy Stokes.”
James and Caroline Stokes prospered. Paterfamilias Anson Greene Phelps died in 1853, the year sightseers thronged to the World’s Fair at the Crystal Palace on 42nd Street. One crowd-pleasing exhibit there was a newly designed “Ansonia” brass timepiece with mass-produced metal gears. Anson Greene Phelps had bequeathed Ansonia Brass to his son-in-law James Stokes, and it became one of the family’s principal moneymakers. His estate upon his death was valued at $7 million (about $200 million in today’s dollars), guaranteeing a substantial inheritance for each of his ten sons and daughters.
Anson Stokes, Newton’s father and James’s son, was named after his grandfather Anson Greene Stokes, and true to his name fit squarely into the family business for which he was bred. Book-learning had little practical application for him, and he made his own way after elementary school. He started out in the downtown offices of Phelps, Dodge at seventeen, and became a partner in the company by the time he was twenty-three.
Anson spent his formative years in Clifton Cottage, in the healthy environs of his grandfather Phelps’s East River enclave. His path to social success was smoothed by the perfectly wrought wedding to the literal girl next door, a woman he had known all his life, his cousin Helen Louisa Phelps. Her father, Isaac Newton Phelps, expanded the family’s interests to real estate speculation, tearing down crumbling buildings and erecting new brownstones in their stead. The two men came from parallel lines in the Phelps family. Bride and groom, the cousins Anson and Helen, were thus united in both love and genealogy, with a sense of almost militant pride in their shared family background. Newton would be their firstborn son. Isaac Newton Phelps was well on his way to garnering the $10 million fortune that would comprise his estate upon his death in 1888. Aside from a tithe to the old man’s pet charities, his daughter Helen would stand to inherit the entire sum ($230 million today). An heiress to the manor born.
Isaac Newton Phelps erected a townhouse of his own within the family compound on Murray Hill, at 229 Madison Avenue. The house would continue to stand into the twenty-first century, over 150 years since its building, as part of the Morgan Library complex at the northeast corner of 37th Street. It was from its windows that young Newton would gaze down to the East River.
With its conservative lines and firmly restrained Italianate accents, 229 Madison seemed determined to reveal as little as possible about the level of privilege enjoyed by those who resided within its walls. Its outward modesty was a family trademark, as was the opulence of the interior. Consider the Phelps home-decorating approach, circa 1865, when Helen and Anson were married. The wedding took place in a lavish suite of three connected drawing rooms that ran through the entire block-long house, the suite hung in best contemporary fashion with rich blue brocade and embellished with mirrors, busts and statues.
Anson and Helen would never stray far from the bosom of family. The couple settled as newlyweds in the home of Helen’s father, where their son Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes came into the world.
IN THE YEAR of Newton’s birth, 1867, New York City consisted only of Manhattan, and the island’s inhabitants numbered fewer than one million. Pure water flowed south through a new viaduct, a miraculous forty-five miles, from the Croton River in upstate New York. A fountain fifty feet high gushed from Croton Fountain in City Hall Park. New Yorkers celebrated the opening of the viaduct with a seven-mile parade, including firefighters four thousand strong and representatives of numerous temperance societies, water being much preferable to demon rum.
A few well-to-do residents enjoyed indoor plumbing, some had central heating, and gaslights illuminated a number of homes and streets. The city’s stench was somewhat less rank than in the past, in part because slaughterhouses had relocated from 14th Street uptown to 57th. Horse-drawn “street railroads,” aka trolleys, expanded their operations. Not all streets were paved, but the most trafficked were. Telephones and electric lights would soon gain currency. The robber baron Jay Gould built an elevated railway downtown, in the financial district. In Albany, the state assembly began to debate a bill for the construction of a subway.
Images created during the era show a forest of straight-edged buildings in the southern quadrant of the island, with relatively untouched, primeval tracts extending all the way up to the creek that separated Manhattan from the mainland Bronx. Though maps also showed villages laid out in uniform blocks, the upper reaches of the island—Yorkville, Harlem and Manhattanville—remained paper towns, no more than gleams in the eyes of developers.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the urbanized thoroughfares we now know resembled streets in a country village. Riding stables dominated 42nd Street, and in the blocks between Fifth and Lexington avenues, horses arrived from the Wild West by cattle car. Cowboy wranglers paraded immense draft horses to entice buyers. For much of the century Third Avenue was a racecourse, which saw hundreds of riders tearing north up to Harlem every Saturday night. Described by one ob
server as the “exercise and trial ground of all fast trotters in the city,” the road surface had not yet been macadamized out of concern for the horses’ hooves.
New York was a city in flux, not yet having emerged from the chrysalis of a sleepy past to assume its powerful postbellum dimensions, when big money would build mansions, pave streets, erect monuments and generate electricity. The past was proving not prologue but epilogue. In 1867, the year of Newton’s birth, residents of the city worried over the death of a pear tree. Planted in 1647 by Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Netherland, on his boewerie in the vicinity of what was the now thoroughly citified Lower East Side, the tree flourished for more than two centuries, but was finally killed off in a carriage accident, an incident disregarded by many, mourned by some, and signifying to others the death knell of New York as it was once defined. The tree had given bushels of fruit until the very end.
NEWTON GREW INTO a tall, gangly youth with oversized ears, his neck appearing unnaturally elongated, with a shock of hair so dark it appeared nearly black. A somewhat odd, serious boy, intensely curious, he tended to pursue various hobbyhorses one after another with a hyperactive intelligence, and was obsessed even at a young age by the city in which he lived. As much as the physical city, what attracted Newton were representations of Manhattan Island in engravings, drawings and maps.
One engraving in particular fascinated Newton as he was growing up. In the old-fashioned parlance of collectors, the “iconography” of a specific locale meant all works pertaining to the way a place looked. Newton’s fateful first encounter with the iconography of Manhattan came by way of “New York 1855 from the Latting Observatory, Showing the Reservoir and Crystal Palace,” drawn by B. F. Smith and engraved by William Wellstood, which gave a bird’s-eye view of the city south from 42nd Street.
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