Manhattan Island retained a low-rise silhouette in the 1870s, the years of Newton’s youth. The Equitable Life Assurance Building, built in 1870 in the financial district at 120 Broadway, was the world’s first skyscraper, seven and a half stories, twice the height of its neighbors, the first office building erected using a skeletal steel frame, the first with passenger elevators. But the world featured in the Latting Observatory print hewed to the dimensions of the past. When the bright, big-eared young boy engrossed himself in the image, he was staring into a time warp, transporting himself back a quarter of a century.
It must have been a dizzying feeling, difficult for us to imagine in the age of Google Earth, for a person to be able to travel not only in time but in space, slipping earthbound constraints to ascend 315 feet into the air. Warren Latting erected his observatory, a wooden tower resembling a scaled-down oil derrick, on 42nd Street just off of Fifth Avenue, as part of the World’s Fair of 1853 (“The Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations”). Left standing after the fair as a tourist attraction, the tower boasted a thoroughly modern elevator—a steam-powered “safety hoister” designed and demonstrated by its inventor, Elisha Otis. The elevator transported visitors in a tiny, ornately decorated cab from the sidewalk to the pinnacle of the tower, high above the street. There they could observe the marvels of Manhattan through a battery of telescopes.
The engraving, made in 1855, captured that aerial view in crisp black and white. Immediately to the south, in the foreground, was the Croton Reservoir, completed in 1842. Along the reservoir’s stately, Egyptian-style parapets, the fashionables of the day liked to promenade. Next to the reservoir stood the kaleidoscopic glass-and-iron Crystal Palace, hailed by Walt Whitman as “Earth’s modern wonder.” The Crystal Palace housed the fair’s exhibits, revolutionary marvels such as the telegraph of Samuel Morse and the sewing machine of Isaac Singer.
All the buildings of the midcentury city rolled out toward the base of the island. Near Wall Street stood the neo-Gothic spire of Trinity Church, a geographic talisman of New York the way first the Woolworth Building and then the Empire State Building would be for future generations.
Clearly visible from this godlike perspective was Murray Hill, to the east and south of the reservoir. There, alongside the engraving’s major monuments of the day, were the houses of Newton’s grandparents, the Phelps and Stokes grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins. Surrounding their residences could be glimpsed open spaces and even, in miniature, the genteel landscaping that served as a green buffer against the encroachment of new buildings in every direction.
The world presented by the print was already superannuated by the time Newton perused it. Latting Observatory burned to the ground a year after the view was captured. The Crystal Palace, though it had been considered as impervious to fire as the Titanic would be thought unsinkable, was consumed in its own conflagration two years later. Yet as Newton approached maturity, the prospect from the observatory presented the land that still belonged to him, his home turf, the stomping ground he had circuited, the mansions in which he passed his childhood.
Perhaps only in hindsight does a young boy’s fascination with “New York 1855 from the Latting Observatory” prefigure the adult he would become. But the novelty of a bird’s-eye perspective in an earthbound world, the neat microcosm of life that the print presented, the fixed-in-time view from the past and the fact that it located Newton himself within the flux of the great, multitudinous world of New York City—these are all reasons to believe that from the time he first obsessed over this print, Newton Stokes began to grow into his future self.
“THE ONLY WAY not to think about money,” Edith Wharton wrote, “is to have a great deal of it.” The Stokes family were not the Vanderbilts, but the fortune they did have assured Newton of an extremely well-cushioned existence. During the boom years after the Civil War, a million dollars was roughly equivalent in purchasing power to twenty million today. This was enough to build a mansion, keep a coach, provide one’s daughters with a stylish debut and get away to Newport or Saratoga in the pestilent summer months. The Phelps-Stokes combine could marshal much more than that, what today would be about a quarter of a billion dollars. Considering their wealth, the family practiced a discreet form of consumption. They lived in buttoned-up brownstones, not Fifth Avenue rockpiles. A Protestant abhorrence of ostentation informed their style.
When he was one year old, Newton moved with his parents from his birthplace to their own home, just across the street, a residence referred to by all as the Dower House because Grandfather Phelps had built it for his daughter when she married. Much later, Newton’s memories of the house evoked the mysteries of childhood. He would always remember watching his parents at prayer in their sitting room, remaining on their knees for so long he was convinced they had fallen asleep.
The rapidly growing family would reside at the Dower House until 1880, when they moved three blocks down Madison, to 34th Street. Eventually there would be four boys—Newton, J. G. (Graham), Anson and Harold—and five girls—Sarah, Helen, Ethel, Caroline and Mildred. Ultimately, the family would relocate at least once more, to a familiar haunt, back across the street to 229 Madison, empty since the death of Newton’s grandfather Isaac Newton Phelps in 1889. The grand house wasn’t fancy enough, apparently, for Helen, who had just inherited the world (or something close to it), and was determined that she must renovate it to accommodate her still growing brood. She expanded the house, redecorated and modernized.
Including the blue-brocade-lined parlor suite, 229 Madison featured forty-five rooms, with a conservatory and a marble fountain, a ballroom with a thirty-foot ceiling, twelve bathrooms, twenty-two fireplaces and wall-to-wall marble floors. The block-length library must have seemed a mile long to a boy, and it was stuffed not only with leather-bound books but with tassels and swags and club chairs, along with a mammoth, walk-in fireplace and gilt picture frames as wide across as a man’s hand. The glorious ballroom got a regular workout, hosting dances during every social season. The windows of the upper floors framed the fantasy view of sloop traffic on the East River that held Stokes in thrall as a child.
As the new mistress of her childhood mansion, Helen enlarged the household staff, from a bare-bones four to fourteen. A butler named Cornelius managed the household servants, who included the cook-laundress Mary-Ann, who had just two teeth and a knack for making pie crust, and the Irish upstairs maid Catherine, who was more than willing to put her duties on hold to play with the children. When Newton was a boy, a coachman named William Hunter had the crucial responsibility of overseeing Grandfather Phelps’s pair of fine grays, carefully matched and intended to impress the neighbors.
As he grew up, the world of Newton’s grandparents surrounded him, quite literally. On the mansion’s uppermost floors lived not one but two of Jane Eyre’s Bertha Masons: the boy’s invalid stepgrandmother, Grandfather Phelps’s second wife, remained closeted in her sitting room, and a ghostly old-maid aunt haunted the third floor. Grandfather Phelps never seemed to absent himself from the bay window off the dining room, where he smoked, read the papers and received callers. Phelps’s euchre games with cronies often lacked a fourth, and his young grandson would be called in to play. Years later, in his memoir, Stokes would recall his loss of nerve under the gaze of three glaring old men, exacerbated by the ghoulish appearance of one Mr. Brewster, whose eyes had been damaged in a fire, so that his raw-looking lids never quite met.
Venturing ten blocks down the avenue brought Newton to the home of his other elders, Grandfather and Grandmother Stokes, his father’s parents, who had moved there from Clifton Cottage. He spent his time at 37 Madison exploring their well-stuffed attic, rummaging through wooden trunks filled with antique dresses, yellowed books and letters of another era, and wondering over a French stereopticon with views made of several thicknesses of colored paper, pricked with holes to admit light. Among the dusty relics, Grandfather Stokes kept a bicycle, known in the language of t
he period as a “bone-shaker” velocipede, which Newton’s uncle Will, Anson’s brother, bequeathed to the boy. Gardens, stables, a chicken house, an aviary and fruit trees stretched down the property from the house, and a milk cow grazed the grounds.
Family lore celebrated Grandmother Stokes’s piety. Once, it was said, she refused to wear a gown imported from abroad because it had crossed the ocean on a Sunday. Another time, traveling on the Cunard Line, she petitioned the captain to halt the ship so as to observe the Sabbath. (It was a testimony to the family’s perception of its own importance that the skipper’s refusal was seen as outrageous insubordination.) She kept a scrupulously neat house, with a homily posted in the pantry that the growing boy would remember for the rest of his life: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”
Even before the family occupied 229 Madison and Helen’s inheritance joined her husband’s assets, indulgences were commonplace. A Christmas party when Newton was seven featured that cliché of culinary privilege, a pie that had its crust removed to release a flight of doves. His mother kept a passel of marmoset monkeys. One of them nearly burned the house down playing with matches when the family attended Sunday church services. “They used to sit on her shoulder and warm their clammy little hands by putting them inside the neck of her dress,” Newton recollected later.
As eight more Stokes children followed Newton into the world, each member of the brood could count on regular treks with their mother to Tiffany’s and the fabulous new toy emporium FAO Schwarz. Newton and his brothers, Graham and Harold and Anson, formed a pack that dominated the household with a vigorous boy energy that was indulged and even celebrated by their mother. Birthdays were a time of loving, and lavish, gift-giving. Presents from Helen and Anson included gold rings set with diamonds, china figurines, leather-bound novels, silver bangles. For the occasion of his sixteenth birthday, Newton received gifts geared to his passion for the outdoors: a lantern, a book on camping cookery and a canoe.
The boys received formal equestrian instruction at Dickel’s Riding Academy, at 39th and Fifth, where the murals of Switzerland that surrounded the riding ring reminded Newton of a family trip to the Alps. He found himself aboard an ocean steamer to Europe twice before the age of ten. The newly faddish bicycle enthralled him. There was ice-skating on the artificial lake at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, in front of the Plaza Hotel. There were rides through Central Park in a big old-fashioned landau with a pleated cloth cover. On winter days, Anson Stokes might shepherd his son out in his single-seat, horse-drawn cutter sleigh along Madison Avenue, its sidewalks banked high with snow.
Years later, Newton would remember childhood trips rumbling over the cobblestones downtown to shop with his mother. He would wait in the carriage for her to emerge from Arnold, Constable & Co., in the meantime watching the peacocks strut in the yard of the Goelet mansion, across the street at 19th and Broadway. Newton experienced low and high culture in equal doses: the Barnum and Bailey Circus one day, Edwin Booth in his monumental Hamlet the next, as well as Lily Langtry in A Dream of Fair Women, Lillian Russell, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Bunnell’s Museum on 9th Street, with attractions such as the Elastic Skin Man, the Bearded Lady and the Wild Man of Borneo.
Part of privilege was being able to afford getting away from it all, including Sunday walks along still undeveloped Park Avenue, the uptown streets with fewer than a dozen vehicles in sight, and the silence at night offering the quiet of the country. The hush recalled grandfather Anson Greene Phelps’s pleasure in the “absolute retirement of the roads in the vicinity.” New York City changed at a blistering pace, but the Stokes family enclave held on beyond all reckoning.
With such nobility came noblesse oblige. A block west of Newton’s brownstone on Madison Avenue stood a row of wooden hovels. Every year, the Stokes clan saw fit to bring these unfortunates baskets of foodstuffs at Christmas. When Newton was a boy, his parents took their children to visit the Colored Orphan Asylum for a holiday celebration, held at 143rd Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway, in what was then open country. He never forgot it. The young heir felt himself struck by the institution’s sheer plainness—the whitewashed boards for walls, the rough benches, the tin plates and cups for table settings, so different from the sculptures and fountains, the china and silver, of Madison Avenue.
Central Park was Newton’s great love. He spent days exploring the newly developed eight-hundred-acre greensward. Members of the Phelps and Stokes families flew in their coaches down the winding drives, strolled in the Ramble and enjoyed such novelties as the goat carriages on the Great Mall. It was largely an oasis for the rich. The whole park served as a back yard for Newton, who sailed his model boats on the Reservoir Pond at 72nd Street.
From the ship traffic on the East River to sailing toy sloops in Central Park, and every other lovely object and engrossing activity in the surging, teeming city, it all belonged to young Newton Stokes. The one thing he lacked, as he grew to young adulthood, was someone with whom to share it.
4. Big Mary
Edith Minturn stood in a cluttered sculpture studio on West 11th Street, negligently draped in white fabric that had been styled into someone’s idea of a Grecian robe, her bare arms outstretched, her face an immobile mask, posing in what was, for the age, a state of relative undress, all for the higher purpose of Art. Thus exposed, Edith modeled for the Great Sculptor, Daniel Chester French. He worked in clay on a yard-high maquette, a preliminary figure for what would eventually become the emblematic statue of the Gilded Age.
The fall of 1891. Edie’s deflated debut into society, derailed by her family’s temporary economic reversal, had occurred six years before. Perhaps for the reason Susanna cited—that suitors would be less interested in a girl without a fortune—her coming out did not result in matrimony. Or maybe she had taken the road less traveled, enjoying freedom and independence more than the warm cocoon of convention. She had enjoyed the indulgences of New York City, visiting with friends, attending teas and balls, promenading along the avenues and park paths where young women like her went to be admired. Marriage was, for the moment, extraneous.
And her fortune had returned. Though Edith’s beloved father had died of a heart attack at age fifty-three, his last accomplishment was to restore the firm to financial health, and his family as well. The children had lost the velvet glove of their father, and were left with the iron fist of their mother. Known for her domineering personality and regal bearing, fifty-year-old Susanna Minturn’s looks had faded only a little with the years. Long after her youth, a male friend recalled her as “one of the most beautiful creatures I ever saw, with bright hair and such a carriage and a manner!” Her grandchildren carried indelible memories of an elderly Susanna sitting quietly as a maidservant drew a brush again and again through her silver locks.
The formidable Susanna was the powerhouse of the Minturn clan. A family anecdote had her stepping off a Fifth Avenue curb, parasol thrust in front of her, trusting her statuesque bearing alone to halt traffic. From the end of Edith’s adolescence on, Susanna ruled alone over the four girls and their two brothers. She disallowed all the girls but the youngest, Mildred, from obtaining the higher education that was just then becoming available for privileged women. All the Minturn daughters were expected to be literate, of course, as well as lovely, but that goal was to be accomplished through private tutoring and the attentions of their parents.
What Mildred later would term their mother’s “gigantic personality” expressed itself as frequent, physically abusive rages. Perhaps her anger stemmed in part from the loss of the treasured son, Edith’s young brother Francis. But whatever the cause, Susanna’s dictatorial nature only grew more pronounced as she grew older.
Susanna’s relentless affection for her children came accompanied by a need for control, a dynamic that would have played itself out with particular intensity in the case of her vulnerable, growing daughters. Even when the children reached adulthood, she never stopped sending them
letters crammed with admonishments and proscriptions. “Do not go out alone after dark,” Susanna wrote to one of her adult daughters. “You should never travel alone at night.” Mother always knew best.
Gertrude and Mildred, the two younger daughters, were five and seven years younger than Edith. May was two years older. The older and younger girls operated as twin pairs, whether at home or on the town or abroad. When separated, each wrote faithfully, at least weekly, to their mother, and frequently to one another.
Susanna wrote daily.
None of the daughters easily escaped the grip of their husbandless mother, and none married before the age of twenty-eight. Susanna wanted them close by her side. In the 1890s, when the Minturn girls were receiving suitors, the median age of women at first marriage hovered around twenty-two. Not to wed until twenty-eight would appear extreme, and all the more curious since Susanna’s four daughters were charming, beautiful and celebrated socially. Each daughter went through the complicated, drawn-out dance of the debut, yet none ended up with a husband. Each would marry eventually. Perhaps Susanna convinced them that waiting was all for the best, or that forgoing an early engagement allowed them the independence they needed to explore the world, something that she would help them do.
Susanna was a manipulator par excellence, demanding unequivocal attention from her progeny. When Edith attempted to tear herself away from the family bosom, her mother’s response was typically grasping. In a letter to Mildred after Edith’s betrothal (at age twenty-eight) she would write, “May and I wonder how we shall feel when Edith leaves this roof with her husband. Oh, my—won’t it be dreadful?”
Still, Edith had managed to break away at intervals. In 1887 she had journeyed, in the company of men as well as women, to tour the Civil War battlefields of the South. A breathless society reporter writing about the expedition would describe the group as traveling “from Gettysburg to Appomattox Court House.”
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