TO FILL THE empty space at the center of his life with Edith, Newton turned to collecting. What was to become a lifelong passion ramped up in this period to an obsessive frenzy. The money was there, the objects were there, and Newton Stokes set about exchanging the one for the other with an almost comic energy. Later, his collection addiction became less indiscriminate, more serious and focused, and would comprise one of the great accomplishments of Manhattan historiography. In the early 1900s, though, it was all for personal amusement, and he purchased cars, boats, bicycles and motorbikes.
Like his father, Newton coveted fine boats. In 1899, he commissioned a yawl from the nationally renowned naval architect Bowdoin Crowninshield. He insisted that the builder observe his traditional taste, and would have nothing to do with the Gloriana, a newfangled forty-six-foot cutter with a long, overhanging bow of the kind that became all the rage in the 1890s. “I want a comfortable little cruiser,” he emphasized, “not over nineteen feet on the water line. I am too old-fashioned in my ideas to admire the Gloriana bows.”
In autumn 1898, Newton purchased one of the first fifty gasoline automobiles made in the United States, a Winton one-cylinder. He quickly disposed of the putt-putt only a month later after a slight disappointment with its performance. Then Newton tried a White steamer, which he rejected as soon as he realized it needed to be pushed up hills. Next up was something called a U.S. Long Distance, from a firm in Jersey City. He crashed the $2,000 machine into the side of a barn on his first foray out. The fourth time was the charm. “I bought a good car,” he wrote in his memoir, not specifying the make, “hired a chauffeur, and never looked back.”
Throughout the first decade of the new century, the pace of Newton’s purchasing picked up. Correspondence between Newton and his suppliers shows the scope and the eclectic quality of his mania:
a new Kodak De Luxe in 1902; Newton wished, he wrote, “to have the most complete and perfect pocket camera securable”
an Art Graflex camera made by the Folmer & Schwing Manufacturing Company in 1905
repairs to revamp a 1906 Packard in 1908: “Your car has been taken carefully apart,” wrote the manufacturer, “and we are confident that by replacing said parts your car will be in first class condition”
a marble basket of fruit in 1906, from a Madison Avenue art gallery
a Singer “Motor Bicycle and Trailer” in 1903
a two-cylinder automobile from Waltham Manufacturing in 1907
a Dill Stanhope car in 1903
a stone fireplace from an art dealer in Bath, England, in 1910
a mahogany and gilt frame for $45
a Tiffany suitcase made to his specifications, over whose imperfections he had a prolonged epistolary tussle with the company
a sixteenth-century terracotta medallion in 1907
a Japanese jinrikisha, or rickshaw, from a dealer in Asian art in 1908
an engraving of London at the time of the Great Fire
a bright red runabout in the latest style, with a dos-a-dos seat upholstered in black leather, purchased at an auto show
The collectibles that most interested Newton included Japanese “automata,” mechanical, decorative dolls that Newton and Edith displayed in a glass case near the entryway of every residence they occupied. The rudimentary robots appealed to the tinkerer in him. He still considered himself an inventor, as he was when, as a teenager, he created a crude rotary phone and a working lead-plated storage battery.
Collecting was not his only outlet. For years, Newton tried seriously to develop a product he called Suspenderettes, a sort of advanced form of trouser suspenders that involved an intricate relationship of clasp and pin. The effort culminated in a licensing agreement with the Nealon Corporation in 1904. The contract scratched both backs. Nealon agreed to manufacture sample Suspenderettes on an exploratory basis, and Newton agreed to buy stock in Nealon at the same time.
These were the exertions of a young man who was somewhat in flux in the world, or, less kindly, a young man with a surfeit of money and too much time on his hands. Did it matter how he spent the family inheritance? Probably not. But his devotion to relentless acquisition hints at an obsessive streak that would only deepen later. Whatever he did, he did with an intensity of focus. When he and Edith took a vacation in Italy in the winter and spring of 1905, he didn’t just import a few jugs of Chianti for his wine cellar. Instead, Newton brought back fifty liters of red wine in casks. He then had the vino decanted, as per his particular order, in half-pint bottles.
It was also around this time that Newton began to explore his interest in Greek and Roman sculpted heads. His and Edith’s collection would become a fascination for him much later in life. He importuned a dealer in April 1906: “I don’t care for anything unless it is really good. Not necessarily in good preservation. Even a fragment by a master hand is, of course, interesting.”
The couple’s trip to Italy was not strictly for leisure but for research. Newton had been commissioned in 1904 by Columbia University to design an interdenominational chapel. St. Paul’s would be the first on its grounds not created by McKim, Mead & White, which had laid out the new campus on 116th Street ten years before. Newton enjoyed an inside track on the commission, which was made possible by a donation from Newton’s aunts Olivia and Caroline. Anson’s sisters proposed St. Paul’s as a memorial to their parents, with the proviso that their nephew design the structure.
Completed in 1907, the diminutive chapel’s Renaissance design continues to garner acclaim a century later for its beacon-like green dome, its Italianate authenticity, its aged-brick Guastavino vaults and its splendid acoustics. The wrought-iron gates through which visitors entered had been imported from the North Dutch Reformed Church, which stood until 1875 on Manhattan’s William Street, a few blocks from the Stokes family headquarters. The gates represented a vital piece of New York’s heritage that would almost certainly have been destroyed without the young architect’s salvage effort.
Newton accepted the final product as an accurate measure of its creator’s talents. Columbia’s St. Paul’s Chapel stood designed, as he told his aunts, “with nothing false or deceptive.” As an architect, he would not limit himself to a single genre, whether it be a charming chapel, an apartment house for the poor or a buttoned-up office building.
SOMEONE, DECIDED THE Tenement House Committee of the Charity Organization Society, would have to make the models. The best and only candidate? The meticulous-verging-on-obsessive young Newton Stokes. The models were the centerpiece of an exhibition that the architect had brainstormed, researched and pushed to fruition. Newton and his colleagues set up three floors of exhibits designed to illustrate the vile conditions of the poor in Manhattan and the ways in which new housing designs might mitigate those conditions.
In his models, Newton constructed his vision in miniature: the claustrophobic, contagious slum tenement and the open, well-ventilated, sunlit apartments he espoused. It would all be there, an eloquent argument in 3-D, put forth to persuade the public, especially Newton’s wealthy friends, to do the right thing.
The exhibit would be displayed at the popular Sherry restaurant, at Fifth Avenue and 37th Street, usually a setting of debutante balls, benefits and cotillions. An inspired stroke, that, since the restaurant would allow visitors not only to remain in their comfort zone but to feel as though they were making a scene that was somewhat chic. At the Sherry it would all be laid out for them, the inescapable truth. The blue bloods could not be dragged to the Lower East Side to see the thing itself, so Newton would bring the mountain to Mohammed. What they encountered would be overwhelming: a thousand photographs covering the walls, a hundred heavily coded maps, diagrams and charts, the misery of the wretched of the world, distilled into three floors of exhibits.
In the middle of it all, tables with the models Newton had painstakingly put together with his own hands, a mini-Manhattan as it was experienced by the poor. Problem, solution. For example, tumbledown tenement A, the world as i
t was. Brilliantly conceived new housing design B, the world as it could be.
Upon completion of the Settlement House, Newton banded together with an action committee of reformers, including that documentarian of the downtrodden, Jacob Riis, and the financier Andrew Carnegie. They had already made a run at the city council, trotting out their charts and designs before a collection of Tammany Hall aldermen. But Tammany was in the landlords’ pocket, and vice versa, so the reformers were essentially laughed out of the room. Housing reform? That’s a good one, gentlemen. Now run along.
Newton concluded that without pressure from the wealthy and powerful, no progress was possible. First things first: the well-off of the city needed to be educated in the ills of tenement life. Eminently rational Newton believed that if his peers only knew the facts and understood the conditions, reform would inevitably follow. But he would have to rub their faces in it. Thus the Sherry.
Tenement slums. A collection of scabs on the flank of Manhattan, sick, murderous, unconscionable. For the origin of the phenomenon, Newton fixed a specific year, 1833, and even a specific dwelling: a structure on Water Street, built by one James P. Allaire, the “first house built exclusively for the occupation of tenant families.”
Allaire’s entry into the housing market consisted of four floors, each with a single suite of rooms. The design for this first tenement was spacious compared to the dimensions of chronically cramped later ones. Nevertheless, Allaire’s folly represented an abrupt departure from the one-family domicile, from colonial times the accepted type of dwelling in New York. Living chock-a-block with strangers was an arrangement to which only the most desperate would resort.
The slumification of Manhattan would intensify as the grid street plan of 1811 marched up the island. The plan dictated 2,000 blocks, each a uniform 200 by 800 feet. Profit depended upon how many bodies could be squeezed into each lot. Tenement apartments were stacked, cloned and doubled. In order to cram more housing into limited space, alleyways were dispensed with, forcing garbage collection onto the streets and sidewalks. Over time landlords chopped and subdivided further, carving up the old, gracious one-family houses of Manhattan’s past and creating rickety new structures built expressly as tenements. In addition to the street-facing building, a structure known as a back tenement materialized in the rear courtyard. Squeezed between the walls of their poorly built apartments, tenants suffered fires and epidemics. Hundreds of residents shared a single wooden latrine in the yard between tenements.
By the time of Newton’s Sherry restaurant exhibit, conditions had only worsened. Fully seventy percent of Manhattanites lived in tenements. New York City could boast the highest population density in the world, averaging 143 residents per acre (Paris was a distant rival, at 125 per acre). The Lower East Side had become the most congested neighborhood on the island, with an almost unfathomable density of 800 residents per acre.
Tenement apartments such as the ones Riis photographed and Newton took action to reform had a uniformity that was born of deprivation. A step through the typical doorway would find you in the kitchen, with a cold water sink and a table. No windows. The parlor served as the main public space, though several family members might bunk there. If the apartment doubled as a home sweatshop, it also might have a work area, positioned to catch the light from the two windows facing the street. Through another door, one or two windowless bedrooms.
In each flat as many as a dozen people slept on beds, couches, or—commonly—on a bedroll under the kitchen table. None of the apartments had indoor plumbing, gas for cooking or electricity. Lightless stairwells and lobbies had worn, trip-hazardous flooring. Coal stoves were all that kept families warm, and the coal had to be hauled up those treacherous stairs. Tenants used kerosene or oil lamps to throw a dim light. Day or night, they descended up to six flights of stairs to use the wooden privy in the back courtyard, a cramped, filthy space where tenants did their laundry and children played in the dirt alongside the latrine.
Newton earnestly attempted to bring home the reality in his small-scale models. One model displayed a “dumbbell” apartment, a former award-winning design attempting to improve on tenement housing that turned out to have disastrous drawbacks. The dumbbell building had sliver-like air shafts piercing its hundred-foot length. But the shafts instantly became monstrous trash receptacles, functioning only as banquets for rats. All apartments in the building had to live with the odor of whatever was putrefying down below.
Landlords loved dumbbells, which saved them money while supposedly offering light and air to their tenants. Tenants endured them. One reform architect, a cohort on the committee, called the dumbbell “the worst curse that ever afflicted any great community.” Newton’s model ingeniously demonstrated the design’s drawbacks, displaying the decreasing availability of light and ventilation on the lower floors as well as the firetrap character of the middle hallway.
With glue, paper and balsa, Newton also constructed an intricate scale-model block of “old-law” housing, built before 1867, when legislation required certain modifications in tenement design. In a chart accompanying the model, viewers bore witness to the facts: 2,781 people in 605 dwellings, 1,588 rooms, with 441 of those completely lightless and 635 facing air shafts. One hundred sixty-four water closets served the block’s whole population, for a ratio of sixteen persons per john. There was not a single bathtub.
Most troubling, perhaps, were the “death-maps” of the Lower East Side displayed on the third floor of the Sherry. Organizers marked specific buildings with black dots to indicate how many fatalities had occurred there from tuberculosis, typhoid and diphtheria.
The exhibit opened on February 10, 1900. The next day, a New York Times review extolled the show. In a bit of probably unintended irony, the review shared space on the page with a puff piece describing a “brilliant ball,” a high-society carnival “intent on the pleasure of the hour,” dazzling with symbolic floats, a seventy-two-person ballet and a flower temple decked out in thousands of electric lights.
Then something remarkable happened: the exhibit was an unlikely hit. It did exactly what it was intended to do, sparking reform, helping visitors fathom the sometimes fatal repercussions of bad housing for Manhattan’s working poor. Over the course of two weeks, ten thousand people trooped through the Sherry’s three floors. Faces were rubbed raw with the truth. The top half witnessed how the other half lived, and blanched at the sight. Within the year, Governor Theodore Roosevelt convened the New York State Tenement House Commission, a body whose job would be to thoroughly detail the crisis and propose solutions. Newton Stokes served as the group’s architectural adviser, and sat on three of its committees, one of which he chaired.
The commission represented a peak experience in the young architect’s life. In a typically dry locution, he would recall “with interest and satisfaction” the many hours he spent “whipping the law into semi-final shape for submission to the commission.” On February 18, 1901, the group presented its report to Roosevelt. Two months later, the Tenement House Act, a.k.a. “the New Law,” became a revolutionary reality.
Credited with saving thousands of lives, the new rules created a series of building codes to transform low-income housing. The New Law forced Lower East Side landlords to cut some 350,000 windows into lightless, airless rooms. Lamps must illuminate every staircase. Owners must install at least one toilet for every two apartments. Every building must have a courtyard with adequate space for tenants, a requirement that forced builders of new tenements to use drastically different plans. The stricture all but banned the construction of buildings on 2,500-foot lots.
Finally, the dumbbell fell. Newton Stokes gloried in the hand he had taken in its demise.
EDITH HELD HER own in the department of good works, accepting, in 1900, the appointment by New York Mayor Robert Van Wyck to be a school inspector for the twelfth district. Adhering to the close-mouthed stance of her tribe, she “refused to discuss her appointment last evening,” according to the Ne
w York Times on Dec. 27. The next year, Edith assumed the presidency of the Women’s Municipal League. With a founding impetus from Edith’s aunt Josephine Shaw Lowell, the league charged itself originally with educating women about their civic responsibilities, with the idea of strengthening the municipality of New York. A charity specialty of those women who today might be dismissed as “ladies who lunch,” the group took on an array of causes, opposing white slavery one year, noxious automobile exhaust another, excoriating billboard pollution, advocating separate subway cars for women.
So, yes, good works all around. But there was something else, too, the elephant in the room, the situation that Susanna, with uppercase emphasis, referred to as “the Problem.” Edith’s husband, Newton the stoic, suffered in silence, but Edith could hear her mother and sisters say it out loud. “Edith would make such a good mother,” they all said. Trying to be nice, but only drawing attention to the Problem.
Her two-dimensional selves mocked her in the paintings by Sargent and Beaux. Life was so beautiful in that world, so serene. Nothing troubled her there. Procreation, sex, womanhood as opposed to maidenhood, all the messy stuff existed only in the abstract. The wispy tip of her engagement ring would never be varnished away.
In the real, three-dimensional world down in Gramercy Park, the Problem moved in and set up housekeeping. Edith remained strong and capable as always, her beauty undimmed. As the new century came on, she went about Manhattan trying to make things better for people, schoolchildren and tenement dwellers and girls sold into sexual slavery. The farm, up on the windy hill above Greenwich, delightfully engaged her love of nature.
She loved her husband. Her fierce self was intact, but wounded. She simply could not find a way out of this. The Problem. The Predicament. The Puzzle.
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