Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  Something else, too, argued in favor of baby Helen: this might be their only opportunity to have a child.

  They were both highly engaged people, with interests, activities and commitments. The addition of a child, one already out of infancy, seemed sensible, neat, circumscribed. Parenthood without the muss and fuss. Familiarity with the genteel heritage of the child in question rendered the consideration all the easier. There was no fallen woman here, no possibility of a bad seed, a belief still common.

  Newton and Edith made no rush to decision. They would go to Britain and pay a visit to Miss Bax-Ironside. In October 1906, they sailed from Manhattan to London, an ocean voyage of a good two weeks. No commitments, of course. Simply an exploratory visit.

  But in the presence of the little creature, reason and reserve collapsed. When Edith came through the front door of Herendon House, she went blind to everything but baby Helen, round and smiling and seemingly waiting just for her. The decision made itself, immediately, instantly and irrevocably. Newton was thrilled that his wife was thrilled. It hurt not at all that the child came equipped with a wonderful English nurse.

  Stokes wrote his aunts about the arrival of “little Helen,” a “dear, sweet baby, full of life and fun,” with “pretty manners.” Adoption statutes were new at that time, but progressive-minded Newton and Edith had formal papers issued in New York on January 14, 1908. Unmoored as her young life had been so far, baby Helen had her financial future secured when Newton took out a trusteeship with the Equitable Life Assurance Company in her name, guaranteeing his adopted daughter a fixed income for as long as she lived.

  Shortly after her arrival, Helen makes an appearance in a reunion photograph of the Stokes clan, taken at their Birch Island retreat. The whole brood is present. Newton’s sisters and sisters-in-law have settled themselves on the floor, the females of the family holding their various children, babies and toddlers, eight all told. Backing them up stand the young male scions, gazing staunchly at the camera. Behind Anson and Helen in their wing chairs stands Edith, leaning confidently forward with clasped hands. Beside her is black-bearded Newton, holding aloft Helen in her pouf of child-dress white.

  Edith and Newton’s relationship with their daughter’s birth family remained somewhat iconoclastic, an open adoption by today’s lights. Some months after Helen came to her new parents, the baby’s aunt and three siblings sailed to America to spend the summer with the Stokeses. They loved the swimming pool at Round Hill Road and also learned to “rough it” on Birch Island. In the years to come, Newton and Edith would travel overseas to visit with Helen’s aunt and the trio of young Bax-Ironsides, and would welcome them back to America as well.

  Shadowbrook, once the largest house in America.

  John Singer Sargent in his studio. (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)

  Newton, Edith and friend (Courtesy of Lithgow Osborne)

  Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes by Cecilia Beaux (From the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Newton P. S. Merrill)

  "View of the City and Harbour of New York, taken from Mt. Pitt" by Saint-Mémin (Collection of the New-York Historical Society)

  Newton's rendering of High-Low (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University)

  Edith (left) with unidentifi ed woman (Courtesy of Lithgow Osborne)

  I. N. Phelps Stokes by Dewitt Lockman, 1930 (Collection of the New-York Historical Society)

  Despite his absorption in caring for a lively baby, it was at just the time of Helen’s adoption that Newton embarked on his greatest enterprise, one that would become much like the adoption of another child. But unlike the adoption of Helen, it was not a decision he made with a lot of logical thought. Creating buildings continued to earn income that Edith and he relied upon, especially now, with little Helen. But increasingly he turned to another occupation that stimulated his imagination to a new degree.

  THE GREATEST CELEBRATION New York City had ever known changed Edith and Newton’s lives forever. For three weeks in fall 1909, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration rolled out in a series of parades, regattas and grand exhibitions. It was all New York, all Manhattan, all the time, the great and glorious city at the center of the world.

  The occasion was something of a fabrication, a random conflation of two historical events that occurred around two hundred years apart. In 1609, Henry Hudson became the first European to sail up the river that bears his name. Two centuries later, Robert Fulton’s steamboat, the Clermont, made its first commercial passage, from Manhattan to Albany. The relation between the two events was proximate and largely imagined (they both had to do with boats, the Hudson, New York, etc.). But the age had a mania for transportation, and the civic buttons were bursting with the wish to celebrate something, so the Hudson-Fulton Celebration it was.

  A million visitors descended on New York. Seventy-five thousand children took part. Thousands of spectators watched a history-themed parade that included fifty floats proceeding in chronological order through the streets of the city. There was the Stamp Act of 1765 float, say, followed by one for Washington’s Farewell to his Officers, and then the Statue of Liberty. Some tableaux were more mythic than historic, with only a glancing relationship to the matter at hand. Saint Nicholas brought his sleigh and reindeer. Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle alternately slumbered and awoke.

  When people gazed upward they witnessed a real wonder of the age. Wilbur Wright of the Wright Brothers became the first aviator to fly a plane over the Hudson, taking thirty-three glorious minutes to transit from Governors Island to Grant’s Tomb, making a neat circle around the Statue of Liberty en route. As a fail-safe, Wright lashed a canoe to the bottom of his biplane in the event he made an emergency landing in New York harbor.

  As was the case with Chicago’s Columbian Exhibition, what caused the most excitement arose from a seemingly simple yet novel commodity: electric light. In 1882, Thomas Edison opened a power station in downtown Manhattan to supply electricity to eighty-five buildings, including the stock exchange and the offices of the New York Times. Still, by 1909 only three out of ten homes in the city were wired. For the Hudson-Fulton extravaganza, the city hired ten thousand workers to add electric sparkle to its bridges and buildings.

  For those few weeks in the fall, New York became the City of Light. City hall, the Washington Square arch and the four spans over the East River were all alight, and the parade route, which stretched from 4th to 110th Street, blazed with twenty-five thousand bulbs. Across the Hudson, the Palisades became a light show, with a hundred searchlights of several thousand candlepower illuminating its dramatic crags.

  The lights dazzled, the pageantry commemorated, and the civic virtue thoroughly congratulated itself. Numerous small touches were lost amid the hullabaloo at the time, but they live on today. Most spectacular, perhaps, in the long-term scheme of things were the two thousand cherry trees planted along Riverside Drive, a gift of a group called the Japanese Residents of New York. All told, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration was, in the words of the Times, “an occasion for enthusiasm, without misgivings.”

  Two opposing aspects of the festivities deeply affected Newton Stokes. He felt gripped with a renewed love for his hometown, brave, sprawling, unstoppable New York. And at the same time he had a sense of bewilderment, panic almost, that the early history of the city was being lost. He saw it happening right before his eyes. Didn’t anyone else grasp what was going on? The Hudson-Fulton Celebration gloried in the city’s history, but it also threw into high relief how fragile it all was.

  More than any other great urban center, New York lived in an eternal present. London, Paris, Rome—they were all steeped in time, in the passage of centuries, of millennia. New York City had a mayfly’s sense of its own past. For too many of the businessmen Newton knew, including virtually every man in his family, the only history of any importance was contained in a bank statement or a balance sheet.

  Who could stand against the churning, charging-bull commercialism that f
lattened everything before it? Who would tell the story of New York City?

  JUST AS HUDSON-FULTON mania began to accelerate, an itinerant dealer in lithographs appeared at the Stokes family offices on lower Broadway. The dealer might have known that in one of the occupants he had a mark. Newton had dabbled in such prints before, buying one here and there, receiving one as a gift from his mother. Purchased, accepted, admired, filed away, forgotten. Such was the scattershot nature of his collecting.

  But on this singular afternoon, Newton happened not to be busy. Not precisely at leisure, as the phrase would have it, but with enough spare time to go through the dealer’s prints in a focused way. One engraving impressed him immediately, a 1673 version of “Nieuw Amsterdam View, with Ships,” by Carolus Allard, from his atlas Orbis Habitabilis. He spent the fifteen dollars the dealer asked.

  The Allard was a prize, to be sure. It would come to be known as “the fourth view of New York,” the “Restitutio [restoration] View,” an especially fine early engraving of the city from the perspective of Brooklyn Heights. A scene from over two centuries in the past, dated the last full year of the Dutch occupation of Manhattan, it demonstrated beautifully the maritime richness of the island.

  But more than the artwork itself was Newton’s experience of perusing the dealer’s stock of prints, the quiet of the midday office, the whispery rustle of heavyweight paper as the dealer took away one offering and substituted the next. He spent a long hour getting swept back in a time machine to Old New York.

  “As a result,” Newton recalled later, “my dormant interest became keenly aroused.”

  It was as if a ghostly hand had materialized and tapped Newton on the shoulder. That experience with the dealer showed him that there were countless depictions out there, slumbering in the hands of people who did not even know what they had, spectacular, little-seen “views,” rare prints of the early life of the city. More for the taking.

  That same winter, as Hudson-Fulton rolled toward Manhattan, another tap on the shoulder, another exposure to the contagion of history. Edith and Newton spent an evening at the home of Richard Townley Haines Halsey. A successful stockbroker, R.T.H. Halsey almost single-handedly triggered a craze for Americana; his interest would eventually culminate in his founding of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum. The man had an amazing eye. Guests knew when they went to Halsey’s townhouse they would encounter exquisite objets, artworks and rarities.

  A pair of engraved views by an artist named Saint-Mémin grabbed Edith and Newton’s attention. Created in 1796, the “View of the City and Harbour of New York, taken from Mt. Pitt, the seat of John R. Livingston, Esq.” was a picture as simple as its title was cumbersome. Though it was more than one hundred years old, the freshness and purity of its colors acted upon Newton in a way none of the previous pictures he’d collected had.

  Charles Balthazar Julien Fevret de Saint-Mémin produced the piece shortly after arriving in New York, at the age of twenty-three. The young Frenchman befriended Livingston and made a drawing of the landscape from the porch of his house fronting on Grand Street. The promontory called Mount Pitt, in the neighborhood we now know as the Lower East Side, in that distant past existed as a fashionable resort. Even in 1908 the spot was barely remembered by New Yorkers.

  Saint-Mémin did not consider himself an artist at all. But his new patron Livingston introduced him to the public library, where he learned from an encyclopedia the principles of engraving. Soon thereafter, he completed the etched, hand-colored “View of New York.” Saint-Mémin would go on to become one of the great miniaturists of his time, in a generation that treasured the diminutive portrait as an art form. He would depict senators, merchants and such luminaries as Jefferson and the explorers Lewis and Clark, all meticulously rendered with the aid of a device he called a “physiognotrace.”

  In the artist’s first effort at engraving, which Edith and Newton encountered that evening at Halsey’s, the eastern flank of Manhattan Island presents itself in a pastoral panorama. Under a cloudhead of light mocha, the action of the view spreads and flows outward, anchored by a tall oak in the foreground. To the right midground stands a yellow farmhouse and its adjacent red barn, bounded by a split-rail fence that bisects the frame. Beyond the fence, the harbor lies flat under the clouds, with a hamlet of black-roofed, pastel houses in the center and, behind it, a web of ship masts.

  Later, Newton would study the geography of each feature of the Saint-Mémin print in the context of the historical record. He discovered that the canvas was as precise as a road map. The yellow farmhouse stood at the junction of Clinton, Hester and Division streets, and the black-roofed settlement huddled in front of the U.S. Navy Yard. He could not physically enter the world of the past, but Saint-Mémin presented him with the next-best thing.

  What riveted Edith and Newton on this first viewing was something more visceral. Saint-Mémin the future miniaturist worked his magic. Alongside the fence, seemingly a tiny dot on the face of the picture, a pair of horses pull a coach. In the foreground, two figures walk along the rutted dirt road that dominates the center of the print (Clinton Street, it would turn out). A somnambulant bull reclines in an open pasture, and the smaller of the two figures ever so delicately raises his arm, as if to wave to Edith and Newton, viewers in a later century. In the halloo of Saint-Mémin’s two tiny figures, Old New York lived. The past was alive.

  “What modern mind,” Newton would wonder, “could refuse to be impressed by the early portrait of some tiny hamlet which has since become an important city? Can there be anyone so callous, and so lacking in romance?”

  MANHATTAN, America’s great masterpiece, has generated its share of masterpieces. Any listing is necessarily incomplete. But a six-volume, thirty-nine-pound book, wholly singular though little known, stands as one of the greatest tributes to New York City ever created. Titled The Iconography of Manhattan Island, the massive, maddening, oddly enchanting work was the product of the increasing mania and ultimately ruinous obsession of Newton Stokes, sparked by the lithograph of Saint-Mémin.

  From that eureka moment came a simple premise: Collect every map, every view, every fact, every detail about Old New York. Research the city’s beginnings. Bind it all together in a book of exquisite quality.

  The work came into the world haltingly, volume by volume, beginning in 1915 and staggering to an end, exhausting its creator’s fortune, health and grip on sanity, in 1928. A tortuous gestation, an outrageously prolonged birth leading to a shelf life of unremitting obscurity. Yet the Iconography is truly a monument, one of the few individual works in existence that could be said to do full justice to the multitudinous subject of Manhattan.

  The closest comparison might be to that idiosyncratic oddity of the Middle Ages, the cabinet of wonders. In a period when discovery was just beginning to expand the horizons of the European world, erudite collectors, usually noble and often staggeringly wealthy, acquired from afar rare and deemed-to-be-magical objects. The collectors then arrayed their wonders in purpose-built rooms (“cabinets”). Ostrich eggs, nautilus shells and “unicorn horns” took their places among other natural curios.

  Although the style of the Iconography was rational, as rational as a book based around pictures could ever be, the cumulative effect of its volumes had something of the flavor of a modern-day cabinet of wonders. Newton Stokes collected marvels, too, only his were two-dimensional, man-made and inscribed on sheets of finest-quality Japan paper. As with the collectors of a former age, his approach was encyclopedic, sprawling—promiscuous and at the same time brutally discerning. Like Walt Whitman, the Iconography contains multitudes. And like his medieval forebears, Newton felt an urgency about expanding his collection of wonders, even when his cabinets were clearly full to overflowing.

  PART THREE

  14. Silent Bearers of Many a Half-Read Message

  Their daughter turned four years old in 1909, the year of the Hudson-Fulton festivities, becoming her own little person. “We are enj
oying her immensely,” Newton wrote to his brother-in-law. Laid up with typhus at home, Newton was already buying prints. He and Edith felt a sweet sense of peace and equilibrium, with their child, their work, their two lovely homes.

  Edith, for her part, bound herself ever tighter to the child. Her maternal feelings expressed themselves in typical progressive fashion. Like many a committed mother after her, Edith would extrapolate from the specific (her child) to the general (all children). She sought to improve the quality of Helen’s world by reforming how society itself approached childhood.

  The most progressive child-rearing movement of the day came out of Germany, the brainchild of the teacher-philosopher Friedrich Froebel, who launched his movement 1837 with the then extreme notion that children could learn best not through rote repetition but through doing. Although “kindergarten” might to our ears have an innocent ring, in the early years of the twentieth century the idea represented a model of insurgency.

  Edith embraced the cause. She joined a group of New York radicals and feminists in spearheading the reform of immigrant education, using the kindergarten concept as a means of altering the enmeshed dynamics of class and power. The New York Kindergarten Association was founded in 1889 with the basic goal of taking the children of the tenements off the streets, allowing mothers who worked to drop off their children and feel confident that they would receive instruction and medical attention if they needed it. Activists called themselves “kindergarteners,” seemingly as a show of solidarity with their charges. Edith would serve for twenty years as the association’s president.