by Daniel Wakin
Little is known about the next fifteen years or so in Davis’s life, but he must have learned something about the dry goods business, manufacturing, and acquiring capital, enough to establish a baking powder producer in either 1878, 1879, or 1881, depending on which account you believe. He called it the R. B. Davis Company. The company’s first location was at 112 Murray Street in lower Manhattan, after which it moved to 15 Hudson Street, then 90–92 West Broadway. In 1890, R. B. established a factory in Hoboken; the corporate offices joined it during World War I. The R. B. Davis Company also made cornstarch and cocomalt, a heavily advertised powdered chocolate drink, and distributed Cut-Rite Waxed Paper.
At thirty-eight, having just set up his business, Davis decided it was time to find a wife. On May 31, 1881, he married Jennie Weed nine days after her eighteenth birthday. Their only child, Lucretia, affectionately known as Lulu, was born four years later.
By the turn of the century, R. B. was a prosperous businessman, known as the Baking Powder King, with a much younger wife and a daughter in her twenties. In 1905, he joined the pioneering wealthy who saw a Riverside address as a sign of prestige, acquiring the most elaborate and Parisian of Farley’s buildings, No. 330.
It was a beauty, but in one way an odd one. The facade on Riverside Drive is technically the public face of the building, the first in the row of townhouses. It is well proportioned, with each floor distinguished by a different style of windows, and with symmetrical variations within each row. The third floor has an elegant stone balcony topped with a broken pediment. But there is no entrance on Riverside Drive. The south side, on 105th, has the grand entryway and a long, grandiose canvas of architectural elements on what is essentially the side wall of a typically sized townhouse.
A large frame lined by small quoins (ornamental stone slabs) rises up to the top floor from the doorway, which is positioned about three quarters of the way to the western end of the building and is topped by imposing brackets. The windows and balconies above the doorway vary in form from the rest of the facade. A large cartouche—that indispensable Beaux-Arts decorative oval surrounded by scrollwork and designed to display a family’s ancient coat of arms—crowns the frame above the fourth floor. (Needless to say, ancient coats of arms are not common on Upper West Side cartouches.) Horizontal cuts—called rustications in architecture-speak—score the limestone facade on the first floor, which presents a solid, almost fortress-like attitude. Quoining on the side walls reins in a frolic of ornamental brackets, balconies of metal and stone, carved acanthus leaves, and pediments on the front facade, which in the upper floors is faced with light tan brick.
To the right of the entryway is a facade punctuated by four bays. Grilles and metal balconies adorn the windows. A mansard roof bedecked with cartouches and arched dormers sits atop the building. A one-story conservatory separates No. 330 from the building to the east on 105th Street, with the space above the conservatory providing air and light for the stories above. It is the most detailed and high-quality work by Janes & Leo on the block, a showcase of Beaux-Arts technique. “This selective use of ornament underscores the care taken in every aspect of the design of a building such as this to create a coherent and dignified whole,” the City Landmarks Preservation Commission said.
But whatever happiness R. B. managed to enjoy there evaporated within a few years. The home became a scene of scandal and discord.
In the fall of 1910, after nearly three decades of marriage, Davis sued his wife Jennie for divorce. The newspaper narratives cast Jennie as the villain. They portrayed her as a manipulative conniver and their marriage as a rancorous, even bizarre, union. Davis charged that Jennie tried to have him declared insane so she could seize his business, accusing her of telephoning executives of the company to say he was losing his mind. She intercepted his mail while keeping him trapped in his house under the surveillance of nurses. Was he insane? Not at all, retorted the old soldier. Just look at the success of his baking powder business.
Then there was the Harry problem.
According to an account in the New York Times, the Davis marriage “had been happy until his house became crowded with his wife’s relatives. And he especially names Harry W. Weed,” mistaking the middle initial. Harry H. Weed was the baby of the family, the last of seven children, thirteen years younger than his sister Jennie, and her pet. The clan came from Montour Falls, in upstate New York, seventy-five miles from R. B.’s birthplace of Pompey. It’s probably true that Weed family members were frequent guests at 330 Riverside—at least they were after R. B. moved out, according to the family’s letters. But Harry seems particularly to have gotten under R. B.’s skin. The divorce complaint said that while Davis was sick, “his wife would nag him and Weed irritate him into bursts of temper, which were further aggravated when Weed began taking stenographic notes of his language” to use as evidence of his insanity. The Weed siblings supposedly tried to force R. B. into a depression by showing him a doctor’s report indicating that he had tuberculosis.
But the reference to Weed lingered and acquired a salacious cast. The implication was that Weed and his sister were just a little too close, more so than was healthy between siblings. The rumor has rankled the Weed family to this day. Harry’s granddaughter, Brenda Steffon, dismissed the idea. “They were just siblings who held an affinity for each other,” she said. “That relationship tainted R. B.,” she said.
Back during the legal battle, R. B. sought to dramatize the extent of his abuse, twice recounting what he described as daring escapes from his own house. Once, he said he dropped a letter to a friend from a fourth-floor window, asking for help. The friend sent a car, and Davis said he slipped out when the servants were distracted by clearing his dinner dishes, and headed for another home he owned, in Summit, New Jersey. Then he engineered an escape from the Summit house, dressed as a doctor and accompanied by two nurses in uniform. His destination was Los Angeles, where he filed the divorce case. A year after filing, Davis backed away from his more corrosive charges, telling the court that his wife had merely grown tired of him.
Part of the dispute involved R. B.’s will. A letter introduced in court from Jennie, addressed to “Bob,” complained that Davis’s bequest would reduce the annual living allowance to Lucretia, who lived in the house, from $20,000 to $9,600. “Unless you change this, I shall be compelled to allow Lucretia to go on the stage, and you will be responsible if she falls into the many pitfalls of that career and becomes a low woman,” Jennie Davis wrote. “It costs $40,000 a year to run the New York house. You must let us have more money after you are gone.” The letter was reported in newspapers at the time but the writing style, and its salutation to “Bob,” raise some suspicion. Neither matches original letters from Jennie that have survived. But more on these doubts in a moment.
The press introduced another element into the Davis battle: an affair between R. B. and his nurse, identified as “Miss Arthur.” Referring to the Davises, the Washington Post said in a dispatch that “their difficulties are well known among their friends in the East.” The article continued, “The friends have no hesitancy in declaring that the septuagenarian is eager for a divorce, so that he may marry Miss Arthur, his nurse.” Certainly rumors about an affair between the two were circulating. R. B. asserted Jennie believed them. Privately, Jennie denied ever seeing Miss Arthur as a threat, calling R. B. “such a damned ass” for making the claim, according to a letter from Jennie to Harry several years later.
Jennie and Lucretia, who remained close, headed out to the coast for the legal case. They brought along their lawyer, Delphin Delmas, who had recently been involved in one of the most sensational cases of the time: the murder of the architect Stanford White. Delmas had defended the man who killed him, the eccentric millionaire Harry K. Thaw. Thaw shot the architect out of jealousy for White’s affair years earlier with Thaw’s wife, the showgirl Evelyn Nesbit. The case notably introduced the public to Nesbit as the “girl in the Red Velvet Swing,” a reference to an access
ory in White’s love nest. Delmas managed to win his client a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, even though Thaw had shot White in a crowded theater and cheerfully admitted it. Delmas scored a temporary victory for Jennie in Los Angeles when a judge ruled against R. B. on the grounds that he did not have legal residence in California.
Jennie filed her own motion for financial support pending the divorce, demanding a $5,000-a-month stipend—the equivalent of about $115,000 today. The judge, Walter Bordwell of Superior Court in Los Angeles, denied the request, saying she did not deserve the money because, he declared, she had temporarily driven Davis from his home in 1908 when he was sick. Another judge had already granted her $1,500 in a monthly living allowance, along with $1,500 for court costs and $10,000 for lawyers’ fees. It appeared that the case had gone against Jennie, but she did not give up. She had Delmas launch an appeal.
Reports on the case were based mainly on Davis’s testimony, his divorce complaint, and information that seemed to come from his side. But just how true was this portrayal of Jennie—the much younger wife—as the evil manipulator? It smacks all too much of the sexism of another era. How likely was it that Jennie would receive a sympathetic portrayal before courts and the court of public opinion when her husband was a powerful businessman? The narrative of a conniving younger woman seeking to steal the fortune of an ailing Civil War veteran may have seemed just too tempting to resist, whatever the truth may have been.
Letters from Jennie to Harry and from Harry’s father to him around the same time, the period of 1914–1915, paint a very different picture. Jennie emerges as a bitter, wronged woman who felt abandoned after years of loving and taking care of an elderly husband, yet at the same time susceptible to any sign that R. B. might still care for her and want to help her financially. She was dogged by insecurities, about where she would end up living and how she would support herself. It’s possible that Jennie connived just as the newspaper accounts had it. But it’s likely we are getting an honest account of her feelings in letters to her brother Harry, the person she felt closest to in the world, aside from Lulu.
In the years after the divorce case, Jennie appeared to still be at 330 Riverside, but fretted over whether she had the “strength or heart to do what I have to in this big house.” She also spent weeks at hotels in New Jersey, like the Monmouth Inn in Caldwell or the Hotel Montclair.
R. B. was unhappy too, it seemed. He had severe cataracts and feared going blind. “He said it made no difference one way or the other to him, for his life was wrecked anyway,” Jennie wrote Harry. “He did not say who wrecked it,” she added, an implicit assertion that it was not her. R. B. acquired a new house in 1915 but apparently not in his name, to avoid having to leave it to Jennie. “Harry, I don’t think R. B. will do anything that is right by me again,” she laments. Later she sees a photograph of the home. How strange it is, she writes, to see a picture of your husband’s house.
R. B. stayed in hotels on visits to New York, and the couple found amicable moments. In May 1915, he visited 330 Riverside for dinner and spent several more evenings in his old home. When Jennie and Lucretia took him to the train station, presumably to head back to California, “he seemed to be glad to see me again,” Jennie wrote. Even Harry was back in favor. Despite R. B.’s legal accusations against Harry, in private he considered him a “good-hearted fellow,” Jennie wrote.
A calming force was on the scene by then: Lucretia’s fiance George Jephson, a solid, honorable Princeton graduate who was just establishing a business making auto bodies in Newark, New Jersey. R. B. thought highly of him, enough that he wanted George to immediately join the baking soda concern. But George declined to consider the matter until he and Lucretia were married—and only if she agreed. (They did, and she did.) George was solicitous of his future mother-in-law, and a frequent visitor.
But rancor over financial support continued, with R. B. refusing to give any further lump sums to Jennie, “for he did not want to do any more for the Weeds,” Lucretia reported. “I hope he is going to stop and leave us all alone,” Jennie told her brother, adding that her husband is “living to do what he can to injure his wife. But Harry I put all my trust on Jesus. He is all I have to turn to.” Later she again frames her deep-set hurt in biblical terms. “R. B. does not write any more mean letters about any of us. I think it is time he stopped. He has done all he can to hurt us, but God is keeping him for something.”
Her hatred for R. B. also infected relationships with her beloved daughter and steadfast son-in-law. Lulu’s sympathy for her father got under Jennie’s skin. “She thinks her father at times is all right and forgets all he has said and done to me, but she would not if he had done it to her,” Jennie lamented to her brother. Two months after Lucretia and George married on September 8, 1915, Jennie complained how little Lulu asked about how she was doing or how little she offered to help, and declared her heart broken over what she interpreted as George’s backtracking on an offer to have Jennie live with them. “He has said and done such mean things to me,” she added.
A frequent refrain in her letters is her appeal in the divorce case. Over and over again she harps on it, and much of her life seems to revolve around the possibility of a ruling. “Harry I do not think what would happen to me if the appeal should go against me,” she writes on March 14, 1915. Four and a half months later she expresses the same fear: “But I know I am innocent. Mr. Delmas says he has no fear but what I will be granted a new trial. R. B. says he will talk with me after the appeal is heard.” Jennie goes so far as to tell Harry that if her daughter and son-in-law even dare to visit R. B. in California before the appeal comes, she will mark them as disloyal. There is an air of desperation about it all.
As the months pass, the appeal of the divorce case decision grows into an obsession. “Mr. Delmas just wrote me if his life depended on it, he should say it will be reversed, ‘for you have both Law and Justice on your side. I never had a case that I felt more sure of,’” Jennie recounts in a letter of November 28, 1915, days before traveling to Santa Monica, California. “My appeal surely comes up in April court. I expect to be there if I am alive.”
She never made it. Seventeen days later Jennie was dead.
Jennie bequeathed everything to her daughter, as did R. B. when he died five years later. Jephson had taken up his father-in-law’s offer of a job with Davis Baking Powder, and on R. B.’s death assumed command of the company. The couple became the unquestioned master and mistress of 330 Riverside Drive.
CHAPTER 5.
The Planning, Stage 2: “One Good Ton Deserves Another”
THEY WERE WANTED BY THE POLICE upstate for the O’Connell kidnapping and hunted by Albany’s political machine, but Oley and Geary operated openly in the New York metropolis. Stewart introduced them to Manning and McMahon, and they joined up as the Albany faction with the Manhattan West Siders. Naturally, Oley and Geary wanted to check out the armored car for themselves, so it was back out to Coney Island for another scouting trip to follow the vehicle. Oley asked if he could bring in his brother Francis.
The group met in a furnished apartment on the East Side and then in public spaces to avoid suspicion of gambling. Geary and the Oleys in particular could not afford to be picked up by the police on a routine matter. Sometimes they gathered in Riverside Park, sometimes six miles or so down in Stuyvesant Square.
The gang grew. Manning and McMahon brought in a car thief named Joseph Kress to acquire the getaway vehicles. Kress said he would store the cars he stole in a garage on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn that belonged to his uncle.
The Oleys and Geary continued making trips to Brooklyn to trail the armored car, and in the process learned that it made irregular stops but always appeared at a loading dock at the Rubel Ice Corp., at Bay 19th Street and Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn’s Bath Beach section—just three and a half blocks from a police station. The gang members noticed something else. The armored car doors opened twice at each stop: once to let the first of t
he three guards out, who entered the office with pistols drawn for a collection, and a second time to let out another guard who covered the men returning with the money.
Just as it is hard to remember what life was like before the invention of the radio, the TV, the telephone, and especially handheld, do-everything computers, it is difficult to conceive of the days before a giant box in your kitchen, plugged into an electrical outlet, kept your food cold and fresh twenty-four hours a day. Before the invention of the refrigerator, a vital industry flourished to provide blocks of ice to homes across the city, usually coupled with the sale of heating coal, because the two operations followed the same distribution routes. The combination represented a lovely joining of two basic human needs: keeping the body warm and keeping it fed. It was a competitive, rough-and-tumble trade, and one of its most successful practitioners was Samuel Rubel.
Rubel, who was born in the then-Russian city of Riga, emigrated to the United States about 1903 at the age of twenty-one. He found work hauling ice and coal in a horse-drawn wagon and selling the goods door to door in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, working the north side of Watkins Street. It was tough, relentless labor. He would rein his horse to a stop in front of a building and haul the block of ice or bag of coal up the stoop. Rubel earned enough to become a supplier to other peddlers, and by 1907 had established the Independent Ice Company. He expanded into shipping coal to the city by train. “One good ton deserves another,” became his catch phrase.
By 1913, Independent had become the Rubel Coal and Ice Company, which embarked on expansion by absorption. In the mid-1920s, the company won control of three other firms, including the Ice Service Corporation. By 1928, more than thirty ice companies had been consolidated into the Rubel monolith, which was worth $40 million, sold four million tons of coal and ice a year, and racked up nearly $100 million in annual sales.