by Daniel Wakin
In 1925, her upstanding Riverside Drive neighbors Lucretia and George Jephson (in No. 330) bought the Davies home (No. 331), differences in moral standards having no bearing on real estate. No. 332 was also sold and divided up into two- and three-room apartments. The Depression began taking its toll and by 1930, six families lived in No. 332, mostly immigrants with husbands working as rug merchants, salesmen, and teachers, and rents ranging from $100 to $150 a month. The trail of No. 332 peters out almost before it begins. Within several decades, it was demolished.
CHAPTER 7.
The Heist, Part I: “Ramshackle or Abandoned Mansions”
BROOKLYN’S BATH BEACH NEIGHBORHOOD LIES NORTHWEST of Coney Island and its edge serves as the shoreline of Gravesend Bay, a pocket of water cupped to the south by thumb-shaped Coney Island and facing Staten Island’s long shoreline slouching off to the southwest. The neighborhood is situated just below the Narrows, the spot where Brooklyn and Staten Island are closest, a gap now spanned by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and leading into Upper New York Bay. Just inland from Bath Beach was the heart of New Utrecht, which was founded in 1661 and was one of the six original towns that made up early Brooklyn. In 1776, British troops landed at the shore of Bath Beach on their way to the Battle of Brooklyn.
In the 1800s, Bath Beach served as an elegant resort, named after Bath, England, with acres of farmland. It was controlled by the Benson family (who gave their name to Bensonhurst). Another family of landholders, the Cropseys, who were descended from an eighteenth-century immigrant from German-speaking lands, gave their name to the avenue that runs parallel to the bay shore and was near the Rubel factory.
By the 1930s the Bath Beach neighborhood featured a “cluster of small houses and ramshackle or abandoned mansions and hotels leading down to a deserted beach,” according to the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City. It is only twenty-four blocks long, cut through lengthwise by four main avenues: 86th Street is the boundary to the northeast, then Benson Avenue, Bath Avenue, Cropsey Avenue, and the Shore Parkway, which is now cut off from the water by the wide Belt Parkway.
On the morning of August 21, 1934, the block of Bay 19th Street between Bath and Cropsey Avenues murmured with an urban calm. Children watched tennis players thwack balls back and forth on a group of five courts on the south side of the street. Directly across, on the north side, was the Rubel Ice Company building, with an office and two sets of three loading bays. A few cars were parked nearby. Women sat on the stoops of several houses. Grass sprouted from cracks in the sidewalk near a fire hydrant. A moving truck driver, William McGee, sat in his cab. A muddy pothole occupied a piece of the street. A block and a half away, Gravesend Bay glistened in the sun.
After the aborted attempt a week earlier, the underworld actors were back in position.
Manning, swaddled in a long white apron, stood by a peddler’s cart near the loading bays. The cart was a simple wooden affair, a crudely nailed together, open-topped rectangle with three spindly wheels. Every recent day Manning had placed his cart in the same spot—right in front of the Rubel company office and a few feet from the little flight of stairs leading up to the loading platform—seemingly there to collect a shipment of ice, so that bystanders would get used to his presence. He was so convincing that on this August morning a little boy tried to buy some ice from him. Out of nerves or natural orneriness, Manning cursed at the boy and chased him away.
Geary also posed as a peddler. Some accounts said he was leaning against the loading platform, although a witness later placed him by the tennis courts, where Stewart lounged in a dark green suit and white cap. Like Manning, Stewart had been showing up regularly in the area and idling about, also letting the neighborhood become accustomed to his presence. Francis Oley was some distance away, stationed by a warehouse, probably across the street not too far from the Rubel company. John Oley stood near the loading platform with a machine gun hidden in a cart under a piece of canvas.
The gang members had taken precautions to protect themselves. They had spread a substance called collodion on their fingertips to avoid leaving prints. Originally formulated to fix photographic prints, collodion acquired a new use, under the brand name Newskin, to close skin lacerations. The men also did not shave for several days, to make identification more difficult, and brought along white gloves to make doubly sure no fingerprints were left behind.
Meanwhile, Wallace and the boatmen Quinn and Hughes crossed the bay in their launches and waited at the end of Bay 35th Street, about a mile away.
McMahon, driving a blue Lincoln, and Kress, in a Nash (both stolen), staked out the route, waiting for the armored car to pass by.
This morning, the stops before Rubel were numerous, the last one being a Bank of Manhattan branch at 86th Street and 20th Avenue, about five minutes away. Three guards were on board. Joseph Allen drove. In the back of the truck were John Wilson and William Lilienthal, whose twin brother was a New York City police officer and whose other brother was a police detective. At 12:25 p.m., after three hours on the road, it rumbled up to the Rubel building, a squat, rolling strongbox with a white roof, fenders over the wheels, a shatterproof windshield, and a cargo of cash.
CHAPTER 8.
No. 333: The Canavans, Bellow, and the Duke
WHILE OLEY AND GEARY IN ALBANY and McMahon and Manning in Manhattan were approaching adolescence, while the Davises’ bitter division was coming to a head, and while William Ahnelt’s magazines were teaching fashion to a generation of American women, another New Yorker and his large family installed themselves at 333 Riverside Drive: David Canavan, who dug holes for a living.
Any New Yorker with minimal powers of observation will be aware of the constant building that goes on in the city. After the razing of an empty structure comes the first major step in construction: chewing out the ground—or often rock in Manhattan’s crust—to prepare for the foundation. That work quickly disappears. The foundation is laid, the building erected on top, and no one is the wiser about the work. In the early years of the twentieth century, one of the busiest and most expert excavation companies digging out foundations was Canavan Brothers, formed by the brothers David, John, and Maurice.
David bought No. 333 in 1910. With the Canavan business on West 56th Street and his home on West 105th Street, David Canavan became a firmly rooted West Sider. He was also politically connected, a necessity for a businessman who bid for public contracts. Canavan, a man of impressive girth with a thick brush mustache, was a member of the local Tammany Hall chapter, the Nameoki Club, which had its base a few blocks away at 233 West 100th Street and was known as the “little wigwam,” in the tradition of borrowing Native American terminology for Tammany Hall trappings. He also belonged to the National Democratic Club, the Catholic Club, and the slightly waspier New York Athletic Club, which years later would be the scene of another crime by one of the Rubel robbers. Canavan even formed his own political association and named it after himself.
Poor David Canavan did not get to enjoy his spacious new home for long. He died of what the Real Estate Record called “neuritis” on September 21, 1914, as the first shots of the Great War were being fired an ocean away. He was forty-seven. Funeral services started at his home and continued at the Church of the Ascension, another recently built structure in the neighborhood, on 107th Street east of Broadway.
The building industry grieved. “To enumerate all the work performed by his company would be a recital of the City’s growth and progress in real estate improvements in the last 25 years,” the bulletin of the General Contractors Association wrote on David Canavan’s death. In fact, Canavan Brothers did the dirty unseen work to build New York, and their presence is widespread in numerous structures. Think of David Canavan if you step into the lobbies of the Apthorp, Belnord, and San Remo apartment buildings, or the University Club, 23rd Street YMCA, and Ethical Culture School. He helped dig the foundation holes below.
David Canavan’s seven children (four sons and three daughters) included E
stelle, who married a doctor in 1926; May, who married around 1940; and Helen. He also had a hot-headed son, William. In 1927, when he was thirty-two, William was driving with a woman from Queens named Anna Sheridan on Riverside Terrace near 177th Street when he stopped to check his tires, news reports recounted. At that moment, he later told police, two men he had never seen before stepped into the road. In a time-honored macho ritual, one of the men said something William considered insulting. He took a swing, and the loudmouth pulled out a gun and fired. Canavan was wounded in the leg, and the two men disappeared. The bleeding victim rode around in a police cruiser in search of the assailants, but to no avail. The Times quoted him as saying, “I could have gone to my private physician and you would have known nothing at all, but I was determined that if the police could catch these men I would see to it that they were punished.” The origins of the shooting remained murky: one of his sisters was quoted as saying that the young Canavan was shot when he refused to put up his hands during a robbery. Whatever the circumstances, finding oneself shot was not considered the right sort of behavior by the Canavans’ tonier neighbors.
Through the 1930s and early 1940s, 333 Riverside Drive remained in the Canavan family. In 1945, the grandson and namesake of David Canavan sold the building to an out-of-town investor and it was broken up into apartments. The following decade, Saul Bellow, then a forty-year-old literary transplant from Chicago, lived in one of them when he was writing Seize the Day, a novella about an unemployed, divorced, self-doubting salesman named Tommy Wilhelm.
In the novel, Wilhelm lives in an Upper West Side residence hotel called the Gloriana, and the book is studded with mentions of the neighborhood, including this particularly evocative passage:
Along Broadway in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, a great part of New York’s vast population of old men and women lives. Unless the weather is too cold or wet they fill the benches about the tiny railed parks and along the subway gratings from Verdi Square to Columbia University, they crowd the shops and cafeterias, the dime stores, the tearooms, the bakeries, the beauty parlors, the reading rooms and club rooms.
Wilhelm’s father lives in the same hotel as his son, and a major theme of the novella is the old man’s disapproval of his son’s bad habits, grooming, and lack of achievement. Wilhelm, in turn, rails against his father’s coldness and lack of sympathy.
The novelistic relationship is poignant, given Bellow’s life at the time. In May 1955, his father died, and Bellow wrote the next month to the critic Leslie Fiedler from his apartment at 333 Riverside Drive: “Since my father’s death last month I’ve been slow at everything. Not that I was ever prompt in anything, but life is particularly difficult in all departments right now.”
Several years after Bellow sent his letter, 333 Riverside Drive passed into the hands of another American cultural giant: Duke Ellington. The block was already something of an outpost for Ellington’s circle. A few years earlier, the Duke had bought No. 334, and his sister Ruth Ellington James was living there with her husband Daniel James and young sons Stephen and Michael in a duplex on the top two floors. When No. 333 came up for sale, Ellington bought that one too. The owner wanted out, Stephen James recalled in an interview, after getting mugged in his own lobby. The two buildings became a thriving locus of the Ellington world. No. 333 housed the offices of Tempo Music, Ellington’s publishing company, which Ruth ran, and included a room filled with awards and other Ellingtonia. Several other family members and friends lived in apartments in the two townhouses at various times, including Bernice Wiggins, Ellington’s cousin, who had a place at No. 333 as late as 1980. Mildred Dixon, a former companion of the jazz great, worked for Tempo and lived on the ground floor of No. 334. No. 333 was also the scene of Sunday jazz salons and concerts, including a 1976 performance by Bea Benjamin, a South African protégé of Ellington’s, with Johnny Hodges playing alto saxophone and Buster Williams playing bass. Ellington was said to have written songs there, and copyists used the office to produce musical scores of his compositions.
Ellington family members have incisive memories of the houses. In an interview shortly before he died in 2007, Ruth’s son Michael James recalled the glorious view and the mahogany-paneled living room at 333 Riverside Drive, and a birthday party for Duke, where he saw such luminaries as Joe Lewis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Ezzard Charles, Adam Clayton Powell, and Roy Wilkins. Also present was Louie Bellson, the Duke’s drummer. “He spent the whole party hanging out with me because Louie didn’t drink or smoke,” James recalled. “He was just there to pay tribute to Duke on his birthday. He was a very dedicated musician. He was all about the drums. He spent the whole party showing me different drum patterns.”
Mercedes Ellington, a daughter of Ellington’s son, Mercer, who lived with her maternal grandmother, remembered visits to her Aunt Ruth at No. 334 and sunning herself on the balcony there. She spoke ruefully of a melancholy Sweet 16 party thrown for her by Ruth in the mid-1950s. Many invited guests failed to show. Others stopped by just to gawk at the house. “People came and went, and mostly went,” she said. Stephen James recalled the front-room library at 334, mentioned Edward R. Murrow’s 1957 interview with Ellington in the family apartment, and spoke of playdates with the daughter of Leonard Feather, the jazz writer and musician, who lived half a block up Riverside Drive in No. 340 and formed a record company with Mercer. He also mentioned the neighborhood’s increasing seediness.
The James family moved briefly into No. 333 and left the neighborhood in the early 1960s, Stephen James said. Ellington bestowed No. 333 on Ruth, and gave the title of No. 334 to Mercer, who sold his building in 1975. Ruth sold hers in 1980.
Three years after Ellington’s death in 1974, the city granted a new name to the street around the corner, West 106th Street, my street. It became formally known as Duke Ellington Boulevard, the result of a compromise between the Duke Ellington Society, which wanted a street-naming closer to Lincoln Center, and the city, which the society said preferred a small street in Harlem. The law establishing the name-change made note of the presence around the corner of the “Duke Ellington Mansion,” and though Duke is often said to have lived in 333 Riverside Drive, his survivors dispute the notion. “He never spent one night there,” Stephen James said. But his spirit is indelibly present.
CHAPTER 9.
The Heist, Part II: “Say a Word, and It Spits”
AS THE ARMORED CAR PULLED UP in front of the low-slung warehouse in Bath Beach, four trucks were lined up along the loading platform, waiting for ice deliveries. Because of Manning’s cart, the armored car was forced to pull up about twelve feet past the entrance. The pickup from Rubel that day was to be about $450. Following company protocol, the first guard, William Lilienthal, stepped out of the back of the armored car to head inside for the pickup. He shut the van door, his hand resting on the butt of his revolver. Next, John Wilson emerged from the car, prepared to cover Lilienthal. The green-suited Stewart, the connector of the gang’s Albany and Manhattan crews, began moving stealthily toward Lilienthal from across the street. The peddler in the white apron—Manning—appeared to be rearranging burlap sacks on his cart but was actually digging out his machine gun.
As Wilson stepped onto the pavement from the armored car, Manning pulled out his gun from under the burlap sacks, aimed the barrel at him, and ordered him to raise his hands. “Say a word and it spits,” Manning barked at the guard. At least, that was the quote provided by the newspapers, the kind of West Side gangster-speak that smacks of Jimmy Cagney. The reality of the situation did not immediately register with Lilienthal, who later said he thought it was a joke. “Come on, don’t bother me. I’ve got no time for fooling,” he said, according to what his wife Anna later told the Brooklyn Eagle. But Lilienthal became a believer when his eyes registered the gun.
Manning ordered Joseph Allen, the driver and third member of the three-man guard crew, out of the truck. Geary, who was close by, moved toward the group, followed by Oley, who kept his eyes on th
e end of the street. Allen later said he tried to sneak a look at the robbers but was discouraged with the words, “If you look around again I’ll blow your brains out.” That quote, at least, has the air of verisimilitude.
Geary veered over to close in on Lilienthal behind the truck, stuck a pistol in his back, and guided him into the Rubel office as Stewart went to the edge of the loading platform, which was as high as a man’s stomach and ran along the facade for about eighty feet. Rounding up eight adults and several children standing nearby, Stewart forced them into the company’s office. The other two guards and William McGee, the moving truck driver who had been waiting in the truck’s cab, were ordered to huddle under the loading platform. Shut up, Stewart told the rounded-up adults, and all will be well. He then went into the office to back up Geary, who was there with Lilienthal.
Inside the office, Geary had forced Lilienthal onto the floor. Taking command as the more experienced executor of big-time crimes, he told Stewart to keep an eye on the guard. When Lilienthal raised his head and looked up, Stewart showed Geary his toughness, issuing a warning: do it again, and I will kill you. Stewart went over to rip a telephone off the wall. Outside, Francis Oley trained his gun on bystanders and kept watch on the people under the loading dock.
At that point, Kress and McMahon, who had been following the truck, pulled their cars up next to the armored car, Kress in the Nash and McMahon in the Lincoln. John Oley jumped into the back of the armored car and began heaving out bags of money and tossing them to Kress, Manning, and McMahon. The bags—about ten in all—were filled with bills in denominations of $20 and less. The back seat of the Lincoln had been removed to accommodate the loot.