by Daniel Wakin
Within months of the engagements, a man named Charles Barkley bought the house, who flipped it to another buyer. Three investors bought the building in 1921. Somehow life at No. 337 never settled down in the early years. It changed hands the most among the Seven Beauties.
Count Carl Armfelt, a former diplomat, arrived from Copenhagen with his new bride to take up occupancy at River Mansion in 1923. “I have a family which I can trace back for 500 years, but I want to work, and that is the reason I have come to America,” Armfelt told the Times. The ship that brought him, the Frederick VIII, also carried 200 Swedish and Danish immigrants planning to settle on farmland in the Northwest.
During the 1920s, the mansion continued to find new owners. Even before the Depression, when single-family homes began breaking up more and more, River Mansion had almost certainly become a boardinghouse, and a 1937 certificate of occupancy made it officially a purveyor of furnished rooms. Throughout the autumn of 1930, a resident named Madame Bittain advertised her services: the restoration of “old, faded or discolored tapestries.” In the summer of 1935, a doctor named William J. Spring, an immigrant from Dresden, Germany, who earned his medical degree at Columbia University, lived there in a fourth-floor apartment with his wife Lila and fifteen-month-old child. Spring jumped to his death from an empty apartment above. He had been depressed, his wife said, and a terrible heat wave had apparently worn his nerves ragged to the breaking point.
Living in another room in the house at the time was Michael De Santis, a forty-three-year-old Italian immigrant who had studied art in Naples. By the early 1920s, De Santis was working as a commercial artist and became one of the first tenants of the Masters Apartment building at Riverside Drive and 103rd Street, paying $70 a month in 1930 to live in the just-constructed Art Deco skyscraper, built to house the museum and institute dedicated to the work of the artist and theosophist Nicholas Roerich. Roerich was a famous and powerful painter who had designed the sets for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and had wealthy backers for his global travels and multidisciplinary school, the Master Institute of United Arts. Maybe De Santis felt at home in the company of a great artistic spirit, or maybe he felt frustrated by the limitations of his newfound specialty: academic portraits. De Santis made it his métier in the later 1920s, usually painting the scholars from likenesses after they died, and often rendering their wives too. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Union College, and the University of Rochester were said to own his works. Not surprisingly, professors at Columbia University, just a half-mile to the north of De Santis’s final home, were a major source of patronage.
De Santis painted at least one Columbia personage a year from 1929 to 1935. But commissions were small and not frequent enough, and De Santis’s fortunes declined. He was forced to leave the Masters and rented a studio apartment in a Columbia University building on 115th Street in 1932. He continued to struggle, and resorted to pleading for help from none other than Nicholas Butler, the towering president of Columbia, who had won the Nobel Peace prize two years earlier. De Santis might have been encouraged by a signed note from Butler acknowledging receipt of a portrait of the Columbia professor Henry Drisler. Butler called it an “admirable representation of one of our fine old Columbia scholars of a past generation.”
Five weeks after the acknowledgment, De Santis issued his painfully obsequious plea for financial help. He starts out by saying how much talent and training he has poured into the portraits he has done for Columbia. “In all of this work I have given most of my time to keep up the standard of good work and for your Institution’s sake,” he wrote, and then noted that he accepted payments below market rate. (The Drisler painting brought him $150.) “It has been almost impossible to meet my obligations fully,” he lamented. And now, trouble loomed. He had fallen woefully behind in rent at his studio at 115th Street, in the Columbia building. The rental agents let him slide for a while. But their patience had run out. Now, he wrote, they want “to put me out on the street.”
“I am very much grieved and in distress over the matter,” he continued. “My dear Sir, I beg your forgiveness for bringing this matter to you, but if there is anything possible for an adjustment I shall be very grateful.”
His appeal failed. Two days later, a secretary to Butler passed on the president’s sympathies, along with a bureaucratic dodge. “Unfortunately, however, he has no practical suggestion to make.” The treasurer and finance committee controlled the university’s funds “and there is nothing that any of the rest of us can do in connection with them. The president is very sorry not to be able to make a more helpful reply.” Soon after, De Santis moved to his room at 337 Riverside Drive.
Within four months of the letter, De Santis found himself at Bellevue Hospital and after a month and a half there, he was dead of a brain tumor, destitute. Fellow artists arranged a sale of 100 oil paintings, watercolors, and pastels by their colleague to pay for his funeral. One image was some sort of allegorical canvas painted originally as a gift for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The works went on view at the Toran Decorative Art Studios, a collective display space created for indigent artists. The founder, Alphonse T. Toran, told the Herald-Tribune, “I can assure you, the paintings are excellent and it’s enough if they bring $3 or $4 apiece.”
De Santis was survived by his parents, Nicholas and Rosa, of the Bronx, and his brothers Ralph, Joseph, James, Dominick, and Carmine and sisters Rose, Mary, Anna, and Concetta. This last was the only one of the siblings who had a job, the newspaper said, also pointing out that two family members were “on relief,” a small-hearted reference in the man’s obituary. De Santis’s funeral was held at Holy Name Roman Catholic Church at 96th Street in Manhattan, ten blocks from his room. He was buried at St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.
These are the bare facts of the life of an obscure artist who arrived in this country full of hope and who died penniless and alone. But artists leave behind a tangible legacy: their work. Ten De Santis portraits still exist on Columbia’s campus. De Santis found most of his customers in the ranks of the chemistry and mining (soon to become engineering) departments. The portraits show distinguished men with luxuriant facial hair, kindly eyes, and the tools of their trade in the frame—test tubes, beakers, and diagrams. Most of the subjects were already dead when painted and De Santis worked from previous portraits or photographs. Former students, alumni, family members, and fellow faculty commissioned or donated them.
I wanted to see what I could in person, and the Art Properties office obliged. So one cool morning on an early spring day, Lillian Vargas, an administrative assistant in the office, took me on a tour of De Santis’s works.
In the university’s Miller Seminar Room in Havemeyer Hall, the chemistry building, hangs the portrait of Charles Frederick Chandler, signed by De Santis and dated 1935—the year before the death of the artist. Chandler looks down on the viewer, sporting a bushy walrus mustache and a winged collar, holding a chemistry bottle in his left hand and test tube in his right, as if caught in mid-experiment. Chandler, 1836–1925, was a major figure in modern American chemistry—a former president of New York City’s health department who oversaw improvements in protecting the public’s welfare. He was a giant on the Columbia faculty, helping establish the School of Mines, serving as dean of the medical and pharmacy schools, and educating generations of chemistry students as a professor.
The portrait, a gift of School of Mines alumni, is apparently a copy by De Santis of a previous one, since Chandler died a good ten years before it was painted. One Columbia curator did not think highly of the copy, writing in 1966 that it was a “considerable error of taste” to hang it instead of the original (no record of that painting was evident), and calling De Santis an “inconsiderable artist.” Ouch! The painting underwent other indignities: by the late 1980s, it had suffered punctures and tears resulting from the shooting of paper clips at the surface. In fact, many of the De Santis Columbia paintings endured rough treatment—tears, holes, stainin
g, and the effects of time, like buckling, flaking paint, cracking and deteriorating varnish—mostly the result of normal wear and tear over the decades.
The Art Properties department periodically restored its paintings, including the Chandler, but by early 2017, apart from the two De Santis portraits on display, only three more remained in good condition; the other five were damaged.
Ms. Vargas took me to see the second painting on view. It was a portrait of Thomas Egleston (1832–1900), the founder of the School of Mines. Egleston loomed over the computer and desk in a small administrative office of the Engineering department, the successor to the School of Mines. Egleston, in a crimson academic robe, stares off to the left, seemingly looking out of the window toward Teachers College across 120th Street. The portrait previously had hung over a copying machine in the Egleston Library, where the Chandler painting also lived for a while. The portrait had also made an appearance in the New York Times of September 8, 1935. It was used to illustrate a small story announcing the seventy-fifth anniversary celebration of the School of Mines.
Our last stop was Art Properties’ storage area, in the basement of Avery. There, Ms. Vargas had set up the other three decently preserved De Santis portraits on easels: the chemistry Professor Thomas Bruce Freas (1868–1928); Henry Drisler, class of 1839 and a professor and dean from 1843 to 1897; and Alexander Holley (1832–1882), a lecturer in the School of Mines who introduced the Bessemer steel process to the United States and wrote frequently for the New York Times.
De Santis based the 1934 portrait of Drisler on a photograph. It shows the professor in half-length view, draped in a black satin robe with purple lapel, his florid cheeks fringed by a white mustache-less beard and shaggy sideburns. Two shelves of books rise behind him to his left. Conservators did a good job of fixing some fifteen holes, probably suffered while Drisler hung in Butler Library and also partly the result of paper-clip fire. De Santis presented an early version of the Drisler portrait with a short note to Columbia’s president, Nicholas Butler, using quaint and respectful language. “My dear Sir, It would give me great pleasure if you would do me the honor to accept the preliminary painting of your old friend and teacher Dr. H. Drisler, as a token of esteem.”
De Santis painted Holley in a gray wool suit, wearing a handlebar mustache, against a pink fabric background. The final portrait on display depicts Professor Freas, holding a slide rule in his right hand and pencil in his left. Paper with a graph drawn on it and a pair of compasses lay on the desk in front of him. Freas looks like Sigmund Freud, with his pointy white beard and round black glasses.
“In its lines and shadings the artist had created the savant,” Henry Sherman, a food chemistry professor, told the Times in its obituary of De Santis. Faculty opinion, Sherman said, considered the portrait a “remarkably successful job both artistically and as a record of personality.” At last report, the portrait had a large hole in the right eye, a puncture on the lower right corner, a tear in the lower left corner, and a slash near the bottom.
Sherman also received the De Santis treatment, portrayed at his desk with a library outside the window near him. So did Eleuterio Felice Foresti (1793–1858), an Italian professor at Columbia who was a revolutionary, jailed by the Austrians for fifteen years before coming to New York; Oliver Wolcott Gibbs (1822–1908), a Columbia grad and chemistry professor at City College and Harvard University; Thomas Henry Harrington (1866–1956); and James Jay (1732–1815), John Jay’s brother and a Columbia benefactor. The latter five were the paintings that remained in storage, awaiting some reason, and money, to repair them.
De Santis, the Italian immigrant craftsman, was considered a competent presenter of his august subjects, able to capture an air of wisdom and gravitas but with moments of awkwardness, like imperfectly rendered hands or a head that seemed slightly askew. His handling of fabric also showed skill. For his epoch, he was a contributor to what university administrators considered an important function: preserving the memories of scholarly giants and keeping them in the minds of their intellectual descendants and future generations of students. It is altogether likely that some of his subjects—Chandler and Holley—had Eberhard Faber, the Columbia engineering grad and pencil baron who lived next door to the artist, in their classes. What a lovely example of how the Seven Beauties tied together the lives of people from so many walks of life. How very New York.
As the neighborhood continued to decline, River Mansion changed hands several more times in the 1940s. In 1952, the rooming house was operated by Louise Dickmann, who became something of a heroine to the police. A group of investigators of the State Temporary Rent Commission had been shaking down landlords by taking payoffs in exchange for not reporting violations. Three of the investigators visited Mrs. Dickmann and accused her of overcharging her boarders. They threatened her with fines of more than $10,000. Ah, but for a mere $800, they promised to quash the violations. Mrs. Dickmann marched over to the office of District Attorney Frank S. Hogan, and his investigators set up a sting operation. They prepared a packet of marked bills, and when Ms. Dickmann handed the money over, the three crooked investigators were arrested.
CHAPTER 19.
Farewells
DETECTIVE JOHN OSNATO, THE DOGGED PURSUER of the Rubel gang, retired in June 1944, retreating to a horse farm near Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania, after a life of big investigations and personal tragedies. Along with the death of his first wife in 1916, his son Dudley suffered mental problems and was institutionalized for decades. His son John Jr. was struck by polio as a child. And a third son, Charles, died of appendicitis at age eighteen, three years before Osnato handed in his shield.
Within a year and a half, at the age of fifty-five, the retired lieutenant was dead of a heart ailment. O’Dwyer called him one of his best friends. “He was clever in his work and loyal to his city and friends,” he told the Times, which ran a eulogistic editorial, suggesting Osnato’s death left a final mystery: “What made him what he was?” The answer lay partly in his ability to understand human nature. But other qualities make for great investigators, and the Times took the opportunity to muse on what they were: “A taste for danger,” or at least the ability to be “sublimely careless of it”; the capacity to think with the deviousness of criminals, speak their language and induce them to talk; and a “faculty for hard, sustained work,” both physical and intellectual. Great cops must also have a restless curiosity, a “tenacious mind that can pigeonhole a small, seemingly irrelevant detail for months and even years until it suddenly takes on meaning.”
Detective Osnato’s funeral mass was held at Our Lady of Angels Roman Catholic Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. More than 200 people attended, including top brass from the police department. He was buried at St. John’s Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens.
Fire took an inordinate toll on the property of characters in this tale. It heavily damaged No. 332. Mrs. Donnell was forced from No. 334 by a blaze that charred much of the Takamines’ Japanese décor, and Ahnelt’s summer home in New Jersey also went up in flames. Samuel Rubel’s mansion in Roslyn, Long Island, suffered the same end in 1946, costing his wife a half-million dollars in jewelry.
Within days of the Rubel verdict, Judge O’Dwyer summoned Burt Turkus, who had represented Stewart Wallace, to his chambers and praised his handling of the Rubel case. “You got everything out of it there was,” he said, and then let drop a bombshell: that he planned to run for district attorney. He offered Turkus a staff job if he should be elected. Just a few months later, O’Dwyer won the office, replacing the ineffectual Geoghan, and put Turkus in charge of the homicide division. Working with Osnato, Turkus prosecuted the Murder, Inc., syndicate. O’Dwyer went on to be elected the 100th mayor of New York City in 1945.
For his services, the turncoat Archie Stewart spent fourteen years of his sentence for the Pine Bush robbery stashed away in county jails, to keep him safe from the vengeance of fellow gang members. In 1945, Governor Thomas E. Dewey lopped six years off Stewart’s thi
rty-year sentence as a belated thank-you for his testimony in the Rubel case. But the time spent in the milder county jails proved a mixed blessing. In 1952, the year Stewart was up for parole, the state corrections department asked the New York Attorney General for clarification regarding his status in the penal system. Normally, state prisoners received ten days off of their sentence for good behavior for each month served. But Stewart had spent fourteen years in county jails. That raised a question: was Stewart eligible for the time off when his body was in the county lockup while his soul resided in a state prison? The state attorney general said no, a ruling that cost Stewart four years, seven months, one week, and three days of freedom. His bargain with prosecutors did not turn out to be as good a deal as he thought.
In 1942, Dr. Gilbert lost his medical license for failing to report his treatment of McMahon’s gunshot wound. Gilbert, who was as outspoken defending himself as trumpeting his treatment of alcoholics, testified in a disciplinary procedure that gang members had threatened to kill him if he went to the police.
The next year, a two-paragraph item in the Times reported on the resignation of Bernard Beinstock as an assistant state attorney general. Bienstock, the paper said, had handled a case against Gilbert, who was “indicted for treating wounded members of the Rubel Ice Corporation hold-up gang.”