by Daniel Wakin
“The heiress woman I loved and knew as a child was patient and jovial,” said Brenda Steffon, her godchild and the daughter of Lucretia’s cousin, Joseph Weed. Lucretia had a special affection for Joseph, and paid for his education.
It’s hard to know what effect the bitter divorce of her parents had on Lucretia. It was so public, so exhaustively chronicled—a double source of embarrassment for something already so shameful in society. It may have contributed to Lucretia’s retreat into a private life.
But three years after her husband’s death and well into her sixties, Lucretia made a sudden and unexpected departure from that existence. She married her chauffeur, William Olsen. The marriage shocked and even outraged the circle of family who experienced her benevolence and the friends and lawyers who provided a cocoon of care. Ms. Steffon remembers the phone call at dinner from Lulu telling her parents about the marriage and how stunned they were. “With George gone, she was in a very vulnerable state,” Ms. Steffon said. Taisey described Olsen as “self-seeking,” and her supporters rallied to try to protect her from what they viewed as a fortune-hunting employee. Lucretia was convinced, and the marriage was quickly annulled. No. 330 may even have been sold to raise money to buy out Olsen.
The Davis name lived on in the courts and the crosshairs of the Internal Revenue Service. In the 1980s, the IRS slapped an $850,000 tax bill on Lucretia’s estate, which consisted of stocks and bonds worth about $10 million.
The Jephsons also shaped the fate of the neighboring buildings.
In 1925, George and Lucretia spent $80,000 to buy 331 Riverside Drive, the house next door, where Marion Davies had cavorted with William Randolph Hearst. They repaired the heating system and installed a caretaker to show the place to prospective renters. But because they could not get the rents they wanted, the building remained un-let.
Nine years later, the couple bought 332 Riverside, intending to build an apartment house on the property, which was most likely the reason the building was torn down. It is also possible that a fire that seriously damaged the top three floors in 1935 led to the demolition.
By the early 1950s, Lucretia also owned 334 Riverside Drive, the site of Bernard McMahon’s bloody final moments. In late 1954, she sold Nos. 330 and 331, and the plot at No. 332, to a real estate investor named Fred H. Hill, who opened his firm, the Hansair Realty Corp., in 1948, shortly after being discharged from the army. In 1955, Hill sold 330 Riverside Drive to an arm of the LaSallian Christian Brothers, an international Roman Catholic order focused on education, and No. 331 and the now vacant plot at No. 332 to the American Buddhist Academy. No. 330 later passed from the LaSalle order to another worldwide Catholic organization, Opus Dei, which named it the Riverside Study Center, as a simple plaque next to the door reads.
The center still functions as a Manhattan outpost for Opus Dei, whose members believe that sanctity can be pursued through daily life and work. Opus Dei says it has 90,000 members worldwide and about 3,000 in the United States. Seventy percent live a regular family life and are called supernumeraries. The rest commit themselves to celibacy, and of those there are two categories: numeraries live together in Opus Dei residences, like at No. 330, and associates live separately. Opus Dei, which also has a small body of clergy who adhere to it, was elevated by Pope John Paul II as the Catholic Church’s first personal prelature—something like an international diocese—which made it answer directly to the Vatican. With strong influence in the Vatican, a reputation for secrecy, the occasional practice of corporal mortification, and a conservative bent, Opus Dei has become a lightning rod for critics. Its depiction as a nefarious force in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code popularized suspicions, prompting the order to issue statements pointing out that the book was most definitely a work of fiction.
330 Riverside Drive is home to eight celibate men and three priests, and is a base for organizing activities in the New York City area. Despite the order’s international reputation for clandestine influence, which it has worked hard to overcome, a glimpse inside the residence showed a much more mundane—if pious—reality.
On a rainy, foggy Sunday afternoon before a recent Christmas, the residence opened its doors to lay adherents, family, and a few friends for a brief religious ceremony, finger food, and caroling in the large sitting room, once R. B. Davis’s library, on the third floor overlooking Riverside Park. The Reverend Malcolm Kennedy, an alarmingly tall and looming priest in a full cassock, played jazz-inflected piano accompaniments to Christmas carols, the titles and page numbers announced by John Coverdale, a tax attorney and a historian of the organization, who is director of the house. Both men live there, along with Brian Finnerty, chief of communications in the United States for Opus Dei; two Opus Dei financial staff members; an administrator and a professor at the Opus Dei-linked business school IESI; a professor at New York University’s business school; and a staff member of a non-governmental agency that works with the United Nations. I was there as a visiting journalist.
The afternoon started with a benediction in the exquisitely restored chapel on the second floor, in what used to be the music room, where Lulu probably took her singing lessons and invited musicians gave private recitals. The faithful genuflected in front of the altar, adorned by a cross engraved inside a circle—Opus Dei’s symbol of God’s presence in the world. About twenty people filled the few rows of pews, bending down on cushioned kneelers; several men who came in later, unable to find spots in the pews, knelt on the bare floor of herring-boned parquet.
After some moments of silent prayer, accompanied by the whispering of a little girl, Father Kennedy and Brian Finnerty swept in. The congregants rose immediately and dropped to their knees. Father Kennedy prayed and delivered a brief homily on the art of rejoicing at Christmas time, tempered with a reminder that penance was also appropriate for the season. The conservative cast of Opus Dei Catholicism was readily apparent in the recitation of Latin prayers and singing of a Latin hymn by Thomas Aquinas, “Adoro te devote.” It was a musical moment that would have been pretty anomalous for Jennie and R. B. and Lulu.
Some time later, Finnerty invited me back for a private visit with the architect and architectural historian Seth Joseph Weine to soak up the spirit of No. 330. Weine summed up the feeling of the carefully restored interior: a Beaux-Arts-ian atmosphere of serenity, conveying “a lion at rest—powerful but not agitated.” The dining room has the original heavy furniture, in all its gleaming mahogany—the table, the massive carved buffet, the dining chairs (reupholstered in vinyl, not leather), plus the sylvan murals. It is here the men of Opus Dei take their meals, served by the staff of women. The conservatory still has plants. In the former library, an album of photographs showing the rooms and exterior in the early years of Lucretia and George’s marriage sits on a side table.
But the house has a very non-secular feeling of serenity, a quiet but strong contrast with the residence of an industrialist family of a century ago. Statues and paintings of the Virgin Mary dot the rooms. On a hallway wall near the living room, a picture shows John Paul II at the grandiose ceremony in St. Peter’s Square declaring Josemaría Escrivá’, the organization’s founder, a saint. In the former billiard room, a framed verse from the Gospel of John—in Latin—reads: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” The house is due for renovation, to be completed in 2018. The tiny fifth floor rooms will be enlarged, the service stairs widened, the elevator replaced and private bathrooms installed. But officials promised the public spaces will remain as they were.
In the lot that once housed No. 332, the New York Buddhist Church built a small structure in 1963 after being forced to leave its home at 171 West 94th Street because of a building development there. A giant bronze statue of Shinran Shonin, the thirteenth-century religious leader who founded the Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism, stands on a terrace in front. The statue, which was once situ
ated in a park in Hiroshima and survived the atomic bombing in World War II, was donated by the Japanese businessman Seiichi Hirose, a Jodo Shinshu follower. Shinran gazes benevolently on passersby on Riverside Drive to this day. A dojo operates downstairs. My older son took karate classes there.
The Buddhist Church occupies the second floor in No. 331, using it as a room for receptions and meetings. The minister has an apartment on the fourth floor. The American Buddhist Academy, since renamed the American Buddhist Study Center, operates out of the third floor.
These days, Nos. 333 and 334 are divided into apartments. By 1946, 335 Riverside Drive, the home of the Fabers, was also split up into eight rentals. In 1983, Graciela Chichilnisky, an Argentina-born economist, mathematician, and entrepreneur, bought the building, turning it back into a single-family home, and has bestowed a loving restoration on it over the years.
“I wanted to have a house in New York,” Ms. Chichilnisky told me. “I didn’t want to have an apartment. It seemed to me that Riverside Drive was the best locale in New York City because it was across the river, and there were no houses in front of it. And there was this beautiful park in front of it. I wanted to have children, and I did, and it was perfect. At the time I didn’t realize what I was getting into. You buy a building and say, ‘Oh my God, what have I done!’”
In the mid-2000s, Ms. Chichilnisky put No. 335 on the market, at one point listing it for $9.6 million. But she said she changed her mind, finding herself unwilling to part with the house. “Somehow I couldn’t come to grips with it,” she said. “It was not in the cards.” The house where the Fabers lived for so many years had now become part of her bones. “It’s who I am. It’s part of my life.” And so were the ghosts of those who preceded her. Ms. Chichilnisky seemed to share my fascination with forgotten occupants.
“I live with all the people that were there before. They are all there. I don’t know how, but they are all there. I have given many parties,” she said. But each party felt like “a replay of somebody else’s party. This was not my party, this is the continuation of somebody else’s.”
Next door at No. 336, Mrs. Penfield died at home on September 27, 1944, just as her husband had done twelve years earlier. Her son James Preston Penfield, the last of the family to live there, died on January 26, 1945, at forty-five. Two years later, a granddaughter in Chicago, Margaret Penfield Stockholm, sold the building to the government of Finland to become the residence of the Finnish consul general. Auctioneers had emptied it, putting its array of antiques, reproductions of period furniture, furnishings, and artwork on the block. The contents included oil paintings, bric-a-brac, china, a hundred oriental rugs, and marble statues, all of it in a range of styles—English, French, Georgian, Renaissance, Empire, and Sheraton.
Whether any Finnish consul general ever lived in 336 is unlikely because in 1948 the building passed through several different hands and was eventually broken up into sixteen small apartments. After forty-seven years, the age of 336 Riverside Drive as a single-family mansion was over.
River Mansion, next door, followed a different course. In 1970, after some four decades as a rooming house, the building reverted to a single-family status and became the home of John Mace and his partner Richard Adrian Dorr, a pair of singing teachers who operated the John Mace Music School in the building—even installing a stage on the second floor. In 1978, Edgar Bronfman Jr., the Seagram Co. heir, and his wife Sherry B. Bronfman bought River Mansion with another couple and eventually acquired the whole building. They raised their three children there. Ms. Bronfman, who has since divorced, remains the latest occupant as of this writing.
Ms. Bronfman is friendly with Ms. Chichilnisky and Ms. Bronfman’s son works for her. Ms. Bronfman also attended meditation classes at the Buddhist Church. These relationships quickly raised an intriguing question. What connections existed between the previous generations of owners? Did the four longtime families—the Canavans, Penfields, Fabers, and Jephsons, whose residence on the block coincided from the mid-teens to the 1940s—socialize? I can imagine an entire mini-ecosystem of life surrounding the buildings. Maybe the widows Penfield and Canavan formed a friendship and would take regular tea, alternating homes. Perhaps they consulted George Jephson for advice on business matters. Maybe Lothar Faber passed out free pencils to the neighbors, or Jennie Davis worried about the influence of the hot-headed William Canavan on her daughter Lulu before George Jephson came along to provide a respectable match. Marion Davies and her messy establishment may have shocked some of these fine respectable people. Maybe they were all secretly thrilled to have a motion picture star on the block. I can picture Jokichi Takamine rushing over to hold the door for her as she came home with shopping. Some years earlier, Lulu, out for a stroll, may have gazed admiringly on Julia Marlowe when the great actress came bustling home from a long tour, secretly wishing that she could indeed become an actress herself. How did William Randolph Hearst square his newspapers’ rabid anti-Japanese campaign with the distinguished Japanese scientist living a few doors away? I’d like to think that one evening, while leaving his love nest, Hearst may have held an umbrella for Takamine as the Japanese gentleman was entering his motorcar in the rain. Perhaps the occupants of these houses returned misdirected mail to each other, or sent servants to borrow sugar, or complained to each other about garbage pickup.
Julia Marlowe’s connection to 337 Riverside Drive certainly resonated for the current occupant. Ms. Bronfman, a philanthropist and advocate for arts education and social issues, was an actress herself early in her life. Then Sherri Brewer, she is best known for her role as Marcy, the kidnapped daughter of a crime boss in the blaxploitation movie classic Shaft. “Without me Shaft would not have had a job,” she said. “I was essential to the plot. He had to find me.” Ms. Bronfman also had roles as Ermengarde and Minnie Fay in the all-black cast of Hello, Dolly!, starring Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway, which had a two-year run on Broadway in the 1960s. Ms. Bronfman, who said she was dipping her toe back into the acting world, learned about her home’s earlier owner from the article I wrote in the New York Times that was the germ of this book. “That meant a lot to me,” she said. “I was fascinated by the reality that the woman who owned the house had been an actress and was so successful.”
So in the second decade of the twenty-first century on the stretch of Riverside Drive between 105th and 106th streets, here was how things stood. No. 330 belongs to Opus Dei; Nos. 331 and 332 comprise the Buddhist Church. Nos. 333, 334, and 336 are modest apartment buildings. Nos. 335 and 337, River Mansion, have reverted to private ownership. But what about the scene of the Rubel robbery?
A visit one summer day showed that the Rubel Ice Co. building retained its original shape, but with its surface details smoothed out. The six upper windows are no more. They’ve been bricked up, but ghostly outlines remain. The loading bays are still there, the blue metal rolling doors contrasting with the dark beige stucco wall. The street is quiet. Next to the building are six two-story attached brick houses, on whose stoops witnesses, on that August day in 1934, sat and watched gunmen disguised as peddlers stick weapons in the face of armored guards, round up witnesses, load up bags of cash, and screech away in two cars. The tennis courts are now a parking area for a used car lot. Part of the Rubel property on Cropsey Avenue was also a used car lot.
The building is occupied by the Bruce Supply Co., which makes pipes and sells plumbing products. The main entrance is on the next street over, on the other side of the building, with the address of 8808 18th Avenue. The Rubel robbery was certainly not the last crime associated with the building. A sign attached to the wall near the loading bays offered a $2,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the men who robbed the building—in July 2011. Ghostly green photographs, apparently made from night-surveillance cameras, of figures with their shirts pulled over their heads, accompanied the text.
The Bank of Manhattan branch that was the armored car’s last port of call, on 86th Str
eet and 20th Avenue, is now a Chase bank, the result of a merger in the 1950s that created Chase Manhattan Bank.
The place near Bay 35th where the getaway boats (one of which was sold at police auction in 1940) might have been moored is no longer accessible, its entrance blocked by a mall. Nearby is the Harbor Motor Inn and a New York Sports Club. A tall aluminum wall blocks the view and access to the water. As for the Ben Machree Boat Club where witnesses saw the Rubel gang make their getaway over the water, an attendant at a fuel oil company nearby said he remembered a boat club being next door years ago. The company may have been on the same site as the fuel oil concern where the witness named Loomis Wolfe in 1934 described one of the getaway boats.
The industrialists who owned the Riverside townhouses are little remembered today, but the products they created or nurtured live on. You can bake with Davis Baking Powder, write with Eberhard Faber pencils, drive on Goodyear tires, brush your teeth with Forhan’s Toothpaste, soothe a sour stomach with medicine containing takadiastase, or even watch a Marion Davies movie. As for their homes, the Seven Beauties kept their shapely forms, solid testaments to the real estate cycles of Manhattan, from the hopeful aspirations of the newly rich in a dynamic young economy, to the decline of postwar neighborhoods, to the new prosperity of twenty-first-century gentrification. Going back to their earliest years, not two decades after they were built, the townhouses already reflected the character that could always be found in Manhattan’s Upper West Side: The respectable and upright mixed with the seamy and sordid, bridged somehow by the bohemian and artistic. That really has always been the promise of New York City, an egalitarian stew.
Why did I pick these buildings in which to take up mental residence for so long? On the surface, it was pretty convenient. I was lucky enough to live around the corner from the oldest remaining freestanding row of townhouses on Riverside Drive, in a district that had been declared a landmark. I had also spent my childhood in close proximity. They were part of my inner landscape, and their European elegance and charm, their sense of the past, somehow touched in me a longing for another world, or a world gone by.