Soon To Go - the 1886 York Hotel - 222-224 East 86th Street

photo by Beyond My Ken

By 1880 the Yorkville neighborhood was no longer a sleepy suburb.  Development following the Civil War was hastened by the opening of the Third Avenue elevated in 1878 and the Second Avenue line in 1879.  On June 15, 1882, Joseph Murray paid the extravagant sum of $10,000 for the 34-foot-wide, three-story wooden house at 222 East 86th Street (the price would translate to $307,000 in 2024).

Three years later, in March 1885, the Health Department approved the "plans for light and ventilation" for a new flat building at 222-224 East 86th Street.  Completed early in 1886, its Queen Anne design was rigidly balanced--a departure from the style's normally asymmetrical form.  Two storefronts flanked the residential entrance.  The upper section, faced in red brick and trimmed in brownstone, featured brawny arched windows at the second floor, and a pair of prominent copper gables that fronted a paneled parapet.

A center stair hall separated 222 and 224 and residents were listed at either address.  Described as a "first class, well kept apartment house," each of its apartments held four rooms.

Among the initial tenants of 224 East 86th Street were Byron W. Anderson and his wife Lucette.  Living with them was Lucette's widowed mother, Elizabeth Wall, who had a fascinating history.

Born Elizabeth Thompson in Freehold, New Jersey in 1798, her father, according to The New York Times, "was a German slaveholder."  The newspaper noted, "His house at Monmouth was Washington's headquarters when the famous battle was fought."  An "intellectual girl and of singular beauty," Elizabeth married Major William Wall.  When he died in 1856, he left Elizabeth with 10 children and "a handsome pension."

Fond of knitting, Elizabeth would often walk to Central Park and sit on a bench where she knitted socks that she would offer to policemen or laborers.  But it appears she also shows signs of what today we would recognize as early dementia.  Lucette wrote "Anderson, No. 224 East Eighty-sixth-street" on a slip of paper and tucked it into her mother's bag.  The New York Times explained she "feared that some day her mother would lose her way or be taken sick."

On September 20, 1886, The Boston Globe began an article saying, 

For many seasons the old lady with the knitting has been a familiar figure in Central Park.  All the policemen and laborers knew her by sight, but were ignorant of her name and residence...Selecting a shady bench in some retired nook the old lady took her knitting from the reticule and worked industriously until the afternoon was far spent. 

The day before the article, Charles McGlone, a park watchman, "saw a woman's body floating close to the western wall of the North basin."  He and an assistant removed the body.  The article said, "it was the 'old lady with the knitting.'"

The family had been searching for Elizabeth for hours and Byron W. Anderson identified his mother-in-law's body at the morgue.  While The Boston Globe attributed her death to "mental weakness, the result of advanced age," Anderson was not so sure.  He told a reporter from The New York Times, "to get to the reservoir basin she would have had to scale a fence which it was no easy task for an able-bodied man to get over."  The article said, "He scouted the idea of foul play."

Another early tenant was Mrs. Katherine Bassett, who taught German in Grammar School No. 37 on East 87th Street.  Katharine was most likely a widow, since, for the most part, only unmarried women taught in public schools.

Traveling salesman Oscar Hammerslough and his wife lived here by 1897.  The couple was married in 1893 and their domestic life was already troubled.  The New York Herald said on June 27, 1897, "Mrs. Hammerslough, who is twenty-seven years old and an attractive brunette, is said by her husband to have a passion for drink."

On the morning of June 22, Hammerslough gave his wife $20 for shopping before leaving on a sales trip.  When he returned home three days later, she was gone.  With two detectives, he found her in the home of Laura Johnson and Elisha Brewer, described by the New York Herald as "colored."  The article said Mrs. Hammerslough was intoxicated.

In court, Mrs. Hammerslough explained, according to the New York Herald, "that she had gone to a house to get some washing, and that she had been given something to drink by the colored man.  She denied that the man had assaulted her."  Laura Johnson testified that Mrs. Hammerslough came to her house at 11:00 that morning to get her laundry, that she asked to be allowed to sit down, "as she did not feel well," and that Laura had left her alone with Brewer.

Oscar Hammerslough told the judge he would apply for permission to have his wife committed to a private sanitarium.  She pleaded with him, "This will kill me.  Let me go, and I will go to my sister's."  The article said, "But her husband, who was standing close to her, turned his back and would not pay any attention to her.  He said afterward that he was going to apply for a divorce."

Interestingly, at the turn of the century the building was racially mixed.  Among the black tenants were the Robert W. Carter family.  Their movements were closely followed by the society columnists of The New York Age.  On September 28, 1905, for instance, it reported, "Mrs. R. W. Carter of 222 East 86th street, who has been seriously ill for four weeks, is able to be out again," and the following year, on October 25, the newspaper announced, "Mrs. Robert Brown of Manassas, Va., left for home last Saturday after paying a six weeks' visit to her daughter, Mrs. Robert Carter, of 222 East 86th street."

For some reason, Robert W. Carter lived apart from his family, only occasionally visiting.   On April 25, 1907, The New York Age reported, "after making a ten days' visit in different parts of Virginia, [he] spent the remainder of his vacation with his family.  He left for Boston on Sunday, April 21."  And on April 23, 1908, the newspaper reported, "Mr. R. W. Carter, of Brookline Mass., is spending two weeks in the city with Mrs. Carter and his daughter, Beatrice, at his house, 222 East 86th street."

No mention was made of the Carters' son, Myron L. Carter, in that article.  Eight months earlier, his name had appeared in newspapers for a a hideous crime.  On August 8, 1907, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that "Myron L. Carter, a mulatto, 19 years old, of 222 East Eighty-sixth street" had been arrested for the murder of eight year old Katie Tretschler.  The article recounted that she "was found strangled and outraged [i.e., raped] in the cellar of 203 First avenue" on August 1.

By 1917, State Senator Robert Ferdinand Wagner and his wife, the former Margaret Marie McTague, lived at 224 East 86th Street.  Born in Prussia in 1877, Wagner was elected to the State Assembly in 1905 and to the State Senate in 1909.  He was Acting Lieutenant Governor of New York from October 17, 1913 to December 31, 1914.

Robert F. Wagner, from the collection of the Library of Congress

Wagner left the Senate in 1918 to serve as a justice of the New York Supreme Court.  He remained in the 86th Street apartment following Margaret's death in 1919.  Journalist Ada Patterson titled her article in the June 1921 issue of The New Success, "The Janitor's Son Who Became a Judge."  She began her article saying,

He lives in a comfortable home, with his ten-year-old son at 222 East Eighty-sixth Street, New York City.  His recreation is grand opera.  Once a week he goes to the Metropolitan Opera House, or he puts a Caruso or a Barrientos record on his victrola and the music is an aid to him as he reads or studies...Robert F. Wagner was a poor immigrant's son.  He arrived in this country when he was eight yeas of age--and he could not speak one word of English.  His father secured a job as janitor in an East Side apartment house.

Patterson attributed Wagner's success to hard work, determination, and academic excellence.  Six years after her article, he was elected to the United States Senate and would served until June 28, 1949, succeeded by John Foster Dulles.

A socially visible tenant was Mrs. Lucelle Shiloh.  On March 3, 1923, The New York Age reported on the "Martha Washington dinner dance" she hosted in her apartment "in honor of Mrs. M. Patillo Harper of New Rochelle" on February 22 (George Washington's birthday).  The article listed 17 guests, who must have experienced snug conditions in the four-room apartment.

On November 12, 1926, The New York Sun reported that the Joseph Murray estate had sold 222-224 East 86th Street.  The next year the second floor was converted to offices and the upper floors to "non-housekeeping" apartments, meaning they had no kitchens.  That year G. Lipksin & Son, violin dealers, moved its shop into the western store.  In reporting on the move on September 24, 1927, The Music Trade Review noted, "This firm is thirty-five years old and specializes in fine repairing."

John Szabo operated his travel agency from the other store in 1937.  He ran afoul of anti-Nazi groups in September that year when he displayed American flags along with posters advertising German Day.  He was summoned to appear in the Yorkville Court on September 13 to answer to charges by the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League and the German-American League for Culture of "misuse of the American flag."  

The cut-up apartments no longer housed well-to-do residents.  Among the tenants in the spring of 1940 was 28-year-old James Russell Osterman, an unemployed shoe salesman.  On March 9 that year, he applied for a job at the shoe store of William Shapiro at 1485 First Avenue.  When Shapiro turned him down, Osterman reacted violently, stabbing him fatally with a hunting knife.  Before Osterman could escape, according to The New York Times, Shapiro, "with his last strength, kicked out the plate glass window before he died."  It attracted a crowd of passersby, who trapped Osterman in the store.  Police found him "crouching in the rear of the store grasping a hunting knife," said the article.

image via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

By the third quarter of the 20th century, the building was known as the York Hotel, a squalid SRO.  The New York Times journalist Sarah Lyall called it "a single-room-occupancy hotel that was little more than a flophouse."  In 1992, the nonprofit group Postgraduate Center for Mental Health purchased the building with financial help from New York State.  The group announced plans to convert the building into a group home for 38 mentally ill people.  It's president, David Glazer, told Lyall, "it was small [and] so rundown that repairs could only be welcomed by the community."

There were only two tenants in the building when the Postgraduate Center purchased it.  One left after she was found an affordable new apartment and given $3,500 for expenses.  The other, Jerome Smith, refused to budge.  Smith, who owed nearly $40,000 in back rent since 1988, "has refused to leave even as his neighbors moved out, as the paint peeled away in strips, as the curtains turned from yellow to brown and the rats took over," Lyall reported on March 8, 1993.

Despite all incentives--including an apartment in the renovated building--Smith stayed on.  The city, concerned about tenants' rights, would not allow the Postgraduate Center to evict him, threatening to "deny the group permission to renovate the hotel" if they did.

Finally, after a 14-month standoff, Jerome Smith accepted a $10,000 payment for moving expenses and the forgiveness of the back rent.  On March 13, 1994, The New York Times reported, "After being blocked for a year and a half by a tenant who would not move out, work began last week on the decaying York Hotel at 222 East 86th Street."

The PCMH Residences provided apartments to mentally ill residents until 2022, when a demolition permit was issued for the building.  On January 3, 2023, Nick Garber, writing in Patch, opened an article saying, "A nearly 100-year-old [sic] Yorkville building, home since the 1990s to a mental health facility, will be demolished by its nonprofit owner."

photograph by the author

More than a year later, the striking Queen Anne style building survives, but its future is shaky at best.

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