The "Charlie Parker House" - 151 Avenue B

 

Around 1849 or 1850 the three-story and basement house at No. 151 Avenue B was completed.  What set it apart from the similar Italianate style homes in the neighborhood were its Gothic Revival details--the especially handsome entrance with clustered colonettes and a square-headed hood over the arched opening, and the delicate tracery that ran below the cornice.  (Interestingly, the interior details were purely Italianate.)  Three bays wide, its parlor windows were nearly floor-to-ceiling, suggesting that they were once graced by a cast iron balcony.

The house faced the newly-opened Tompkins Square, completed in 1850, which assured summer breezes, sunlight and pleasing views.  It was hinted at in an advertisement in the New York Herald on July 12, 1853 read:

Elegant House To Let:  Nearly New, and finished in the best style, with all the modern improvements, finely located by a grove of forest trees.

A succession of tenants followed, all of them "genteel families," as demanded in a subsequent ad.  In 1853 James T. Bertine, Jr. and his widowed mother, Lillis, moved in.   James Bertine, Sr., who had operated four stage coach lines and omnibuses, died on December 28, 1842.  He left his grown children and Lillis considerable real estate in New York and New Jersey.  

In 1857 No. 151 became home to the Conger family.  John S. Conger's profession is not listed in directories, suggesting he may have been retired.  Abraham M. Conger was a clerk in the Post Office.  The family had one boarder, William F. Vanathringe.

When the "modern 3-story brown-stone house" was offered for sale in October 1858, the neighborhood was rapidly filling with German immigrants, not all of whom were impoverished.  No. 151 was purchased by the well-to-do Werner family.

Both Abraham and Edward Werner were brokers and they shared an office at No. 14 Rector Street.  Adolph Werner was a "tutor in History and Belles-Lettres" at the Free Academy of the City of New-York.   By 1863 he had been promoted to Professor the German Language and Literature.

The Werners remained in the house until 1864 when it became home to flour merchant Henry Mander and his wife Louise.  Following Henry's death in 1867, Louise took in a boarder, Christian Dick, who listed his occupation as "scavenger" at No. 1 Centre Street (the term most often referred to what today would be a street cleaner).

Louise Mander managed to keep the house by taking in one boarder at a time for several years.  By 1873, however, she was essentially running a boarding house.  Living with her that year were Francis T. and Sophia Lilliendahl (he was a cashier and she taught music), Louis Gros, who ran a biergarten at No. 60 Avenue B., and merchant Charles G. Sachs.

The Cohn family moved into the house around 1878.  Philip and Joseph Cohn were partners in the underwear company Philip & J. Cohn, Sigmund Cohn ran a clothing store on Canal Street, and Isaac was a inspector for the Department of Docks.

In 1880 Dr. David D. Toal and his wife, Annie, purchased the house.   Born in Ireland in 1838, Toal graduated from the New York University Medical College in 1867.  The house was conveniently close to the German-American Pharmacy at the corner of Avenue B and 12th Street which he had opened in 1868.  Toal divided his time between his office in the house and the drugstore.  In 1888 City of New-York, The Metropolis of To-Day said "Dr. Toal is a practising physician of wide-spread and enviable reputation and his residence and surgical rooms are located at No. 151 Avenue B., where he is in attendance at specified hours, and also gives free consultation at the pharmacy from one to two P.M. daily."

Annie E. Toal was not one to be underestimated, as a would-be thief discovered on June 19, 1882.  That day a "woman, whose black silk dress was heavily trimmed with lace, and whose black hat was adorned with a handsome ostrich feather," as described by The Sun, rang the bell.  With "a slight foreign accent" she asked the servant if a Mrs. Hill was in the house.  The Toals, too, took in a boarder who may have had a visitor, so the maid allowed the woman into the entrance hall while she checked.

The Sun reported "Mrs. Toal came into the hall to see what was wanted just as the woman was trying to open the door to leave the house.  She had Mrs. Toal's watch in her hand."  Annie had no intention of letting the crook get away.  "Mrs. Toal caught her wrist and took the watch away, and at the same time a set of diamond earrings fell to the floor."  Annie held the woman until police arrived.  The Sun remarked "The police have had complaints of a number of similar robberies from the neighborhood."

Dr. Toal was rather feisty, himself.  Two days each week he treated poor patients who were unable to pay for a physician.  On October 24, 1889 James A. McGinn sought his services, but he could not find the house.  Lost, he stopped in the drugstore of William Lang on East 10th Street to inquire.  Lang's shop was in direct competition with Toal's German-American Pharmacy.  The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported "the druggist refused to give him the information and used insulting language about Dr. Toal."

When McGinn finally found the doctor, he mentioned what had happened.  After David Toal paid a visit to the William Lang's drugstore to confront him, Lang had him arrested for assault.  But Toal's testimony was far different.  The Brooklyn Daily reported "Dr. Toal went to the drug store for an explanation and he found the druggist with a milk pitcher in his hand.  He attempted to strike the physician with it, but the latter warded off the blow with his cane."  The judge found the evidence "clearly in favor of the doctor" and "honorably discharged him, to the discomfiture of the druggist."

On December 17, 1897 Toal confronted a burglar in the house.  In reporting that Frank Miller was sentenced to ten years in State Prison on December 26 The Press added, "When the doctor discovered the intruder Miller struck him on the head with a sandbag."

On February 26, 1904 David D. Toal died.  The Sun noted "He lived at 151 Avenue B and was known to nearly every man, woman and child in the region."

Two years later the house was acquired by the Bryson Day Nursery as an addition to its operation next door at No. 149.  In 1909 the group initiated $18,500 in renovations, more than half a million in today's dollars.  Wealthy socialites who supported the Bryson Day Nursery included the wives of William G. Rockefeller, Robert Bacon and George S. Brewster.

The Bryson Day Nursery operated from both buildings.  photo via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

The National Association of Day Nurseries retained possession of the side-by-side houses until 1944, when The New York Sun reported on April 26 that Samuel Kilpatrick has purchased them.   The following February Joseph Raskob bought No. 151 and converted it to one apartment per floor.

The house became home to several artistic tenants, the most celebrated of whom was Charlie "Bird" Parker and his wife (although they never actually married), Chan Richardson.   By the time the Parkers moved into their basement apartment late in 1950 the jazz saxophonist was already famous.  In her 1993 autobiography, My Life in E-Flat, Richardson remembered:

Our apartment was in the Ukrainian section of the Lower East Side...It was an area full of poverty, peopled by Hasidic Jews with side locks and gypsies, and was a melting pot for refugees.  Our building was across from Thompkins [sic] Square Park and each of the...families living in it occupied an entire floor.  We occupied the ground floor, which had a separate entrance and opened onto a large courtyard in back for the children and all the animals we would eventually accumulate.

Richardson said she decorated the apartment with "blond wood furniture, put up Steinberg birdcage wallpaper from Sloans and painted the living room charcoal grey."  The year after they moved in the Parkers welcomed a daughter, Pree, and in 1952 son Baird was born.  

Parker's use of alcohol and drugs resulted in his being banned from New York State nightclubs in 1951.  He was forced to take to the road to support his family, and during those lengthy absences his alcohol abuse worsened.  That only exacerbated his depression.  Then, in March 1954 little Pree died of congenital heart failure.  Devastated, Parker attempted suicide twice.  The family moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania in October 1954.  He died nearly penniless there on March 12, 1955.

In the meantime, other notable tenants were Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Klein, who lived in the third floor apartment in 1955; and sculptor Peter Agostini who was here from 1962 to 1966.  Agostini's works are exhibited in esteemed venues like the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hirshorn Museum.

In 1979 Judy Rhodes purchased the property for $90,000 (about $317,000 today) and moved into the ground floor apartment where the Parkers had lived.   Chan Richardson's birdcage wallpaper was still there.

Rhodes had a jazz connection as a producer of concerts and booking agent for musicians at jazz festivals and clubs like the Village Vanguard and Sweet Basil's.  For a while she allowed artists like Art Blaky, Don Cherry and Dewey Redman to use her front room for rehearsing.

Two marble Italianate mantels, intricate plaster detailing and striking fluted pilasters survive on the parlor level.  photo via www.6sqft.com

The house was placed on the market in October 2015 for $9.25 million.  Rather amazingly, much of the 1849 interior detailing is beautifully intact.

photographs by the author

An 1890 Re-do - 165 Avenue B

 

J. G. Thomas lived in the house at No. 165 Avenue B in 1852.  But the neighborhood was begun changing.  In the 1840's German immigrants began pouring into Manhattan, settling mostly on the Lower East Side.  Within the next decade 800,000 Germans entered New York Harbor and by 1855 only Vienna and Berlin had a larger German population than did New York City.  The following year Thomas's house was gone, replaced by a five-story tenement building.

Not only the residents of the 23-foot wide building, but its owners were German.  Christian and Dorothea Hieber owned it until 1872, when they sold to Frederick Graf.  The shop on the ground floor was Albert Kessler's hardware store at the time.  

Upstairs the tenants included Knobloch family.  George M. Knobloch was a tailor and his son, Jacob, worked as a clerk.  The other tenants were another tailor, Martin Bollmann; "trimming maker" Herman Fuss; Jacob Meupfarth, a carpenter; Herman Neisner who worked in a dyeing works; and two widows, Francesca Maier and Elisa Stahl.  Elisa took in sewing to scratch out a living.

In the late 1870's three Irish immigrants lived among the otherwise German tenants.  Andrew Gallagher and Andrew Daley were both machinists, and Patrick Ryan was a bartender in Edward Hare's saloon at No. 104 Avenue C.   By the very nature of their jobs bartenders overheard conversations and that resulted in Patrick Ryan being involved in a bank robbery case in 1879.

Eight months earlier, on October 27, 1878, the Manhattan Savings Bank had been robbed in what was discovered to be an inside job.  The bank watchman, Patrick Shevelin, and policeman John Nugent were arrested, while Patrick Ryan and a bank teller, Joseph Bird, were locked in cells as witnesses.

It was Ryan who had identified Nugent to investigators during a clandestine walk-through of police headquarters.  Then, on June 14, 1879 he testified, recounting the conversations Nugent and Shevelin had had in the saloon over a matter of weeks.

By now the hardware store had been converted to an oyster saloon, run by George Hamber.  Oysters were a major part of 19th century New Yorkers' diets.  Oyster peddlers sold the shellfish from push carts and oyster restaurants and saloons were popular throughout the city.  (At least one, the famous Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, survives.)  It was still in the space at No. 165 Avenue B as late as 1886 when it was being run by Henry Kiefer.

In 1890 Abraham Katz purchased the aging building for $15,500--around $450,000 in today's money.  He hired the German-born architect William Graul to make massive renovations, including a new façade and "interior alterations."  Now faced in warm orange brick, the openings were capped by pressed metal cornices.  A handsome bracketed metal cornice included a Queen Anne sunburst below which was Katz's name and the date of the work.

The building continued to house tenants with German and Irish surnames.  But their financial and professional standings had improved--possibly reflecting higher rents in the updated building.  An example was William H. Lorch whose family moved in when the alterations were completed.

Active in politics, he was a candidate for the New York Assembly in 1890, running for the Prohibition Party.  He won and would retain his seat for decades.   On March 18, 1892 he ran an advertisement in the Sullivan County Record announcing "Farm For Sale."  Formerly the property of Adam Lorch, the Youngsville, New York farm engulfed 43 acres and had "good buildings and good orchard."

The tenants at the turn of the century included auctioneer Louis Sachs, and Amelia Hansen and her teen-aged daughter, Valdburga.  In 1903 Valdburga was 18 years old and worked in a shop on Broadway--until she was wooed away.

According to the New York Herald, in September Amelia told authorities that Valdburga "left her home some weeks ago after meeting a wholesale merchant, who is credited by Mrs. Hansen with being a millionaire, but whose name she does now know."

The article explained that, according to Amelia, the man "took the girl to Long Island.  He afterward called on the mother and said he was interested in the girl and wished to take her to Europe to improve her education."   When Amelia refused, he promised he would take along an older woman as an escort.  She still objected.

Six weeks after Valburga left the apartment her mother flew into a panic.  She read in the newspapers that information had been leaked to the police than an "heiress" was going to be kidnapped and taken to Europe because her family disapproved of her suitor.  Amelia thought that perhaps the facts had gotten twisted and the girl was actually her daughter.  She rushed to the Hoboken police with her story in an frenzied attempt to find Valburga.

On September 13, 1903 the New-York Daily Tribune reported that she told Chief Hayes "that a policeman had told her that her daughter, Valdburga, was about to be kidnapped and taken to Europe on board the Pretoria."  The case fizzled out, the New York Herald saying "No fair heiress was kidnapped in Hoboken yesterday to prevent her marriage to a man of low degree, but the city had a thrill of genuine excitement over a chase for the elusive heiress and the resulting rumors."

Apparently disillusioned, Amelia seems to have given up.  "At the headquarters in Mulberry street in this city," said the New York Herald, "it was said that Mrs. Hansen had not called."

Joseph Jacoby was 22 years old in 1914 and worked as a salesman.  On Tuesday, September 22 he left the family's apartment for an afternoon on Flushing Bay where he hired a rowboat at Simpson's boathouse.  A while later witnesses saw him out in the bay, "stepping into the trunks of a bathing suit," according to the Daily Star.  They later said they saw him jump into the water.

That he would do so was puzzling, since he had earlier told a boathouse attendant that he could not swim.  The Daily Star reported "He was seen struggling in the water, holding on to the side of his rowboat.  Before would-be rescuers could reach him, he was drowned."

The currents of the bay swept the body under.  Two days the Daily Star reported "The police have so far been unable to recover the body."  It was not found until Friday when a yacht saw it floating atop the water.

The police had a theory as to why Jacoby had apparently killed himself.  "A red-covered book on Socialism was found in the empty rowboat the police later picked up.  Jacoby is thought to have been a deep student of the theories of Marx and his deep reading may have unbalanced his mind," explained the Daily Star.

The post-World War I years saw more Italian immigrants in the neighborhood than German.  In 1920 Pietro Fardellone, who worked for the Department of Docks, purchased No. 165 and moved his family into one of the apartments.  

Most likely unknown to him, two of his residents, Jacob Ackerman and his wife, were running a business from their apartment--one that displeased Federal authorities.  On April 23, 1925, working on a tip that bootleg alcohol could be purchased there, four undercover Prohibition agents showed up at the Ackerman apartment and bought liquor.  Inside they found the still that produced the illegal alcohol.  Not surprisingly the Ackermans were arrested.

During the Great Depression years the store was home to Burger Brothers, a hardware and housewares store where housewives could buy items like the Wear-Ever stew pan.

In the last quarter of the 20th century the space held Bossanova, listed in The New York Times's "A Guide to the Area's Hot Spots" as an "interesting home furnishing shop."

The storefront was remodeled in 2009 and the upper floors renovated in 2013 to three-bedroom apartments.  It was purchased by Aksum Investors L.L.C. in 2017 for $7.2 million.  Other than the modern storefront, it is little changed since Abraham Katz remodeled it in 1890, adding his name for passersby today to wonder about.

photographs by the author

many thanks to reader Matt Kay for prompting this post