Among the speculative investors who quickly recognized the
potential of Washington Square as an elegant residential enclave was wealthy
attorney Edmund Wilkes. In 1835 he began
construction on three brick-faced mansions at 21 through 23 Washington
Square North. Completed a year later,
they were stately Greek Revival homes with high brownstone stoops, columned porticoes and floor-to-ceiling parlor windows which opened onto handsome cast
iron balconies.
The land on which the houses were built was leased, not owned,
by Wilkes. The practice of signing a “leasehold”
on the land was not uncommon—as a matter of fact all the houses being built
along Washington Square North east of Fifth Avenue were on leased
land. That property was owned by the
Sailors’ Snug Harbor.
Wilkes signed a lease on the vacant lots on January 10, 1835
for a term of 19 and a half years. The
contract demanded that he construct a building within two years and that “there
shall not at any time…be erected, permitted or suffered upon the said hereby
demised premises more than one dwelling house.”
Wilkes complied with the terms of the lease which said the homes “be
constructed of brick or stone and covered with slate or metal, and be three or
more stories high above the basement.”
It all seemed very simple at the time. But that leasehold would prove to be more than
problematic a century later.
In May 1837, 22 Washington Square became home to wealthy commission
merchant Nathaniel T. Hubbard whose office was at 27 Front Street. Well educated, he would be best remembered
for his Autobiography of N. T. Hubbard,
With Personal Reminiscences of New York City From 1789 to 1875. Hubbard was a great lover of the opera
and became close friends with several singers. In his memoirs he mentioned “the musical entertainments I so often gave
at my own house on Washington Square.”
When the celebrated Caradori Allan arrived in New York with
her husband, they were introduced to Hubbard.
He wrote of them, “Her husband was a Scotchman by birth, and very much of
a gentleman, and very fond of money, it was said. She was no actress, but made up for that
defect in the beauty and splendor of her voice…I gave a musical entertainment
at my house on Washington Square in her honor.
During the evening she sang three or four of her English songs.”
Among Hubbard’s close friends was the prominent Boston
banker and merchant, Colonel William Parsons Winchester. When Winchester died in 1850,
Hubbard boarded a train to attend his funeral.
He had scarcely left New York when his son suffered a tragic accident.
On the afternoon of August 7, the young man attempted to
board a moving Hudson River Railroad car at the corner of Canal and Greenwich
Streets. The New-York Daily Tribune
reported the following day that he, “accidentally fell under the wheel and had
his leg crushed to pieces, so that amputation was necessary.”
Within a few years of the accident Hubbard would update his
home. He replaced the Greek Revival
ironwork, including the balcony, with more contemporary Italianate style examples. It was possibly at this time that the striking
arched doorway was installed.
On November 9th, 1861, the mansion was the scene
of the Hubbards’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration. The couple was surrounded by “all my children
and a large number of grand-children,” as Nathaniel Hubbard later remembered. But that year would also be the beginning of
problems.
According to Hubbard’s autobiography, his “fortunes began to
wane.” He managed to stay on in the
Washington Square house until 1866 where he had “resided twenty-nine years—twenty-five
years in great prosperity.”
By the 1870s, the family of John Jay moved into the
house. A grandson of John Jay, president
of the First Congress and first Chief Justice; Jay had been appointed Minister
to Austria in 1869. An ardent and early
abolitionist, he had became a manager of the New-York Young Men’s Anti-Slavery
Society in 1834, two years before graduating from Columbia College. He argued several slavery cases
and during the Civil War frequently advised Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet.
On April 13, 1869, the New-York Tribune said of him, “Apart
from his professional and public career, Mr. Jay has succeeded in earning for
himself a far-famed renown, and has nobly maintained the traditional reputation
of his distinguished family, by the publication of numerous literary
productions, which have more particularly been devoted to the discussion of
questions of public interest.”
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| John Jay II -- Massachusetts Historical Society Photo Archives. |
On February 28, 1878, Jay’s wife, the former Eleanor Kingland Field, hosted the first meeting of
the Thursday Evening Club. Its first president,
she intended the social club to “maintain its standard, and to make it
increasingly a centre of intellectual intercourse and recreation, by resisting
every tendency to ostentation or extravagance in its entertainments and by
welcoming to its fellowship those whose credentials are to be found in
cultivated tastes and literary or artistic accomplishments.”
The dues were set a $2 and membership limited to 160. Meetings were to be held on the first and
third Thursday of each month, beginning in December and ending in April, “with
no meetings during the Lenten season.”
Eleanor and her co-founders were specific in how the
meetings would be run. They would start “precisely
8:30 o’clock.” All addresses and
entertainments were to “begin punctually at 9 o’clock and last no more than
forty-five minutes.” The hostess at
whose home the meeting was held was responsible for providing the
entertainment.
Refreshments at the
meetings of the club are to be very simple, and the wines limited to claret,
hock, sherry, and punch. The light
refreshments may be placed on a buffet or passed around on waiters, but no
regular supper tables shall be set and no champagne shall be allowed.
For the first meeting, Eleanor arranged for Bishop Potter
to address the women. He chose “Clubs”
as his topic. Eleanor Jay had
succeeded in forming one of the first women’s clubs in New York and admittance
to the exclusive Thursday Evening Club was highly coveted.
Eleanor took an afternoon drive up Fifth Avenue each day. As
The New York Times later pointed out, such an outing was then “a part of the day’s
fashionable program.” The newspaper said, “A commanding figure always, her bonnet and coiffure strictly Victorian, she
sat erect in her somewhat outmoded high C-spring barouche, drawn by
high-stepping horses, with coachman and footman in cockaded liveries.”
John Jay’s public celebrity and his wife’s social status notwithstanding,
the Washington Square house would be just as socially important in the 1880s
when Louisa Aspinwall Minturn moved in. Recently widowed, her husband, shipping mogul John W. Minturn, had shockingly committed suicide in his office in 1881. When
Louisa altered the house, she expectedly turned to architects Renwick &
Aspinwall to handle the project.
Fabulously wealthy, Louisa Minturn’s dances and receptions
were glittering affairs. The Evening
World mentioned on December 19, 1887 that Mrs. Minturn’s dance that evening “will
start the festivities of the week’s gaieties.”
The newspaper was prompted to print an apology to Louisa
Minturn a few days later after it seems the dowager had voiced her
displeasure. “The dance given on Monday
evening by Mrs. John W. Minturn, of 22 Washington Square, was not in honor of
her daughter, as has been announced, but for her niece, Miss Appleton.”
Among the happiest events in the house was a wedding
reception on April 14, 1894, following the marriage of Katherine M. Minturn to
Edward A. Le Roy, Jr. in the nearby Church of the Ascension. The New York Times noted that the ceremony
was “attended by a large number of fashionable people.”
The following year Louisa turned her attention to an
admirable cause—the erection of a new hospital for contagious diseases. She donated $25,000 to start the building
fund and, according to The Sun on May 2, 1895, “is devoting all her energies
toward the completion of her scheme.”
The project would result in the construction of The Louisa Minturn Hospital.
Louisa was, of course, a member of the Thursday Evening Club
and on January 16, 1896 she scored a coup
when adventurer Lieutenant Robert Peary spoke to the group on his recent trip
to the Arctic. The New-York Tribune
reported, “The lecture was illustrated with a number of stereopticon views.” If the club had started out as a women-only
group, Peary’s presence ended that. A
number of the socialites were accompanied by their husbands that night.
Louisa Minturn summered in Tuxedo. Summer homes required a staff as large,
and sometimes more so, than city mansions.
On October 31, 1900, she advertised in the New-York Tribune for, “BUTLER—First
class butler wanted for Tuxedo. Apply,
bringing references, Wednesday at 10:30.”
The Minturn Hospital continued, understandably, to be Louisa’s
pet charity. She repeatedly opened her Washington Square home to bolster
funding, such as the Christmas sale she held in December 1901.
On December 23, 1904, the 60-year old socialite attended a
dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. At 10:45, she climbed into her electric hansom and instructed her chauffeur, John Riley,
to take her home. As Riley drove down
Fifth Avenue “at a moderate rate of speed” towards 31st Street, an
electric cab was coming the opposite direction.
“In the north-bound hansom was a very pretty and fashionably gowned
young woman,” reported The New York Times the following day.
Suddenly the cab swerved diagonally across the avenue “with
no lessening of speed,” according to The Times.
“The two cabs came together with a crash.”
Louisa Minturn was thrown through the windshield and onto
the running board of the other vehicle.
The cab driver, Charles C. King, “was jolted forward and fell into the
wreckage.” His passenger received cuts
to her face. When an ambulance arrived,
both Louisa Minturn and the cabbie were unconscious.
“Dr. Lanthrop, who responded, found that Mrs. Minturn’s
head, face, and shoulders were lacerated, and, possibly, that her nose was
fractured," said the article. “King’s injuries were more serious. His left leg was crushed and the bones were
broken in several places. The heel of
his left foot was nearly torn off.” He
was arrested, charged with reckless driving.
Each of the owners of the Washington Square mansion had
renewed the leasehold on the land below it.
So far, it had not been an issue. Before long that would all change.
On June 7, 1919, the New-York Tribune reported, “Sir
Edgar Speyer has purchased the dwelling and Hamersley estate leasehold at 22
Washington Square North.” Speyer paid
$22,000 for the property, about $300,000 in today’s dollars.
The former London banker had given up his title as a British baron, resigned as a member of the British Privy Council, and moved to New York
in 1915. This followed the British Home
Secretary’s charge that he “has shown himself by act and speech to be
disaffected and disloyal to his majesty, and had, during the war in which his
majesty was engaged, unlawfully communicated with the subjects of an enemy
state and associated with a business which was to his knowledge carried on in
such a manner as to assist the enemy in such war.”
A member of one of the oldest families in Germany, Speyer
had been reared there, although he was born in New York City. He lived in England for 30 years and the
baronetcy was conferred on him in 1906 by King Edward for his services as the
Chairman of the underground railroad system in London. His wife, Leonora, was the daughter of Count
Ferdinand von Stosch. An accomplished violinist
and poet, she would go on to win the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her Fiddler’s
Farewell.
Two months later, after moving into the Washington Square
mansion, the Speyers announced the engagement of Leonora’s daughter from a
previous marriage, Enid Virginia Howland, to J. Robert Hewitt. “Miss Howland attended school in Europe and
has been in this country five years,” reported The Sun. “She is now with her mother in their country
place at Lake George, N.Y.”
Newspapers at the time referred to the Speyers and “Sir Edgar
and Lady Speyer.” But by the time Enid’s
sister, Pamela, married Count Hugo Charles Moy in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in
1926, The New York Times noted, “The bride’s father is Sir Edgar Speyer,
although he prefers to call himself Mr. Edgar Speyer.”
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| Edgar and Leonora Speyer in 1921. Illustrated London News, 24 December 1921 (copyright expired) |
On December 11, 1922, upon arriving at Pennsylvania Station, Leonora Speyer discovered that one of her
suitcases was missing. It came at a
time when police were puzzled by the robberies of “several fashionable women in
Pullman trains and in prominent hotels by removing suitcases packed with
jewelry and wearing apparel,” as reported by The Evening World.
Police staked out pawn shops and Detective Gunita’s
suspicions were raised when Emily Armstrong pawned a pearl necklace for $20 in
a shop at the corner of Third Avenue and 34th Street. “She was shadowed by Detective Gunita…to two
department stores, where he said he saw her steal several articles. Then he followed her to her furnished rooms,
where he arrested her.”
The Evening World described the “ladylike thief” as “about
thirty-five years old and of evident refinement.” The necklace she had pawned for $20 belonged
to Leonora Speyer and was valued at $4,000—in the neighborhood of $55,600
today.
Armstrong confessed, admitting that “she stood around the
Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal until she spied a fashionable woman
with a traveling bag, and then she would follow her to her Pullman compartment
and await her chance to walk off with the bag.”
The Evening World said, “Those at the Speyer home refused today to
discuss the case.”
The wedding of another daughter, Vivien Claire Speyer, took
place in St. Mark’s in the Bowery on April 8, 1927. Afterward, guests arrived at the Washington
Square mansion for a wedding breakfast.
Vivien married Herbert Goldschmidt-Hergenhahn, who was related to the
Rothschilds and Merton families of Germany.
That evening the newlyweds set sail on the Homeric, headed for their new home in Hamburg.
Finally, in 1929, the last of the Speyer daughters, Leonora
married--she, too, to a German, Dr. G. Von Wolff a Berlin surgeon.
In January 1932, Edgar Speyer traveled to Berlin for a nasal
operation. Doctors said he was “apparently
fit.” But his condition deteriorated and
on February 16 he died of a hemorrhage at the age of 69. For a few years, Leonora stayed in the house which she and
her husband had filled with antiques and art. Then, in 1935, she
entered negotiations with sculptor Robert Aiken to remodel the house for the
use “solely for his studio and private dwelling.” The architectural firm of Lenygon &
Morant provided a proposal for $20,000 in significant alterations to the
interiors and “possible remodeling of the front.”
But Leonora soon ran up against a legal wall—the leasehold. A letter from her attorneys, Guggenheimer
& Untermyer, on April 3, 1935 noted in part, “Under the terms of Mrs. Speyer’s
lease she cannot assign same without the consent of Mr. Hamersley. Further, since the present lease expires in
1938, Mr. Aitken is not willing to purchase unless he can come to some
satisfactory arrangement with Mr. Hamersley with respect to the terms of the
renewal.”
Leonra Speyer finally gave up. In
1939, the mansion was acquired by New York University to house a new Faculty
Club. The school commissioned architect
William S. Gregory to design the interior alterations.
In
2008, Morris Adjmi Architects began restoration and conversion efforts to serve the needs of
NYU’s School of Law. Although, as
explained in the firm’s website, “the north and south facades were meticulously
restored,” the grand interior spaces were less fortunate.
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| photo http://www.ma.com/project/22-washington-square-north/ |
non-credited photographs taken by the author
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