The 1902 The Rutherford - 206-208 East 17th Street

 

At the turn of the last century, residents in the Stuyvesant Park neighborhood saw the beginnings of a transformation, as private homes were being replaced with upscale apartment buildings.  On March 8, 1902, the Real Estate Record & Guide reported that two more residences, 206 and 208 East 17th Street, had been purchased by Isidor Mishkind and "a six-story flat will be erected."

Mishkind and his partner William Feinberg hired the architectural firm of Sass & Smallheiser to design the 44-foot-wide building.  The plans, filed in September, projected the cost of construction at $65,000, or about $2.37 million in 2025.  Completed the following year, The Rutherford was faced in beige brick above a rusticated limestone base.  The entrance was sheltered by a handsome portico supported by Ionic columns and pilasters.  The architects gave the building dimension by gently rounding the end bays.  They splashed the Renaissance Revival design with touches of Beaux Arts, like the richly carved oval windows on either side of the entrance.

Apartments in The Rutherford ranged from three to five rooms with a bath.  An advertisement stressed that it sat within a "refined residential section" and boasted an elevator.  A five-room apartment cost $42, an affordable $1,500 per month by today's conversion.

Among the early residents was Benjamin Thackara and his wife.  He was the "outside superintendent" of the Tiffany Studios Building and was in charge of its physical maintenance.  

The Thackaras were already here when Jean N. McIlwraith and Imogen Harding moved into the building in 1904.  According to Eva-Marie Kröller's Writing the Empire, The McIlwraiths, 1853-1948, McIlwraith had to share the apartment because she "had to count her pennies."  

Jean N. McIlwraith, Canadian Magazine, June 1901 (copyright expired)

Imogene was a music student and the women's apartment had a piano.  According to Kröller, both joined the choir at nearby St. George's Church on Stuyvesant Square.  McIlwraith worked for publishing companies, eventually becoming head reader at Doubleday, Page and Co.  She would write children's books, an opera, and historical romance novels.

Edward B. Schmalholz, was presumably living here alone when McIlwraith and Harding moved in.  He was described by The New York Times as "a well-to-do butcher" whose shop was at 73 Third Avenue.  The previous year, his wife, Margaret, left with their two children, ten-year-0ld Theodore and eight-year-old Edith.  She and the children moved into the home of her sister and brother-in-law on West 83rd Street.

Schmalholz devised a dastardly scheme to end the monthly support he gave his wife.  In the winter of 1904, Margaret attended an affair at the Waldorf-Astoria.  She met a dashing young man, "who said he was Capt. Phillip K. Stone" of the U.S. Army, reported The New York Times.  In fact, the soldier was Philip K. Sweet, a private detective.

Schmalholz visited the children every Wednesday, and during a visit the following summer, he said that Theodore looked sickly and offered Margaret $100 to take the children to Lake Placid.  She was surprised to run into Captain Stone there.  At one point Margaret sprained her ankle and Stone offered to help.  The New York Times reported, "He was in the act of applying the ice, the children being in another room, when the door was broken in and Mrs. Schmalholz's husband and several other men rushed in."  

Edward Schmalholz filed divorce papers, naming Stone as her lover.  Margaret charged him for conspiracy, exposing Stone and Sweet as the same person and alleging, "her husband wants to get out of paying further alimony and desires to be free to marry a woman who is now living at 206 West Seventeenth Street."  (The woman who answered a reporter's call to Schmalholz's apartment identified herself as the housekeeper.)

Joseph J. Evans and his wife had a remarkable houseguest in 1906--Evans's mother-in-law Hepsa Daggett Cottle.  Born in 1809, Cottle lived on Nob Hill in San Francisco.  When the earthquake and subsequent fires destroyed her house "almost around my ears," as she described the disaster, she found herself homeless.  And so, the 97-year-old (who had never been in an automobile) drove cross-country to visit the Evanses.  The Sun said, "After trying a short ride about town she motored to Boston and back and enjoyed the trip hugely."

Abraham Levi was the partner of Isaac Picker in their importing business at 12 Union Square.  The two men were arrested early in 1912 for receiving stolen goods after a bizarre investigation.  Fifteen reels of silent films had been stolen during a break-in at the General Film Company on Sixth Avenue.  Detectives suspected 20-year-old Victor Weiss and trailed him as he repeatedly visited Levi and Picker.  But he never carried anything into the shop.

Finally, detectives detained Weiss at 14th Street and Sixth Avenue as he neared Levi and Picker's office.  In its March 1912 issue, Moving Picture News reported, "After a cursory search, they found no stolen property on him and were about to release him when one of the detectives opened the youth's vest."  Weiss had spirited the movies one-by-one by winding the film around his body.  The article said, "An end of the film dropped down.  After removing Weiss' overcoat and coat the detectives spun him around like a top until the film was unrolled."  

The occupants of The Rutherford continued to be professional.  Living here in the years before World War I were pharmacist Eugene C. Osborn, whose drugstore was at 131 Third Avenue; pathologist Dr. James G. Callison; and artist William Grimm.  Dr. Callison would still be here in the mid-1920s when Dr. Sandor Roth occupied an apartment.

Living here six months a year in the early 1930s was Amandus Hochman, who had served in the Prussian Army during the War of 1870.  He came to America in 1873 and had worked as a bank guard.  Now he divided his time between his daughter's family here in The Rutherford and his other daughter's farm in Hopewell, New Jersey.

On January 7, 1935, the superintendent of the building told The New York Post that Amandus Hochman, was "taken back to New Jersey yesterday by State troopers, who came here for him in a car."  The 87-year-old Hochman was not in trouble.  He was being escorted to testify in the trial of the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping.  The New York Post said Hochman, who was "quite feeble," was "prepared to take the witness stand and identify Bruno Richard Hauptmann as a man he talked with on the night of the Lindbergh kidnapping."

Amandus Hochman (original source unknown)

Hochman testified that on the afternoon of the kidnapping, he witnessed Hauptmann stall his sedan by the road to his family's farm in Hopewell.  He claimed he noticed a ladder in the car, presumably the one used to climb into the Lindbergh baby's window.

Grace Avery and her daughter, Elizabeth Harrison Avery, were residents in the early 1940s.  Grace's husband, Commander Harrison Avery of the U.S. Navy, had died of a heart attack on board his patrol vessel in 1934.  Grace's son, Harrison, Jr. was a cadet in the Army Air Force in Greensboro, North Carolina.  As a child of a military family, Elizabeth had not only attended the Brooklyn Friends School and the Katharine Gibbs School, but the Shanghai American School in China.  The military tradition continued within the family when Elizabeth married Ensign Adam A. Smyser in St. George's Church on Christmas Day 1943.

A renovation completed in 1974 resulted in four apartments per floor.  Happily, the exterior of Sass & Smallheiser's "delightful, rather playful design," as worded by the Landmark Preservation Commission the following year, is almost totally intact.

photographs by the author

The 1903 W. M. Evarts and U. S. Senate - 231 and 235 Second Avenue

 

Largely forgotten today, William Maxwell Evarts was born in Boston in 1818.  He graduated from Yale University in 1837 and from Harvard Law School in 1839.  In 1849 he became Assistant U. S. Attorney, and in 1868 became United States Attorney General.  He would add U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Senator from New York to his resume before retiring from public service.  He and his wife lived in a refined brick and brownstone mansion at 231 Second Avenue at the northwest corner of East 14th Street.

The Second Empire style Evarts mansion was separated from a similar house facing Stuyvesant Square by a common garden.  from the collection of the New-York Historical Society

On March 1, 1901, The New York Times began an extensive article by reporting, "William Maxwell Evarts, lawyer and statesman, died yesterday morning at his home 231 Second Avenue, corner of Fourteenth Street."

At the time of Evarts's death, his neighborhood was changing.  Mansions on East 14th Street were being razed for commercial buildings, and those on the avenue were rapidly being replaced by apartment or institutional buildings.  Real estate developers Feller & Sherafsky razed the Evarts mansion and hired the architectural firm of Sass & Smallheiser to replace it with two apartment buildings.  As a nod to the esteemed statesman, they would be called the E. M. Evarts and the U.S. Senate.

The six-story, Beaux Arts style structures were completed in 1903 at a cost of $100,000, or about $3.57 million by 2024 terms.  Sitting upon a rusticated limestone base were five floors of dark red brick.  Two porticos with polished granite columns protected the entrances; their entablatures carved with each building's name.  Interestingly, the W. M. Evarts portico had single columns, while the slightly larger U. S. Senate's had paired columns.  The buildings' midsections were dominated by triple-height limestone arches, each crowned with shields and swags.

"W. M. Evarts" and "U.S. Senate" are engraved in the entablatures of  the porticos.  photos by Beyond My Ken.

Both buildings offered apartments of five or six rooms with a bath.  An advertisement in The New York Times on July 26, 1904 boasted, "near Stuyvesant Park; most beautiful location down town; all modern improvements; hall attendants."  (Uniformed hall boys were on duty to carry packages and help with minor errands.)  Rents ranged from $38 to $65--about $2,290 per month for the more expensive apartments.

The W. M. Evarts and U. S. Senate filled with well-heeled, professional tenants.  Among the earliest were Harvey W. Watterson and his wife, the former Alice Burrows.   Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1878, Watterson was a graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University Law School.  He was admitted to the bar in 1902 and in 1904 he and Alice were married.  A junior member of the law firm of Wing, Russell & Watterson, his social and financial positions were reflected in his memberships to the Manhattan Club, the Southern Society and the Kentuckian Society.

Harvey W. Watterson.  New-York Tribune, November 12, 1908 (copyright expired)

Around 5:30 on the afternoon of November 11, 1908, the Watterson maid answered their door.  Harvey was expected home around this time, but it was, instead, the wife of a close friend.  She had been telephoned by Thomas E. Wing, the senior member of the law firm, who asked her to break the news of Harvey Watterson's death to Alice as gently as possible.

At 4:45, Watterson was going over papers with a colleague when he looked at his watch and said, "Well, I must be going home."  The 30-year-old rushed to his private office, put on his overcoat, then noticed an open window.  The New-York Tribune reported, "It is believed Mr. Watterson reached up to pull down the window, tripped over the radiator in his hurry, and plunged headforemost to his death."  His estate, valued at over $1 million in today's money, went to Alice "until she shall die or marry again," as reported by the New-York Tribune.

Anna Snider, a widow, lived in the W. M. Evarts with her teenaged daughter, Mabel in 1914.  For several months, Joseph Zucker "wooed" Mabel, according to The Evening World.  The newspaper described her as a "pretty sixteen-year-old."  Her suitor was 24.  The Evening World explained, "When Mabel took Zucker to her house, Mrs. Snider looked him over and decided right then and there he wasn't the man to marry her daughter."

Anna later told Magistrate Appleton in the Centre Street Court, "I didn't like his looks and told him to make himself scarce."  Although Mabel cried, she promised her mother she would not see Zucker.  Not surprisingly, Anna discovered the two were meeting secretly and went into private investigator mode.  She went to Police Headquarters and discovered he had spent time in prison.

Anna told her daughter, who reacted by becoming angry and insisting the two were in love.  On March 13, 1915, the couple sneaked off to City Hall and were married.  But the tenacious and protective Anna Snider was undeterred.  She had Zucker arrested for abduction, The Evening World explaining, "it being a felony in this State to marry a girl under the age of eighteen years without first obtaining the consent of her guardian."  

In court on March 15, Zucker's prior convictions "as a disorderly person and pickpocket" were revealed.  This  new information was too much for Anna to endure.  The Evening World said, "When Mrs. Snider heard of it she promptly fainted."  Zucker was sent to the Tombs and, as reported by The Evening World, "Mabel cried a bit and then went home with her mother."

The 14th Street side of 231 Second Avenue was lined with stores, one of which was the Dreyfus Drugstore.  On December 6, 1922, The Evening World reported, "Burglars have robbed Druggist Dreyfus of No. 231 Second Avenue twelve times."  Rather sarcastically the article added, "Apparently it's a habit."

More than two decades after being repeatedly robbed, the Dreyfus Drugstore advertised in the Yiddish language The Day on February 11, 1945.

The U. S. Senate was the scene of a tragedy in the summer of 1926.  On August 18, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, "In view of thousands of persons, Hyman Zuckerman, 30, a laundry owner, of 1381 Eastern Parkway, leaped from the roof of a six-story building at 235 2d ave., Manhattan, shortly after 10 o'clock this morning and was impaled on a six-foot picket fence."  (The cast iron fence had to be cut with acetylene torches to extricate the body.)

The article continued, "A tragic scene was enacted a few minutes later when Mrs. Elsie Zuckerman, wife of the laundryman, with her 11-month-old daughter, Marion, drove up in a taxicab in search of her husband.  The cab was forced to stop because of the crowd, and she saw her husband's body on the fence.  She swooned."  Why Zuckerman chose this building for his suicide is unknown.

A fascinating resident of 235 Second Avenue was Dr. Leon M. Pisculli.  A gynecologist, he was the founder and director of the American Nurses' Aviation Service, Inc.  In August 1932, the 53-year-old organized a 4,000 mile, non-stop flight from Floyd Bennett Field on Long Island to Rome, Italy.  Pisculli recruited 31-year-old William Ulbrich, "a veteran barnstorming pilot," according to the New York Evening Post, and Edna Newcomer, a 28-year-old student nurse.  She was one of two trained female nurses in the United States with a pilot's license.

Edna Newcomer and Dr. Pisculli in the monoplane The American Nurse prior to takeoff.  from the collection of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

The Morning Call said they expected their trip in the monoplane to take 25 hours.  It left Floyd Bennett Field shortly after 6 a.m. on September 13.  At 5:50 p.m. it was sighted by the tanker Winnebago in the mid-Atlantic.  That was the last anyone saw of The American Nurse and no trace of it or its crew was ever found.

Living here in the early 1980s were Andrea Rita Dworkin and John Stoltenberg.  (The couple would marry in 1998 because of Dworkin's ill health, despite Stoltenberg's being gay.)  Dworkin was a radical feminist writer and activist, and Stoltenberg was an editor, author, lecturer, playwright, theater critic.  Over his career he would edit Essence, Lear's, Working Woman, and AARP: The Magazine.  

Surprisingly, after more than 120 years the two porticoes have survived.  The W. M. Evarts and the U.S. Senate are the sole reminders that a once-revered statesman once lived on this corner.

photographs by the author

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The Young Men's Benevolent Assn. --No. 311 East Broadway

The oddly-shaped plot of land at the point where East Broadway melded into Grand Street saw immense change in the 19^th century.  The four-story house at No. 311 East Broadway was home to broker James E. Betts in 1842 whose office was at No. 14 Wall Street.  But already changes in the neighborhood were underway.

The commercial district of Manhattan pushed forever northward, forcing residential neighborhoods out.  The Lower East Side’s old residents were replaced by the waves of immigrants that arrived throughout the next decades.  As the century drew to a close, Jews from Germany, Poland and neighboring countries had filled the area.  By the turn of the century about 50,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in New York Harbor every year.  While poor, most were respectable and hard working.  Some were not.

In February 1894 police barged into the house that had been home to James Betts half a century earlier.   The New York Times reported they “raided a gambling house kept at 311 East Broadway by Herman Rosenthal, Saturday night, and captured twenty-eight men, but not the proprietor.  They were engaged in a game of chance.”  The men were fined $1 each.

Soon, however, the Young Men’s Benevolent Association would take over Herman Rosental’s gambling house.  Organized in 1889 by a group of six young Jewish men seeking to provide a respectable place of social activity and learning for locals, it took as its motto “Education and Benevolence.”  Funded by wealthy philathropists, the Settlement Movement spurred the construction of settlement houses throughout the impoverished neighborhoods of Manhattan.  But The Young Men’s Benevolent Association was determined to make it on its own, without help from rich donors.

The group, understandably, started small.  And yet by 1899 they had the resources to rent No. 311 East Broadway and convert it to the Association’s headquarters. It boasted between 200 and 300 members.   The Times pointed out that “a library and reading rooms are maintained.”

The lofty goals of the Association sought to better the minds of its members and to educate them on current events in their new country, on history, and on the arts.  To this end lectures were given once a week by “men of prominence” invited by the group.  On January 13, 1899, for instance, Mayor Seth Low addressed “about 200 men and a few of their young women friends.”  He spoke that night on “The Greater New York Charter”—the important legislation enacted in January 1898 that consolidated Manhattan and the outer boroughs into one city.

The men of the Association worked tirelessly to raise funds for its own clubhouse.  They came one step closer when, in May 1902, they obtained title to No. 311 East Broadway.  The Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide noted “The buyers now occupy the building.”

It would be nearly a year before the men commissioned architects Sass & Smallheiser to design their new building.   The Record and Guide reported that the plans called for a five-story clubhouse with an estimated cost of $35,000.

Largely overlooked today, Sass & Smallheiser were prolific in the Lower East Side at the time, producing for the most part tenement structures.  But their design for the Young Men’s Benevolent Association would dazzle.

For more than a decade the Flemish Revival style had been popular in Manhattan, most evidently on the Upper West Side.  But Sass & Smallheiser brought it downtown to East Broadway; adding touches of the equally-popular Beaux Arts style for good measure.   An exuberant concoction of red brick and granite, it featured all the decorative elements of Flemish Revival—the stepped side gables, playful dormers poking through the steep tile-covered mansard, and bold stone voussoirs that fanned out over the openings—all on a rusticated Beaux Arts base supporting a Beaux Art stone balcony.  If the two styles were by definition conflicting; they managed to happily coexist at No. 311 East Broadway.

No. 311 East Broadway as it appeared at its dedication.  The house it replaced would have been similar to the one seen partially to the right.  New-York Tribune, June 18, 1905 (copyright expired)

High above the sidewalk a panel announced the expected date of completion:  1904.  It was off by only a few months.  The dedication was held at 2:30 on the afternoon of April 30, 1905.  The press was as impressed by the building as by the fact that it came to be solely through the work of the humble members.

The date of completion was off by a few months.

The Evening World reported on the club’s many amenities. “But the fine equipments of the house are not the things that commend it most conspicuously to the public interest,” it said.  “The new building is the occupying association’s very own in every way.  It is the fruit of sixteen years of joint planning and harmonious effort.  The $50,000 which the establishment cost came in contributions from four hundred very earnest and hard-working young men; not in gifts from any great and rich friends.”

The New York Times called it “one of the handsomest buildings in that section of the city.”  The New-York Tribune said it “is now one of the show places of the East Side.  Like The World, The Times was impressed that the necessary $50,000 (in the neighborhood of $1.4 million today) came from the members, “mostly in the humbler walks of life.”

Members pose in the new gymnasium -- New-York Tribune, June 18, 1905 (copyright expired)

Mayor George McClellan chimed in during his remarks at the dedication.  “It was no small nor easy task for you to erect this splendid edifice.  It was a task from the carrying out of which older and wiser heads might have discouraged you.  Bu you have succeeded splendidly and are to be congratulated.”

Dr. David Blaustein, President of the Education Alliance, pointed out the group’s origins.  “You, or your parents, have come from countries of oppression where there were no opportunities for our race.  In this country we can proclaim aloud and without fear that we are good Jews in order to be better citizens.”

The Tribune reported that the “internal appointments are in keeping with its external appearance.”  The newspaper said “Throughout the greater part of the building the interior is finished in dark wood, with antique furniture, and presets an especially attractive appearance.”

The first floor contained the circulating library and reading room, and a billiard room.  In the basement were bowling alleys.  On the entire second floor was an auditorium, capable of seating 500; and the offices.  On the third floor were classrooms and “the cosey social rooms and ladies’ parlor,” said the Tribune.

In the classrooms interested members could receive schooling on a variety of areas.  Teachers were volunteers, some of them coming directly from the membership.  The New-York Tribune pointed out on June 18, 1905, “That it is productive of results is shown by the fact that two young men who received their early training in the club school are this year members of the graduating class at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University.  Another will be graduated from the New-York College of Dentistry and till another form Cooper Union.”

The gymnasium was on the fourth floor and the janitor’s apartment was tucked into the gable above it.

Seven months later the building was used as a rallying point in reaction to the October massacre of 800 Jews in Russia.  On November 14, 1905 The Jewish Defense Association met here “to call Jews to help their countrymen in Russia arm themselves in defense of their rights and lives,” reported The New York Times.  The group pleaded for funds to arm Jewish Russians.  “New massacres are preparing.  Our people must be possessed of arms to defend themselves and their honor.”

Within ten days the fund-raising had netted nearly $1 million.  The members of the Young Men’s Benevolent Association did their part.   The Times on November 24 reported that they were “arranging a big open-air demonstration…to be held in one of the large public parks not yet determined upon.”

Other Jewish groups used the auditorium at No. 311 East Broadway as well.  The Federation of Jewish Organizations took advantage of the large hall for meetings.  The group addressed and acted on issues of political and social importance.  In December 1908, for instance, it was decided to ask Congress to appoint rabbis as military chaplains.  At the time the Army and Navy had only Christian priests and ministers. 

At the same meeting Nathan Wise brought up the possibility of religious prejudice on the part of immigration agents.  “There seems to be an underground prejudice against the naturalization of Jews and I believe that the new law which compels them to speak English is part of the plot.”

By 1909 the membership of the Young Men’s Benevolent Association had risen to 400.  But within five years it found itself in financial trouble.  In September 1914 the group lost its building in a foreclosure auction.

No. 311 East Broadway became home to the Arnold Toynbee House in 1918.   Founded by Rose Gruening, it was named for the English social reformer who started the settlement house movement in London.   Neighborhood children were welcomed here as a refuge from the streets.  Various activities and classes were held here, like those of the Working Girls’ Recreation Committee which gave classes in “dancing, chorus singing, elocution and music appreciation.”  The Annual Report of the Jewish Protectory and Aid Society noted that in 1914 “A dancing class of special interest is being held at the Arnold Toynbee House to which the boys of the neighborhood are invited and a small sum is charged for each dance.”

ATH was carved into the granite cartouche on the balcony.

Like the Young Men’s Benevolent Association, the Arnold Toynbee House offered free lectures.  And in July 1918 the building opened as a summer “play school” for the needy children between the ages of 6 and 12. The New-York Tribune reported “Special attention will be given to looking after the health of the children…A standard luncheon at five cents will be served.”

In 1929 the New York Charities Directory encapsulated the work of Rose Gruening and her Arnold Toynbee House. “A neighborhood house affording the usual club activities, a roof garden, which last summer accommodated a play school for anaemic children, kindergarten, gymnasium, auditorium for lectures, concerts and dances, bowling alleys and pool tables for adult recreation.”  The Directory noted that the House was “supported by voluntary contributions;” but neglected to say that Rose Gruening was its greatest sponsor.

Called by the neighborhood “the angel of Grand Street,” she had funded the settlement with her own money and worked tirelessly with no compensation.  The daughter of a prominent eye and ear specialist, she grew up in privileged surroundings and graduated from Vassar College. 

The New York Times would later say of her “A calm, efficient, sympathetic and motherly person, she was known and loved by thousands of the East Side’s poor many of whom grew up to become well off financially after she had started them on their careers with her own money and returned to aid her work. She often helped to finance the college education of the youths she had aided as children.”

Around 1931 the Arnold Toynbee House was renamed the Grand Street Settlement House.   In 1936 it moved to No. 283 Rivington Street, not far away.   In reporting on the new location on November 18 that year, The New York Times noted “The old building which stood at 311 East Broadway was inadequate and was condemned last Spring by the Fire Department.”

Happily, the condemnation resulted in repairs rather than demolition.   In 1941 No. 311 East Broadway was converted to the Agudath Taharath Mishpacha of the East Side, Inc., “the Association of Family Purity.”   The renovations resulted in a mikvah, the ritual cleansing baths required for all Orthodox Jewish women.  Also in the building was the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls.

In 1994 a $200,000 renovation was initiated that modernized the 700-gallon roof-top cisterns that collected rainwater.  The pure water is processed through filters before filling the bathing tubs.

Today Sass & Smallheiser’s delightful 1905 structure continues to be used as the mikvah.  A bit grimy, it houses several chapters in the fascinating history of Jewish culture on the Lower East Side.

photographs by the author