The Henry A. Smith Mansion -- No. 460 West 44th Street

The block of West 44^th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues was somewhat of an anomaly in the years following the end of the Civil War.    It was surrounded by the notorious Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood—blocks of dangerous slum infamous for crime, vice and hopelessness.

And yet here were rows of handsome brick and brownstone Italianate homes, many of them owned by physicians.  The double-wide mansion at No. 460 was separated from the row of houses on the southern side by a wide carriage drive that led to the private stables in the rear.  Unlike its neighbors whose parlor floors were entered above high brownstone stoops, the entrance of No. 460 was nearly at street level.

A peek over the industrial-type gate reveals the surviving Smith stable at the end of the former carriage drive.

The brownstone-fronted residence was home to Henry A. Smith, his wife Rosena, and their three sons, Henry, Augustus and Oliver.  Born in England, Smith had come to New York as a youth and found a job with a wallpaper manufacturer named Jones.  Eventually he became a partner and the firm’s name was changed to Jones & Smith.

When Jones died, Henry A. Smith continued the business and built a large wallpaper factory on Tenth Avenue and 42^nd Street, just two blocks away from his house.   But before long he would retire from active business.  The New York Times said “A few years after the war he sold out to Mr. Campbell, who had been one of his employes, and retired from active business.  He had by that time accumulated an ample fortune, and he thenceforth devoted his time to the management of his investments.”  

The Smith boys were educated in the City College of New York.  Augustus was enrolled there when his spinster aunt, Hannah Maria Smith, died on February 19, 1878.  The funeral of the 69-year old woman was held in her brother’s 44^th Street mansion at 1:00 on the afternoon of Thursday, February 21^st.

The carriage drive allowed for an attractive bay on the eastern side of the mansion.

Henry A. Smith’s retirement from the wallpaper business did not translate to inactivity.  In January 1886 Smith was elected a Director of the Tradesmen’s National Bank.  He eventually became one of the bank’s largest stockholders.   All wealthy New York City families left the city during the hot summer months for fashionable resorts or country estates.  The Smith’s maintained a summer home on Cayuga Lake in New York’s Finger Lakes district.

In the meantime, the Smith sons were doing well for themselves.  In 1890 Oliver was still attending New York City College; but Augustus had earned a civil engineering degree from the School of Mines, and Henry was an architect, temporarily running his business from the family home.

On Tuesday, July 21, 1891 Henry A. Smith suddenly died at the Cayuga Lake residence.  The New York Times reported “The cause of his death is not known here, but as he was an exceedingly hale and active man for his age, about seventy years, and was quite well up to last Saturday, it is supposed to be apoplexy.” (Apoplexy was the term most often used for what we now call a stroke.)

The first of the sons to leave 44^th Street was Henry.  On May 28, 1898 Architecture and Building reported “Mr. Henry A. Smith, architect, formerly of No. 460 West Forty-fourth Street, announces that he has removed his office to No. 85 Nassau Street, New York.”

Only three weeks later, on Saturday, June 18, Rosena W. Smith died.  Her funeral was held in the house the following Monday.

By now Augustus was the senior member of the engineering firm of Augustus Smith & Co.  In May 1901 he was awarded the contract for erecting a new bridge across the Mott Haven Canal by Bridge Commissioner Shea.  Just two months earlier the Smith brothers had agreed to sell the family home.

The Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide reported that the Young Women’s Christian Association had purchased the property on March 1 for $36,000.  The Association had maintained their West Side Settlement nearby at No. 453 West 47^th Street since 1897.  It was founded “as a boarding house at low rates, which would be as a home under the care of a home-mother.”  It then branched out into settlement work in the neighborhood.

The New-York Tribune now described it as a place “where women find a congenial home at rates suited to their earnings.  Classes at nominal charges to fit young girls for self-support, a kindergarten, a library and a penny provident station, which has grown to be one of the largest in the city, are there carried on.  Mothers’ meetings to refresh and cheer the over-burdened women of that district have been established.”

The Association’s work in the disadvantaged neighborhood had been so successful that it required larger quarters.  The Tribune reported that in addition to the $36,000 the group had spent on the property (which it called “the old Smith mansion), “Four thousand dollars more will be needed for alterations, additional furniture, etc.”

A house-warming was held on the afternoon of April 24, 1901.  The New-York Tribune remarked that ”During the evening a number of the police force of the Forty-seventh-st. station called with their wives.  Tea was served in the assembly room on both occasions.”

The newspaper described the new arrangements.  “The house, formerly the home of the late Henry A. Smith, is a spacious mansion of the English basement type, four stories high and between thirty-five and forty-feet wide.  The two upper floors are fitted as sleeping rooms, and will accommodate twenty boarders.  Most of these rooms have been newly decorated and all are tastefully furnished with iron bedsteads and white dressers, washstands and chairs.  The floors throughout the house are of hardwood and are covered with rugs.  The bedrooms are arranged for from one to four persons.”

On the top floor was a “daintily equipped” infirmary; on the second were the parlor, house mother’s room, assembly room and a classroom.  The assembly room had a rolling partition which made it possible to divide the large room into two classrooms.  “During the morning this is occupied by the kindergarten, in the afternoon by classes and in the evening for clubs, entertainment, etc.” explained the Tribune.

The first floor held the dining room, another parlor, library (which consisted of an amazing 3,000 volumes) and office.  The women eyed the large Smith carriage house with eager anticipation of additional classrooms.

The West Side Settlement was supervised by the wealthy and unmarried Ada Laura Fairfield.  But a year after opening the 44^th Street facility, she would move on to another project.  Every summer she took working girls to the country “in order to give them recreation, and at the same time an idea of country life of which they usually know so little,” as explained by The New York Times in May 1902.

But she found the places which she rented “more or less makeshifts.”  So in the spring of 1902 she purchased a large farmhouse outside of the village of Terryville.  The Fenn Homestead was built in 1784.  The New York Times reported “She proposes to make the old landmark a fresh-air home for the poor children of the west side New York.”  The newspaper added, “There, she says, she can give the working girls of the west side absolute rest during their two weeks’ stay.”

Another unmarried socialite, Alida A. Bliss, took over supervision of the West Side Settlement.   Christmas that year provided the perfect opportunity for the cooking classes to exhibit their skills.  “The jollity began with a gingerbread festival last week,” reported the New-York Tribune on December 15, 1902.  “Gingerbread hot and gingerbread cold, gingerbread by the loaf, by the cookie, by the wild animal, with bead eye and red flannel tongue, was served, plus accessories to the friends of the Settlement in general and the ‘Ada Laura Club’ in particular.  The senior cooking class cooked while the club received, and the ‘gingerbread hot’ was served ‘from oven to guest.’”

A few days later the Junior Cooking Class got its turn.  None of the girls in the class was over 10 years old.  The course—ten lessons long—taught girls the fundamentals of “plain cooking.”   The girls’ mothers were invited to the Settlement to sample the results.

Christmas week was filled with activities for all the “clubs” and groups associated with the Settlement.  Perhaps the most heart-warming of the activities, however, was the Christmas tree for the “outside poor.”  This year, however, the Y. W. C. A. feared it could not afford the gesture. 

The Tribune described the “Outsiders’ Christmas tree” as a “festival for all in the neighborhood who had not been remembered through some church or other channel.  There are many of these; last year they ranged in age from five to seventy-two years.  An old woman of sixty odd wept like a child when a bright shawl pin was given her from the tree.  It was the first Christmas gift she had received for many years.”

The newspaper told readers on December 14 that the Settlement “fears this feature of its many activities must be omitted, unless some friend of the ‘outsiders,’ some one with five cents or $5, or their equivalents in dollies and candy and ‘Christmasness,’ who has a fellow feeling for those whom every one else has passed by, will let the Settlement know about it, and so fill this threatened void in the usual Christmas cheer.”

The newspaper’s plea was worded to pull the heart strings of turn-of-the-century readers and it worked.  On December 30 it reported “There was a Christmas tree for the “outside poor” last evening at the West Side Settlement.”   Readers donated $17 in cash and a box of toys, as well as a Christmas tree.  In an early example of environmental sensitivity, the Settlement advised “After the tree has served its purpose there it will be ‘passed on’ to the potting house, in De Witt Clinton Park, for the children of the Plant branch.”

In 1906 the Y. W. C. A. published the long list of the classes available at the West Side Settlement.  It included classes in embroidery, industrial arts, economic cooking, basketry, cord work, sewing, weaving, and “Mothers’ Meetings” where parenting skills were taught.

When the Y. W. C. A. raised a staggering $4 million in 1913, the Settlement received $50,000 for improvements.  The Association reported that “A gymnasium will be added to the present facilities which are entirely inadequate to the needs of the neighborhood.”

The Settlement could now add “physical culture” to its list of classes.  By 1912 it had added dressmaking, millinery, and Bible Classes to the list.  There were still boarding accommodations for “twenty-five self-supporting young women.”

When the Settlement purchased the Henry A. Smith mansion in 1901 the block was still an oasis among the tenements and ramshackle buildings of Hell’s Kitchen.  But a quarter of a century of change had taken its toll.  On Friday March 6 1925 The New York Evening Post reported that the Young Women’s Christian Association had received permission from Supreme Court Justice Erlanger to sell the property.

“It is set forth in the petition that the neighborhood in which the building is situated has changed so much since 1901, when it was bought for $36,000, that it has become inadvisable to continue its use as a boarding house.”   The Association sold put the property on the market for $43,000.

Over the elliptically arched doorway a cross was incised into the keystone.

Today the Smith mansion is nearly unrecognizable.  The complex, bracketed cornice and the lovely paneled Victorian entrance doors are the sole surviving architectural elements.  The lintels were long ago shaved flat and the Italianate doorway surround was streamlined by the Y. W. C. A. which added an incised cross to the new keystone.  It nevertheless tells a vivid story of a time when reformers and social activists worked to improve the lot of the West Side’s poor.

photographs by the author

The 1882 Ontiora Apartments -- No. 200 W. 55th Street

Although it was inventor and actor Isaac Merritt Singer who founded the Singer Sewing Machine Company; it was Edward Clark who made it a success.  The sewing machine was not a new idea when Singer began tinkering with the contraption around 1850; several variations had already been patented.

Singer’s improvements, however, patented on August 12, 1851, resulted in the first practical machine.  His prototype could sew 900 stitches per minute—more than 40 professional seamstresses.   Clark had been Singer’s attorney since 1848 and the two became business partners.  

A marketing genius, Clark sold the domestic versions of the machine to wives of clergymen at a 50-percent discount.  When the preachers’ wives received their sewing machines, Clark knew that women in the congregations would follow suit.  He also came up with the idea of an installment plan, so a housewife could make small payments on the $10 machine until it was hers.  As improvements made the older machines obsolete, Clark accepted trade-ins—an unheard of concept that caused sales to skyrocket.

Edward Clark amassed a personal fortune and began looking towards real estate development.  In the 1870’s he teamed with architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh and erected rental cottages for summer visitors to Lake Otsego near Cooperstown, New York.  It would be the beginning of a long and mutually-prosperous relationship.

It would still be years before Hardenbergh’s name would be nationally recognized for buildings like the Waldorf and Astoria Hotels, the Western Union Building on 23^rd Street, and the Plaza Hotel.   Toward the end of 1877, Clark bought up several building plots on Seventh Avenue.   Outspoken in his elitist attitudes towards the impoverished; he intended to make the West Side as affluent as the East.  To do so he would simply push the poor out by constructing high-end apartment buildings and he urged other property owners to do the same.

He encouraged landowners to work together, mutually investing in property, and issuing restrictive covenants on construction.  He told a meeting of the West Side Association in 1879 that only their cooperation could establish the West Side’s “exclusive character” and lure well-to-do residents. 

According to the authors of “The Park and the People," he asserted “There is the highest authority for believing that the poor will always be with us; but it does not follow that the poor will necessarily occupy any part of the West Side plateau.  The poor would be sufficiently with us if they lived in New Jersey or Long Island.”

The previous year Clark had put his money where his mouth was.   He owned three of the corner lots at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and 55^th Street.  In 1878 he began erecting what today would be termed “luxury apartments.”  Henry J. Hardenbergh designed all three—the Wyoming, the Van Corlear, and the Ontiora.

The Ontiora was completed in 1882 at the southwest corner.    The red brick building with white stone trim stretched along West 55^th Street with its entrance centered at No. 200.   Unlike the Dakota Apartments he had designed for Clark two years earlier, there were no turrets or pyramids or balconies.  Instead Hardenbergh turned to the sharp angles and clean lines of the Queen Anne and Eastlake Movements currently taking hold.  The entrance portico morphed into the slightly-projecting wall of the central staircase hall within; which then edged back to the façade much like an exterior chimney wall.  Here the architect focused his embellishments—including stained glass windows with “jewels,” and the date of completion in a carved cartouche.

The date of construction is carved in a cartouche resembling a frightening, gap-mouthed creature.

Still hoping to push the poor to New Jersey, Clark’s Ontiora offered one enormous apartment per floor—about 2,000 square feet or the dimensions of a reasonably-sized private home.   The ceilings rose over 10 feet from the floor and the interior doors and cabinetry were of handsome woods.

Just as the first residents moved into the new Ontiora, Edward C. Clark died on October 14, 1882.   The new tenants were of the social class Clark had hoped for.  Lawrence Miller and his wife lived here by 1892.  She was a member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Committee of the Post Graduate Hospital and a force behind the building fund for the new babies’ ward of that facility.

Mrs. Miller and the other committee members worked to raise $20,000 to build and equip the new Post Graduate Hospital wards.  The New York Times said “These wards not only serve to relieve the misery among the children of the destitute, who are treated free of charge and without distinction of race, color, or creed, but also serve as a school for the physicians from every part of the country who come to study the diseases of children.”

It was not all charity work for the socialite, however.  A year later, on January 26, 1893, the society gossip newspaper, Town Topics, noted that “Mrs. Lawrence Miller, of West Fifty-fifth street, who has been visiting her mother, Mrs. Joseph Sawyer, in Boston, the past fortnight, has had no end of agreeable attention offered her.”   No doubt other wealthy ladies poured over the list of affairs held for her.  “She had a dinner at the Somerset Club, among other smart entertainments, given by Mr. and Mrs. David Nevins.  Mrs. Miller gave a luncheon just before leaving for New York to a party of twelve of her old school friends at her mother’s house on Commonwealth avenue.”

White stone trim contrasts with the robust red brick.

In the Ontiora at the same time were Dr. Bernard E. Vaughan and his wife.  The medical prodigy had moved to New York two years after the apartment building was completed to study at the College of Physicians and Surgeons.  Following his graduation in 1887, he was accepted as a member of St. Luke’s Hospital, later to be made house physician.

The year after he left the hospital, in 1889, he married Maud Phillips Kniffen.  His career continued to skyrocket.  By 1895 he was the assistant attendant physician at the New York Cancer Hospital, physician at the New York Dispensary, instructor at the Post-Graduate Hospital (Mrs. Miller’s pet charity), and was on the medical staff of the New York Life Insurance Company.

On February 27, 1895 the 32-year old doctor was taken from his apartment to St. Luke’s Hospital.   He was operated upon for appendicitis the following day; and within a few days succumbed from “the effects of an operation,” according to The Sun on March 7. 

Rather oddly, the members of the Hospital Graduates’ Club felt it necessary to vote on delivering condolences to his young widow.  The club’s minutes of April 23, 1895 read “Resolved, That the sincere sympathy of the club be tendered to his bereaved family, and that this action be entered upon the club records and published in the professional journals of the city.”

The McLoughlin family was residing here at the time and little William McLoughlin proved that a privileged upbringing did not always dissuade mischief.  He found himself behind bars in November 1896.

According to The New York Times on November 4, “William McLoughlin, eight years old, of 200 West Fifty-fifth Street, was arrested last night for building a bonfire in Fifty-fifth Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues.”   Exacerbating the boy’s crime was his choice of fuel for the fire.  He was also charged with “tearing down fences built around a vacant house in the same block.”

Other residents were the well-to-do W. H. Shields and his wife.  Mrs. Shields was the sister of the Rev. John Spencer Turner, Jr.  On October 9, 1898 The Sun reminded readers that he was “the Episcopalian clergyman whose conversion to the Catholic church created considerable discussion last summer when the fact became known.”

Mrs. Shields and her brother were born in Brooklyn and he was ordained an Episcopalian priest in 1894.  When he converted to Catholicism, things got messy.  “He was rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Rochester, N. Y., when he incurred the displeasure of the late Bishop Cox by reason of his ritualistic practices,” said The Sun.  “The Bishop forbade him to preach in his diocese, and in token of this inhibition Mr. Turner caused a black flag to be displayed from his residence.”

The hoop-la seemed to have died down a bit by the following year.  The European comings and goings of Mrs. Shields and her husband were commonly noted in the society pages.  But in October 1898 social eyebrows would be raised after their steamship docked in Manhattan.

The Sun ran the shocking headline that announced “Mrs. Shields Turns Catholic” and reported “Mrs. W. H. Shields of 200 West Fifty-fifth street, this city, has lately returned from Paris, where she was converted to the Roman Catholic faith.”

In 1915 sewer workers toil on 55th Street.  The deep light well with its iron railing is still evident and the commercial space on the ground floor is still years away -- photo from the collection of the New York Public Library

When Helen Guard lived here in 1915, the ground floor of the Ontiora was still girded by a deep light well and the apartments were still rambling, upscale flats.   That year Italy put aside its policy of neutrality and in May entered World War I on the side of the Allies.  Helen Guard was a friend of Madame Daballa, the wife of the Italian General in Turin.  Through her Helen learned of the sufferings of the Italian troops in the frigid mountains 8,000 to 10,0000 feet up.

She wrote to the Editor of The New York Times on October 8, 1915 offering to collect warm clothing for the soldiers.  Telling readers that the Italian Government had let its female citizens know that 18 million pairs of woolen socks and several million woolen mittens and sweaters were needed, she wrote “Italy has made no appeal of any kind for aid to others than her citizens.  I am quite sure, however, that there are thousands of American women who feel themselves in debt to her, and if any one of them would like to send one pair, a dozen pairs, or a hundred pairs of woolen socks for the Italian soldiers’ use, I shall be happy to forward them.”

Helen closed her letter saying “They should be of large size.”

Throughout the following decade the apartment house retained its respectable tone, although by 1922 a commercial space had been gouged out of the Seventh Avenue facade.  Thomas D. Green and his wife lived here in the 1920’s while daughter, Julie Gibbs Green, attended the Veltin School and the Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington, D. C.  In August 1923 Julie was married in a fashionable ceremony to Princeton graduate and former Navy Junior Lieutenant Perry McKay Sturges.

In 1922 when the Greens were living here a storefront had been installed on the 7th Avenue side.  photograph by Irving Underhill, from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UAYWRMYLJ0&SMLS=1&RW=1280&RH=915&PN=18#/SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UAYWRMYLJ0&SMLS=1&RW=1280&RH=915&PN=18

As the 1940’s approached change was coming to Seventh Avenue.  In 1938 the light well was covered over and each of the gargantuan apartments were divided into three—all except the third floor which remained a single apartment.  That holdout resident remained until 1956 when the third floor apartment, too, became three.

Through the first decade of the 21st century the building was slathered in gray paint -- photo http://www.startsandfits.com/hardenbergh/ontiora.html

Sometime after the mid-20^th century Hardenbergh’s robust Ontiora was covered over in a monochromatic coating of gray paint.  The all-important contrast of brick and stone was disguised and the building became supremely overlookable.  Inside things were not faring too well for the once-elegant apartment building either.  In 1997 The Times opined “the Ontiora is now far from what Edward Clark envisioned: dirty and bedraggled, swamped by traffic and noise, the ground floor now turned over to commerce.  The halls have open trash cans—Clark would have had staff whisk any garbage away by dumbwater—and the walls are grimy with age.”

Although the street level, including the wonderful entrance portico, has been obliterated, most of Hardenbergh's hefty design survives.

A restoration of the façade sometime after 2006 resulted in the re-emergence of the wonderful details.  The stained glass panels still survive in the stairwell hall and the three apartments per floor—still roomy by Manhattan standards—with their 10-1/2 foot ceilings still exist.

non-credited photographs taken by the author