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 National Fine Art Foundry Bldg. - 218 East 25th Street

 

As early as 1853, Jane Clare, the widow of Peter Clare, operated the four-story boarding house at 108 East 25th Street (renumbered 218 in 1867).  In the rear yard was a two-story building.  Clare's tenants were working class, and in 1853 they included one laborer, two carpenters, a watchman (today's security guard), a smith, and a shoemaker.

Erected in 1848 and faced in running bond brick, the vernacular building was trimmed in brownstone.  Its pressed metal cornice was supported by creative brick corbels and dentils.

An advertisement in the New York Herald in April 1862 foreshadowed a major change to the property:  "To Let--At 108 East Twenty-Fifth Street, a four-story brick building; with two story Rear Building, suitable for business purposes."

The lower floors and back building were converted to the Chambers & Gabler piano factory, operated by Emil Gabler and Thomas H. Chambers.  Chambers had been making pianos as early as 1835.  He and Gabler partnered in 1863.

The least expensive of the 1866 instrument would translate to $7,250 in 2025.  Hannibal Daily Monitor, April 17, 1866 (copyright expired)

Chambers & Gabler dissolved in 1866 and Vinton & Son's pianoforte factory briefly operated in the space.  Charles A. Vinton had founded the business in the 1850s, and partnered with his son, Henry A. Vinton, in 1865.

In the meantime, Maurice J. Power was establishing himself as a sculptor.  Born in Rosscarbery, Cork, Ireland around 1836, he was brought to New York City at the age of three.  Powers wanted to create monumental sculptures--the heroic statues and monuments that adorned parks and cemeteries.

from History of the Tammany Society from its Organization to the Present Time, 1901 (copyright expired)

In 1868, Power established the National Fine Art Foundry and moved into the East 25th Street property.  (Presumably, the designing and molding were done in the main building and the foundry in the rear.)  By 1870, sculptor William Rudolf O'Donovan was employed here.  Born in 1844, he had apprenticed as a marble cutter in Carmichaels, Pennsylvania.  He saw fighting in the Civil War, including the Battle of Gettysburg.  Among their many works, Power and O'Donovan would design and execute several Civil War monuments.

William R. O'Donovan in the East 25th Street studio.  McClure's Magazine, October 1895 (copyright expired)

In April 1870, The Technologist said, "Mr. Maurice J. Power is an enthusiastic artist and, above all, an American artist and truly national work may be expected from his hands."   At the National Fine Art Foundry, said the article, "the noble art of bronze sculpture is conducted, which may be observed in all its stages, from the modeler's atelier to the foundry."

The Brooklyn Citizen Almac, 1893 (copyright expired)

At the time of the article, Power was completing the soldier's monument to be erected at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.  A statue not designed by the National Fine Arts artists, but cast here, was Byron M. Pickett's statue of Samuel F. B. Morse, installed in Central Park in 1871.  On June 17 that year, The Telegrapher commented, "The bronze statue was cast at the National Fine Art Foundry of Mr. M. J. Power, on East Twenty-fifth street...The casting was worthy of the model, and creditable to all concerned."

A 19th century stereoscope slide highlights the metalwork--the statues, plaques and decorations--of the Civil War Soldiers' Monument in Greenwood Cemetery created at the National Fine Art Foundry.

On July 29, 1893, Architecture and Building noted that the National Fine Arts Foundry had "erected about thirty public monuments in the United States" and were located "in nearly every State of the Union east of the Mississippi River."  The article said, "It contracts for the complete erection of monuments, including the granite work, and in association with sculptors of reputation it undertakes the execution of such memorials."  

Workers in the foundry portion.  The caption in McClure's Magazine in October 1895 read "Making a mould for the bronze casting...Most of the workmen are French."  (copyright expired)

Among the monuments the firm had executed at the time were the Battlefield of Monmouth Monument at Freehold, New Jersey; the Oriskany Battlefield Monument near Utica, New York; the Soldiers' and Sailors' Fountain in Manchester, New Hampshire; and the Tower of Victory at Washington's Headquarters in Newburg, New York.

In 1895, Power handed the reins to William R. O'Donovan in the commission to design life-size bas relief statues of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.  The panels would be incorporated into the Brooklyn Memorial Arch.  In its October issue that year, McClure's Magazine said, "In the south side of East Twenty-fifth Street in New York City, just out of the roar of Third Avenue, stands a dingy brick building, on whose front big black letters announce "Fine Art Foundry."  The article said, "A queer place, one would think, to find Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln; yet here they are, or were during the summer months, eying the visitor with stern salutation from the backs of their bronze horses."

Maurice J. Power died in September 1902.  In addition to his artistic work, he had been highly involved with Tammany politics, serving as a Police Court Justice from 1880 to 1890; Shipping Commissioner for the Port of New York starting in 1893; and Aqueduct Commissioner in 1897.  His wife, Mary F. Power, sold the East 25th Street property to F. Morris & Co. in January 1906.

In May 1909, Rochette & Parzini purchased the building.  Founded by sculptors Michael Parzini and Eugene Rochette in 1904, the firm continued the tradition started with Maurice J. Power.  Parzini was born in Turin Italy and studied sculpture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

A year after moving in, the studio was the scene of a mystery.  On the morning of September 23, 1910, a sculptor, Emil Gautier, was found dead on the floor.  Initially, his death was attributed to heart failure and "fellow-workmen, who found Gautier lying dead, said he suffered from attacks of syncope [fainting]," said The New York Times.  But the coroner, Dr. O'Hanlon, "found the case not so simple as it had seemed."  Gautier's head was badly burned, the hair "burned to the scalp, the top lobe of the ear was seared, and the skin of the jaw and cheek badly burned," said The Times.  In addition, his face was "badly scratched."  Frustratingly, newspapers did not follow-up with the results of O'Hanlon's autopsy.

Upon the death of Michael Parzini in December 1946, The New York Times remarked, "The firm did much work for the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White...Its work can be seen on the present Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the Hotels Pierre and Biltmore and the Hotel Roney Plaza in Miami."  The article noted that Rochette & Parzini sculpted decorations of buildings at the New York World's Fair in 1939-40, "the New York Stock Exchange, the Yale, Columbia, Lehigh and Fordham University buildings and other structures."

image via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

The founders' deaths did not signal the end of Rochette & Parzini.  On August 26, 1964, The New York Times reported on sculptor Mario G. Tommasi's work high atop the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.  The article said his hammer and chisel were working on "a block of stone that has been waiting since 1924...The cast was made from a clay model in the extensive workshop of Rochette & Parzini, Inc., 218 East 25th Street, a concern that has completed numerous projects here and throughout the country," said the article.

Six years later, Rochette & Parzini received the commission to execute the 11-1/2-foot-tall bronze statue of Leif Ericson for Leif Ericson Park in Brooklyn.  Sculptor Arnold Bergier designed the monument, which was dedicated on May 23, 1971.  At the time, the building's first and second floors were designated as a "sculptor's studio" by the Department of Buildings, and the upper floors as "storage."

In 1977, photographer Clara Aich purchased the property.  Amazingly, Rochette & Parzini artifacts were still in place.  She converted the building to a residence, and used the sculptural pieces as decoration.  In 1979 she opened the Casa Clara Theater in part of the building.

photographs by the author

The 1900 Century Hotel - 119 West 45th Street

 

photo by Sean Khorsandi

Maxwell S. Mannes, a highly active real estate operator and developer, purchased the three-story former house at 119 West 45th Street from Lefferts and Agnes M. Strebeigh on June 29, 1899.  In the rear yard was a two-story brick building.  Mannes paid $25,000 for the property--about $975,000 in 2025 terms.

Within a year, Mannes opened the Century Hotel on the site.  Designed by the architectural firm of Israels & Harder, the six-story structure was clad in red brick and limestone.  Drawing from Tudor and Italian Renaissance precedents, the architects focused greatly on fenestration--the facade being as much glass as masonry.  The second and third floor windows were flanked by brick panels framed in stone.  The elliptically arched second-floor openings were capped with layered, scrolled keystones and those of the square, angled bays of the third floor wore dignified molded cornices.  

Israels & Harder framed the fourth and fifth floors with stone quoins.  The windows, including faceted oriels at the fourth, shared limestone frames.  Paneled brick pilasters separated the openings of the sixth floor under a cast metal cornice with foliate brackets.

The Century Hotel was a "bachelors' hotel," a concept that was popularized in the 1880s.  The number of unmarried men in the city skyrocketed between 1870 to 1890, when about 45 percent of the male population was single.  In 1890, The Real Estate Record & Builders Guide called the bachelor flat, “a product of our modern life.  It is not a social fad, ready to disappear directly.  It has ceased to be a novelty.  It has come to stay, for it filled a gap in the life of every unmarried man who has become weary of the boarding house, the furnished room, or the hotel.”

Bachelors' hotels offered the necessities of an unmarried man--a parlor, a bedroom and a bathroom.  Bachelors were presumed to be unable or unwilling to cook for themselves, so bachelor apartments did not have kitchens.  The Century Hotel had four apartments per floor--two in the front and two in the rear.

Architectural Record, July 1901 (copyright expired)

Rents ranged from $35 to $50 per month, about $1,930 for the most expensive today.  Occupants would enjoy "hotel services," which included maid service and hall boys, who delivered mail and other sundry tasks.

Among the early residents was Henry Romeike, born in Riga, then part of Russia, on November 17, 1855.  Educated in Russia and Germany, he began collecting press clippings while living in England.  Romeike opened the first press clipping bureau in the world.  He immigrated to New York City in 1885 and established his business here.  The New York Times explained, "Politicians, lawyers, and heads of great enterprises found it of great value to know what the newspapers had to say of themselves and of their adversaries."  

Romeike's clients included, according to The Times, "Americans of prominence and many royal personages."  The newspaper said, "Few persons of any prominence were disappointed when they applied to him to learn the world's opinion of themselves as reflected in the public press."

On June 3, 1901, the 48-year-old suffered a heart attack in his apartment.  Newspaperdom reported, "His death was almost instantaneous.  Dr. Frauenthal...was hastily summoned, but he found Mr. Romeike beyond aid."

The Sun, July 18, 1900 (copyright expired)

Living in the Century at the time were James E. McGahen, the treasurer of the American Bridge Company; and Dr. John English McWhorter, a clinical assistant in diseases of the genito-urinary system at the Medical School of Columbia University.

"Jack" C. Wilmerding moved into the Century Hotel in 1907.  Fifteen years earlier, on March 25, 1892, the New-York Tribune reported, "Miss Marie de Lex Allen, daughter of Colonel Vanderbilt Allen, was married to John Christopher Wilmerding, jr. yesterday at noon in the chantry of Grace Church."  The bride was the great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt I.  The marriage had a rocky start.

In March 1898, Marie was committed to the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum.  Asylums were a common means by which spouses or relatives disposed of troublesome family members.  Marie's society friends rallied to her aid, prompting a hearing that summer.

Marie testified that she had been forced to marry Wilmerding by her stepmother.  On August 9, 1898, the Chicago Tribune quoted her, "I was obliged to marry Jack Wilmerding by the influence that woman brought to bear upon my father...Jack Wilmerding was a brute.  Why, he struck me in the face in a ballroom even before we were married.  I was obliged to marry him under threats that my character would be ruined if I didn't."  She told the court, "He beat me, and insulted me, and cried our troubles from the rooftops."

Now, in the spring of 1907, Jack Wilmerding was living alone in the Century Hotel.  He sued for divorce on April 6, alleging that Marie had fled to England where she was living with James Coates.  Although she and Wilmerding were still married, she and Coates had an "alleged marriage ceremony" in London on January 14, 1907, according to Wilmerding.

Edmund Mitchell moved into the Century Hotel in October 1916 on an extended business trip.  His permanent home was in Los Angeles where his wife and daughter lived.  An author and journalist, he was born in 1861 in Glasgow, Scotland.  Mitchell graduated from Aberdeen University in 1881 and became an editorial writer for The Glasgow Herald, The Melbourne Times and The Los Angeles Times.  Among his several fictional books are The Temple of Death, Plotters of Paris and The Despoilers.  

On April 1, 1917, the New York Herald reported that a maid entered Mitchell's apartment to make the bed and "found the body of the author lying across it."  Mitchell had suffered a heart attack.

The property was sold and renovated in 1920.  Now called the Rialto Apartments, an advertisement in the New York Herald on July 12, 1921, offered, "just completed" and "newly furnished" two-room-and-bath apartments at $30 and up weekly, and $125 and up monthly.  (The least expensive monthly rent would equal about $2,000 today.)

Like Jack Wilmerding, motion picture actor Kenneth D. Harlan moved into a Rialto apartment amid marital upheaval.  On October 15, 1921, his wife, Florence C. Harlan, filed suit for separation.  Prior to her marriage, she was Flo Hart, a showgirl with the Ziegfeld Follies.  The couple was married in June 1920 and soon afterward Harlan "began treating her cruelly."  Florence testified, "on Christmas Day he threw her around the room and on December 31 hurled her against a window so that she almost fell out," reported The New York Times.  On July 24, 1921, she alleged, he "threw her into the gutter, banged her head on the sidewalk, and then abandoned her."

A 1918 publicity photo Kenneth Harlan  (copyright expired)

Florence told The New York Clipper that while they were in California where he was making a movie, they were happy.  "Kenneth didn't get much attention.  Women didn't pet him or make a fuss over him."  That changed, she said, when they moved back to New York.  "When we came here they went wild about him.  He treated me in an inhuman manner, beating me."  She told the reporter, "I don't want to cause my husband any trouble.  He was a good boy.  Women spoiled him."

Harlan would have a 25-year career in motion pictures, making 200 feature films and serials.  His most famous role came in 1923 in the title role of The Virginian.  Florence would not be the last of his wives to file for divorce--there would be a total of nine.

Novelist and poet Maxwell Bodenheim had an apartment here in 1928.  Born in 1892, he and other writers including Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters and Theodore Dreiser founded The Chicago Literary Times in 1923.  In New York, he became a favorite of the Greenwich Village Bohemian community, including being a member of the Raven Poetry Circle.  His books of verse, including his 1923 Against This Age and the 1928 The King of Spain made him a leading American author.

Maxwell Bodenheim, New York World-Telegram & Sun, 1919 (copyright expired)

Bodenheim apparently used this apartment as a pied-à-terre at best, or for extra-marital trysts at worst.  He was married and had an eight-year-old son.  

On July 19, 1928, the body of 24-year-old Virginia Drew was pulled from the Hudson River.  The New York Times reported that she had committed suicide, "shortly after she had left the apartment of Maxwell Bodenheim...whom she had chosen as her adviser in letters."  Virginia had gone to Bodenheim's apartment in the Rialto supposedly to show him the manuscripts of two novels she had written.  She was seen leaving the apartment around 1:30 the next morning.  Virginia went directly to the river and threw herself in.

Detectives who attempted to interview Bodenheim, "found he had left his apartment," reported The New York Times.  He had left New York the day after Virginia's death with two suitcases and a portable typewriter.  One of Virginia's friends told detectives that she had told her of a "suicide compact" she had made with "a literary light."

Maud Drew, Virginia's mother, thought her daughter's death was not merely a suicide.  "It was foul play," she told officials.  "Virginia did not jump into the water.  She was killed."  She pointed out that Virginia was the second pupil of Bodenheim who "became despondent recently."  She said that less than two weeks ago, "a 19-year-old girl was found unconscious in her apartment in Greenwich Village" with gas escaping from the stove.

The teenaged girl was Gladys Loeb.  Now, she too, was missing.  When her father, Dr. Martin J. Loeb, read the reports of Virginia's suicide, he trailed Bodenheim to Provincetown, Massachusetts.  He searched house-to-house, according to The New York Times, asking for the whereabouts of the novelist.  With police accompanying him, he confronted Bodenheim, who admitted that Gladys was on the way there from Boston.  Before leaving for the train station to intercept Gladys, Loeb warned Bodenheim to stay away from his daughter.  "I'll be very pleased to stay away from her," he replied.

A renovation completed in 1929 resulted in a store on the ground floor.  The hotel was renamed the Hotel Normandie.  

A sign on the Normandy notes that transient guests were now accommodated. via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

Living here in 1937 was empresario Mischa Ross (born Mischa Rosenbaum).  The 31-year-0ld was estranged from his 20-year-old wife and their 3-year-old daughter.  The estrangement was likely the result of Ross's romantic affair with a violinist, 24-year-old Julia Nussenbaum.  

The couple met in 1935 at an audition for Ross's and his brother's musical troupe.  Julia was hired at $40 per week to play in an act with five other musicians and three dancers.  An affair developed.  According to Julia's sister, Edith Schnee, Julia was unaware that Ross was married. 

On Sunday afternoon April 18, 1937, Julia's "hammer-bludgeoned body," as described by The New York Times, was discovered in a rehearsal studio.  A bloodied hammer was found at the scene.  Investigators went to the Hotel Normandie.  Among those they interviewed was the superintendent, James Cockrell.  He recognized the hammer as being his.  He told investigators, "he went to Ross's fifth-floor room Thursday morning to repair some drapery.  He left a kit of tools inadvertently and returning later discovered the hammer was missing."  A grand jury indicted Mischa Ross for first-degree murder on April 21, 1937.

By the early 1980s, the name of the Hotel Normandie was spelled Normandy.  It was now being operated by the city as a welfare hotel.  City Council President Carol Bellamy declared that the families housed here had "an average of three school-age children each."  

The Normandy operated as a welfare hotel until around the turn of the century, when the building was converted to the Big Apple Hostel.  Then, in 2018, it returned to a main-line hostelry, the Merrion Hotel.  On December 31, 2018, The New York Times food critic Florence Fabricant commented on the ground floor restaurant.  "Named for a street in central Dublin, this theater-district pub in a new boutique hotel takes a fairly traditional route when it comes to pub fare, like fish and chips, burgers, smoked salmon and a seafood chowder."

image via michelin.com

Throughout its several phases, the former Century Hotel building has survived without extensive outward changes.

The Much-Altered Wm. V. Webster House - 251 East Houston Street

 

photograph by Carole Teller

North Street was so named because it marked the northern boundary of New York City in the 18th century.  Development reached this far north by the 1820s, when smart, brick-faced homes and shops began lining its sides.  By 1808, Nicholas Bayard III had cut a road through his property to the west which he called Houstoun Street.  It was named for his daughter's husband, William Houstoun, who married Mary Bayard in 1788.  Later, he extended Houstoun Street (later corrupted to Houston Street) to meet North Street, which became East Houston Street.

Typical of the houses on the block between Norfolk and Suffolk Streets was 251 East Houston Street, described in The New York Times later, as a "2-story and attic and under-cellar Brick house and lot."  Eighteen-feet-wide, it was faced in Flemish bond red brick.  Its Federal design included an arched entrance above a short stoop, stepped paneled lintels, and one or two dormers.  

By the mid-1850s, William V. and Julia Webster occupied the house.  William was listed as a clerk, a term that ranged from an office worker to a highly responsible and well-paid financial position.  Beginning around 1860, the couple shared their home with George Marshall and his family.  The house became a bit more crowded when a young couple, William H. and Susan Dukes, moved in.  The Websters were surely well acquainted with Susan.  She had lived next door with her widowed mother, Sarah Ann Vanderbeck.  Sarah died there on November 12, 1862 at the age of 51.  It was most likely shortly afterward that the Dukes moved into No. 251.

The year 1863 was significant for all three families.  On April 30, Susan Dukes died here at the age of 23.  Her funeral was held in the parlor.  On August 25, R. Marshall was drafted into the Union Army, and on September 10 Julia Webster died at the age of 86.  The house was offered for sale that year.  The advertisement noted that "gas and Croton water" had been introduced, a significant upgrade.

Isabella White, the widow of Thomas White, and John C. Devoe and his family shared the house at least through 1865.  By 1867, it was home to the Alexander D. Farrell family.  Farrell and his wife, the former Mary A. Hendricksen, had a son, Alexander Washington Farrell, born in 1848.

Farrell operated Alexander D. Farrell & Co., a mattress firm, on 283 Canal Street.  The younger Alexander is listed in 1868 as being in the hardware business (he was 20 years old at the time).

The social and financial status of the Farrells was reflected in an advertisement in the New York Herald on March 24, 1868:

251 East Houston St.--[Needed] A Competent girl to do plain cooking, washing and ironing.

In more affluent households, those job descriptions would have been clearly defined.  To ask the cook in a wealthy family to do laundry would have been highly insulting and grounds for leaving.

The Farrells left 251 East Houston Street in 1871.  Their former home became a boarding house.  Its residents the following year were highly varied.  Mary E. Everett worked as a binder, William Glaser was a clerk in the Custom House, Moritz Selig was listed as a "pedlar," Andrew Senges was a machinist, and George Walker was a clerk.

Around 1873, the basement level was converted for business.  Herman Hirschfield, who lived nearby at 257 East Houston Street, ran his shoe shop here.  That year he advertised, "Wanted--A female operator, American, on ladies' shoes; Howe's machine; must understand fitting."

Change came in 1879 when the Virginia Day Nursery moved into "a few rooms" on the lower floors.  Founded in February that year, it was run by the City Mission.  The facility took in children under six years old whose mothers needed to work during the day.  The toddlers were taken care of for "a nominal charge of 5 to 10 cents a day," according to the Directory to the Charitable and Beneficent Societies and Institutions of the City of New York in 1883.  The most expensive charge would translate to about $3.25 in 2025.

The Virginia Day Nursery moved to 632 East 5th Street in 1886.  It continued to grow and in 1894, Mrs. A. M. Dodge described the Virginia Day Nursery in the Handbook of Sociological Information saying, in part, "The total of number of children cared for in the past three months was seven thousand." 

In the meantime, a permit was issued in 1886 to conduct the upper floors of 251 East Houston Street as a lodging house.  Lodging houses were the lowest form of accommodations, after boarding and rooming houses.  Their transient residents paid on a nightly basis and received no other services.

The former nursery space was converted to a meeting space, Mayer's Hall.  On August 17, 1888, for instance, the New York Herald reported, "At No. 251 East Houston street yesterday evening the James Munroe [sic] Club, of the Tenth Assembly district, organized as a Cleveland campaign club."  The Evening World added that at the, "overflow meeting of the James Monroe Independent Citizens' Association...Mr. Julius Harburger delivered an address, showing the benefits to be derived by the people in another term of Democratic rule with Cleveland and Thurman."

Construction worker Jacob Schwenk was renting a room here on September 26, 1888.  He was working on a new building on Willet Street that day when three men "annoyed" him," as described by The Evening World.  "He picked up a stone and threw it," said the article.  Tragically, it missed the men and struck and seriously injured five-year-old Benjamin Frinz.  Schwenk was arrested for the incident.

In April 1894, apparel trimmings merchant and parttime real estate operator Max Schwartz purchased the building.  He and his wife (who was highly involved in the Ladies' Hungarian Aid Society) moved in, and he converted Mayer's Hall to a saloon-restaurant.  

Policeman Conrad Schillenberger was indicted on October 26, 1894 "for assaulting Thomas J. Stanton" on August 8, as reported by The Sun.  The officer's bail was fixed at $2,000 and he offered "as bondsman Max Schwartz, a liquor dealer, of 251 East Houston street," said the article.  "Schwartz was not considered satisfactory for some reason which was not given," reported The Sun and Schillenberger remained in jail.

In March 1897, Schwartz hired architect Louis F. Heinecke to remodel the interiors and to raise the attic to a full floor.  The renovations cost Schwartz the equivalent of $78,000 today.  Heinecke matched the proportions of the second-floor openings and gave them cast metal cornices.  The bracketed terminal cornice was crowned with a triangular pediment.  

In 1941, the first floor wore a veneer of marble to accommodate a synagogue.  via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

Among the tenants in 1897 were the Smith and Miller families.  A year earlier, gold had been discovered in the Yukon Territory in Canada, sparking the Klondike Gold Rush.  Thousands of prospectors flooded into the territory.  Among those hoping to find their fortunes were 17-year-old William Miller and 19-year-old John Smith.  On July 27, they and two other stalwart adventurers--brothers John and Robert Thomas, 18 and 17 years old respectively--struck out.  They did not get far.

At 4:00 the following morning, Patrolman Glock, "picked up four boys, who were drenched to the skin and shivering from the cold, on the Newark Plank Road near Glendale Woods," reported the Jersey City News.  The would-be prospectors were taken to the station house where they were warmed and dried out.  The article said, "They had among the four of them $2.06, a razor and two pocket knives."

Max Schwartz brought back Louis F. Heinecke in November 1899 to make minor renovations.  They most likely had to do with the converting of the former saloon space to a cleaning establishment.

Around midnight on March 28, 1904, burglars broke into the Metropolitan Cleaning and Dyeing Company space.  They dragged the safe to the rear of the store and drilled "an eight-inch hole in the inner metal wall," as described by The New York Times.  They extracted the $65 in cash and started work on the inner compartment when Max Schwartz, who had been wakened by the noise, banged on the door.  "The burglars got out by a rear window and ran away," said the article.  Happily for the cleaner's manager, named Bruckner, Schwartz had arrived just in time.  Bruckner had put his wife's $1,000 worth of diamonds in the inner compartment.

Max Schwartz retained possession of 251 East Houston Street at least through 1921.  Shortly afterward, the basement and parlor floors became home to the Hellman Funeral Chapel, run by Moe Hellman and his wife, Bertha.  It was likely during this renovation that the parlor windows were replaced with three arched openings.

A funeral that captivated the public's attention was that of Police Officer Edward Winger, who was fatally shot at the corner of Rivington and Norfolk Streets on July 18, 1929.  During his funeral two days later, undercover officers surveyed the "crowd of sightseers" on the street, said The New York Times, who were "seeking Winger's murderer mingled with the mourners."

What could have been a tragic and macabre incident was averted by one of the Hellmans' quick-thinking hearse drivers on October 15, 1933.  A New York City resident died in Saratoga, New York and Harry Pomper drove there to bring the body back to the Hellman Funeral Chapel.  He was on the Bronx River Road at around 6 a.m. when the carburetor "sputtered."  Pomper said, "flames suddenly shot out from beneath the hood."  He pulled over, removed the corpse and pulled a nearby fire alarm.  Four fire engine companies responded.  "After repairs were made, the hearse continued its trip to New York City," said the Yonkers Herald Statesman.  The fire caused $75 of damage to the vehicle.

The Hellman Funeral Chapel was replaced by the East Side Branch of the Socialist Workers' Party headquarters in the late 1940s.  Then a renovation in 1949 resulted in a synagogue in the basement and former parlor floors, two apartments on the second floor and one on the third.  

 

On July 15, 1988, Newsday reported that Cafe Bustelo, "recently moved from Avenue B in the East Village to a former synagogue at 251 E. Houston St. on the Lower East Side."  The article said it "features stream-of-consciousness monologues, post-punk folk musicians and a 'preponderance of poets.'"  

NOoSphere Gallery, a "nonprofit storefront," as described by The New York Times, opened in 2011 "as a showcase for Norwegian artists."  It was replaced by Gaia Italian Cafe, which recently closed.

photograph by the author

The original stoop has been replaced by a metal version and a stucco-like material covers the first floor facade, which now has a show window.  At some point the metal cornices of the second floor windows were removed, revealing the forms of the Federal lintels.  Two Stars of David remain on the facade as relics of the synagogue period of the venerable structure.

many thanks to Carole Teller for prompting this post

The 1901 Edwin J. and Clausine M. Benson House - 255 West 101st Street

 

Developers Egan & Hallecy erected numerous Manhattan rowhouses at the turn of the last century.  The architectural firm of Neville & Bagge designed several of their projects, including the six upscale homes at 245 through 255 West 101st Street in 1900.  Completed in 1901, they were a balanced row of three designs in an A-B-C-C-B-A plan.  Nos. 245 and 255, at either end, were mirror images and by far the most fanciful of the row.  The entrances within the rusticated stone bases sat above shallow porches.  Their formal, elegant porticoes, upheld by classical columns with Scamozzi capitals, would have been at home in London's Mayfair district.

While the houses in between were rigidly symmetrical, these had romantic personalities.  A full-height bay projected forward from the rest of the row.  It featured paired windows with a elegant fan light under an ornate Renaissance style eyebrow at the second floor.  At the third floor was a tripartite window with bracketed cornice and sill.  Most eye-catching were the storybook elements to the side--stone-framed oculi in the staircase hall and a Rapunzel-ready quarter-round oriel.

An advertisement in the New York Herald on January 31, 1901 touted: "Six of the best American basement houses yet constructed, having all modern improvements; artistically designed and built in the most completed and thorough manner, under personal supervision of the owners, Egan & Hallecy."

It would not be until October 1902 that Edwin J. Benson and  his wife, the former Clausine M. Doscher, purchased 255 West 101st Street.  The couple had two sons, Reynolds and Claus.  Moving into the house with the family was William C. Doscher, presumably Clausine's unmarried brother.

Edwin Benson was a visible figure within the sports community.  He sat on the Board of Governors of the New York Athletic Club, and on January 11, 1910 was elected its vice-president.

William C. Doscher was also athletic.  Born in 1853, he was described by The New York Times as "a noted oarsman."  He joined the Atalanta Boat Club on May 10, 1880 and served as captain of the crew from 1884 to 1886, and was elected president in 1906.  Doscher died in the house at the age of 59 on April 30, 1912.  His funeral was held in the parlor on May 2.

Both Reynolds and Claus were enrolled in Columbia University at the time.  Following his family's tradition, Reynolds was described by The New York Times as "a star of Columbia's basketball and baseball teams" from 1912 to 1916.  

America's entry into World War I changed the brothers' lives.  In 1917, Reynolds enlisted in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps.  He would serve with the French Army at Verdun, St. Mihiel, and the Argonne and rise to the rank of captain.  Claus, too, enlisted in the Army and fought in France.  In January 1918 he was promoted to first lieutenant.  Both brothers were awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Sadly, in their absence, their mother died.  Clausine M. Benson died on May 12, 1918 and her funeral was held in the home three days later.

Following the declaration of peace, Reynolds returned home in 1918 and his brother early in 1919.  Claus made it back just in time for Reynolds's wedding.  On January 26, 1919, the New York Herald reported that "Capt. Reynolds Benson, Air Service, U.S.A." had been married the previous evening to Sarah Redway Smith.  "Claus Docher [sic] Benson acted as best man for his brother.  Capt. Benson recently returned from France."  The article mentioned, "After their wedding trip [Reynolds] and his bride will live at 255 West 101st street."

Later that year, in September, Benson sold 255 West 101st Street to Samuel Copeland for $25,375 (about $447,000 in 2025).

image via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services

Claus Doscher Benson would marry Maxime Harrison-Berlitz in 1921, and his brother would become athletics manager of Columbia University in 1924.  Reynolds would serve his country again when America entered World War II as an officer of the 45th Combat Bomb Wing, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross.

In the meantime, the Copeland family appeared in social columns rather than on the sports pages.  On May 21, 1920, for instance, The American Hebrew reported, "Miss Josephine Copeland, of 255 West 101st street, has just returned from a trip West, where she attended the Kentucky Derby and visited at French Lick Springs."

As early as 1932, Dr. Albert J. Decker occupied the house and operated his private practice here.  But the end of the line for 255 West 101st Street as a single family residence was near.  In 1936 it was converted to apartments, one each through the first through third floor and two on the fourth.  A subsequent renovation completed in 1962 resulted in two apartments per floor above the first story.  In a questionable choice, at some point the brick was painted lavender.

photographs by the author