The Nicholas Keane House - 96 Madison Street

 

In the 1820s and 1830s, prim Federal-style houses rose along the Madison Street block between Catherine and Market Streets.  As early as 1830, Lewis Higgins and his family occupied 80 Madison Street, a two-and-a-half story, brick-faced home (renumbered 96 in 1852).  Two dormers pierced its peaked roof.  Higgins was a wholesale grocer at the nearby Catherine Market.

By the mid-1840s, the Jonathan Gardiner Fleet family occupied the house.  Born in 1801, Gardiner and his wife, the former Lydia Seaman, had four children, Harriette Rebecca, Sarah Cornelia, Maria, and Jennie.  Fleet operated two livery stables.

The family received a scare at around 7:30 on the night of March 30, 1847 when a fire started.  The Evening Post reported, "It was caused by a bed in the second story accidentally taking fire."  How the bed caught fire was not explained.

The Fleet family left Madison Street in the spring of 1851.  As was common, they sold everything in the house and started over in their new home.  An auction listing on March 28 reflected the Fleets' comfortable lifestyle.  It included, "tapestry carpets, rosewood furniture covered in maroon velvet, sofa, tete a tete," marble top center table, a piano forte, and oil paintings.

Grasset Launy, a coppersmith, occupied the house through 1858, followed by Thomas Rice, who ran a saloon and hotel at 44 Catherine Street.  

James W. Hefflin took possession of 96 Madison Street from Rice in 1865.  Although he listed his profession as running a boardinghouse, the size of the residence limited his number of boarders.  That year William Hutchinson, a tailor, and his family lived here, and in 1867 Cornelius Haggerty, an oysterman at the Catherine Market, boarded here.  Hannah Stapleton, a widow, and her son, Tobias, who was a printer, lived here the following year.

Hefflin was not necessarily an upstanding citizen.  On December 3, 1868, the New York Evening Express reported that he had been arrested.  Describing him as "said to have been an ex-policeman, but at present the owner of a sailors' boarding house at No. 96 Madison street," the article said he had broken into the saloon at 41 Market Street at 1:00 that morning and stole $3,000 in cash and "a lot of segars of the value of $7.50."  (The cash would translate to about $33,600 in 2025.)

The article said:

Hefferon [sic] was found in the building up stairs with a jimmy, skeleton key, and a lot of segars beside him, and a receipt from the New York Gas Company, which the bartender testified was in the desk from which the money was taken, was picked up when the prisoner was found.

Hefflin told the judge, "it was a woman that brought him there."

His imprisonment ended Hefflin's career of running the boardinghouse at 96 Madison Street and it became home to the Nicholas Keane family.  Keane had operated a chandler shop at 171 South Street since 1849.  

Also living here with the Keanes was their adult son, Nicholas Jr., and his wife, Bridget.  The younger Nicholas worked in his father's business and, interestingly, spelled his surname Kane, perhaps to differentiate him from his father.  The Kanes had two children, David and Mary.

On December 4, 1879, The Sun reported, "Nicholas Keane, an old resident of the Seventh Ward, died in his home, 96 Madison street, yesterday in his 55th year.  The article mentioned that he "amassed a fortune" in his business and "was a conspicuous member of St. James's Roman Catholic Church."

The Kanes soon leased the house, and it was again operated as a boarding or rooming house.  In the spring of 1884, a sailor, Thomas Jackson, was brought here with serious injuries.  Jackson had been aboard the William A. Lincoln heading to Manila on February 25 when he was "cruelly beaten," according to a crewmate, with an iron bar by the ship's captain.  When the ship returned to New York, another sailor, Abraham Weeden, had Captain M. J. Daly arrested.  The New York Times reported on May 20, "Jackson is now laid up at No. 96 Madison-street on account of the injuries received."

In September 1886, David J. Kane, Nicholas's son, hired architect Bernard McGurk, to enlarge the house by raising the attic to a full floor and adding a one-story extension in the rear.  McGurk added stylish pressed metal lintels to the openings and a triangular pediment above the entrance.  An Italianate-style bracketed cornice finished the renovations.

As early as 1941, the brick was painted.  Before the 1886 renovations, the house matched the Federal-style house down the block.  via the NYC Dept. of Records & Information Services.

As early as the mid-1890s, Mary Kane Carroll, David's sister and daughter of Nicholas, occupied the house.  She and her husband, Michael Carroll, were living here when a fire caused $1,200 worth of damages.

On October 19, 1910, The New York Times reported that Mary, "daughter of the late Nicholas Kane and Bridget Kane, and widow of Michael Carroll," had died the previous day.  The following year, in August, David J. Kane hired architect Jacob Fisher to reconfigure the interior floorplan as a "tenement," according to Fisher's filing.

On April 3, 1918, The Evening World reported, "Shichisaburo Hosaki, twenty-five, a Japanese ship steward, was killed by one of his roommates in a sailors' boarding-house at No. 96 Madison Street at 2 A.M. to-day."  The article explained that four Japanese shared a room on the top floor.  One of them came home drunk and Hosaki scolded him.  "He drew a clasp knife and slashed Hosaki three times on the neck, killing him almost instantly," said the article.  His slayer fled before his roommates could stop him.

The following month, on May 13, Hitash Mogi, another steamer steward, was arrested in Boston.  Mogi admitted being in the room at the time of the slaying but insisted he, "had nothing to do with it."  He insisted the crime "was the result of a family vendetta" and named Roy Shida as the murderer.

A twist in the case occurred four weeks later when Lota K. Kamali was arrested in Lima, Ohio.  He was appearing with a troop of Hawaiian singers and guitar players at the Orpheum theater there.  The Lima Times-Democrat reported on June 18 that he was arrested for disorderly conduct and "suspicion of being the man wanted for the murder of Shichisaburo Hosaki, a Japanese knifed at New York on April 3d."

As it turned out, the case was never solved.  Both Mogi and Kamali were released without being charged for the murder.

Painted shades of blue today, the house sits within a streetscape of late 19th century tenement buildings.  The sole surviving relic of the block's earliest years, it looks much as it did in 1886 when David Kane remodeled it.

photograph by the author