In 1851, the family of Edward F. Saxton, a stockbroker, leased the newly-built house at 91 East 26th Street (renumbered 117 in 1867). One of a long row of identical, high-stooped Italianate residences, it was three stories tall above the basement level and faced in brownstone. The iron railings of the stoop matched the balcony that fronted the parlor window. A simple, molded frame embraced the double-doored entrance, and the elliptically arched openings sat upon bracketed sills. Each of the homes had its own pressed metal cornice with robust scrolled brackets.
The following year, agent Edward B. Kinshimer advertised three of the houses, including No. 91, for rent. He wrote, "they have baths, ranges, gas &c. and all is in good order. Rents $750." The figure would translate to about $2,500 per month in 2025.
Samuel Hanna, a baker, moved his family into the house and would remain through 1854. Then, on February 19, 1855, Kinshimer advertised 19 East 26th Street for sale, noting its "location genteel." The ad was answered by the multi-faceted Hiram Dixon.
Dixon had served in the Revolutionary War and was a member of the Veteran Corps of 1776. He was a member of The American Institute of the City of New York, described by The New York Times in 1860 as "including many of the ablest and best men the City and country afford."
Although he listed his profession in 1857 as an accountant with the Adams Express Company, he had additionally been "a professor of penmanship for many years," according to The New York Times in 1860. Groups sought out Dixon for his remarkable penmanship to create elaborate Victorian documents like testimonials and proclamations. One commission came from the New-York Typographical Society in 1865 when Dixon was hired to pen a "handsome testimonial" for the society's former president, William McCrea. When the document was exhibited in August, The New York Times remarked, "The penmanship, executed by Mr. Hiram Dixon, of the Adams Express Company, is a rare specimen of art."
Dixon's expertise in calligraphy was so well-known that when the U.S. Government charged Henry Williams with stealing a letter from the mail and forging the signature on a $3,000 note inside, Hiram Dixon was "called as [a handwriting] expert," according to The New York Times on January 26, 1860.
In 1868, Rev. Jesse Ames Spencer moved in. Born in June 1816, he began working in a printing office at the age of 14. He graduated from Columbia in 1837 and from the Episcopal General Theological Seminary in 1840. In 1869, he was elected professor of Greek language and literature at the College of the City of New York. He and his wife, the former Sarah Jane Elizabeth Loutrel, had seven children.
Rev. Jesse Ames Spencer, (original source unknown)
A prolific author, he published numerous books, many of them about history. While living here, he finished his four-volume History of the United States from the Earliest Period to the Death of President Lincoln, and published Greek Praxis: Or, Greek for Beginners; and The Young Ruler Who had Great Possessions, and Other Discourses.
The house was offered for rent in August 1872. It received a long term resident starting in 1874 with Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton. Born in October 1848, Hamilton was the grandson of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and of Louis McLane, former Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State, and two-time U.S. Minister to the United Kingdom. His privileged childhood was reflected in his autobiography, Recollections of an Alienist, in which he recalls, "my Thanksgiving dinner [was] taken yearly with Mrs. John Jacob Astor, the mother of 'Willie' Astor."
Hamilton was a newlywed when he moved into 117 East 26th Street. He married Florence Rutgers Craig on May 25, 1874. At the time, he was "connected with the Board of Health" and was "Professor of Nervous Diseases in the Long Island College Hospital," according to The New York Times on June 27 that year. The couple's only child, Louis McLane Hamilton, was born here in 1876.
Dr. Allen McLane Hamilton, from the collection of the Library of Congress
Dr. Hamilton was an alienist, or what today is known as a psychiatrist. He specialized in suicide, and the effects of blows to the head to mental health, and often testified in criminal cases. Despite his expertise in psychiatry, he was appointed by the Health Department as a "sanitary inspector." That side job earned him $1,600 per year in 1876, or about $47,000 today. Sanitary inspectors investigated the conditions of tenements and houses within impoverished neighborhoods.
Dr. Hamilton almost assuredly knew Dr. Evert S. Warner, who moved into the house in 1881. On July 1 that year, The New York Times reported that Evert was one of "a corps of 50 physicians for service among the tenement-house population during the heated term." Warner was a resident physician at Bellevue Hospital.
On the evening of January 24, 1896, Dr. Warner became involved in a bizarre incident. At around 8:30, a man knocked on the door of 117 East 26th Street. "The Doctor was asked to call at the offices of the gas company," said The Sun. The Consolidated Gas Company's building was nearby at 26th Street and Fourth Avenue (Park Avenue South today). Half an hour earlier, a drama had begun to play out.
The Sun reported that a closed cab had "rapidly" driven along East 26th Street to the gas company building. "It was followed by a second cab, which stopped immediately behind it. Three men jumped out of the second cab and hurried over to the first one." As one of the men unlocked the door of the gas company's offices and turned on the lights, the others "opened the door of the first cab and lifted out a dead man." They carried it into the building and the cabs drove away.
Dr. Warner arrived at the office where one man asked, "Is it a fact that this man is really dead?"
The Sun recounted, "Dr. Warner examined the corpse, and replied: 'The body's cold. He has been dead some time.'"
All four men at the scene, including the dead man, Captain William J. Collins, were employees of the gas company, Collins being its head bookkeeper. The men had left work that night and got as far as the Brooklyn ferry when Collins became ill. He ordered a cab to take him back to the gas company building. Concerned, his coworkers followed. Collins apparently died en route.
As was common, the Warners took in a roomer. On June 18, 1897, an advertisement in The New York Times said, "117 East 26th St.--A pleasant, nicely-furnished room in physician's house."
In 1941, the original ironwork and balcony of the house next door was intact. via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.
By 1901, the house was home to Dr. Ellice Murdoch Alger and his wife, the former Louise Stevenson. Alger was an instructor in diseases of the eye at the New York Post-Graduate Hospital. He was a co-founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness.
The Algers remained until about 1908, when it appears the residence was being operated as a rooming house. Then, in its April 1913 issue, The Smith College Monthly reported, "Jean Cahoon is running a tea room for business women in New York." The Sun reported that M. Jean Cahoon had leased the building "for a term of years...for a tea house." Cahoon called her cafe The Noonday.
The Noonday was relatively short-lived. The house was leased in 1915 and returned to a rooming house. It was leased by architect and artist C. Bertram Hartman around 1922. His daughter, Rosella M. Hartman, was listed as an artist here the following year.
In the late 1920s, writer Dorothy C. Heligman lived here.
Before World War II, the Italianate ironwork was removed. Other than that loss, the exterior of the former Dixon house is greatly intact. It is a single family home today.
photographs by the author
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment