The Lost Valentine Mott Mansion - 94th Street and Broadway

 

image from the Victor Prevost collection of the New-York Historical Society.

Born in 1785 in Glen Cove, Long Island, Valentine Mott came from a line of Quaker physicians.  Having graduated from Columbia Medical College in 1806, he traveled to London to study under the renowned Sir Astley Cooper.  So adept was the young doctor that Astley almost immediately made Mott assistant in surgery.  In 1809, at the age of 26, he returned to New York as a recognized surgeon.

Because he was ambidextrous, Moss was able to operate with either hand, an ability that contributed to his success.  He garnered international fame when he performed successful, never-before attempted operations on arteries, including his 1818 surgery on a tiny vessels just two inches from the patient’s heart.  

Dr. Valentine Mott.  from the collection of the New York Academy of Medicine, Carte de Visite Collection

In 1819, Dr. Mott married Louisa Dunmore Mums, whom he described in his autobiography as "a lady of English descent, congenial temper, great personal attractions, elegant manners, and rare intellectual endowments."  The couple had nine children, six sons and three daughters.

Louisa Dunmore Mums Mott, artist unknown, from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery

By the early 1830's Mott had garnered a substantial personal fortune.  Wealthy New Yorkers routinely maintained townhouses for the winter social season, and "country seats" for the summer.  The latter provided a respite from the stifling heat and conditions of the city during the hot months.  In 1833 Dr. Mott purchased land in the Bloomingdale district, north of the city, from Samuel Oakley, and a year later added to the property with land purchased by Thomas D. Carpenter.  The estate stretched from the Hudson River to today's Amsterdam Avenue, and from 93rd Street to 96th.

The estate, seen here in 1874 after building plots and roadways were laid out.  from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

The purchase was made for Louisa and the children.  In his biography, written in third person, he admitted, "The country, in fact, had no charm for him."  There was an existing house on the property, which the Mott family used for a decade.

During their father's many extended trips abroad, the children's tutor, Mr. Darling, aided Louisa in their care.  In 1888, Henry Mott recalled, "My father purchased [the] property on the 30th of April, 1833, and our family went that summer to Bloomingdale, and Mr. Darling was then with us...He was from that time in our family up to 1836, either as tutor or as guardian and proctor during my father's absence in Europe."

Two years after the family moved into their sumptuous town home at 1 Gramercy Park, Mott replaced the Bloomingdale house with a noble Greek Revival residence at approximately 94th Street and the Bloomingdale Road.  Set back from the road, its double-height Scamozzi columns not only provided a breeze-catching veranda for summer evenings, but gave the house a stately air.  Mott described it saying, "In 1846, he built, near the Bloomingdale road, an elegant and stately mansion, adorned with various kinds of trees and shrubbery, and surrounded with gardens, conservatories, and graperies, which he used as a summer retreat until the time of his decease."

The family was here during the summer of 1855 when Dr. Mott read an unsettling article in The New York Times:  "Dr. Valentine Mott, we are very sorry to announce, is quite ill of intermittent fever, at his residence in Bloomingdale."  Foreshadowing Mark Twain's famous letter about his own supposed death, Valentine Mott responded to The New York Times on July 31, 1855 saying:

I am happy to be able to contradict the rumor, and affirm that my health is very good...I find it necessary to make this statement, as the erroneous paragraph has found its way into several other journals and country papers.  By correcting this mistake you will oblige.

                    Yours respectfully, Valentine Mott.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Dr. Mott dedicated his full attention to the war effort, offering his services to President Abraham Lincoln.  As consultant to the War Department, he gave advice on the administering of anesthesia in battlefield hospitals.  Through this work, he and the President became close friends.

The assassination of the President on April 16, 1865 deeply affected Mott.  Four days later Mott was bedridden.  On April 26, The New York Times ran a single-line article that read, "We regret to learn that Prof. Valentine Mott was taken suddenly ill on Saturday, and is not expected to recover."  The following day the 80-year-old died in his Gramercy Park mansion.

His death came at a time when the ambitious concept of extending Broadway northward to replace the Bloomingdale Road (for the most part) was in its formative years.  In 1868 the project had reached the Mott estate.  The dignified mansion sat squarely in the middle of the proposed road, known at the time as the Boulevard.  Years later, on January 22, 1910, the Real Estate Record & Guide would recall, that "the home of the celebrated surgeon, Dr. Valentine Mott...stood back from the river such a distance that it had to be moved to make way for the contemplated Boulevard in 1868."

The mansion was relocated slightly south, to the corner of 93rd and the Boulevard (i.e., Broadway).  In the move, the house was necessarily altered.  The veranda, removed in order to transport the house, was replaced with a Greek temple portico.  Where the cupola had sat, there was now a peaked roof.  

It was here that Louisa Mott died on June 2, 1873.  The heirs began selling off the property in the following year.  On March 27, 1874, an auction of the mansion's contents was held at Robert Somerville's auction house at 74 University Place.  The announcement called it an "important sale of Valuable Furniture of the late Dr. Valentine Mott, removed from the Mott Mansion, Boulevard."  In addition to the furniture, Somerville sold the "massive mantel, pier and hall mirrors,"  as well as the chandeliers, carpets, "dining ware," and kitchen utensils.

At the time of the auction, The Children's Fold had been operating on East 58th Street for seven years.  The small, private orphanage under the supervision of Rev. Edward Cowley took care of around 34 children.  Horrors within the institution were uncovered in December 1876.  On January 15, 1877, The New York Times reported on an investigation that found "the children brutally beaten and maltreated."  Cowley, expectedly, was not only removed but jailed in the Tombs "under indictment for cruelty to his unfortunate wards," as reported in The New York Times on February 7, 1880.

Henry E. Pellew, in a letter to that newspaper on February 5, updated readers on the status of orphanage.  "The Children's Fold, under new management, soon recovered from its temporary difficulties, and under the administration of the Rev. Dr. T. M. Peters, in its new situation at Broadway and Ninety-third-street, has every claim to the full confidence of our citizens."  The "new situation" was the former Mott mansion.

A sign noting "All Welcome" hung on the pillars of the remodeled portico after the Mott house became a mission/orphanage.  from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

By 1885 the orphanage had grown considerably.  A notice requesting donations in The Evening Post on December 18 read, "The Children's Fold:  The ladies of the Fold desire to make a merry Christmas for their 160 children."

For some reason, an arsonist attempted to destroy the orphanage in the summer of 1895.  In the middle of the night on August 21, a dog barked at a man in the yard.  "This aroused the inmates and the man decamped," said The Press, which reported, "A bundle of rags soaked with kerosene were found...under the steps of the Mott mansion, at the northeast corner of Ninety-third and Western Boulevard.  Burnt matches were found, also, near the steps."  

At the turn of the century, what had been bucolic countryside was a bustling neighborhood of homes and shops.  The stately, if timeworn, Mott mansion survived until around 1903 when it was replaced by the Beaux Arts style Hotel Narragansett, and the Advent Lutheran Church.

The Hotel Narragansett (center) and the Advent Lutheran Church (right) sit on the site of the Mott mansion.  photo from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York

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The Lost Furniss Mansion -- Riverside Dr and 100th Street

At the turn of the last century the Furniss mansion was still in excellent repair.  photographer unknown, from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=24UAYWFYGACJ&SMLS=1&RW=1536&RH=747

Between 1762 and 1763 the royalist Charles Ward Apthorp acquired an enormous tract of land far north of New York City in the area known as Bloomingdale.  The New York Times would later say he did so “with the intention of founding a manorial home in the plan of the great English estates.”  Apthorp would certainly not be the first to do so.  Upper Manhattan island was dotted with sprawling summer estates of wealthy merchants and British officers.

Apthorp died in 1797, leaving his more than 200-acre estate to his ten children, who quickly began dividing it up.   A handsome columned mansion was soon erected on one substantial swatch—the grounds of the house itself sitting at what would become 99^th to 100^th street, from the river’s edge to about West End Avenue.  Who the builder was is unclear.  Chroniclers repeatedly attributed the estate to Humphrey Jones or William Rogers; but that similar mansion sat nearby on former Apthorp land, around Broadway and 101^st Street.

The spacious wooden house faced the river where cooling breezes were captured by the deep veranda.  The New York Times would later call it “a substantial and roomy mansion overlooking the Hudson at Bloomingdale…with stately pillared portico on its western front that commands a wide sweep of the river to Castle Point.”

No expense was spared on the outfitting of the interiors.  The Sun described the dining room as “immense in length and breadth” and wainscoted in black walnut; “cupboards of the same with plate glass doors curved into the wall at the four corners.”

In the meantime William Ponsonby Furniss was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on July 16, 1790.  A self-made man, Furniss had sailed to St. Thomas at the age of 21 “taking with him little capital other than native Yankee pluck and perseverance,” according to The Sun decades later.

Furniss eventually amassed a fleet of clipper ships that operated between the West Indies and Portsmouth.   By at least 1833 Wm. P. Furniss & Co. had received a government contract, as well.  The Naval Magazine on January 2, 1837 noted that the firm was listed on the Naval Register as “temporary navy agents” based in St. Thomas.   By 1843 it was noted as permanent agents.

That same year William Furniss relocated his family from St. Thomas to New York City.   He and his wife, the former Sophia B. Huber (called by The Sun “a Philadelphia lady”), had six children—William, Sophia, Gardner, Margaret, Robert, Clementina and Leon.  Now wealthy, he purchased a impressive home on fashionable Bond Street, as well as the large estate in Bloomingdale.  More than half a century later The New York Times would remember “Every Spring the family moved from their town house up to the great white house…In those days the lawn sloped to the water’s edge, for it was before the building of the Hudson River Railroad.  Instead of steam whistles and the puffings of engines and the snorts of automobiles here were heard the merry shouts of romping children, who loved the house as their birthplace and played in the lush grass and blossoming groves with the freedom of country life, or bathed or floated, feeling a sense of proprietorship of the river that then was only dotted with occasional sails and formed a gentle boundary to their parental domain.”

The Sun noted that here Furniss “entertained about all the notable people that visited this country.” 

Tragically, two of the Furniss sons, William and Robert Livingston Patterson Furniss, died in 1862.  Nine years later their father would die in the Bloomingdale mansion.   By now Furniss had moved his fortune from the shipping industry into real estate and had greatly augmented his land holdings around the Bloomingdale estate.  Upon his death on October 29, 1871 his estate was valued at about $1 million—nearly 20 times that much in today’s dollars.  In his will he stipulated that the estate “should never be sold for public buildings or anything but a private residence.”

The last of the Furniss sons, Leon, died in 1877.   A year later, in May, Sophia Furniss died in the pillared mansion as her husband had.  Her funeral took place in St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on Broadway and 99^th Street on May 5.  “Besides a large number of the friends of the family, there were present many of the residents of the neighborhood, where Mrs. Furniss was well known and beloved.”

By now serious development had begun on the Upper West Side.  But the Furniss mansion, mostly due to William Furniss’s dying wishes, survived.   But the Furniss siblings had lost interest in spending their summers here.    Shortly after their mother’s death the mansion was leased to the family of Russell Clarke.  But before the Clarkes were given the key, the Furnisses put double locks on a small room upstairs.  The lease stipulated, according to The Sun, “that this little room—the smallest in the house—must never be touched or meddled with.”

The Clarkes spent at least 20 summers in the home, caring for it and the Furniss furnishings as though they were their own.  And by all accounts, the little room on the top floor was never entered.

The three Furniss sisters were brilliant administrators of their father’s estate.  It was apparently Sophia who handled most of the dealings.  By the turn of the century the women had increased their $1 million inheritance to a staggering fortune of $40 million—equal to those of America’s greatest industrial or banking titans.  They maintained individual cottages in Newport and shared ownership of a Lenox, Massachusetts estate and a mansion at No. 461 Fifth Avenue.

By now the Clarke family had given up their lease on the Bloomingdale mansion and Sophia rented it to Alma Walker.   In Alma’s lease was the same mysterious clause regarding the bolted door on the topmost floor.

The mansion became a sort of artist colony under Alma Walker.  The Sun noted in 1903 “Mrs. Walker wants it understood that she doesn’t run a boarding house; she rents rooms to artists and serves meals to them.”   Among those who came and went were writers, Paul Wilstach, Paul Kester and his brother Vaughan Kester, and Gertrude Stein. 

In 1913 Paul Kester, in his The Hand of the Mighty; And Other Stories noted “Vaughan was about twenty-three when we went to New York, settling ourselves on Riverside Drive in The Big White House, as the place came to be called by our friends.  Here my brother and I wrote a two-act play together—The Cousin of the King—which was published in The Looker-On, and afterward played by Walker Whiteside.”  Paul Kester left, according to The Bookman, around 1900; but not before writing a railway story entitled The Manager of the B. and A., published by Harpers.

On January 16, 1904 the artists were sitting down to dinner when Policeman Carroll was patroling along Riverside Drive. The officer noticed fire in a second floor window.  After calling in a fire alarm, he rushed into the mansion and the dining room.

The Sun reported the following day “All the artists at dinner, including Mr. Vanderbeek, Miss Rumboldt, Miss Clark, and Miss Schulpatis, ran upstairs with the policeman. Then somebody suggested a bucket brigade and it was formed.”

The fearless group attacked the fire, “which was really dangerous at the start,” with buckets of water passed up the staircase.  The newspaper reported “The city firemen had little to do.  Dora, the maid, put the last bucket of water on the flame.”

The blaze had started in “Mrs. Reade’s room” where “There were several old pictures and some antique furniture in the room.”  The old paintings and furniture were still there from the days when the Furniss family spent its summers here.

A vintage postcard captures the encroaching apartment buildings built on land liquidated by the Furniss sisters.

As early as 1898 the Furniss sisters had begun selling off some of their real estate around the mansion.  On October 22 that year Sophia responded to questions about the future disposition of the “homestead block.”  She responded “In selling our property we have always restricted it…and as we have a special feeling about the old homestead block, we…will particularly hold to having only first-class private dwellings erected thereon.”

On October 31, 1909 The New York Times noted “Several months ago the Furnisses sold fourteen lots, including the West End Avenue frontage of the ‘old homestead.’”  Little by little the women were reducing the estate around their old family mansion.  In the meantime, Alma Walker was keeping up the maintenance as well as she could.

On December 5, 1909 The Sun said that the old Furniss furnishings “were pretty near to falling apart when the last tenant took possession, but she had them repaired and reupholstered.  The tenant of the ‘White House’ always did the repairing—and the repairs became pretty nearly a continuous performance.”  The newspaper added “Latterly it was occupied only by a selected few artists or literary people who valued it for what it was, a commodious, restful old retreat that was run in the spirit of camaraderie.  It was not a spot to which to invite the worldly or the fashionable.  It was hospitable to the last and lent a helping hand to more than one straggler in the race.”

But by now the three Furniss sisters were elderly—Sophia was 85, Margaret 80 and Clementina 74 years old.  After being in Furniss possession for 66 years, the women decided to sell the uptown estate.   On October 31, 1909 The New York Times wrote “The sale of the old Furniss mansion with its surrounding plot of twenty-three lots, not only marked the passing of what was perhaps the best known of the historic ‘country places,’ established in upper Manhattan fifty to seventy-five years ago, but it also emphasized the recent rapid development of the whole Riverside Drive district.”

In a poor quality photograph of 1909, the curious stop to pose before the old mansion is destroyed.  The Sun, December 5, 1909 (copyright expired)

Three weeks later The Sun reported that the syndicate which purchased the real estate sold “the old Furniss mansion, an uptown landmark, to a firm of house wreckers who have paid $500 for the privilege of converting the antiquated structure into second hand lumber and carting it away for resale.”

The demolition of the house meant the removal of furnishings, carpets and paintings that had been in the house for decades.  And it meant the opening of the little room on the top floor.  The Sun, on December 5, 1909, reported on what was behind the double-locked door.

“It contained what might be classified as family relics.  There was a cradle in which all the last generation of Furnisses were rocked; there were some curious sea shells from foreign shores; there was a small section of a quassia tree with inverted cuplike center, from which all the youngsters had been compelled to quaff a morning draught in the days when a quassia cup was regarded as an aid to health; there were six or seven cases of old wine of different vintages, most of it dating from 1830.”

Neighbors were aghast at the loss of the house and its lush gardens.  “To think that we shall never see that splendid old garden with all the lilies and lilacs and roses” a neighbor pined to The Sun.  “Isn’t it awful.”

The newspaper agreed. “The yield from the old flower garden even in its decline was immense.  During the last six or seven years its last tenant after liberally supplying friends and acquaintances used to send each spring several bushel baskets full of lilacs and roses to the patients in New York hospitals.  No wonder that the prospective array of ten or a dozen new apartment houses covering the grounds of the White House, as it was locally known, fails to appease the regret of the dwellers in the neighborhood.”

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The Furniss mansion was pulled down to be replaced by the 12-story Wendolyn Apartment, built by Jacob Axwelred, which survives today.

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