The 1890 Horace Greeley Statue - City Hall Park

 

Born into poverty, the son of an unsuccessful farmer, Horace Greeley began his career in journalist at the age of 15 in 1826 as a printer's apprentice.  He moved to New York City in 1831 and worked for several newspapers, saving his money and in 1840 embarked on a risky proposition--the founding of the New-York Tribune.  The one-cent newspaper was four pages--a single sheet folded in the middle.  After a long, rocky beginning it was a success.

In stark contrast to its great competitor, James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, the Tribune refused to publish stories of scandal and sensational crimes.  Greeley lobbied for reform, abolishment of slavery, and an end to political corruption.  He served in Congress in 1848-49 and ran for President in 1872 as the Liberal Republican candidate.

Greeley died on November 29, 1872, before Electoral ballots were counted and just a month after his wife May's death.  Harper's Weekly lamented, "Since the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, the death of no American has been so sincerely deplored as that of Horace Greeley."

On May 19, 1888 The Evening World reported "The committee of printers interested in the movement to erect a statue to Horace Greeley will meet at 475 Pearl street to-morrow."  The project gained ground quickly and five days later The New York Times wrote, "A well-defined effort is being made by the union printers of this city and Brooklyn and the members of the Horace Greeley Post, Grand Army of the Republic, to erect a statue in honor of Horace Greeley in City Hall Park."

On May 28 The New York Times advised, "Alexander Doyle, the artist, was selected to submit a design for the statue and it was recommended that the statue represent Mr. Greeley in a sitting posture.  It is expected that a model of the statue will be completed in about six weeks."

The chosen site for the monument was on Printing House Square.  The Patterson Sunday Call wrote, "It will stand in City Hall park, just across the way from the magnificent building of The Tribune...Alexander Doyle, the celebrated American sculptor, has the work in hand." The article said, "The statue will be placed on a granite pedestal of chaste classic design of the severest simplicity."

The cost of the project was placed at "$15,000, perhaps more," said the Patterson Sunday Call.  (The figure would translate to about $420,000 today.)  Newspapers reported on the fund raising and according to The Sun by the fall of 1890 $10,557 had been raised.  It was no longer only typesetters and printers contributing to the project.  The Horace Greeley Statue Committee published the names of wealthy New Yorkers like Levi P. Morton and Cornelius N. Bliss as they donated funds.  James Gordon Bennett, once Greeley's greatest rival, donated $1,000.

At some point two significant changes were made to the plan.  First, the well-known sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward took over the project.  Secondly, the location was changed from City Hall Park to directly in front of the Tribune Building.

The unveiling was held at 11:00 on September 20, 1890.  The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, "Printing House Square in New York is no longer without a memorial of Horace Greeley, who did more than any other one man to make the spot famous."  Chauncey M. Depew was the "orator of the day," according to the New-York Tribune.   The Brooklyn Daily Eagle said, "After Mr. Depew's speech Miss Gabrielle Greeley, Horace Greeley's daughter, pulled the cord, the flags which had enveloped the statue dropped away, the crowd cheered, the band played 'Yankee Doodle,' and the ceremonies were over."

from the collection of the New York Public Library

Ward's design closely followed that of Doyle, which had originally been approved.  Greeley was depicted in a sitting position in a heavily-fringed Victorian easy chair.  He held a copy of the New-York Tribune loosely over his knee, as if in deep thought.  Gabrielle Greeley later recalled that Ward "spent hours studying my father as he worked in his office [and] after his death took a mask of his face."  The polished Quincy granite base was designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt.

from the collection of the New-York Historical Society

In 1915 the Tribune leased the corner, ground floor space in its building to a drugstore.  The deal included the remodeling of the storefront and that presented a problem.  On June 13 The New York Times explained "An up-to-date American druggist cannot display the latest concoctions of ice cream and fruit flavors with a twenty-foot statue right where a show window ought to be."   

The New-York Tribune was deeply concerned that the statue of its founder be relocated to a proper place.  "It is the hope of the officers of The Tribune Association and many others who revere the memory of Mr. Greeley for the great work which he accomplished by his public services that a new site may be found for the statue, as least as near to the scene of Mr. Greeley's journalistic labors as the City Hall Park," said an article on September 21, 1915.

No one was more concerned than Gabrielle Greeley, the last of the Greeley family.  When a proposal to move the statue to Battery Park was suggested, she responded with an open letter to New Yorkers, published in The Sun on December 24.  It said in part, "I do appeal to you not to have my father's statue buried in an out of the way obscure park...let his statue rest somewhere in Printing House Square, that his feet trod so often in his busy life."  She ended her letter with an emotional plea, "Again, as the work of a great American sculptor, as a remarkable likeness of a characteristic American, let it not pass into obscurity, O people of this city and of his heart."

The decision was finally made to relocate the statue to the exact spot for which it was originally intended--City Hall Park directly across from the Tribune Building.  In 1922 The Evening World romantically mused:

It is only a couple of years since the statue of Horace Greeley was shifted from the barren surroundings of the Tribune doorway to a little green spot in City Hall Park, on the Park Row side near Chambers Street.  The trees here now have grown up around the worthy old gentleman and he sits as he liked to in life, amid a leafy bower.

A century later the description applies.  The statue of Greeley is considered by many to be among Ward's best works.

non-credited photographs taken by the author

LaptrinhX.com has no authorization to reuse the content of this blog

The Much-Altered Horace Greeley House -- No. 35 East 19th St.

photo by Alice Lum

In 1831 Samuel B. Ruggles purchased swampy land, part of James Duane’s Gramercy Farm.  He proceeded to drain the tract and lay out what would be the elegant Gramercy Square (later renamed Gramercy Park), surrounded by 60 building plots.  That same year20-year old Horace Greeley arrived in New York City.

Born to humble farmers in Amherst, New Hampshire, Greeley had left school at the age of 14 to serve as a printer’s apprentice in the newspaper offices of the Northern Spectator in Vermont.  After working as a printer for the Erie Gazette in Erie, Pennsylvania, the ambitious young man set off to make his fortune as an New York City editor.

In 1836 he was working as a printer when he married Mary Young Cheney.   The opportunity to finally become an editor came in 1838 when he took the reins of the Jeffersonian, a Whig campaign newspaper read by 15,000 nationwide.  Two years later he was editing the Log Cabin as well, another campaign newspaper, this one with a subscription list of 90,000.  In 1841 he merged the two papers into what became the New-York Tribune.

Greeley’s newspaper quickly grew, becoming the leading Whig publication in the city and gaining nationwide readership.  He used it to promote his personal political and social ideals—anti-slavery, political reform, temperance, and vegetarianism among them.  The Tribune was widely known as the “Great Moral Organ.”

By the early 1850s Samuel Ruggles’ grand plan of Gramercy Square had firmly taken root and the blocks surrounding the exclusive enclave filled with comfortable homes.   Nearby, the block of East 19^th Street, between Fifth and Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue South), was lined with identical red brick houses built on speculation.  The three-story homes sat above high stoops over English basements.  They were designed with financially secure merchant classes families in mind—like that of Horace Greeley.

Greeley purchased No. 35 East 19^th Street and, despite his growing fortune, would remain here and in his upstate estate farm, Chappaqua, until his death.    Greeley's neighborhood boasted several other literary residents like his next-door neighbor, the poet William Allen Butler.  Greeley convinced the poet sisters Phoebe and Alice Cary to move to Manhattan from Cincinnati about this time and they settled in around the corner on East 20^th Street.

The Illustrated American later described the home as “an ordinary brick building back of the Peter Goelet mansion on Broadway.”   The rear yard of the Goelet house was home to an exotic menagerie—a cow, peacocks, storks, and pheasants.  So it is unsurprising that William Allen Butler claimed that he was unperturbed by the goats Greeley kept in his own back yard.

Butler’s patience with the over-wrought Greeley continued.  As the houses in the row were all alike, Butler reported that the editor, “his mind intent on great affairs,” would sometimes mistake Butler’s home for his own.

The Greeley House in 1890, prior to renovation -- The Illustrated American, October 4, 1890 (copyright expired)

Greeley was not always found at the 19^th Street house, however.  Mary Cheney Greeley developed what The New York Times in 1926 described as “almost insane melancholia” following the deaths of five of their seven children (Arthur died at the age of 5, two infants died at childbirth, Mary Inez at 6 months and Raphael at 6 years).  After Arthur’s death (she was convinced he had been a spirit medium), she hired 11-year old Margaret Fox to live in the house to contact him.

Her demeanor became “shrewish” and she was reportedly a poor housekeeper.  Despite the fact that the pair was devoted to one another, Greeley spent much of his time at hotels.  A man from Washington DC once stopped by the house hoping to interest Greeley for a lecture.  He wrote of his encounter with Mary Greeley:

I rang loud and repeatedly, and at last a lady came down with sleeves tucked briskly up her arms and her hair twisted into a knot on top of her head.

“Is Mr. Greeley in?”
“He is not.”
“Do you know where is he?”
“I do not.  He is not stopping here now.”
“Can I see Mrs. Greeley?”
“You can.  I am Mrs. Greeley.’
“Do—was---is—does Mr. Greeley come home sometimes?”
“Occasionally.  He has not come home this week.”
“Do you know where he is stopping?”
“I do not.  He stopped at the Everett House last week.”

The gentleman checked the hotel, to be directed to the New York Hotel where he found the editor in his rooms there.

Nevertheless, Horace Greeley entertained in the house at No. 35 East 19^th Street, hosting fellow Grahamites (the Reverent Sylvester Graham not only pushed for temperance, but dietary reform including vegetarianism...hence the Graham cracker), literary and political figures here.   In his office on an upper floor he wrote his "History of the American Conflict," and other works.

The year 1872 would be both momentous and tragic.  Greeley was at the height of his power and fame and was nominated to run against Grant in the presidential elections.  Five days before election day Mary Greeley died in her husband’s arms, the victim of what The New York Times said was a “severe attack of lung disease.”

On November 6 the New-York Tribune reported on its editor’s defeat for the Presidency and two days later Greeley’s last column in his beloved newspaper appeared.   Behind his back an in-office conspiracy resulted in the sale of stock to anti-Greeley interests.  In the period of one week he had lost his wife, the Presidency, and the newspaper he had founded and loved.

The New York Times later said “The triple blow snapped the harness of a brain already disordered.”  Greeley wrote “My sorrows do not come single file, but in battalions.”  He was committed to an asylum in Pleasantville, New York and within three weeks, on November 29, he was dead.

Greeley’s two surviving daughters lived on briefly in the 19^th Street house, but before long it fell victim to commerce as did the rest of the houses along the block.   In 1890 The Illustrated American noted that it “is now let out to several tenants, who carry on various kinds of business in it from basement to roof.  In the basement where the philosopher used to be the host at temperance dinners, and where he entertained fellow-Grahamites, a stone mason has his office.  In the parlors where he often was found in shirt-sleeves playing with his children, a typewriting business is conducted.  There are no dwelling-houses across the way nowadays, for Sloan’s [sic] mammoth carpet establishment has taken possession of the territory.”

The brick-faced residence-turned-business building was shortly-thereafter converted beyond recognition.    The front was stripped off, to be replaced by a cast iron façade with expansive window openings.  What had been essentially four stories became three, with a retail space at street level.   An arcade shop window was flanked by two entrances—one for the store and another for the businesses upstairs.

Multi-paned opaque windows survive above the shop window -- photo by Alice Lum

Conradi Manufacturing was one of the upstairs businesses in 1901, makers of “jewelry cases.”  But by World War I the entire building was used by the Manhattan Paper Company.   By 1920 the company was ready to move on and Paper magazine noted that “the structure will be used for other industrial service.”

The sale of the building in January 1921 to Rae Dreyer would trigger the first of several rapid fire turnovers.   In July Dreyer sold it to David L. Cohen.  A month later, Cohen sold the building to Edwin E. Besser.

Besser leased both of the upper floors in 1922—one to Louis Cohn & Son, tailors; the other to Alfred Munzer, dealers in dolls and novelties.  But within the decade social and economic upheaval would make itself felt at No. 35 East 19^th Street.

In 1935 the building was home to a number of labor organizations intent on staging demonstrations and protests.   It was headquarters to a “sheet metal workers’ union, said to have Communist leanings,” according to The Times, which was responsible for a protest on January 10, 1935 that resulted in the arrest of 102 members.

Also in the building at that time was the ungainly-named Conference of White Collar, Professional and Cultural Organizations.  On April 27 the group paraded about 200 businessmen in front of the office of the Emergency Relief Bureau on Broadway to protest a proposed investigation of 11,000 white collar employees “on the relief rolls to weed out those not entitled to assistance.”

Depression Era workers were being employed by the Works Progress Administration which created jobs for the unemployed.  The City Projects Council, with offices here, joined other labor organizations in promoting strikes against the WPA for higher wages.   On August 12 it called for an across-the-board strike of more than 10,000 skilled workmen rather than accept the $93.50 per month offered them.

President Roosevelt was not intimidated and issued his famous “work-or-starve” order.  Of the 10,000 strikers predicted by the City Projects Council, only 656 men failed to show up for work.

By mid century M. Singer Sons was here, designers of modern furniture; a tradition continued today by techlineStudio.  The company designs and installs custom-fit modular furniture systems.

A red enameled plaque is affixed to the wall informing the passerby who cares to pause that once, a century and a half ago, one of the nation’s most influential publishers lived here.

photo by Alice Lum