The 1899 St. Anthony Hall - 434 Riverside Drive

 

Delta Psi Fraternity was founded at Columbia University in 1847.  Because it was the fraternity's first chapter, it was given the name Alpha.   In the second half of the century, as exclusive university-based clubs were formed--the University Club, Princeton, Yale and Dartmouth Clubs among them--the St. Anthony Club (sometimes called the Alpha Club) was organized.  Its announced purpose was "to promote social intercourse among members of the Delta Psi Fraternity."

The New-York Tribune pointed out that Delta Psi was the first "of the Greek letter societies to establish in New-York a club which presents many of the features of the other society clubs in the city."

The Delta Phi Society erected a handsome clubhouse designed by James Renwick, Jr. on East 28th Street in 1879.  The Sun's Guide to New York later noted "This is the oldest and probably the wealthiest of the college fraternity clubs in this city...Not only is membership restricted to members of the Delta Psi fraternity, but no non-member is even allowed to pass the threshold of the club-house."

In the spring of 1895 Columbia University began erecting buildings far north of the city in Morningside Heights.  A year later the school relocated to the remote campus, leaving the club in its wake.  In response, on March 23, 1897 the Alpha Club acquired a 36-foot wide plot on Riverside Drive between 115th and 116th Street from Harriet B. Hale.

The site was conveniently close to Columbia's new campus and afforded breathtaking views of the Hudson River and New Jersey palisades.  The club hired the architectural firm of Wood, Palmer & Hornbuster to design its new clubhouse.  The commission was influenced, no doubt, by the fact that George Carnegie Palmer was a Delta Psi brother.  The plans, filed on August 26, 1898, called for a "5-story brick and stone club house" to cost $45,000--or around $1.43 million in today's money.  The final cost was reportedly nearly twice that amount.

The architects blended the Beaux Arts and neo-French Renaissance Revival styles to create a stately red brick structure liberally trimmed in limestone.  The entrance, which was placed discretely back from the property line, was accessed by a covered porch which provided a balcony to the second floor.  (Openings in the stone porch gave sweeping north views before a 20th century apartment building snuggled up against it.)

The center openings of the second through fourth floors held French doors that opened onto balconies.  The stone cornice was broken by a false stone dormer which embraced a carved cartouche with the fraternity's symbols.  The fifth floor took the form of a hip roof with copper- and stone-clad dormers.

Known as St. Anthony Hall, the clubhouse, like the exclusive men's clubs downtown, had a dining, billiard, meeting and reception rooms, a library designed in the emerging Arts & Crafts style, and sleeping rooms for 20 resident members.  Fraternity historian  Edward Fermor Hall wrote in 1906 that it was "beautifully decorated and finished in marble at a large expense." 

That the members of the Alpha Club came from some of the country's wealthiest families was pointedly evidenced in 1905 by one resident of the Hall, Rutherfurd Stuyvesant Pierrepont.  A senior that year, he came from the millionaire Pierrepont family of Brooklyn.  His brother, Seth Low Pierrepont, was a sophomore.  Rutherford was known on campus as "a good athlete and wears the varsity 'C' for rowing," according to The Sun.  But the newspaper was not reporting on his athletic abilities.  It was announcing that the 23-year old had paid for the erection of Hamilton Hall--a $500,000 gift to Columbia University (the amount would be three times that much today).

Hermann Oelrichs, Jr. lived in St. Anthony Hall in 1913.  He had grown up in the marble-clad mansion on Fifth Avenue at 57th Street and the family's opulent summer estate, Rosecliff in Newport.   When his father died in 1906 he left the then 15-year old boy a massive fortune in trust equal to $1.5 billion today.

The American Architect and Building News, 1899, copyright expired

Having millions of dollars does not change the fact that college boys are college boys.  On September 30, 1913 Hermann took possession of a new automobile.  That evening the telephone in St. Anthony Hall rang and, as fate would have it, Hermann answered it.  Lucille Singleton asked to speak to D. M. "Billy" Claghorn.  He was not in (as a matter of fact he was in Washington State) and it became evident that Lucille and he had never met, The Knickerbocker Press saying "she sought an introduction."

Oelrichs apparently recognized an opportunity to meet a young woman and did not disclose the fact that he was not Claghorn.  "After some talk he agreed to take her for an automobile ride."   Lucille, described by The Evening World as "a beautiful young girl with a mass of tawny hair," lived nearby on West 115th Street.  Oelrichs picked her up in his brand new car.  But, according to Lucille, he "became insanely jealous when she asked him to bring their automobile ride to a close that she might keep another engagement at her home."

A subsequent argument resulted in Oelrichs smashing his car into a tree at Broadway and 120th Street.  Both he and Lucille suffered lacerations from broken glass.  But in her hysteria Lucille was positive that she had been stabbed--and she still thought she was with Billy Claghorn.  The following day she filed a complaint that he had inflicted ten stab wounds "in the right arm, breast, neck and side."

The car was quickly identified as belonging to Oelrichs, but when questioned Lucille said she did not know him.  A reporter from The Evening News spoke to Oelrichs on the phone, who explained:

I loaned my car to Claghorn last night...I don't know what he did with it.  I haven't seen him since he drove away early last evening.  I didn't know anything about the accident until I heard of it this morning, but it's ridiculous to say that Claghorn stabbed anybody.  Why, such a thing is impossible.

Word of the incident reached Claghorn that morning.  A report from Tacoma, Washington said, "D. M. Cleghorn [sic], former Columbia student, was indignant to-day when told that his name had been mentioned in connection with the accident to Miss Lucille Singleton in New York last night...he believes that some New York man is masquerading as Cleghorn [sic]."

Oelrichs's story soon fell apart as witnesses to the accident identified him.  But Columbia students rallied behind him, nevertheless.  One told a reporter from The Evening World, "It's all that girl's fault.  If she'd kept her mouth shut Hermann would never have been mixed up in this."  The matter was closed when Lucille apparently accepted a $5,000 settlement--just under $135,000 today.

St. Anthony Hall was the scene of tragedy two years later.  Daniel Le Roy Dresser was a well-known financier whose sisters had all married well.  Edith Dresser had married George Washington Vanderbilt and lived in the massive 250-room Biltmore estate in North Carolina.  His others sisters were Mrs. George C. Merrill, Mrs. John Nicholas Brown, and the Countess d'Osmay of Paris.

On the afternoon of July 10, 1915 Dresser's wife of six months, Marcia, was just preparing to leave their home to meet him and head to their Newport estate when the telephone rang.  Dresser's attorney C. W. Gould, told her not to come.  The reason was devastating.

Earlier Dresser had gone to St. Anthony Hall.  The Sun reported that around 3:00 "William Bainbridge, a steward at the chapter house, left for a few minutes."  Dresser, who was in the library reading, was left alone in the house.  Just as Bainbridge returned, C. W. Gould arrived in a taxi.  He had received a registered letter sent by Dresser earlier in the day saying that "the nervous strain" was more than he could endure.

The Sun reported, "The steward was unaware that anything untoward had occurred until Mr. Gould bounded up the steps and demanded to know where Mr. Dresser was.  Bainbridge told him he had last seen him on the third floor in the library, and without further ado Mr. Gould went up stairs.  Dresser lay dead on the floor, a .38 calibre revolver in his right hand."

The striking fireplace in the main room is dedicated to member Joseph Wild Mackay who, like Hermann Oelrichs, was a member of the varsity rowing team.  

A rather unexpected resident of St. Anthony Hall was Charles Christopher Trowbridge.  He was not a student, but a well-respected professor of physics at Columbia since 1892.  The Sun said of him, "Besides his extensive laboratory investigation in modern physics he contributed toward the knowledge of meteors and the mechanics of bird flight."  He was still living in the clubhouse on June 2, 1918 when the 48-year old bachelor died.

As members came and went over the decades, protocol was slightly relaxed.  By the third quarter of the century fewer resident members wore jackets and ties on a day-to-day basis.  Yet many of the generations-old traditions remained.  In the 19th century James Grant Wilson had described the Alpha Club as a "secret order" and on March 31, 1889 the New-York Tribune had said of the old clubhouse, "Those who are not permitted to wear the mystic St. Anthony cross, with its shield of blue enamel, its Hebrew letters and its skull and bones, know little of the interior of the heavily bolted club-house of Delta Psi."  And as late as October 7, 2013 Kaitlin Phillips, writing in the Columbia Spectator, said, "St. A's is one of three secret societies at Columbia."

Above -- The Arts and Crafts style dining room as it appears today.  Below--one of the delicately-leaded dining room windows.

But the modern St. Anthony Hall was not always so "heavily bolted."  In April 1975, for instance, it was opened to scores of decidedly non-members.  The New York Times reported "A dozen Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American children romped through a bazaar at a fraternity house at Columbia University over the weekend, under photographs of crippled Vietnamese youngsters their own age  begging in the streets of Saigon."   The 200 guests were new to America, many of them wives of former American servicemen.  The bazaar was held to raise funds for war refugees in Vietnam.

The loyalty and fervor for St. Anthony Hall held by its members was typified by William Irvine when he read an article in The New York Times on May 11, 1988 which called the fraternity system "self-selecting and discriminatory."  He fired back a letter to the editor which said in part:

My own college fraternity, St. Anthony Hall, was founded at Columbia before the Civil War as a literary society, which it remains.  It is coeducational and has many undergraduate members involved in academic, political and athletic pursuits on campus.

He accused the article's writer of being "uninformed."

The aristocratic facade of St. Anthony Hall is remarkably unchanged.  The past few decades have not been kind to areas of the interior, however, with seeping water causing noticeable damage in the lower areas.  A $100,000 drive for restoration funds is ongoing.  

photographs by the author

many thanks to Will Barker for his help and guided tour.

many thanks, too, to Tad Tharp, Board of Trustees member who prompted the post and shared his vast knowledge.

The Gates W. McGarrah Mansion - 740 Madison Avenue

With its entrance originally facing 64th Street, the house originally looked much like its next door neighbor to the left.

In 1879 prolific architect John G. Prague designed a row of five neo-Grec style townhouses at Nos. 19 through 27 East 64th Street.  The corner house was the most desirable for its full-height angled bay to the front and its long wall of side windows facing Madison Avenue.  Four stories tall above an English basement, it and its brownstone-faced neighbors were typical high-end Victorian homes.

That would all change two decades later.  In 1901 the house was owned by Charles Jefferson Harrah and his wife, Georgina Balfour Harrah.  The title was in Georgina's name and the couple, who lived in Philadelphia, had purchased the property as an investment.  In June that year they hired Philadelphia architect Mantle Fielding to made extensive alterations.

The house was enlarged with a four-story, 28-foot wide extension on Madison Avenue; the entrance and stoop were moved from 64th Street to Madison Avenue (taking the new address of No. 740 Madison); and frothy neo-French Renaissance elements were splashed on the outdated facade.  The alterations cost Georgina Harrah $40,000--about $1.2 million today.

The remodeled mansion was leased to Gates White McGarrah.  The president of the Leather Manufacturers' National Bank, he and his wife, Elizabeth, had two daughters, Marion and Helen.

Now wealthy, McGarrah had humble beginnings.  The New-York Tribune called him a "self-made bank president" who "started at the bottom."  McGarrah had entered the banking business in 1883 as a check clerk in the New York Produce Exchange Bank.  He told that newspaper in 1908 "I never worried about long hours in my apprentice days.  We often left the bank at 10 or 11 o'clock at night, and there was no pay for overtime."

It may have been those early, long hours that prompted McGarrah's ahead-of-his-time work policies.  In 1908 he told a reporter "I believe in annual vacations, however, and think a man can do more work in ten or eleven months than in twelve."   He paid his apprentices from $400 to $1,000 a year--a handsome salary for low-level employees, and gave the clerks free lunch.

Gates White McGarrah - The Banking Law Journal, 1910 (copyright expired)

Three years after moving into the house, in 1904, the Leather Manufacturers' National Bank merged with The Mechanics' National Bank.  The combined banks took the latter's name and McGarrah continued on as its president.  Additionally he was a director in the Astor Trust Company, the Bankers Trust Company and the Mercantile Trust Company.

The Harrah family still owned the mansion in December 1919 when George E. Harrah commissioned architect Henry Glasser to convert it to shops and apartments.  The stoop was removed and the entrance altered to a show window, a three story addition extended to the 64th Street property line, and another one-story addition on Madison Avenue would house another shop.   The alterations cost the equivalent of $283,000 today.

Seen here in 1927, the 1919 extension on 64th Street made no attempt to meld into the architecture. photograph by George F. Arata from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York   

The shops were leased to a variety of tenants--Mrs E. . Hedlund's Employment Agency, Henry Renard's tailor shop, and Margquerite Jonap's gown and millinery shop, for instance.

Among the first residential tenants upstairs were advertising man John W. Murray and his wife, actress Anita Murray.  The newlyweds were married on Christmas Eve 1920, but the marriage quickly went downhill when John discovered his wife declined to sleep with him.

The problems had started on their wedding night.  According to The New York Herald, Murray said that the two quarreled on their honeymoon at Atlantic City "because he refused to have twin beds in their suite."  Within months he had moved out of their Madison Avenue apartment into the Chatham Hotel.  Anita filed for separation in April, complaining that her husband "only occasionally" returned home and did not furnish her sufficient funds.  She told the courts Murray made $15,000 a year--a considerable $205,000 per year today.

Murray was pointed in his rebuttal.  He explained, as reported by The New York Herald on April 28, 1921 that "he lives at the hotel so that he can sleep, as his wife used to compel him to sleep on a couch in the Madison avenue home."  He added that his wife's friends "seem to be extreme radicals" and that one of them asserted the Government should be overthrown by force and had strong views in favor of free love.  Anita was nonetheless granted $40 a week alimony.

The McGarrah family came an went through the entrance above a high stoop, where the center awning is today.

Other moneyed residents in No. 740 seem to have had more serene domestic relations.  Robert C. Rathbone and his wife were here in the early 1920's.  They maintained a summer home in Englewood, New Jersey and had three daughters, twins Elizabeth and Mary, and Juliet.  Elizabeth's marriage to Franklin Websgter Dorman in June 1926 was covered by society columns.  It took place in Englewood and the reception was held in the Rathbone's home there.

In the 1930's the shops saw new tenants, among them Frederick Keith Koones gallery of antique prints and designer Emil's gown shop.  Similar upscale stores would continue to occupy the spaces over the next decades.

In the 1940's Miss Lena, the millinery establishment run by Lena Markert was here, and in the 1950's Hillel Tennenbaum's pocketbook store opened.  Tennenbaum had learned to make handbags at the turn of the century in his father's shop in Warsaw, Poland.  He custom-made the bags to the whim of his customers.

On September 24, 1956 The New York Times explained "Today's woman crowds her bag with a larger compact, eye glasses, cigarettes, checkbook, driver's license, keys, identification, notebook, address book, lipstick, comb and, like as not, letter and business papers.

"If, in addition, she wants to carry a book or magazine in her purse, that's all right with Mr. Tennenbaum.  He'll make her a handbag large enough, allot space for the reading matter, and take pride in solving the problem."

Tennenbaum told the reporter of a particularly difficult order placed by a female police officer.  She wanted to carry her revolver in a bag that would not draw attention yet be designed so she could draw it as easily as from a holster.   Tennenbaum said "I also designed the flap so she could pin her badge to the under side and flip it in view as fast as she could turn back her lapel.  She was delighted."

At the same time Wakefield-Young Books had a shop here.  Not merely a bookstore, it also staged original art exhibitions.

Upscale hair salons appeared on the second floor by the end of the 1950's.  Carita Sisters of Paris opened in April 1959.  The Times reported "The star stylist is Mr. Thierry, who has just arrived from Paris."  A month later the newspaper added "In the palm-printed green and white salon on Madison Avenue, where a Parisian artist named Mr. Jacques holds forth, photographs on the wall show the latest, cost alluring Carita hair styles.  A woman has only to point a finger and pay $10 for the same effect."  The cost of the styling would be more in the neighborhood of $85 today.

Men were not ignored at No. 740.  In 1961 Joyce Markson operated what was said to be "the only European-style barber shop in the United States."  The New York Times, on December 13 that year, said "Men are treated to services that rival those in beauty salons: hair coloring, shampoo, cut and styling, facials, pedicures and manicures."  Expected today, the services were nearly unheard of in 1961. 

Markson's shop was decorated as a hunting lodge, with a beamed ceiling and a life-sized stuffed bear.  There was also a Dow Jones news ticker so the customers could keep up with any market developments.  "Mrs. Markson also has supplied the shop with an oxygen tank to cure hangovers," said The Times.

Other shops throughout 1960's and '70's included Charles C. Paterson's antiques shop, The Picture Decorator which sold vintage photographs of New York, and the Phone-tique Gallery, which offered designer telephone.    In April 1976 New York magazine called Phone-tique "posh" and noted it "has a number of 'exclusive' designs and oddities of the genre known as 'conversation pieces.'"

The 740 Madison Avenue Corporation owned the building in the 1980's when it initiated a restoration and renovation by Samuel J. De Santo & Associates.  The two-year project included removing paint, and replacing the stonework, balustrades and windows on the upper three floors.  At the time ground floor housed shops like Sermoneta and Bennetton.

The upper story windows retain their neo-Grec stone frames.

Today it is difficult for most passersby to recognize the sprawling structure as a former mansion.  Although the paint was removed from the masonry in 1982, today it is back.  The 1879 neo-Grec and the fussy 1901 neo-French Renaissance elements which survive remind us of a time when Madison Avenue and 64th Street was an enclave of high-end private homes.

photographs by the author