The 1929 444 East 52nd Street

The 1929 agents' brochure for 444 East 52nd Street explained "the desire of the present day New Yorker for the comfort and convenience of the apartment house, coupled with his desire to avoid the vexatious traffic congestion of the metropolis, has led to the studio apartment house development along the banks of the East River, to afford far-sighted men and women the opportunity to walk to their offices and the shopping district, and thereby enjoy the convenience of going to and fro without delay and discomfort."  Indeed, the Beekman Terrace district just south of Sutton Place was rapidly filling with "splendid buildings of stone and steel," as described by the brochure.

Designed by De Pace & Juster for Babor-Comeau & Co., Inc., 444 East 52nd Street was a Jazz Age blend of Gothic and Tudor inspired styles.  The base of undressed, variegated blocks featured square-headed drip moldings over the doorways.  The stone continued up the ten stories as quoins, embracing a facade clad in rough-faced brick that simulated age.  Large stone pseudo-balconies, brick diapering and intricately-decorated piers added to the romantic charm.

For decades "studio apartment" buildings had been popular.  The term, which had little in common with the use of the term today, referred to artists' spacious apartments that included vast studio windows which provide the best light.  The northern section of No. 444 East 52nd Street held duplex and simplex studio apartments of four and six rooms.  "All studios have log-burning fire-places," noted the brochure.

The large studio windows are conspicuous in this architects' rendering.  444 East Fifty-second Street brochure.

There were also "maisonette apartments" which had private entrances onto 52nd Street.  The southern half of the building, without the northern light so important to artists, had no vast studio windows.  The only duplexes on this side were the two in the 10th floor and penthouse levels.

444 East Fifty-second Street brochure.

Among the initial residents were newlyweds William Gaston and Rosamond Pinchot, who were married in January 1928.  Born into high society Rosamond was the daughter of prominent attorney Amos Pinchot and the former Gertrude Minturn.  In 1923, at the age of 19, she and her mother were on an ocean liner when she was noticed by the producer and film director Max Reinhardt.  Most likely much to her mother's horror, he cast Rosamond in the Broadway production of The Miracle.  She played a nun who escapes from her convent.

By the time the socialite-turned-actress moved into No. 444 she had become a sort of sensation.  The newspapers called her "the loveliest woman in America."  But shortly after taking her apartment here she created an uproar among tight-laced society when it was reported she had said "uncosmeticed women [i.e., those not wearing makeup] were immodest."  Newspapers printed the outraged reactions of both men and women.  Rosamond insisted she never said it, but had merely been repeating something a friend said.

Nevertheless, she did not back down from the fact that decent women might use makeup.  "They must make up in the city.  Everything is so vivid and startling in the city that a pale, tired face is depressing."

Although the couple would have two children, William Alexander and James Pinchot, their domestic life was more than rocky.  In 1933 they separated.  Tragically, on January 24, 1938 the Beaver County Times reported "Clad in an evening gown and an expensive fur coat, Rosamond Pinchot, 32, famous actress...was found dead today in her automobile in the garage of an estate which she rented [in Old Brookville, New York]."  She had connected a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and taken her own life.

On June 12, 1930 the New York Evening Post reported that "Mrs. Boothe Brokaw has leased a large penthouse apartment at 444 East Fifty-second Street."  She had divorced her husband of seven years, millionaire George Tuttle Brokaw, a few months earlier.

Born Ann Clare Boothe, like Rosamond Pinchot she had had a theatrical career.  But now she was more focused on working for Women's Rights and suffrage.  She maintained a staff of four servants and paid $555 per month rent on the penthouse (about $8,500 in today's money).  In 1934 she poetically described the view from her terrace, published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on August 10, saying:

There are many penthouse views: the East River, sombre as a black velvet ribbon at your feet, shot with phosphorescent slivers that flake away in the wake of river craft.  The Queensborough Bridge and Hell Gate, flung like necklaces across the river's dark body...the lance of the Chrysler Building looming near, the flaming tower of the Radio Building, the golden glow of the New York Central building, the red torch of the Empire State Building, hung high above them all.

On November 23, 1935 Ann married the publisher of Time, Fortune and Life magazines, Henry Luce.  She dropped her first name, becoming Clare Boothe Luce, and would become one of the most recognized figures in American politics (she became Ambassador to Brazil in 1959), and literature (she wrote numerous journalistic pieces, war reporting, and fiction and became best known for her his play The Women in 1936).

Clare Boothe Luce and Henry Luce arrive at Idlewild Airport in 1954.  from the collection of the Library of Congress

Equally well-known was Dorothy Parker, who moved into the building in January 1934.  She may have been influenced on the location (which she reportedly said was "far enough east to plant tea") by the fact that her close friend and Algonquin Round Table member, Alexander Woollcott, lived in The Beekman Campanile next door at No. 450 East 52nd Street.  

Later that year Robert Benchley introduced Dorothy to screen writer Alan Campbell.  He was 28-years old and she was 39.  Campbell would become her second husband.

15 years before moving into No. 444 East 52nd Street, Dorothy posed with members of the Algonquin Round Table.  To the right is Alexander Woollcott, who lived next door at No. 450 East 52nd.  Also seen are Art Samuels, Charlie MacArthur and Harpo Marx.  original source unknown

In 1938 resident Lela E. Rogers was mortified when she read in the newspapers that she was engaged to marry FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.  Lela's daughter was motion picture star Ginger Rogers, but suddenly it was she and not the actress who was drawing press attention.  She called reporters to her apartment to try to dispel the rumor.

On June 9 the New York Post reported "With tears of embarrassment, Mrs. Lela E. Rogers...denied a published report today that she may marry J. Edgar Hoover, chief of the G-Men."  Lela wrung her hands and lamented, "Oh, dear, dear, dear, what will Edgar think?  It's just too silly for words...And what will Edgar think of me if he reads in the papers that I was supposed to have said anything of the kind."

Lillian Gish was living here in 1938 while appearing on Broadway in The Store Wagon.

While Lela Rogers was dealing with erroneous reports of her romantic life, another resident, Lillian Gish was appearing on stage in The Star Wagon.  Earlier that year she had appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Education and Labor to lobby for proposed bill to provide a permanent Bureau of Fine Arts.  She pointed out that with the onslaught of the Depression "the theater was very hard hit...Thousands of actors were deprived of a livelihood, with the consequent loss to our country of that many precious skills."  She concluded her testimony by telling the senators, "Let me end by saying that yours is the opportunity to make a great contribution to the welfare of the country."

Before long Elliot and Elizabeth Hall Janeway moved in.  Married in 1938, the couple would have two sons, Michael and William.  Elliot was a noted economist and writer for The Nation.  His articles caught the eye of neighbor Henry R. Luce who hired him to write part-time for Fortune and Time.

In the meantime, Elizabeth was honing her writing skills as well.  She worked on her first novel, The Walsh Girls, while living here.  Her 1945 novel Daisy Kenyon was adapted to film starring Joan Crawford.

444 East 52nd Street continued to be home to well-heeled, notable residents throughout the coming decades.  In the 1960's, for instance, author and journalist for The New York Times Albert Hodges Morehead, Jr., and James A. Henderson, president of Wells Fargo and Company, lived here.

Significant facade repair is taking place in 2020.

De Pace & Juster's handsome design melds into the row of similar apartment buildings along the southern side of the block.  They constitute a time capsule of the upscale Manhattan life in the late 1920's and early '30's.

photographs by the author

The New York Bible Society (Svensky Kyrkan) Bldg - 5 East 48th Street

Merchant James Talcott was the founder of James Talcott Co., described in 1907 by Who's Who in New York City as "controlling the output of about two hundreds mills of foreign and domestic manufacture of woolens, cottons, silks, etc."  He was, as well, a director in several corporations and a bank.  Educated at Williston Seminary, he and his wife, the former Henrietta E. Francis, gave generously to charities throughout his life.  He was a founder of Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts and the couple funded a professorship of religious instruction at Barnard College (Henrietta was a trustee of that institution).  Upon his death in 1916 he left Henrietta a fortune of more than $3.8 million.

Within the next year she made massive gifts to worthy causes including funds for the land and construction of a new building for the New York Bible Society.  The society was a venerable institution, formed in 1809.  Its main purpose was to acquire and distribute copies of Bibles and Testaments.

On February 19, 1919 the New-York Tribune reported that Ella L. Hawk had sold the 26-foot wide converted house at No. 5 East 48th Street.  Rather than demolish the old structure, the New York Bible Society hired architect Wilfred E. Anthony to make massive alterations.

Early in his career Anthony had been employed in the architectural offices of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson--best known for its Gothic Revival style churches.  Upon setting off on his own, Anthony brought that expertise with him, modifying the Gothic style to the changing times.  

The New York Bible Society published a quarterly magazine, The Bible in New York.  The feature article in its February 1921 issue began "No description can give an adequate idea of our new Bible House at No. 5 East 48th street, New York.  It must be seen in order to be appreciated."

A roofed gallery originally connected the upper turrets. The Architectural Record, December 1921 (copyright expired) 

Anthony had produced a striking limestone-faced structure arranged in three vertical bays.  His 1920's take on the Gothic style has been called "streamlined Gothic" and he touched it with occasional Arts & Crafts elements, especially in the top floor gallery and the two-story barrel-shaped reading room in the center section.  

The central panel originally reading "Bible Society"has been replaced; but the"Talcott Building"panel survives.

Although it was the height of a six-story building, there were technically only four floors.  Both the ground floor reading room and the assembly hall above it were double-height.  Tall Gothic arches culminated in leaded glass windows.  Directly above the central window a picturesque Juliette balcony clung to the facade.   The end bays rose to form octagonal turrets, connected originally by a charming roofed gallery.

The Reading Room rose two stories. The Architectural Record, December 1921 (copyright expired) 

The building was dedicated on April 25, 1921.  It began with a religious service at the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas on 48th Street and Fifth Avenue and concluded at the new building.  The New-York Tribune reported "A special police escort arrested traffic in Fifth Avenue while the assemblage crossed to the Bible House."  A bronze table in the main hall was unveiled that evening which read:

In recognition of the active interest which Mr. James Talcott has always taken in the distribution of the Scriptures, this building is given to the New York Bible Society.

On September 10, 1921 The Publishers's Weekly wrote "Nothing is lacking in equipment to make this a real center for religious work in New York.  Besides the large salesroom, there is an auditorium which will accommodate at least two hundred persons, spacious committee rooms, which adjoin a dining-room and kitchen, and a section given over to hospital flower service, with devices in which flowers may be kept fresh."

The Reading Room - Architecture & Building April 1921 (copyright expired)

Architecture magazine called it "one of the most interesting and suitable small business buildings in New York."  The Fifth Avenue Association agreed, awarding the New York Bible Society Building second prize in the "alterations" category.  Architecture commented in its December 1921 issue, "We should have [been] inclined to put it number one, for it seems an especially happy and appropriate design for its purposes with its elements of ecclesiastical Gothic."

The auditorium was also used for presentations and lectures.  On December 19, 1921, for instance, The New York Herald announced "Dr. A. C. Gaebelein will lecture on 'The Disarmament Question in Light of the Bible."

Rev. Dr. George William Carter, the General Secretary of the society, lived in the building.   Along with the hundreds of Bibles that were routinely distributed, he took note of current events and reacted with special presentations.  Before President Warren Harding attended the Conference on the Limitation of Armament in October 1921, he received a Bible.  The New-York Tribune reported that it "is said to be one of the finest prints of the Scriptures published."

This show of the Reading Room was apparently taken before the area was completely set up.  Architecture & Building April 1921 (copyright expired)

And after Captain A. E. Matthews died aboard the United States Shipping Board freighter Hatteras, Carter read reports that "there was no Bible on board for use in the burial service."  Rev. Carter immediately announced "that his society would present one or more Bibles to every vessel of the United States Shipping Board and that he would have the name of the ship placed in gold letters on the front of the Bible," as reported by The New York Times on January 5, 1923.

Architecture & Building April 1921 (copyright expired)

The number of Bibles distributed by the Society was prodigious.   And the process was sometimes done with flair.  On April 10, 1926 The New York Times reported "Carrying 7,000 Bibles which they will place in hotels, 1,000 young people will march up Fifth Avenue tomorrow afternoon under the auspices of the New York Bible Society...The consignment will bring the total number of Bibles distributed in hotels by the society to 77,000.  The paraders will have a police escort."  That year the Society circulated nearly one million copies, printed in 67 languages, in New York City alone.

The gifts prompted by current events may have sometimes been more about public relations and positive publicity than religious outreach.  A month after Colonel Charles Lindbergh thrilled the world with his non-stop flight from New York to Paris, newspapers nationwide reported that the New York Bible Society had presented him with an Oxford Bible.  The cover was imprinted in gold lettering:

Presented to

Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh

in recognition of

Faith, Courage, Heroism,

by the 

New York Bible Society,

June 13, 1927

In October 1959, the year of its 150th anniversary, the Society announced how it intended to fight the scourge of juvenile delinquency.  New York City was plagued with teen gangs defined along racial and ethnic lines.  Puerto Rican gangs "rumbled" with Italian gangs; whites with blacks.

The New York Times reported that it had "allocated 5,000 Bibles, 10,000 Testaments and 25,000 Scripture portions in English, Spanish and Italian for distribution in the city's racial tension areas."  The article explained "The society rightly took the position that with a Bible in every home in the troubled sections, 'the prospects of a peaceful and Christian solution' to the youth crime problem are brighter."  

The New York Bible Society operated from its distinctive headquarters until 1978 when the building was sold to Svenska Kyrkan, or the Swedish Seamen's Church.  The group had been founded on Water Street in 1873.

Minimal alterations to the building were made.  Today Svensky Kyrkan operates a café, holds Swedish language classes, and celebrates mass every Sunday.  Little changed inside and out, the building is one of Manhattan's hidden treasures.

photographs by the author

The Prescott Memorial Bldg -- No. 247 East 53rd Street

Although the Turtle Bay neighborhood near the East River filled with slaughterhouses, cigar factories and breweries following the Civil War; the block of 53^rd Street between Second and Third Avenues boasted handsome brownstone-faced dwellings.  The three story home at No. 247 East 53^rd Street was purchased by Frank Schaeffler in 1881.  He paid Jette and Baruch Strauss $12,500 for the 25-foot wide building—nearly $300,000 in today’s dollars.

A real estate developer, Schaeffler remained in the house at least until 1888.  But by now the block had noticeably declined.  Tenements filled with immigrant families lured by the low-paying jobs in the factories and slaughterhouses. 

With poverty came crime and vice.  Since the mid-19^th century missions and reformers had been hot on the heels of decadence and wantonness.  On March 2, 1918 the Queen Mab Realty Co. announced it had hired architect Frederick P. Hill to remodel the old house at No. 247 “into a club house.”  And then two weeks later the Real Estate Record & Builder's Guide supplied more clues to what was to come.  The journal identified the lessee of the proposed building as the Prescott Memorial.

The Brevoort Mission was incorporated in 1869 by the First Universalist Mission Society of New York City.  When it moved into the completed Prescott Memorial Building in 1919 it changed its name to the Prescott Mission.

Hill had transformed the Italianate brownstone to a terra cotta-fronted institutional building.  Sparsely decorated, it gave tepid nods at neo-Gothic, with blind Gothic arches and crockets at the top floor and rooftop finials. 

The goals of the mission were to take the neighborhood boys off the streets where temptations were rampant, and to educate women in nutrition, economics and housekeeping.  In 1921 the Directory of Social and Health Agencies of New York City described the Prescott Memorial as providing “general club work, gymnasium, classes in household economics.”

By 1922 the mission had come under the auspices of the Church of the Divine Paternity on Central Park West at 76^th Street.  The 53^rd Street group was renamed the Divine Paternity Mission and its building the Divine Paternity House.  Religious services were also provided here for neighbors.  

In January 1922 eyebrows were raised across Manhattan when the Church of the Divine Paternity hired a new minister who would work at the 53^rd Street location.  The New York Herald pointed out that Helene Ulrich was “Manhattan’s only woman minister.”

And Helene brought progressive ideas to New York City.   A month and a half after she arrived a Herald reporter questioned her on current topics—and her responses bordered on shocking.   She felt ministers were short-sighted in their blanket denunciation of motion pictures and stage plays.  “I am certainly not in sympathy with attacks upon the stage and its people,” she said.  “I believe absolutely in the stage as one of the greatest possible mediums for widespread good, and I think the present condemnation of it is greatly overdone.”

Regarding flappers—those modern women who donned short dresses and bobbed hair—she brushed off the entire issue.  “As to ‘flappers,’ their virtues or deficiencies, the whole subject is a matter more of talk than of anything else.”

And her work in impoverished neighborhoods as well as her understanding of the plights of the poor was evidenced in her stance on birth control.  “I emphatically believe in it, and I approve of birth control propaganda….I feel this way about it: If there are people, a man and wife both, let us say, who do not want to have children, and do want to have dogs, by all means let them have dogs!”

Helene Ulrich encapsulated her goals at the mission as to bring about an “understanding in my own church between strongly contrasted classes of people, the rich and the poor, for instance, and between the educated and the uneducated.”

By 1927 the Divine Paternity House had instituted the Baby and Child Welfare Clinic in the building.  The work of the clinic was supported by the highest levels of society; and when a benefit bridge party was held in the Plaza Hotel on February 8, 1927 Mrs. Andrew Carnegie was among the wealthy patronesses.

In 1933 the neighborhood around the Prescott Memorial Bldg. remained marginal.  Before its 1918 alterations, the house was identical to the brownstones flanking it. from the collection of the New York Public Library

The announcement by the Universalist Church of the Divine Paternity in May 1946 that the 53^rd Street building had been sold to a furniture maker shocked and angered nearby residents.  Among its other functions, Prescott House ran a day care facility which allowed mothers to work.  Its loss would be devastating to the low-income neighborhood.

On May 11 The New York Times reported that “Thirty mothers and their children rode in relays in a horse-drawn wagon through midtown streets on the East Side yesterday urging neighbors to sign petitions protesting the proposed sale.”  A sign on the wagon read “Prescott House Must Not Be Sold” and advertised a protest meeting scheduled for the following Friday night.

Richard Wheelright had paid a $10,000 deposit on the $40,000 building on April 18.  But now the unfriendly hoop-la made him wish he hadn’t.  His attorney told reporters that he “wishes to withdraw from the sale and has asked for a refund of the deposit” and that “Mr. Wheelwright does not desire to put an end to the service of the neighborhood house.”

The Universalist Church of the Divine Paternity was, perhaps, less Christian in its response to the frantic mothers.  It refused to release Wheelwright from the signed contract.  But the women forged on and came to an agreement with the furniture maker directly.

Within a week of the protest and strategy meeting of Friday, May 17 around $7,400 had been raised to save Prescott House.   By January 7, 1947 there was enough money to repay Richard Wheelwright his original $10,000 down payment and he accepted long-term payments at low interest for the remaining $30,000.

The New York Times reported “Prescott Memorial Neighborhood House has been saved and now belongs to the community it serves...Under a new executive board it will continue operation of a day nursery attended by seventy children, besides it other work for older children and teen-agers.”

The new owners turned to motion picture and stage stars—the professions that Helene Ulrich had defended a quarter of a century earlier—for support.  Throughout the coming years box office receipts for certain opening night performances went to Prescott House.  Such was the case in 1955 when Katharine Cornell and Tyrone Power opened in The Dark Is Light Enough; and in April 1958 when Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne donated their opening proceeds of The Visit.

As the 20^th century drew to a close the Turtle Bay neighborhood had once again changed.  Upscale apartment buildings replaced old brownstones and tenements, and there was little need for the aging mission house.  In 1993 the building was renovated for Seicho-No-Ie, a spiritual group founded in Japan in 1930.  The name means “The Home of Infinite Life, Wisdom and Abundance.”

Although the street level was significantly altered; the bulk of the 1993 work was internal.  The upper floors of the former Prescott Memorial Building remain surprisingly intact; looking much as they did in 1919 when mission workers sought to help the neediest of New Yorkers.

photographs by the author

The 1903 St. Nicholas Rectory -- No. 135 East 2nd Street

Although the great wave of German immigrants into New York harbor would not truly begin until the 1840s; in 1833 the first German Catholic parish was established by Rev. John Raffeiner.  Years later Archbishop John Hughes would remember “Wherever there were German Catholics there would Father Raffeiner seek them out and minister to them, being prevented neither by winter’s snows, the summer’s sun, nor the inconveniences of travel in that day, from fulfilling the duties assigned him.”

Father Raffeiner established the parish of St. Nicholas, celebrating mass in an unoccupied Baptist church on Delancey Street.  The cornerstone of a permanent church, on East Second Street between First Avenue and Avenue A, was laid on June 28, 1835 and the completed building was dedicated on Easter Sunday 1836.

The neighborhood in which Die Deutsche Ronisch-Kaltholisch St. Nicholas Kiriche, or St. Nicholas German Catholic Church, stood was the center of Manhattan’s burgeoning German community.  Within two decades New York would have the third largest German population of any city in the world, foi, as it filled with German social clubs, churches and music halls.

The increasing congregation quickly required a larger building and on Christmas Eve, 1848, Archbishop Hughes dedicated the new Church of St. Nicholas—a 100-foot wide Gothic Revival structure.  In 1867 a school was constructed next door, at No. 135 East Second Street.

In 1888 Father Mayer became pastor.  He sparked a series of construction projects.  In April 1914 The Catholic Church in the United States of America noted that “under Father Mayer the grand sanctuary was built, together with a large house on 1^st Street, the rectory on 2^nd Street, and a number of improvements made.”

The “rectory on 2^nd Street” replaced the old school building.  In 1903 The Evening Post Record of Real Estate Sales had reported that “Plans have been filed for a new five-story parsonage for the St. Nicholas German Church, at No. 135 East 2d St.  It is to be 20x41 with a façade of limestone and brick.”  Frank W. Herter had been given the commission to design the new structure.

Frank Herter and his brother, Peter, had arrived in New York from German in 1884.  Having studied architecture in Germany, they established their Herbert Brothers architectural office and went to work designing tenement buildings, most in the Lower East Side.  On January 23, 1892 the Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide praised their improvements on tenement design.  It wrote “the hardworking people who make up the population of the East Side found it impossible to bring up their children decently and respectably, as many of them wished to do…Herter Bros., the architects, have within the past few years erected a number of the most improve class of tenements.”

Completed in 1904, the  building was five stories high, costing the church $15,000—in the neighborhood of $416,000 today.  The rough-cut stone base morphed into red brick halfway into the second story.  Herter’s neo-Gothic design included pointed openings, drip moldings, and a gable medallion that mimicked a rose window. 

A stone faux rose window, hefty brick corbel tables, and wonderful carved pier supports add to the Gothic motif.

The descriptions of the building as a “rectory” or a “parsonage” were simplistic at best—possibly for tax purposes (tax records of 1919 listed the Parsonage” as being partially exempt).  It was, in reality, a mixed-use structure.

The church and rectory were pictured in the 1914 The Catholic Church in the United States of America (copyright expired0

When $200 worth of renovations were initiated in April 1910 by architects B. W. Berger & Sons (altering some windows and interior walls), the plans referred to the building as a “brick school;”  indicating that at least some of the five floors were still being used for that purpose.  And until at least 1916 the annual Report for the New York Public Library listed “St. Nicholas Library” at the address.   Its popularity was evidenced by the number of books circulated—305 volumes in 1914 rising to 557 by 1916.

In 1914 the church's congregation numbered 600.  At the time the school had an attendance of 155 boys and 210 girls, taught by six Dominican nuns.  But already German New Yorkers were leaving the Kleindeutchland and the school seems to have been eliminated by the 1920s, when Department of Building records indicate the building was converted to a Day Nursery.

In the meantime, Father John A. Nageleisen was dealing with bad press.  Five years after the rectory was built, he had arrived from Cincinnati, Ohio to become pastor.  By the time the day school was installed in the rectory, the sometimes controversial priest had become highly unpopular with residents around Congers Lake, near Nyack, New York.

St. Nicholas Church ran a camp on the lake and in a rather un-Christian move, Father Nageleisen battled the local residents over its use.  The New York Times explained on June 21, 1925 “The trouble between the priest and the natives is of long standing and arose from a dispute over the ownership of the lake.  Father Nageleisen has contended that the lake is his own property and that he has the right to determine who shall use it.”  The newspaper noted that several of the locals depending on fishing and boat rentals for their livelihoods.

Father Nageleisen enraged the citizens by establishing a fee for the privilege of using the lake, and then built fences around the property with warnings posted against trespassers.  But the greatest offense came when he dumped four barrels of copper sulphate into the water on June 4, 1925 to, in his words, “destroy decaying vegetable matter.”

Instead he destroyed more than 700 fish whose scaly corpses floated to the top.  Tempers boiled over in the community and The Times reported “Feeling has continued to rise and it was rumored here that the Ku Klux Klan might take a hand.  One report was that the Klan would burn a cross near the priest’s camp at midnight.”

Father Nageleisen was charged with “violating the State Conservation law by killing fish” and his trial began on February 13, 1926.  The misdemeanor was punishable by a fine of $500, plus $10 for each fish killed.  The State of New York contended, in addition, that the lake was owned by the State and “not by Father Nageleisen or any private owner.”

The ugly ordeal apparently did not tarnish the pastor’s reputation on East 2^nd Street.  On May 30, 1935 the pavement outside the church and rectory was packed with “several thousand” according to The Times and “more than 1,500 occupied the church.”  The event was the celebration of Rev. John A. Nageleisen’s golden anniversary of his ordination.

“Throngs from the neighborhood came to watch the colorful procession of priests and children as it made its way from the priest house next door into the church,” reported the newspaper.

But The Times made another pertinent observation.  “Although St. Nicholas has only about fifty parishioners, due to the scarcity of German Catholics in the neighborhood, many former parishioners attended the celebration.”

By now the New York’s German population had mostly migrated north to the Yorkville district.  The Lower East Side was now mainly a Jewish neighborhood.  A congregation of only 50 mostly elderly worshipers could not sustain St. Nicholas Church for long.

But the German Catholics would have something more pressing to worry about first.  Two years earlier Adolph Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany.  As world war erupted in Europe in 1939, German Americans were looked at with suspicion.  The members of St. Nicholas German Catholic Church had suffered the discrimination during the first world war and knew its discomfort.  On Sunday, June 18, 1939 the Rev. Joseph D. Ostermann preached here.  He was Executive Director of the Committee for Catholic Refugees from Germany.  He began his sermon saying “As we look over the world today, we see how heartless and ungrateful the average man is and we wonder which will prevail—the hatred of man or the love of God.”

The parish of St. Nicholas German Catholic Church would cling on for only two more decades.  On January 27, 1960 The New York Times reported that the church building “has been sold and will be demolished.”  The 112-year old structure was torn down for a parking lot.

Rather surprisingly, the old rectory-school-nursery-library building at No. 135 East 2^nd Street survived.  It was used as an apartment building until 1986 when it was converted to a single, massive residence spanning the second through fourth floors, with second apartment on the top story.  The street level was gutted for a garage.

Despite the abuse, a woeful coat of grime and the serious want of façade restoration; Frank W. Herter’s charming 1903 structure is a delightful survivor on a street that has seen more than its fair share of demolition.

photographs by the author