The Federal Survivor at No. 37 East 7th. Street

 

By the 1830's attorney and banker Thomas E. Davis had become perhaps more interested in real estate development than his primary professions.  He would become a major player in the East Side north of the exclusive Bond Street neighborhood; as it transformed from farmland to residences.  Beginning around 1831, he erected rows of speculative brick homes in the area.

Partnering with Louis Wilcox in 1832, he began construction of one such row on East 7^th Street, which included No. 37.  The handsome Federal style residence was completed the following year and was valued at $6,000—about $165,000 today.

Clad in warm orange brick laid in Flemish bond, it rose three stories high above an English basement.  Diminutive carved brackets supported the stone window sills and a prim denticulated cornice capped the facade.  The major hint that the home was intended for a financially-comfortable family lay in the intricate doorway.  Here the round arched door surround with its faceted keystone featured delicate carving and suggested upscale interiors behind its double doors.

The interior of the entrance was paneled and a delicate egg-and-dart molding runs below the fanlight.

As the decades passed, the neighborhood changed.  The Lower East Side saw the influx of immigrant families following the end of the Civil War and tenements soon outnumbered private homes.  Nevertheless 37 East 7th Street held out and in the 1890's was the home of Dr. Milo M. Duncan (sometimes spelled Mylo) and his wife Rebecca.

While Dr. Duncan may have led the respectable life of a neighborhood physician, Rebecca was somewhat of a bad girl.  On February 13, 1896 she found herself on the wrong side of the law.

According to a nameless young man, he was leaving the Star Theatre when he saw Mrs. Duncan.  “She was there with a crowd around her when I came along and I asked her what was the matter.  Then she caught hold of me and accused me of stealing a diamond ring.”

The Sun reported on the incident the following day saying “A fashionable dressed woman, who appeared to be intoxicated, collected a crowd about her in Thirteenth street, near Broadway, a 11 o’clock last night.  She had caught hold of a good-looking young man and clung to his arm, shouting: ‘You stole my ring!’”

Rebecca’s version of events was quite different.  According to the newspaper, she told police “that she had visited friends up town, and had started to go home at 8 o’clock...she rode down on an elevated train to Ninth street.  Then she had met the young man, and had a few drinks with him.  He afterward took her ring and refused to give it up, she said.”

The policeman on duty outside the theater corroborated the young man's story.  He was released.  And when Rebecca was questioned at the police station, her story fell apart.  “She could not remember where she had been drinking, nor could she say how many drinks she had.  Her forehead was cut, and she did not know how she had been injured,” said The Sun.

Worse, when the station house matron searched Rebecca’s pockets, she found a $20 pawn ticket for her diamond ring.  "She was locked up."

A year later Dr. Duncan had apparently had enough.  In May 1897 he sued Rebecca for “absolute divorce,” claiming she had been intimate with Henry White on April 15.  Rebecca Duncan vehemently denied the charge and blamed their differences on the doctor.

“She says her husband preferred the society of his servants to that of his wife, and played cards with them; furthermore, that he continued to be on friendly terms with a doctor who, as she had told her husband, had made improper proposals to her,” reported The Sun on May 22, 1897.

Justice Andrews of the Supreme Court put an end to the couple’s differences by granting the doctor his divorce.  He was directed to pay Rebecca $150 in legal fees and $20 a week alimony.

As the turn of the century arrived, most of the houses along the block had been altered or demolished—but not 37 East 7th Street.  By 1904 the Independent Order B’rith Abraham of the United States of America was using the basement and parlor floor as its headquarters.  Max Schwartz, First Deputy Grand Master of the Order, owned the building.  The upper floors were apparently leased to The Baker & Taylor Co., booksellers.

Baker & Taylor ran its wholesale book company here in 1906--The School Journal March 17, 1906 (copyright expired)

Organized in 1887, the “fraternal beneficiary order” was composed mainly of Russian, Polish and German Jewish members.  The group maintained a cemetery fund, administered donations for charitable causes, and provided relief to indigent families. 

While the Independent Order B’rith Abraham focused on Jewish tradition; it also stressed the importance of learning English and becoming Americanized.  Within a very few years this stance would be vital.

On March 7, 1912, the New-York Tribune noted that Max Schwartz had renewed the lease for the “parlor floor, etc.” to the Independent Order B’rith Abraham of the United States of America.  The lodge would pay Schwartz $2,600 for the 15-year lease.  Quickly, however, the Order rethought the arrangement.

A report dated March 24, 1913 said “Upon recommendation of the grand master, the last convention authorized the executive committee to purchase the property at 37 East 7^th street, New York City, for the sum of $19,000, plus the cost of alterations.  This building has been used by the Grand Lodge as its headquarters for a number of years.”

The total sum paid by the Order to Max Schwartz was $29,373.39.  The immediate alterations included returning the upper floors to a single residence for the Grand Secretary, and the replacement of the stoop which was described as “worn out.”

In 1916 additional interior changes were made when the Order commissioned architects Sommerfeld & Steckler & Samuel Cohen to “erect walls and rearrange rooms” according to the Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide on March 11.

By the time the United States entered World War I, the German population of Manhattan had greatly abandoned the Lower East Side for the Yorkville area.  Nevertheless, the neighborhood around the Order B’rith Abraham still had a noticeable German-born population.  Now with Germany the nation’s enemy, German-speaking New Yorkers were eyed with suspicion and fear.

In February 1918 every German in Manhattan was required to register as an “enemy alien.”  The New-York Tribune reported on February 6, “The Eighty-eighth Street station, in the most populous Teutonic district in the city, had registered exactly 501 out of its estimated total of 3,000 aliens by 5 o’clock last night.”  Each registrant was fingerprinted and his personal data recorded.

“Next Sunday, after the close of the registration period, each policeman will start out to investigate and verify the information given by the registrants on his beat.  If everything is found correct, registration cards will be issued within a fortnight,” said the New-York Tribune.  “Wrong addresses or misinformation, will result in turning the case over to the Department of Justice.”

Those Lower East Side residents with Germanic surnames lined up outside 37 East 7^th Street.  Somewhat ironically the majority of the lodge members were of Germanic descent.  From its inception, however, the order had been outspokenly patriotic. 

Later that year, on October 1, The New York Times reported that “The New York branch of the Independent Order of B’rith Abraham subscribed $50,000 yesterday to the Fourth Liberty Loan, the announcement being made in connection with the raising of the order’s service flag, containing 8,460 stars, in front of its headquarters at 37 East Seventh Street.”  The generous subscription to the Liberty Loan would translate to about $725,000 today.  Before the war’s end the order would sell $5 million in Liberty Bonds.

It was around this time that the organization added a masonry parapet above the building's cornice.  But as other houses on the block continued to be drastically altered, little else was changed to the Federal style building.

Somewhat surprisingly, the end of the war did not bring an end to alien registration.  On December 19, 1922 the Executive Board of the Grand Lodge of the Independent Order, B’rith Abraham, held a meeting in the 7^th Street headquarters.  Wartime registration was one thing, felt the members; but registering aliens in peacetime was not what the United States was all about.  A resolution was passed ‘denouncing” the alien registry bill.

“The resolution declared that any law requiring aliens to be photographed and registered annually was un-American,” reported The New York Times.

Living in the house at the time was Max L. Hollander.  He had been Grand Secretary since 1909.  Born in Czechoslovakia in 1870, he arrived in New York as a child.  After a 23-year career as a tailor on the Lower East Side, he devoted himself to B’rith Abraham.

The socially and politically involved Hollander went to the White House to appeal to President Theodore Roosevelt for financial aid for survivors following the massacre of Jews during the Kishinev pogroms.  A founder of the American Jewish Congress he twice served as grand secretary at its World Conventions in Geneva and Washington, DC.

The 73-year old Max Hollander died in the house on the afternoon of February 20, 1943 after being ill about five months.  Three days later The New York Times said “The synagogues of Manhattan’s lower East Side went into a week’s period of mourning yesterday, and 1,500 persons attended a funeral service in the afternoon for Max L. Hollander.”  Following the service the cortege was escorted by 40 automobiles to the cemetery.

The Independent Order B’rith Abraham remained in the house for decades.  Sometime around mid-century the parapet was removed, making the building appear even more frozen in time. 

In 1981 Princeton architectural student Kevin Lippert and his classmates struggled with the large French drawing books from the turn of the century.  Lippert’s idea was to create more easily handled, reduced-format editions.  The Princeton Architectural Press was born of his idea.

Lippert graduated in 1983 and two years later moved his publishing firm into the East 7^th Street house where it remains today.  Because of its good fortune of being the home of a fraternal organization for many decades, then to an architectural publishing firm, 37 East 7^th Street has survived as a nearly-intact example of Federal domestic architecture. 

photographs by the author

The 1835 Thomas E. Davis House -- No. 68 East 7th Street

photo by Alice Lum

In 1835 attorney and banker Thomas E. Davis constructed his upscale brick home at No. 68 East 7^th Street, just blocks from the ultra-fashionable Bond Street neighborhood.  The three-story home sat above a brownstone English basement.  Its comfortable 25-foot width was a reflection of the wealth of its owner.  The unpretentious Greek Revival elements were the latest in architectural fashion; just beginning to nudge out the Federal style.

Davis and his wife, Anne, would have five daughters and a son.  Six years after erecting the 7^th Street house, Davis built a luxurious country home on Staten Island’s fashionable Richmond Terrace.  The New-York Tribune described it on November 17, 1841.  "The elegant country seat, with about four acres of land adjoining, recently finished by Thomas E. Davis, Esq. at a cost exceeding $60,000…is unrivaled for beauty of situation.”  The home cost the attorney a little over $1.5 million by today’s standards.

Despite their six children and Davis’s substantial fortune—about $2 million by 1870—things apparently were not working out between him and Anne.  When daughter Lizzie married the Marquis Angelo Gavotti Verospi of Rome on October 10, 1861, the ceremony took place in the Church of St. Roch in Paris.  It was an indication of things to come.

By time the of Davis’s death on March 16 1878 only he and his son, Thomas E. Davis, Jr., remained in New York.  Anne lived in Paris as did three daughters; while Lizzie and Matilda lived in Italy.  Davis himself seems to have left 7^th Street to live on Staten Island.  While Anne received “all his horses, carriages, harness, diamonds, jewelry, bijouterie silver, furniture, ornaments, bedding, paintings, articles of vertu, clothing, wines, liquors, and all goods and chattels stores at his banker’s or elsewhere;” the only real-estate mentioned in the will was the house and land on Richmond Terrace (which was left to his son).

That the millionaire attorney would have abandoned the neighborhood is not surprising.  By the second half of the 19^th century the neighborhood was called Kleindeutchland, or little Germany.  Fine Federal and Greek Revival homes were quickly being replaced by tenement houses and German social clubs.  With the German Lutherans and Catholics came the German Jews, as well.

The year prior to Davis’s death there were 250,000 Jewish immigrants in the United States, more than one-third of whom lived in New York.  In 1877 J. J. Reynolds wrote, “A growing interest in missions to the Jews has resulted in the formation at New York of a ‘Church Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews,’ under the presidency of the bishop of the diocese, and with the countenance of eight other bishops and several other eminent men.”

The Episcopal Church, concerned that Jews should be saved through conversion, purchased the house at No. 68 East 7^th Street as the Society’s headquarters.  Two years later, on March 8, 1884, The Real Estate Record noted that the society had taken out a $9,000 mortgage on the property.  The money was no doubt necessary for renovating the house into school rooms and a chapel.  It is possible that some of it went to the exterior remodeling as well.  The façade got a stylish makeover with up-to-date Italianate details—including handsome pediments above the windows and a pretty pressed metal frieze below the cornice.

The architecturally out-of-date building got stylish new clothes -- photo by Alice Lum

The Church Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews explained its technique of reaching its audience in the Board of Missions’ 1893 The Spirit of Missions.  It listed “paid Missionaries” (in actuality, there was only one) and the “maintenance of Missionary Schools and Industrial Schools for the Christian education of Jewish children.”  The pamphlet stressed “The work is purely spiritual.  The Society does not give temporal aid.”

The Society House served as school and home to the missionary, Mr. Lerman, who happened to be a converted Jew, a chapel, and school.  The Society published what it called “Messianic and Missionary literature,” which was in the form of an oddly-named periodical The Gospel of the Circumcision.”

The aggressive work of the Church Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews did not go unnoticed by the city’s rabbis.  On April 21, 1893 The New York Times ran a headline reading “Jewish Ministers Aroused” and wrote “They think the eyes of the Jewish people ought to be opened to the serious inroads of the mission in order that this influence may be checked by counteracting agencies.”

Rabbi Silverman dismissed the idea of “conversion” and preferred to think of it as mutiny.  “A Jew cannot become a Christian.  It is against his grain.  If he says he is a Christian, he is really an infidel.”

The Church Society relied on donations to operate; but it would appear that the group had regular financial strains.  In 1891 another mortgage had been taken out, this time for $10,000; and in 1901 the Citizens’ Savings Bank approved a $11,500 mortgage.  Finally on March 26, 1904 The Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide reported that the Church Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews had sold the East 7^th Street house to Samuel Grossman for $17,250. 

In an act of supreme irony, six days later Grossman transferred title to Machizke Talmud Torah School.  The yeshiva had been founded only a few years earlier when a movement towards replacing Yiddish with English as the language of instruction among Jewish youths began.  A focus on traditional Hebrew, rather than Yiddish, and religious doctrine was stressed as well.

The school gave as its object “to instruct poor children gratis in the Hebrew language and literature, and to give them a religious education.  In addition, poor children were given shoes and clothing.  The school opened on January 22, 1905 with a generous $25,000 financial boost from Jacob H. Schiff.

Machizke Talmud Torah School remained in the converted home at least until 1916.  Afterward the building was used as a synagogue.  By the end of World War I the German population had moved northward to the Yorkville area; but the Lower East Side remained the stronghold of the Jewish community well into the second half of the 20^th century.

Scars in the brick reveal restoration of former in-wall air conditioner damage -- photo by Alice Lum

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Change eventually came, however.  The East Village saw much of the Jewish population displaced by the city’s avante guard artists, writers, musicians, and political and social activists during the 1960s and 1970s.  The Davis house was returned to a single family home in 1960; then in 1989 was converted to one spacious apartment per floor.  Three decades later the remarkably preserved façade is lovingly maintained.

The Lost Keteltas Mansion -- No. 37 St. Mark's Place

photo from "Old Buildings of New York" 1912, copyright expired

The first Keteltas to arrive in New York from Holland landed in 1649.  A merchant, he soon amassed a fortune in the growing community of Nieuw-Amsterdam.  By the time Eugene Keteltas was born on October 18, 1804, the family was fabulously wealthy and highly respected.  Eugene studied law under General Robert Bogardus and began his own practice; but following his marriage to Malvina Gardner (whose family was equally wealthy), he retired.

Like all moneyed families at the turn of the 18^th and early 19th century, the Keteltases maintained a summer estate north of the city.  Theirs was in the area just north of what would become 25^th Street, near Second Avenue.  Nearby were the country mansions of the Watts and the Kips (who gave their name to Kips Bay), and the Beekman house.  Eugene’s sister, Jane, had married James Beekman.

But by the first years of the 1830s, the northern edge of the city was inching closer and closer to these summer retreats.  Thomas E. Davis would be a major player in transforming the area north of the exclusive Bond Street neighborhood from farmland to an elite residential enclave.  In 1831 he built rows of fashionable brick homes in the Federal Style on 8^th Street, between Second and Third Avenues.  The street was renamed St. Mark’s Place and Davis’ high-end mansions would rival any in the city.

At the northwest corner of St. Mark’s Place and Second Avenue he built a massive brick mansion with white marble trim.  Five bays wide along St. Mark’s Place and four bays wide on the avenue, it rose three stories.  The parlor level was girded with a handsome cast iron balcony and white marble steps led up to the marble portico. 

The house was briefly owned by a “Mr. Kane” who decided in the spring of 1833 to sell.  Mayor Philip Hone noted in his diary on April 30 that year “Mr. Kane has sold his large house, corner of St. Mark’s place and Second avenue, to Charles Graham, for $75,000.  He called this morning to offer it to me for the last time before he closed the sale; but I do not wait it.”  Hone told his diary that he could not imagine that property in the area had become worth so much.  The price Charles Graham paid for the mansion would be equivalent to $2 million today.

In 1842 the Graham children were enrolled in the nearby W. Sherwood Select Private School at 201 9^th Street.  The exclusive school accepted only 25 students and the roster read like the Social Register with names including Kipp, Archibald, Kernochan, Suydam and Shepherd.

In the meantime, Eugene Keteltas’ fortune grew.  America’s Successful Men of Affairs later said “He inherited a large property in real estate on the east side of New York city from his father and received a large amount also through his wife, which, constantly appreciating in value, amounted…to a great property.”

Eugene and Malvina had ten children, a situation which required a commodious home.  In 1847 Keteltas purchased the St. Mark’s Place mansion.  The old country estate to the north would not last much longer and like so many other wealthy New Yorkers, in 1864 Eugene purchased an impressive summer home in Newport.

Eugene Keteltas’s “retirement” was in reality heavily involved with the management of his real estate, collecting of rents and negotiating leases; as well as his philanthropic endeavors.  Henry Hall, in 1895, remembered "His friends knew Mr. Keteltas as a benevolent man, constantly engaged in works of charity in the unostentatious way.  Retiring in disposition and fond of the scenes of his childhood, he always lived, while in the city, in the old family residence on the corner of 8^th street and Second Avenue.”

In the 1850s Keteltas updated the Federal interiors.  The Times later reported on the “rare Italian marble mantelpieces, mahogany doors, and other luxurious furnishings” that were installed.

On December 22, 1869 one of the city’s most brilliant events of the season took place in the mansion.  Edith Malvina Keteltas married George Peabody Wetmore that evening.  Wetmore was for many years a United States Senator from Rhode Island and The New York Times called the affair “one of the fashionable weddings of the season.”

On August 26, 1876, while the family was in Newport, Eugene Keteltas died at the age of 73.  The New York Times said he had “lived in seclusion with his family.”  By now several of the children had married; two, Jane and Eugene, had died in childhood; and the others lived on with Malvina in the family mansion.

Among them was Alice, an independent young woman whose inheritance would amount to just under $1 million today.  Alice would eventually be the last Keteltas to leave No. 37 St. Mark’s Place.

At some point around this time the three-story house received an impressive mansard roof.  The Keteltas family with its dwindling number of occupants did not need additional space; however the modern addition may have simply been a means to update the architecturally-passe home. 

In the spring of 1894 Malvina became seriously ill.  But by early summer she had recovered and made the annual pilgrimage to Newport.  Then on the afternoon of July 20 the 84-year old did not feel well and went to her room.  She died there that evening in the same bed where her husband had died 18 years earlier.

Now Alice lived in the Keteltas mansion with her unmarried sister, Mary, and two brothers John and Philip.  John Gardner Keteltas had been judged “incompetent” and his money was controlled by Alice.

A year after Malvina’s death, Mary died.  That same year Alice went to court and on June 28, 1895 The New York Times reported that “Philip D. Keteltas, a brother-in-law of United States Senator George Peabody Wetmore of Rhode Island, has been adjudged insane in the Supreme Court in this city.”  A separate article said “Philip Keteltas, a millionaire, was yesterday adjudged to be mentally incompetent to manage his affairs.  Mr. Keteltas has an income of $60,000 derived from property estimated to be worth $1,035,000.  He has lived for years in seclusion.”

If anyone thought it odd that both Alice’s brothers had been deemed incompetent and that their financial affairs were in her hands, no one seems to have said so.

By now the once-elegant St. Mark’s Place neighborhood was filled with the tenement houses and music halls of German, Hungarian and Italian immigrants.  Directly behind the mansion were the German Dispensary and the Ottendorfer Library.  But Alice was resolutely determined to remain in the old family mansion—now an anachronism in a much-changed urban environment.

At the turn of the century the Keteltas house, on the corner, is the last surviving mansion in the area.  Outside Alice's windows a bread wagon stands at the curb near the Ottendorfer Library. photograph by Byron Company, from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UAYWQ6Q2L0&SMLS=1&RW=1366&RH=631

By the beginning of the 20^th century both Alice’s brothers had died and she lived on alone in the house with her staff of about six servants.  The New York Times said “The Keteltas house has long been an object of interest and curiosity to the residents of lower Second Avenue.  For years it has been the only strictly private dwelling in the neighborhood.  Yet the neighborhood, teeming with a mixed Jewish, Italian and Hungarian population, has never seemed to bother the old lady.”

Alice maintained not only the Newport mansion, but a cottage in Saratoga.  When she left for the summer season the St. Mark’s Place house was closed “with the exception of two or three caretakers.”  On the St. Mark’s Place side of the house was a large yard, protected by a high fence.  Alice kept the family stable on 9^th Street where her various vehicles and horses were housed, along with her stable crew.

Like her father, Alice was generous to charities and other causes; but she chose her projects carefully.  In 1895 she donated $15 to the New York Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society, carefully noting the money was to be used “for prisoners.”  When the Spanish-American War broke out, she paid for the services of two trained nurses.  Her benefactions were not always merely for charity.  In 1905 she paid for the “prize of a silver cup to be awarded at the rose and strawberry show in June,” reported Gardening.  The magazine noted the cup “has created much enthusiasm, and the competition for this honor will no doubt be very spirited.”

As mansions rose along Central Park leaving Alice Keteltas far behind, she was repeatedly urged to move.  The Times, on October 20, 1912, wrote “Although a descendant of an old wealthy and fashionable family of early New York days, and owning a Summer home in Newport, Miss Keteltas cares nothing for fashionable life, and the associations of her old home were of far more value to her than living in a more refined but yet strange neighborhood.”

But Alice Keteltas finally gave in.  “The last of her two brothers lived there until his death a short time ago and this, combined with the persuasions of her friends and the rapidly changing character of Lower Second Avenue, at last led Miss Keteltas to desert the old homestead.”

The 70-plus year old spinster built a sumptuous mansion at No. 9 East 79th Street, adjoining the massive Isaac Brokaw residence.  Here she recreated some of the rooms of the old house; ordering the marble mantels and other architectural details to be incorporated into the new house.   “They have been taken to Miss Keteltas’s new home at 9 East Seventy-ninth Street, and placed there so as to conform as nearly as possible to their appearance in the well-remembered rooms of the ancient homestead,” said The Times on October 20, 1912.

A week before the article ran, Alice walked out of the house her father had purchased 65 years earlier for the last time.  “Miss Alice Keteltas drove away one afternoon in her coach from the aristocratic mansion on the northwest corner of St. Mark’s Place, never to return there to live….It was a transition from early nineteenth century dwelling conditions to the typical twentieth century type, and it was with a feeling of deep regret that the old lady entered her future home.”

Alice was adamant that her refined family home would not be abused as an apartment house.  She refused to sell; instead putting it in the hands of a broker to lease.  “In leasing her home Miss Keteltas has stipulated that it must be used exclusively for business.  There are to be no apartments or living rooms.”

Two weeks later it was announced that the Samuel Augenbloch Company had filed plans “for altering the landmark into stores and a moving-picture house at a cost of $20,000.”  The Times remarked that the conversion would mark the passing of “the most interesting as well as the last of the fine old private homes in that quarter of the city.”

The white marble portico columns lay against the steps as the venerable mansion is demolished -- photograph by Samuel Landsman, US Works Projects Administration, from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UAYWQ6173G&SMLS=1&RW=1366&RH=631

The conversion became instead a demolition.  The 1830s time capsule was demolished in 1913, replaced by a mundane Edwardian theater and office building.

The building that replaced the Keteltas mansion still stands (left) - photo by Edmund V. Gillon from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UAYWQD3A14&SMLS=1&RW=1366&RH=631#/SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UAYWQD3A14&SMLS=1&RW=1366&RH=631&PN=1