Michelle Nevius's Blog, page 27

January 30, 2014

Postcard Thursday: Where Have All The Mansions Gone?

Andrew Carnegie's mansion (today the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum)
The news broke yesterday that the government of Qatar is purchasing the Wildenstein Gallery building at 19 East 64th Street for either $125 million (via the Post) or $90 million (via the Wall Street Journal). In either case, it's a spectacular amount of money to spend on an Upper East Side mansion.

However, while the price may be high, Qatar is following in the footsteps of nearly a century of others who've converted Gilded Age homes into museums, consulates, embassies, and schools.

The postcard above is a view, ca. 1910, of Andrew Carnegie's massive home that stretches the block from 90th to 91st Streets on Fifth Avenue. As we write in our last book,  Inside the Apple :
In 1898, Carnegie acquired the lots on Fifth Avenue between 90th and 91st street—at that point much farther north than polite society deemed fashionable—so that he could build a large mansion in relatively isolated splendor. (In the rapidly growing city, the Carnegies were always concerned with light. When Carnegie’s widow, Louise, sold the lot next door to the Church of the Heavenly Rest in 1926, it was with the proviso that the Gothic towers have no north-facing windows and they be clipped so that no shadows would fall on her lawn.)

Carnegie reputedly told his architects, Babb, Cook & Willard that he wanted his retirement home to be modest, plain, and “roomy”; upon completion in 1901, the 64-room structure certainly had plenty of space. A grand first floor showcased the public rooms, including a conservatory and a music room featuring Carnegie’s gargantuan Aeolian organ. Above were the Carnegies’ private quarters on the second floor, guest rooms on the third, and servants’ quarters in the attic. Amenities included a passenger elevator (one of the first in a private home) and a prototype of central air conditioning.
Louise Carnegie lived in the house until her death in 1946; by that time, Fifth Avenue and the Upper East Side had undergone massive changes. Many mansions had been torn down (see Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr.'s Empty Mansions for the tale of one of the largest homes to be destroyed), but those that remained had been sold at greatly reduced prices. One Astor home had been purchased by the government of India; a Vanderbilt house had become the headquarters of a non-profit. When the French government moved out of Rockefeller Center's Maison Francaise, they scooped up Stanford White's Payne Whitney house just south of the Metropolitan Museum--because a mansion on Fifth Avenue had become cheaper than an office in Midtown. (What a contrast to the price that Qatar is paying today!)

Soon after Louise Carnegie's death, the Carnegie Corporation leased the mansion to Columbia University, who used it as the headquarters for their Graduate School of Social Work. (A nearby mansion owned by James B. Duke had similarly become the home of NYU's art history program.) The social work students used the home for nearly 25 years before relocating to Columbia's Morningside Heights campus when the Carnegie Corporation gave the mansion to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the first branch of the Smithsonian to be located outside Washington, DC.


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Read more about Gilded Age mansions in


Footprints in New York comes out April 15, 2014, but you can pre-order today.
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Published on January 30, 2014 09:20

January 28, 2014

Pete Seeger, the Almanac Singers, and 130 West 10th Street


The world woke this morning to the news of the death of legendary singer Pete Seeger at age 94. Anyone who's ever taken our Dylan-themed tour of Greenwich Village has probably been dragged by James to a small house on West 10th Street to listen to him wax rhapsodic about the Almanac Singers, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger.

Seeger was born in New York in 1919 and was exposed to folk music early, later recalling (as noted in the Washington Post obituary) that he heard artist Thomas Hart Benton play "John Henry" on the harmonica in Greenwich Village. After dropping out of Harvard in the late 1930s, Seeger became a full-time singer. In the autumn of 1941, he rented the house at 130 West 10th Street to be the headquarters of the Almanac Singer, a loose collective of singers and activists he'd founded with Lee Hayes. As John Strausbaugh writes in  The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village ,
At various points Almanac House was home to Leadbelly, Alan Lomax, Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Burl Ives, the actor and activist Will Geer, and Woody Guthrie. They staged hootenannies and charged thirty-five cents admission.


Later, Seeger would recall: "People came and went all the time. The cuisine was erratic but interesting, the furniture and decorations almost non-existent, the sleeping done at odd hours.... [But] the output of songs was phenomenal."

The term "hootenanny" entered the lexicon in 1946 as a gathering of folksingers; Seeger later wrote that he and Guthrie had brought the term east from Seattle. When the folk revival of the 1960s was in full steam, ABC television launched a television show, "Hootenanny," but blacklisted Pete Seeger for his connection to the American Communist Party and his contempt citation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In turn, the vanguard of the second generation folk movement--Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, The Kingston Trio--all refused to appear on the ABC show, stripping it of its credibility.

By 1942, the Almanac Singers had moved out of 130 West 10th Street, finding the $100 a month rent too high. Various other buildings in the Village were associated with the group, but it splintered during the war, with Seeger going on to form the Weavers, which found great success in 1948 with "Goodnight, Irene," selling over 2 million copies.

If you are in the Village today, stop by West 10th Street and tip your cap to Pete Seeger--a true American legend.

Here's Seeger talking about the Almanac Singers in a 2006 interview:





* * * *Read more about the Greenwich Village folk scene in

Footprints in New York comes out April 15, 2014, but you can pre-order today.
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Published on January 28, 2014 08:05

January 23, 2014

Postcard Thursday: Grant's Tomb


This great shot of Grant's Tomb is from sometime in the early twentieth century, and if you've toured with us, you may have seen this on our walk of Morningside Heights. (This scene has to be after 1907 due to the type of postcard, but we aren't car buffs -- can someone identify any makes or models?) As you can see in this picture, Riverside Park and Grant's Tomb were popular destinations for Sunday drives.

From its opening in 1897, Grant's Tomb became a magnet for tourists and New Yorkers alike who were coming not just to honor the memory of the great Civil War hero, but also to gawk at the country's largest presidential tomb. As we write in our previous book, Inside the Apple :
Grant died in 1885, having lived the last four years of his life in New York. His tomb sits at 122nd Street and Riverside Drive, at one of the highest points in Riverside Park....[It is] a remarkable testament to the high esteem in which Grant was held after his death (despite two terms as president marked by scandal and perceived mediocrity) as well as to New York’s growing obsession in the 1890s with becoming the premiere American city. First, New York beat out other places Grant had lived—including Galena, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri—for the right to bury the president. Then, the Grant Memorial Association held two contests to determine who would design the structure, the second contest being held because none of the entries the first time around was deemed grand enough. The tomb, by John Duncan, is modeled on the mausoleum at Halicanarssus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In 1897, the tomb was officially opened and it fast became the leading tourist attraction in the city. Indeed, more people visited Grant’s Tomb in the early years of the Twentieth Century than went to the Statue of Liberty.
In the meantime, if you want to find out the answer to the old riddle, "Who's buried in Grant's Tomb?" you'll simply have to go check it out in person. The tomb is run by the National Park Service and is open for visitation.

* * * *
Footprints in New York comes out April 15, 2014, but you can pre-order today.
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Published on January 23, 2014 08:09