Esther Crain's Blog, page 13

A remnant of the late 19th century city at the corner of First and First in the East Village

On the northwest corner of First Avenue at First Street, on the border of the East Village and the Lower East Side, is a handsome red-brick tenement.

Five stories high (with a two-story, beach house–like penthouse on the roof, but that’s a subject for another post), it’s a typical, well-kept building likely on this corner since the early 20th century.

But look up—what’s that two-sided panel affixed to the second-floor corner? It’s an address plate giving the corner’s cross streets, a not uncommon feature of tenement buildings in New York City.

What was the purpose of these cross street markers? I’m not sure. But a clue might be found in how high up the sign is.

From 1878 to its demolition in 1942 (above photo, looking south from 13th Street and First Avenue), the Second Avenue El would have traveled up First Avenue until it veered over to Second Avenue at 23rd Street.

Perhaps it was put there to let riders know exactly where they were as the train roared its way up the avenue?

[Photo: LOC via Wikipedia]

This crude wood hut is a surviving relic from the Revolutionary War years in Upper Manhattan

In the summer of 1776, with the Revolutionary War underway, British warships sailed into New York Harbor. Soon, Gotham was a city under siege.

A string of bruising defeats by British forces from late August to early November forced George Washington and his Continental Army to flee Fort Washington, in Upper Manhattan, to New Jersey.

The departure of the Americans allowed the British to take over the northern tip of the island. They set up an encampment in today’s Inwood neighborhood and used it as a base of operations as they occupied the city for the next seven years.

In an effort to shelter themselves from the elements in the encampment, members of the British Army built hundreds of short rudimentary huts made out of wood and stone. Each hut housed eight men, according to New York City Parks.

Almost 250 years after the Revolutionary War years came to an end, one of these huts still exists in Upper Manhattan.

This “Hessian Hut”—so named because the huts were occupied by some of the 30,000 German soldiers who (reluctantly) fought alongside the British—sits in the backyard of a colonial-era farmhouse museum on Broadway and 204th Street.

The story of how the hut became part of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, built in the early 1780s by descendants of 17th century Dutch immigrant Jan Dyckman, starts in the early 20th century. That’s when an engineer, historian, and amateur archeologist named Reginald Pelham Bolton developed a passion for exploring Manhattan’s early traditions and culture.

“During Bolton’s time, the fascination of the excavations in Egypt and the soon-to-be subway line extending into the Inwood area sparked the excitement of digging through Inwood to preserve its history,” states the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum website.

Bolton uncovered all kinds of relics from the lands surrounding the Dyckman Farmhouse, which had been sold off by the family in the 1850s and was now threatened with demolition. (Fifth photo: The farmhouse in disrepair in 1897)

While excavating the area adjacent to 204th Street and Prescott (now Payson) Avenue, Bolton came across the remains of a “hut camp” that contained about 60 Hessian huts.

Realizing its historical value, Bolton “dismantled this hut and rebuilt its foundation here in 1915,” according to the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum website. He transferred the wood and stone pieces to recreate the barracks and explore the lives of the men who occupied them—men who were compelled to fight in a war in a country far from their homeland.

“Most of the soldiers camped in Northern Manhattan were Hessians, from the German principality Hesse-Cassel,” states NYC Parks. “They had been forced into the army by their prince, Frederick II, who had sold their services to the British without their consent. Many were weak and old, and few had any desire to come to America to fight another country’s war.”

The rebuilt hut became part of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum after two Dyckman descendants bought the farmhouse and then gave it to the city in 1916 to serve as a historic museum. The rest of the huts Bolton unearthed “were demolished to make way for apartment houses,” per NYC Parks, which now runs the museum.

This crude shelter brings into focus Upper Manhattan’s crucial role in the Revolutionary War. Viewing the dirt floor and low ceiling, it’s not hard to imagine how difficult it would be to reside here through all seasons. It’s something the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum invites visitors to do.

“As you look around, try to imagine what it would be like to live here: huddling close to the small fireplace in the dead of winter, swatting away flies on sweltering summer days, or even sharing this room with multiple people,” states a sign outside this remnant of the 18th century city.

In 1783, the British and Hessians abandoned their huts and departed by ship for good. George Washington and his Continental Army triumphantly returned to a grateful New York City—where a Union Jack flag was taken down and the Stars and Stripes raised over the Battery.

[Third image: “The Hut Camp on the Dyckman Farm,” 1915, by John Ward Dunsmore; fifth photo: New-York Historical Society]

The cliffside subway entrance that cuts through the rockface of Upper Manhattan

Building the subway system’s 472 stations meant contending with the unique geology of New York City.

This geology is starkly evident at the Bennett Avenue entrance of the 190th Street stop on the A train. Here, six doors are framed by an arch of stone blocks nestled in a dramatic ridge of bedrock that extends high above the street.

It’s a breathtaking sight, especially if you’re used to subway entrances on gray sidewalk corners or inside brightly lit transfer stations. And it’s a reminder of the task engineers faced when they set out to put Gotham’s mass transit underground.

“Builders of New York’s first subway faced a severe challenge in Manhattan’s geology,” wrote Clifton Hood in a City Journal article on subway construction pioneers. “Although the island has a total of only 23 square miles, it harbors an unrivaled range of forbidding features.”

“Above 103rd Street, Manhattan is dominated by a line of ridges along its western shore rising 268 feet above sea level. It is also bisected by two major faults that were important barriers to transportation at the turn of the century.”

The 190th Street station was part of the Independent Subway System, which followed Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue and opened in 1932. That was two decades after an IRT stop opened nearby, which helped launch the transformation of Upper Manhattan from farmland to urban cityscape.

New York’s 665 miles of track and network of underground tunnels serve as examples of how transportation engineers tamed the city’s unruly topography. But on this stretch of Hudson Heights, Gotham’s natural rocks and ridges make themselves known.

The delightfully ornate building that brought the feel of the Bowery to the 1870s Bronx

It’s a stunning and surprising sight in the Melrose section of the South Bronx: a Second Empire-Italianate building that resembles a gingerbread house with icing decorating the mansard roof.

This delightful confection has stood at 614 Courtlandt Avenue since 1871. It was out of place back then, a spectacular beauty with design similarities to many of the buildings on the Bowery.

And it’s out of place now, spaced apart from the low-rise walkups and empty lots in the surrounding neighborhood.

How did this striking building find itself here, and why did it survive? The story begins with a German immigrant named Julius Ruppert, who noticed a migration of fellow German newcomers from Lower Manhattan to the countryside of today’s South Bronx—and saw an opportunity.

It’s not clear when Ruppert (no relation to Jacob Ruppert of brewery fame) first arrived in New York. But in 1859, he was running his own billiards hall at 50 Bowery. This main drag of Manhattan’s crowded German immigrant neighborhood, known as Kleindeutschland, was populated by thousands of Germans who settled in New York before the Civil War.

Four years later, with Kleindeutschland extending to today’s East Village, Ruppert opened a saloon at Avenue A and First Street. By the 1870s, German immigration had ramped up again following a pause during the Civil War. Ruppert turned his attention to the section of New York where many German immigrants were relocating.

“No doubt, Ruppert was aware of his countrymen’s migration to the Bronx and was motivated to follow his former customers and to offer them the same hospitality in their new neighborhood,” stated the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), of the Melrose area.

What drew Germans to Melrose and the other villages of today’s South Bronx? Fresh air and roomier quarters. The South Bronx—still part of Westchester until it was annexed by Manhattan in 1874—was farmland before the Civil War.

By the late 1860s, Courtlandt Avenue had transitioned into “the main shopping street, lined by beer halls and the scene of parades by German bands,” notes the LPC. Courtlandt Avenue had taken on such a deep German identity, it earned the nickname the “Dutch Broadway.”

Ruppert bought the land for his building from a German butcher, then commissioned a “builder-contractor,” per the LPC, likely a fellow German immigrant. Three stories with a mansard roof, long windows, decorative fan motifs, and portal windows, it housed a saloon on the ground floor, public rooms for German social and political clubs above the saloon, and a residential flat.

Interestingly, Ruppert himself never moved in. But his wife, Catharine, did reside there from 1880 to 1894. During her time, she leased the ground floor to a butcher and then to saloon keepers. She also made some structural changes.

“It was Catharine Ruppert who commissioned Hewlett S. Baker, architect, to renovate the building in 1882, dividing the second and third stories into two residential flats each,” noted the LPC. “Baker lowered the second story ceiling and, as a consequence, the height of the distinctive windows.”

Following Catharine and Julius’ deaths, their heirs sold the building in 1927. But after World War I, “the neighborhood lost its predominantly German character, and still later, in common with the rest of the South Bronx, had to fight for its very life,” wrote David Bady on a Lehman College website about Bronx architecture.

“As a result of those hard times, the building, always meant to stand out, today stands alone on its corner, next to a vacant lot,” added Bady.

Designated a New York City landmark in 1987, this fanciful building underwent major renovations in the early 2000s, with the upper floors converted to housing, according to a 2008 article in the New York Times.

What’s happening with 612 Courtlandt Avenue these days? A Google search discovered that it’s home to Bronx Documentary Center, a nonprofit gallery and educational center that showcases documentary photos and films that drive social change.

Whatever happens in its next act, this stunner remains “a monument to the first stage of urbanization within what had been the previously rural South Bronx,” stated the Historic District Council, adding that the building “has many of the stylistic features which characterized those along the Bowery in the area known as Kleindeutschland, where Julius Ruppert first established his business before following his fellow Germans to the Bronx.”

[Fourth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The Lower East Side clothing store merchant behind a 1940s Stanton Street ghost sign

Louis Zuflacht isn’t a name that rolls off the tongue easily. But there it is—twice—above the corner entrance to 154 Stanton Street, spelled out in elegant if shabby letters.

The storefront, under a red-brick tenement, is a time machine to the Lower East Side’s midcentury days as a neighborhood crammed with cut-rate clothes and accessories shops—and aggressive store clerks hawking their goods to crowds of shoppers.

The store is long gone, but the leftover sign—reportedly dating to 1942—is a vintage New York dream. Considering that it bears the owner’s name, the sign begs the question: who was Louis Zuflacht, and what kind of “smart clothes” did he sell at his eponymous store?

Born in 1881 in Austria, according to census records, Zuflacht came to New York in 1900. Two decades later, he listed his occupation as a clothing store merchant.

It seems he had a rough start; a New York Times notice from 1916 states that this “dealer in clothing at 184 Stanton Street,” down the street from number 154, had declared bankruptcy.

In 1940, 154 Stanton Street was occupied by a store called Tress & Tress with its own stylish sign (below). Zuflacht took over at some point in the early 1940s.

Frank Mastropolo, author of Ghost Signs: Clues to Manhattan’s Past, states in a 2020 Village Sun article that Zuflacht operated a tailor shop and haberdashery here for decades.

Zuflacht passed away in 1986 after many years of running the store with his sons. But when his shop closed its doors isn’t clear. For the past few decades it’s housed several short-lived businesses that never bothered to remove the old sign.

And why should they? It’s a wonderful remnant of a certain era in Manhattan, and an accidental memorial to a man who invested much of his life in a Lower East Side garment district of inexpensive “smart” clothes for bargain-hunting buyers.

[Third image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The century-old appliance store that has one of the East Village’s oldest neon signs

What would the beginning of First Avenue in the East Village be without the neon beauty of the Gringer & Sons Appliances sign glowing beneath a red-brick 19th century tenement?

This iconic blast of neon has fronted the shop at 29 First Avenue since 1953, when it was commissioned by late owner Philip Gringer, according to a 2020 New York Post article.

“Not only is the color yellow unusual for neon signs, but the twisty GE logos also required a master’s touch,” stated the Post of this carnival of light and color, crafted for the store that got its start in 1918.

It’s not just the kaleidoscopic colors that thrill neon-loving New Yorkers but the old-school Gringer Appliances sign affixed to the tenement facade. The fact that GE doesn’t even manufacture color TVs and air conditioners anymore makes this time capsule of a sign even more wonderful.

This slender 1877 holdout townhouse on the Upper East Side looks more like a dollhouse

It’s more dollhouse than townhouse: just 12 and a half feet across, with two front-facing windows per floor and a double-size slate mansard roof that has kind of a spooky, Addams Family feel.

Flanked by two taller apartment houses, it’s easy to miss as you walk down East 77th Street just past Madison Avenue. The way the house is tucked between its neighbors makes its lilliputian size even more dramatic.

There must be a story as to why someone would build such a slender home in the late 19th century undeveloped wilds of Lenox Hill—and perhaps an explanation for its drastic facelift decades later.

The story of 64 East 77th Street begins in 1877, when it became the easternmost dwelling in a row of eight single-family brownstones on the south side of the street, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s (LPC) Upper East Side Historic District report.

The row was developed by James V.S. Wooley, according to a history of the house by the real estate company Leslie J. Garfield. Why would Wooley construct brownstones that only had half the width of a typical single-family New York City home?

Probably to meet the demand by upper middle class families in the rapidly growing 1870s city, and to maximize profits, of course. Instead of building four regular-size, 25-foot-across townhouses, he likely reaped a bigger profit selling eight narrow brownstones.

This stretch of East 77th Street was a promising choice for a real estate investment. Across the way on the north side of the street was a row of single-family brownstones, per the LPC report. And the proximity to Madison Avenue allowed residents to avoid the grit of Park Avenue on the other end of the block. Known at the time as Fourth Avenue, the street carried dirty, noisy railroad tracks.

Over the next several decades, Number 64 changed hands. But it didn’t change its look until it was purchased by a woman named Virginia M. Moore. In 1925, Moore commissioned a major renovation of the miniature brownstone.

Under Moore’s direction, the house shed its brownstone front in favor of a brick facade. “The new details—wooden portico with Corinthian columns, six-over-six windows, slate roof, and copper-covered dormers are in the neo-Colonial style,” notes the LPC report. In other words, Number 64 lost its 19th century feel in favor of a design style popular in the 1920s.

The updated look appealed to John Junius Morgan, who bought the house in 1931. Morgan, the cousin of financier J.P. Morgan, died in 1949. Under the terms of his will, Morgan allowed a woman identified as Mrs. Talman Bigelow to reside in the house for the next five years, per the Brooklyn Eagle.

Most recently the skinny townhouse was occupied by the Luxembourg & Dayan art gallery. There are no interior photos, but it looks like it sold in 2022 for almost $5.7 million. Not a bad price for a survivor hiding on a pretty side street that somehow evaded the wrecking ball for 147 years!

[Fourth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The 1930s squatters colony that built its shacks beneath the luxury apartments of Riverside Drive

The Great Depression may have been a national financial catastrophe. But it hit New York City especially hard.

In 1932, three years after Wall Street crashed, one third of city workers were unemployed, and half of al factories had shut down production. An estimated 1.6 million residents relied on relief from shaky public funds and dwindling private charities.

Though Mayor Jimmy Walker’s administration launched an initiative to halt the eviction of poor families from their homes, according to New York Almanack, homeless encampments of mostly single men sprang up all over Gotham.

A shantytown called Hooverville popped up in Central Park. “Hardlucksville,” on East 10th Street, was a collection of shacks beside the East River. “Packing Box City” appeared on Houston Street. Two more Hoovervilles existed on Hester Street and on Red Hook’s Columbia Street.

And between the luxury apartment residences high up on Riverside Drive and the Hudson River below was a shanty community of 87 homeless men known as “Camp Thomas Paine.”

Why Thomas Paine? In The American Crisis from 1776, Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls”—which must have resonated in Depression-era America.

The men who lived in Camp Thomas Paine weren’t from New York City. “The Camp was initially formed in 1932 by seventy-five World War I veterans in Washington D.C.,” stated the neighborhood website I Love the Upper West Side.

After being expelled from Washington, “the group settled on Manhattan’s Upper West Side from 72nd to 79th Streets along the Hudson River,” per the website. A Daily News article from 1933 described the enclave as “in the trash flats bordering the Hudson.” (Below, an aerial view)

Riverside Drive, officially opened in 1880, was no stranger to shacks and shanties. In the Drive’s earliest decades as a budding millionaire colony, a line of palatial mansions and elegant row houses overlooking Riverside Park and the Hudson River were occasionally interrupted by flimsy wood shanties left over from the Upper West Side’s more rural, less monied era.

By the 1930s, however, the shacks as well as many of the mansions were gone. In their place rose handsome apartment houses for well-off city residents who likely didn’t anticipate a homeless commune getting in the way of their park and river views.

The Camp, explained a sympathetic New York Times article from 1933, is located “where the tugboats go puffing lazily up and down in the damp November fogs. On the east, freight trains clank and jar together in the night, and beyond, on a superior eminence, the politely glacial facades of Riverside Drive look down, not always approvingly.”

But Riverside Drive residents—and New York City officials—didn’t evict Camp Thomas Paine, at least not at first. Perhaps because the veterans who built their shacks there made sure the community was orderly and structured, Mayor John P. O’Brien allowed them to stay.

The only stipulation was that no more shacks could be built, per the Daily News.

For the next few years, Riverside Drive embraced Camp Thomas Paine. The men living there occupied about 50 shacks, with the wood coming from auctioned Broadway theater sets. They ate meals at a mess hall, banned alcohol, kept a variety of pets, and accepted regular donations of food, fuel, bedding, and clothing.

“Camp Paine is not a port of missing men,” stated the Daily News. “Women come down looking for their husbands; fathers looking for sons, but no reunions have taken place. Nobody seems to be hiding there and the police never bother the men. It’s just a place where a man can call his soul his own.”

But Camp Thomas Paine’s days were numbered. In March 1934, a Daily News article reported that Robert Moses, at the time the city’s Parks Commissioner, sent eviction notices to the shacks. “They’re pre-empting public property that we are going to develop for public use,” the News quoted Moses.

Though many New Yorkers supported the men of Camp Thomas Paine—including Riverside Drive millionaire Charles Schwab, whose now-demolished French Chateau on the Drive is still considered to be New York’s largest-ever private house—the end was near.

“They are good neighbors,” Schwab, chairman of Bethlehem Steel, told the New York Times. “Some of the men came to our house to help in removing the snow last winter….When we had surplus produce from our Pennsylvania farm we were glad to share it with them. We will miss them.”

In May, the men torched their shacks. What didn’t burn was soon destroyed by Robert Moses in the name of West Side improvement, despite the Board of Aldermen ordering Moses to rescind the eviction. (Moses also put an end to the Columbia University Yacht Club at the foot of 86th Street.)

A handful of former Camp residents relocated to a farm colony in upstate New York, according to I Love the Upper West Side. The remaining men? Once the Camp was gone, they seem to have slipped anonymously into history—along with all the residents of the city’s Depression-era homeless encampments.

Curious about more stories of Riverside Drive? Join one of the year’s final walking tours led by Ephemeral New York and explore the Drive’s secrets, stories, and rich history. Space is available for the tour on Sunday, October 27, and the tour on Sunday, November 10. Click the links for more info!

[Top, second, and third images: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: New York Daily News; fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth images: NYPL Digital Collections]

In praise of long-gone, one of a kind New York City restaurants like the Viennese Lantern

I’d never heard of the Viennese Lantern until I stumbled upon this postcard. But the colors and the sketches made me curious about an era when restaurants entertained diners with cabaret shows every night featuring chanteuses and violins.

Located since 1947 on the ground floor of an Art Deco apartment tower at 242 East 79th Street, the Viennese Lantern was launched by Max Loew, a former actor “chased out of old Vienna by Adolf Hitler,” according to the New York Times, which ran a part put-down, part positive review of this strange establishment, which it described as having “an air of schmaltz.”

“Seventeen years ago last night, Mr. Loew, in partnership with a Viennese fiddle player who never did put up his share of the money, took over a nightclub comprising two store fronts and known as the Hungarian Rhapsody, hung up a lantern of his own that reminded him of Vienna, and invited patrons to come inside,” reported the Times on October 10, 1964.

“Then, as now, the place was tremulous with the sound of temperamental violinists and lyric sopranos, a formula that has worked well through the years,” continued the Times, noting the red tablecloths and “the way the aging romeos who patronize the place whisper sweet nothings into the ears of their aging amours.”

What was on the menu? The blog Supper Under the Stars got hold of a vintage menu and described the “many German, Russian and American dishes, along with a special ‘Midnight Snack’ section (think Frankfurters with Goulash Sauce, Herring Salad, Escargots, Steak Tartar, or Anchovies on Toast).”

The Times concluded its review this way: “In sum, there is an Old World charm about the Viennese Lantern and when a soprano there rattles the china with a waltz of Johann Strauss, a bit of prewar Europe lives again.”

I don’t know when the Viennese Lantern shut its doors for good, but I imagine it was a casualty of changing tastes and the decline of the Eastern European immigrant communities that settled in various points in Yorkville in the early and middle 20th century.

No restaurant can stick around forever. But wouldn’t this place be fun to visit in the New York of 2024?

[Postcard: MCNY, X2011.34.4260]

A jewelry-loving widow, her young butler, and a 79th Street mansion make a Gilded Age murder mystery

When Four East 79th Street was completed in 1901, it had all the hallmarks of a stylish Beaux-Arts mansion: a limestone facade, a bow front, a marble staircase, and sumptuous living space for residents and their servants.

It was just the type of stately house prominent self-made millionaire James E. Nichols wanted.

Nichols, a New Hampshire native born in 1845, came to New York as a young man and rose to become the head of a wholesale and importing grocery firm—bringing canned goods, coffee, tea, spices, and cigars to Gotham’s fancy-goods store shelves.

After buying the lot from railroad magnate Henry Cook in 1898 (who owned the entire block and only sold to select elites he wanted as neighbors), Nichols commissioned architect C.P.H. Gilbert to create this showpiece.

It was to be a place where Nichols and his wife, Elizabeth Griggs Nichols—known as Lizzie—could live and entertain in rooms decorated with Nichols’ big-game hunting trophies.

Gilbert designed the more ornate mansion on the corner, now the Ukrainian Museum. Nichols must have known that the plans for his own house next door were in good hands.

For 14 years, the couple, who had no children, presumably enjoyed their 79th Street mansion. There’s a lot to love about living in a silk stocking district with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Central Park steps away.

Nichols died in 1914 of heart disease during a trip to Austria. Lizzie continued living in the mansion with her staff of servants. She was 60 years old, and would have likely had many years left to reside in the home—had she not been the victim of a brutal crime that made headlines across the nation.

It happened on September 8, 1915, the year after her husband’s death.

“At half past 9 o’clock last night there was a ring at the bell of the basement door of the house and 4 East 79th Street,” began a New York Times front-page article the next day.

“Mrs. Nichols was in her sitting room on the third floor, and two Scandinavian servants were in the basement,” the Times continued.

It was the butler’s night off, the cook had already left for the evening, and the remaining servants—second man and “hall boy” Onne (sometimes spelled Oney, or Owen) Talis and maid Edith Langfeldt—answered the bell.

Standing at the door were three men, all in their 20s, one of whom was carrying a package he said was to be delivered to Mrs. Nichols. Suddenly the two other men drew their revolvers, and all three forced their way into the house. They bound and gagged Talis and Langfeldt.

“The three men slipped upstairs and disappeared into the silence of the upper floors,” wrote the Times.

Langfeldt managed to free herself, then ran to the telephone on the first floor and called the police precinct on East 67th Street, reporting the crime in progress.

While waiting for police to arrive, she ran upstairs to Lizzie’s sitting room and found her dead. “A towel was wrapped tightly about her throat and a sheet had been thrown around her shoulders,” the Times noted, adding that her face was “blue from strangulation, and her glasses had been broken.” (Other reports said Lizzie actually died “by fright” and from the strain of trying to fight off the burglars.)

The condition of Lizzie’s body showed signs of a struggle. “She weighed nearly 200 pounds, and the three men had had to apparently fight to overpower her,” stated the Times. The keys to many of her jewelry boxes were “in a bunch,” and the thieves seemingly couldn’t easily get them, as Lizzie typically wore them in a pocket in the back of her corset.

Lizzie’s friends described her to reporters as “a martyr to her love of jewels,” a woman who “wore a small fortune of diamonds and pearls and other precious stones with all her costumes,” wrote one paper. “The police have discovered that this custom of Mrs. Nichols was a subject of talk in resorts frequented by the men they are now trying to arrest.”

The robbers still managed to escape with $17,000 in jewelry. Talis was immediately under suspicion. “Others said the intruders had been known to him, and he had told acquaintances of his mistress’s habit of wearing the strongbox key under her corset,” wrote Christopher Gray in a 2004 New York Times Streetscapes column.

Talis confessed to aiding the three men in robbing and murdering Lizzie. He was convicted for having “guilty knowledge” of the plot and was sentenced to death at Sing Sing. His sentence was then commuted to life in prison, since he didn’t commit the actual murder.

In 1917, a real break in the case finally came. Two men police long sought to arrest for committing the burglary and murder, Arthur Waltonen and Joseph Mulholland, confessed, exonerating Talis. Waltonen had been Lizzie’s head butler until his dismissal weeks before the crime; Mulholland met Waltonen and Talis while hanging out in Mount Morris Park, near Mulholland’s 127th Street home.

Waltonen was described by the New-York Tribune as “the good-looking young butler” who conspired to rob his widowed employer. In her testimony in Talis’ trial, Langfeldt said she recognized Waltonen the night of the crime and “thought he was playing a joke on her,” per one newspaper.

So the butler did it—and he got the electric chair in July 1917. Mulholland was tried and executed one month later, per the Sun. The third man, described early on as “an Italian,” apparently escaped the arm of the law.

The fact that a terrible murder was committed in the house didn’t seem to deter others from desiring to live there. In 1916, it was owned by Katherine A. Fitzpatrick, who commissioned architect Herbert Lucas to do the “major alterations” that updated the now out-of-fashion Beaux-Arts style, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report for the Metropolitan Museum Historic District.

“Lucas redesigned the front facade, altered the fenestration of the side wall, and constructed a penthouse at No. 4,” notes the LPC report. “Although some of the elements of the Gilbert design were reproduced in the new facade, the large curved bay at the right, the entry portico at the left, and the mansard roof with its dormer windows were all removed.”

Over the decades, the Nichols mansion changed hands, and an anonymous buyer just purchased it in 2023 for $56 million, reported Crain’s New York Business in September. Do the buyers know that the house was the site of a horrific murder more than 100 years ago?

I imagine it’s the kind of thing a realtor is compelled to disclose, but it wouldn’t keep new owners from acquiring such a magnificent home on a prime Manhattan block. See current interior photos here.

[Second image: Beyondthegildedage.com; third image: James E. Nichols Memorial Library; fourth image: Find a Grave; fifth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]