Esther Crain's Blog, page 7

The story of the Villa Charlotte Bronte, a magical 1920s cliffside co-op high above the Hudson

Once upon a time, on winding Palisade Avenue in the once isolated Bronx neighborhood of Spuyten Duyvil, there were three beautiful sisters—sister apartment buildings, that is.

The oldest sister, the Villa Rosa Bonheur, was completed in 1924. Fancifully named after a 19th century French painter and with only seven apartments, this sprawling cottage featured gorgeous views of the Harlem River looking toward Manhattan—until it met the bulldozer in 2021.

The youngest sister building, the Villa Victoria, went up in 1927. Not quite as dramatic as the Rosa Bonheur, the Victoria continues to exude Tudor loveliness on a steep cliff with sweeping Hudson River vistas (third photo).

But it’s the middle sister building, the Villa Charlotte Bronte, that stole the show. Built in 1926 next door to the Villa Victoria, the Charlotte Bronte is a romantic fantasy that features two twin buildings bisected by a central sunken courtyard high above the Hudson River.

It’s an enchanting apartment residence designed in a style New York had never seen before.

“Each wing is a carefully irregular composition of tiled roofs, protruding bays, balconies, and casement windows,” wrote David Bady on Lehman College’s Bronx Architecture website. “Together they house seventeen apartments, no two exactly alike.”

The Charlotte Bronte has been described in various ways: like an Italian villa, Gaudi-esque, a pastiche inspired by a fairy tale.

“The exterior is made from stucco, featuring brick and stone ornamentation and multi-colored tiled roofs,” according to a writeup on Curbed. Each apartment had a wood-burning fireplace and varying views of the river; landscaped paths and walkways thread the villa into a cohesive unit.

As much of an showpiece as it is, the Charlotte Bronte and her sisters, all co-ops at their beginning, were built not to lure Manhattanites to the Bronx but to keep the “city ugly” of Manhattan from spoiling Spuyten Duyvil.

Their backstory begins in the 1910s, when residents of this formerly sleepy enclave became alarmed by the encroachment of urban development. The pace of urbanization in Northern Manhattan and the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx was swift, and the community realized that Spuyten Duyvil could be the next area to be carved up and sold to speculators.

Residents pushed back on urbanization, “lest it should jump the Harlem and Spuyten Duyvil Creek and spoil the romantic spot where nature still ran riot among the trees and flowers,” the New York Times reported in 1910.

To deter developers, some residents began buying up lots themselves and laying out plans for “houses of a more expensive character,” per the Times. The goal was to put up new residences (and turn a profit) while keeping the small-scale charm and character of Spuyten Duyvil.

One of these residents, lawyer and businessman John J. McKelvey, had lived in Spuyten Duyvil since the 1890s. At first, he tried his hand at building and selling individual homes, according to Christopher Gray in a 2006 New York Times article.

By the 1920s, he turned his imagination to co-ops. It was McKelvey who built the three sisters and gave them their delightful names. They are considered to be the first apartment houses in Riverdale. “These were not tenements, but ‘villas’ made up of individually owned duplex and triplex ‘studio homes,’” wrote Bady.

Architect Robert Gardner made unusual design choices for the Charlotte Bronte that distinguish it from the hundreds of elegant yet cookie-cutter apartment buildings lining Manhattan’s upper class avenues in the 1920s.

“To get to one apartment, you have to go down two flights toward the Hudson, then turn right and go up two flights to the front door. Another front door is behind a small arched grotto,” explained Gray.

“A third is at the end of a thin, high-flying concrete walkway with a skinny iron railing, cantilevered out over a long and nasty drop to the railroad tracks below.”

At first, the sister buildings attracted elite tenants; one newspaper listed some of the “well known” New Yorkers who planned to make the Villa Victoria their home. But the sisters soon fell on hard times.

“In 1933, Mr. McKelvey lost Villa Victoria in foreclosure, and the Rosa Bonheur co-op failed in 1941,” wrote Gray. The Villa Rosa Bonheur held on for decades as a private home, then in the 2010s was sold to a developer who tore it down—inciting much anger from the community.

Today, the Villa Victoria appears to be a rental building, while the Villa Charlotte Bronte remains a spectacular co-op residence with rarely available units. Spuyten Duyvil gained some apartment towers over the years, but much of this hilly enclave retains a small-town feel high above the bluffs.

Two apartments in the Charlotte Bronte actually came up for sale in 2023. A New York Post article captured the historic interiors of each, both of which were priced at $1.3 million.

A painter who lived in Depression-era Williamsburg captured the struggle of the neighborhood around him

In the middle decades of the 20th century, Maurice Kish was probably not unlike many of his South Williamsburg neighbors.

“Poultry Market,” 1940

Born in Russia in 1895, he immigrated to New York as a teenager, settling in Brownsville with his family. He served in the military and left it in 1919.

Like so many other immigrants, Kish held a hodgepodge of jobs including “poet, amateur boxer, Catskills dance instructor, and factory worker in New York City, where he painted flowers on glass vases,” according to the Smithsonian Institute.

Kish also became a labor activist, a not uncommon cause in a New York hit hard by the Depression. By the 1940s he’d settled into a tenement at 70 South Third Street in Williamsburg with his two brothers and a fourth man identified in the 1950 census as a lodger.

“End of Day’s Toil,” 1932

But what set Kish apart was his talent and passion as a painter. Schooled at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, he often used his skills to focus on the work and economic struggles in the neighborhood around him.

“As an artist, Kish’s main subjects were cities and the human activity within; a labor activist, he used his canvases as a vehicle for telling the stories of industrial workers,” states the Smithsonian Institute.

Williamsburg must have provided plenty of material. His apartment would have been close to the East River waterfront, where thousands of workers toiled at industrial sites like the Domino Sugar Factory, which features in his 1932 painting “End of Day’s Toil.”

“Job Seekers,” 1932

“The men’s bowed heads convey their exhaustion after a long, hard day’s work, but the smoke serves as a reminder that they will have to return to the same tomorrow,” states the Smithsonian, which owns the painting.

“Kish based the factory buildings in the foreground on New York’s Domino Sugar factory, located on the East River and shown here with boats in the background,” per the Smithsonian.

The subdued “Job Seekers,” also a sympathetic portrait of the workers on the East River waterfront, is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. “Here, industrial sites tower over faceless laborers, and all is described in the dull, dark tones indicative of the harsh monotony of their lives,” the museum website states.

“Around East River,” 1940s

Kish didn’t only paint factory workers and small businesses. “Around East River” is a colorful and stylized glimpse of tugboats plying the gray river, with chimney smoke blending into a smoky sky. “Ice Skating at Dusk” has a gracefulness and loveliness to it.

He painted the Washington Arch in Washington Square Park, and the dismantling of the El in the 1930s. His work contains landscapes, nudes, and portraits, many in a folk-art kind of style in direct contrast to his social realist paintings of the 1930s and 1940s.

Kish moved to Queens at some point after 1950, and he died in 1987. Like so many artists, he garnered some notice during his lifetime but very little if any after his death. He captures an era in New York history no one alive today remembers.

[Title not known, about 1940]

With the Domino Sugar factory transformed into high-end offices and lofts and the Williamsburg waterfront now a recreational mecca, all that remains of Kish’s Williamsburg are the tenement apartments.

[Top image: Ashcan_Daily; second image: Smithsonian Institute; third image: Brooklyn Museum; fourth image: Artsy; fifth image: ]

Inside the renovated Frick museum are intimate remnants of the family (and servants) who lived there

When industrialist Henry Clay Frick commissioned the architectural firm Carrère and Hastings to design his Fifth Avenue mansion in 1912, he had more in mind than building an elegant home where he, his wife, and his adult daughter could live. (Below, in 1915)

Frick also planned for his house to one day be a museum. His three-story, Beaux-Arts beauty spanning East 70th and 71st Streets would eventually be open to the public to view his vast art collection of Old Masters, statuary, bronzes, porcelains, and many more treasures.

Frick didn’t have much time to enjoy his Fifth Avenue showpiece. Five years after moving into the house in 1914 from his residence on Fifth Avenue and 51st Street (a former Vanderbilt mansion), he died of a heart attack a few weeks before his 70th birthday. (Below, with his daughter in 1910)

Almost immediately, this limestone mansion began its transformation into a jewel box of a museum.

After the 1931 death of Frick’s wife, Adelaide, the upstairs living quarters were cordoned off and made into staff-only offices. Other traces of the family home were removed or blocked off from the public (like the basement bowling alley) before the Frick Collection opened in 1935.

Now, 90 years later, the Frick has undergone a magnificent renovation. Completed earlier this month, the renovation preserved much of the intimacy of the museum galleries but “created new spaces for the display of art, conservation, education, and programs, while improving amenities and overall accessibility,” according to the Frick website.

The museum’s holdings have doubled since Frick’s death, and many exquisite treasures are on view. For admirers of New York City’s Gilded Age, the renovation offers a deeper peek into what life was like inside the stunning home of one of America’s richest men.

No longer roped off, the carved marble staircase (above) leads you to the second-floor family quarters. There, the breakfast room (with appropriate east-facing windows) and Adelaide’s sitting room have their original artwork reinstated as the family decorated it.

Over the fireplace in Henry Frick’s wood-paneled bedroom, where he spoke his last words to his butler before he died, is a painting he chose.

George Romney’s “Lady Hamilton, as ‘Nature'” is a captivating portrait from 1782 (above), and its place on the mantelpiece speaks to its importance to Frick.

Daughter Helen Clay Frick’s bedroom contains early Italian Renaissance paintings she “chose and loved,” according to a March 2025 New York Times review of the renovation. Helen was instrumental in cataloguing her father’s art and founding the Frick Art Research Library in 1920.

And in the downstairs West Gallery (above), a curious artifact remains partly obscured under J.M.W. Turner’s 1826 landscape painting “Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet-Boat: Evening.”

It’s a row of servant call buttons. Each separate button summoned a specific servant: the butler, housekeeper, valet, pantry, or secretary whenever their services were needed.

There were certainly several servants to choose from. The Frick mansion was home to 27 servants, according to a 2000 New York Times story that examined the 1915 census, and these men and women shared living space on the third floor and basement.

The list of servants would have been pretty normal for the era, though the transformation from huge stand-alone mansions to apartment living would soon reduce the need for wealthy New Yorkers to employ so many people.

The servants “included first and second butlers; first, second and third footmen; first, second, third and fourth chambermaids; a chef; a second cook; two vegetable cooks; three laundresses; and a ”servants’ hall girl,” per the Times article. The call buttons that summoned them were discreet, just like the servants who ran the household.

Come to the Frick Collection to see the art and architectural loveliness of the gallery spaces, including the newly opened second-floor family rooms. But don’t forget to note these more utilitarian call buttons, which the new renovation graciously leaves on display.

[Top image: MCNY, X2010.7.2.25060; second image: by Edmund Charles Tarbell, 1910; third and fifth images: Mitch Case via Frick Collection; fourth image: Frick Collection; sixth image: MCNY, X2010.7.2.25056]

The Upper West Side country villa of the most famous couple to perish on the Titanic

The Titanic claimed several well-known New Yorkers, some with pedigreed last names like Astor and Guggenheim.

But perhaps the most famous passengers who perished after the ship met its fate in the North Atlantic on April 14, 1912 were Isidor and Ida Straus. Their devotion to each other in the last hours of their lives is legendary.

Isidor, the Bavarian-born merchant and philanthropist who co-owned Macy’s, and Ida, also born in Germany and the mother of the couple’s seven children, refused to get into a lifeboat. Instead, the Strauses stayed together on deck chairs until the deck slipped away and they were swept into the ocean.

“We have lived together for many years,” Ida reportedly said to her husband. “Where you go, I go.” Ida gave her spot on the lifeboat (and her mink coat) to her maid, who survived the sinking. In the aftermath, Isidor’s body was eventually recovered, but Ida’s was never found.

In her words to her husband, Ida references their long time living together. The two married in 1871 (above, their wedding photo), more than 40 years before their deaths. But where did this extraordinary couple make their New York City home? The Upper West Side.

In 1884, after residing on East 55th Street in Manhattan and then doing a stint in Inwood, the Straus family relocated “to a villa on an otherwise vacant block bounded by the Boulevard [today’s Broadway], West End Avenue, and West 105th and 106th Streets,” states Fran Leadon, author of Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles.

The decision to move to the newly christened West End is an interesting one. Though streetcars and an elevated train brought new development and residents, in the 1880s this was a country-like part of the city still largely known by its colonial-era name of Bloomingdale. (Above, Broadway and 106th Street, 1900)

Maybe it was this mix of urban and country that made for the perfect place to nurture a big family. The New York Times described the villa, built in 1866, as an “attractive, old-fashioned, wooden structure set well back from the main entrance on Broadway and with its ample lawns and large trees contributed to an atmosphere of old-time Bloomingdale days.”

The property certainly had plenty of space for a large brood (below photo). “It was a virtual farm, with an apple orchard, pear trees, and grape arbors, as well as goats, chickens, cows, a vegetable garden, and a barn they used as a stable near the corner at West End Avenue,” wrote June Hall McCash, author of A Titanic Love Story.

As the family grew, so did the West End. In the next few decades lovely Beaux Arts row houses filled newly opened streets, and some of the first apartment buildings joined the cityscape.

By all accounts, the wealthy and fortunate Strauses built a fulfilling home life inside their increasingly anachronistic villa.

Then came the trip to Europe, and an ill-fated return voyage. When word reached New York that the Strauses were lost at sea, an outpouring of grief came from Macy’s employees. A memorial service at Carnegie Hall attracted thousands; the couple were buried together at Woodlawn Cemetery.

Interestingly, it only took their adult children 10 days after their parents’ demise to sell the villa, which was quickly demolished and replaced by an apartment house called the Clebourne (above), stated Sally Koslow in West Side Rag in 2023.

With all traces of their country villa gone, Ida and Isidor live on in Straus Park at Broadway and 106th Street, where a memorial recognizes their closeness and devotion.

“Lovely and pleasant were they in their lives/And in their death they were not divided,” reads a Biblical quote commemorating their love story, which could only have deepened in their Broadway family home.

[Top photo: NYPL Digital Collections; second image: Wikipedia; third image: MCNY X2010.11.14088; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]

A look inside the abandoned Worth Street subway station in Lower Manhattan, shuttered in the 1960s

Like so many streets spanning Lower Manhattan, Worth Street packs a lot of history.

Originally after a descendent of the colonial-era Lispenard family, which owned a vast tract of land in today’s Tribeca, it was one of the five streets that formed the entrance to Five Points—the East Side slum located north of City Hall and east of the Bowery.

Worth Street was then renamed in 1854 to honor General William Jenkins Worth, a hero of the Mexican-American war. Cleaned up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it became home to municipal buildings on the eastern end and warehouses on the west.

Having such a long backstory makes a street significant. But one thing Worth Street no longer has is its namesake subway station, which once had entrances and exits at the corners of Worth and Lafayette Streets.

One of the original 28 IRT stations with the old-school kiosk (above photo) opened in 1904, the Worth Street station—sandwiched between Canal Street and the Brooklyn Bridge stops (below, on a 1918 transit map)—was shuttered permanently in 1962.

Why did it get the boot? It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that Worth Street was the site of the subway system’s first collision, in 1905, which resulted in several injuries and was blamed on “human fallibility” on the part of the motorman.

Instead, it had to do with platform extensions at the neighboring Brooklyn Bridge Station mandated by the NYC Transit Authority in 1956 to relieve crowding.

The platforms at the Worth Street Station were extended twice already, once in 1910 and again in 1948, to accommodate longer trains. The extension at Brooklyn Bridge would make it so 10-car trains could fit the platform, according to the Abandoned Stations website by Joseph Brennan.

But extending the Brooklyn Bridge platform would bring it too close to the Worth Street station. Worth Street was made redundant, and thus it was set to close, per the New York Times in 1957.

In September 1962, Worth Street was put out to pasture, and for some time the Brooklyn Bridge station was called “Brooklyn Bridge-Worth Street,” per Brennan.

It’s certainly not a secret that some of the first subway stations were eventually closed as transit needs changed. Think the beautiful City Hall station, the 18th Street stop above Union Square, and the 91st Street station at Broadway.

Still, the idea of an abandoned station, complete with the signs, token booths, and infrastructure of its era, holds a lot of fascination. It feels like an underground time capsule, a portal to the city’s past ready to be opened and explored.

The Worth Street station supposedly sits under the public plaza at the Federal Plaza building at the corner of Worth and Lafayette Streets on Foley Square. Federal Plaza began construction in 1963, just after the Worth Street stop was decommissioned—making it seem that the generous size of the plaza area serves as the station’s tomb.

I didn’t see secret way in, and I’m not sure I’m intrepid enough to check out an abandoned subway station without some backup. But two decades ago, the adventurers behind a site called the LTV Squad descended beneath the street and posted ghostly photos of the decayed platform and graffitied walls on their website.

[Top photo: 3am.nightly via Wikipedia; second photo: New York Transit Museum; third image: transitmap.net; fourth photo: New York Transit Museum; fifth image: New York Transit Museum; sixth image: Wikipedia; seventh image: New York Transit Museum]

Welcome to Terminal City—a Midtown district that generated big excitement in the early 1900s

When plans for a new Grand Central Terminal were approved by city officials in 1903, it seemed like New York City was finally entering the era of modern transportation.

Trains would now be electrified and run entirely underground. No more smoky steam locomotives, no more open tracks creating danger on Park Avenue.

The roofing and paving over of train tunnels wasn’t just safer; it created lots of new real estate. Enter Terminal City, the name of a modern residential and commercial district occupying the streets between Madison and Lexington Avenues north of Grand Central Terminal.

“Among the earliest concepts were a 20-story tower over the terminal itself, and an adjacent hotel, later erected as the Biltmore, from Vanderbilt to Madison Avenue, between 43rd and 44th Streets,” wrote Christopher Gray in a New York Times column in 2010.

By the time Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913, Terminal City was a hotly desired address. No, it didn’t quite look like the illustration, with so many identical Classical-columned buildings. But by 1930 (above) this mini-metropolis had its own unified feel.

“Vanderbilt filled up with structures like the high-rise Yale Club, at 44th and Vanderbilt, and the Roosevelt Hotel, from 45th to 46th,” wrote Gray. “Along Lexington, buildings included the giant Commodore Hotel at 42nd and the streamlined Graybar Building at 44th.”

Apartment houses with thousands of units for the well-to-do became part of Terminal City as well, as did the Chrysler Building and Chanin Building.

If you’ve never heard of Terminal City and the whole idea sounds little more than a developer’s invention, you’re not alone. Terminal City gradually fell to the wrecking ball after World War II, as residential apartment buildings and the old hotels made way for sleek towering office buildings.

I don’t get the sense that people working or living in this corridor ever used the term Terminal City it has scant mentions in newspaper archives.

What is this business corridor north of Grand Central called today, if anything? I’m not sure there’s a name for it, but something generic like East Midtown might fit.

[Top image: Wikipedia; second image: Municipal Archives via The New York Times; third image: Brooklyn Citizen]

A New York heir survives the sinking of the Titanic—then writes a book about the harrowing details

When the R.M.S. Titanic set out on the Atlantic Ocean from Queensland, Ireland on April 11, 1912, the ship carried 2,240 people—including 325 first-class passengers.

Among these travelers were some of the richest men in the world, including John Jacob Astor IV (son of society doyenne Mrs. Astor), businessman Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s.

Making his way back to New York while enjoying amenities like the first-class-only pool, squash courts, and Turkish baths was Archibald Gracie IV.

Gracie, 54 years old, independently wealthy, and unaccompanied by his family during the Titanic’s maiden voyage, was the great-grandson of a Scottish immigrant who made a fortune in shipping in 18th century Gotham—building a home on the East River known today as Gracie Mansion.

A vacation brought Gracie (at left) to Europe. He reportedly wanted to relax after finishing a book about the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga, in which his father had fought for the Confederacy. (This branch of the Gracies had migrated to Alabama in the 19th century.)

But this wouldn’t be Gracie’s only book. His story of surviving the sinking of the Titanic—going down with the ship, flailing in the icy waters of the Atlantic, and then managing to stand on an overturned collapsable with dozens of other men for hours until the Carpathia picked them up after sunrise—was the first book about the disaster from a man who lived it.

Gracie’s book, The Truth About the Titanic, starts off with an account of how he occupied himself on the day the ship hit the iceberg. Social and affable, he went to church services, read an adventure book in the ship library, chatted with Isidor and Ida Strauss, had dinner with new friends made on board, and then enjoyed coffee while listening to the Titanic’s band.

After some time in the smoking room, he retired to his first-class cabin—then was jolted awake around 11:45 p.m. Gracie threw on his clothes and overcoat and went outside across various decks to find out what happened. He saw J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the Titanic’s White Star Line, hurrying up a passageway with a crew member.

Ultimately he learned of the iceberg collision from a friend on board. The floor began to list. “Men and women were slipping on life preservers, the stewards assisting in adjusting them,” he recalled, adding that a steward urged him to go back to his cabin and put his on, which he did.

Gracie, along with other male passengers and crew, began helping women into lifeboats. The band started to play, which Gracie called a “wise provision” to counter the anxiety and worry. Word got out that the wireless officers had signaled to neighboring ships. Gracie pointed out what appeared to be the lights of a ship five miles away to John Jacob Astor IV. This ship, the Californian, ultimately never came to their aid.

Forty-five minutes had passed when Gracie spotted Mr. and Mrs. Strauss (above, with their six children), who refused to part from each other, calmly sitting on steamer chairs “prepared to meet their fate.” He passed men in the smoking room who seemed oblivious to what was going on. Rocket flares were fired into the clear night sky. Gracie helped Astor get his pregnant wife into a lifeboat…and never saw him again.

With all the lifeboats launched and the ship soon to take its plunge to the ocean floor, Gracie quotes junior wireless operator Harold S. Bride (at right), who said that Captain Edward Smith announced, “Men, you have done your full duty. You can do no more. Abandon your cabin. Now, it is every man for himself.'”

Gracie, clinging to an iron railing, went down with the ship into the Atlantic. At some point he began to rise, swimming as hard as he could until he eventually came to the water’s surface amid debris from the ship.

“That the sea had swallowed her up with all her precious belongings was indicated by the slight sound of a gulp behind me as the water closed over her,” he wrote.

While in the water he described a spooky “smoky vapor” that created a supernatural affect around the spot where the Titanic had slipped under. But more terrifying were the desperate voices of passengers in the whirling waters all around him.

“The agonizing cries of death from over a thousand throats, the wails and groans of the suffering, the shrieks of the terror-stricken and the awful gaspings for breath of those in the last throes of drowning, none of us will ever forget to our dying day,” he recounted.

Gracie clung to a wood crate. Soon he saw one of the four “collapsible” canvas Englehart lifeboats overturned in the water, with a dozen men “half-reclining on her bottom,” some distance away.

When he made his way over, he grabbed the arm of one of the men and was helped in by another. A dozen more men managed to climb on top of the upturned boat, which was steered with improvised oars by two passengers, one of whom was Harold Bride, the wireless operator.

The oarsmen manuvered the half-submerged collapsible away from “the heart-rendering cries of struggling swimmers,” because they feared if more men were pulled onto the boat, it would sink and everyone would drown.

Hours of exposure to the wind, cold, and 20-degree water left the men with frostbite and exhaustion. Some could hold out no longer and fell into the ocean. “Towards the morning the sea became rougher, and it was for the two-fold purpose of avoiding the ice-cold water, and also to attract attention, that we all stood up in column, two abreast, facing the bow,” wrote Gracie.

All night the men, a cross-section of crew and passengers, chatted and prayed. Finally after daybreak, they saw two lifeboats coming toward them. The lifeboats belonged to the Carpathia, which ferried the men on board. They were greeted with blankets, warm clothes, and hot coffee.

After reaching the Carpathia, which had plucked 705 survivors from the Titanic’s lifeboats before continuing on to New York (above photo), Gracie, suffering from hypothermia, recalls that he “felt like falling down on my knees and kissing the deck gratitude for the preservation of my life.”

That life would end eight months later in December 1912. Gracie was a diabetic, but it’s thought that the physical and mental fallout from such a grueling experience contributed to his death. His book was written before he died but not published until 1913.

It became one of the definitive accounts of the last hours on board the unsinkable ship, and Gracie was heralded for saving the lives of countless passengers by assisting them while getting into lifeboats.

He’s buried in Woodlawn Cemetery with a headstone (above) that calls him a “hero of S.S. Titanic.”

[Top image: The Truth About the Titanic; second image: Wikipedia; third image: Ships Nostalgia; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections; fifth image: Wikipedia; seventh image: Wikipedia; eighth image: Wikipedia]

From girls’ convent school to transitional housing, the story of a Gothic castle on Riverside Drive

There’s a stone fortress with a battlement-like central tower and a double staircase entrance at the corner of Riverside Drive and 140th Street.

As striking as this fortified castle is when you encounter it from the sidewalk, viewing it from the West Side Highway helps you truly absorb its out-of-place Medieval feel.

Five stories high with stone turrets, a gabled roof, dormers, crenellations, and Gothic windows and finials, it’s unlike any of the surrounding buildings in this corner of West Harlem—a quiet neighborhood of tenements and high rises fronting Riverside Park.

Such a conglomeration of rough-cut stone walls and tidy limestone trim must have an interesting backstory. Who built this showstopper—and what purpose does it serve today?

Dial back to the early 20th century, when Riverside Drive was extended past 140th Street. New housing was being built in proximity to the park, but the Drive was also historically home to institutions, asylums, and reformatories that needed open space and excess land.

Enter a Roman Catholic order that wanted to build a new convent school. The sisters of St. Walburga’s Academy had established their first school for girls on the West Side, possibly on Riverside Drive and 104th Street. The school was a simple Italianate Victorian structure with a convent complete with a rooftop widow’s walk next door (photo above).

The sisters needed a bigger building. In 1911 they chose architect John W. Kearney for the task. The inspiration for Kearney’s design isn’t clear, but the origin of the construction material appears to be known.

“The schist rock for constructing St. Walburga’s Academy on Riverside Drive came from excavation of tunnels for the city’s first subway line, the Interborough Rapid Transit subway,” states history and culture website Clio.com.

Completed in 1913, the new St. Walburga’s Academy—in a more spaced-out West Harlem—operated as a day and boarding school for girls. “The Roman Catholic sisters at St. Walburga’s Academy taught 50 girls in four grades in 1915, according to the National Catholic Education Association,” wrote Clio.com.

I wish I had some insight into what happened to some of St. Walburga’s graduates over the five or so decades it occupied this site. Looking through newspaper archives, I did find lots of wedding announcements, some for graduates who went on to Barnard and other women’s colleges.

In 1957, St. Walburga’s moved out of the Gothic castle and took up residence in the Westchester town of Rye. The school renamed itself School of the Holy Child, according to a New York Times article from 2000, and continues to operate today.

After St. Walburga’s left, the Gothic castle became home to a Yeshiva, per Clio.com, then sat empty into the 1990s until a different kind of institution appeared and gave the building renewed purpose.

In 1998, the Fortune Society—a residential re-entry center for formerly incarcerated individuals—took over the space and remade it to serve ex-offenders who need transitional housing, counseling, job opportunities, and other services to help restart their lives.

It’s a fitting occupant for a storied building. The Society renovated what was a crumbling relic and seems to have added to the original building, as seen on the 140th Street side. Scaffolding around the first floor also reveals more renovation is in the works.

It’s not quite a girls’ convent school. But like St. Walburga’s Academy, the Fortune Society has a mission to educate and influence lives.

Curious about many of the other mansions, townhouses, and institutional buildings that remain on Riverside Drive? Join Ephemeral New York on a Riverside Drive walking tour! Space is still available for the next tour on Sunday, April 6 at 1 p.m. Click here for more info and to sign up!

[Third image: Cornelia Connelly Library; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collection]

A towering memorial to Henry Hudson that stands in “magnificent isolation” on a Bronx hilltop

New York is a city filled with hundreds, maybe thousands of public memorials. Some are lifelike figures, some are bas-relief plaques, some take classical architectural forms.

The Henry Hudson Memorial, which for almost 90 years has towered over the British navigator and explorer’s namesake park in the hilly Bronx neighborhood of Spuyten Duyvil, combines all of these elements.

Why so many components to a monument that could have been just as meaningful as a bronze bust on a granite base or an embossed tablet in the ground?

It has to do with the Henry Hudson anniversary mania that gripped the city more than a century ago, when the monument embarked on a three-decade journey from the idea stage to its completion and official dedication in 1938.

The story of the memorial begins in 1906. That’s when New York City was in the midst of planning a spectacular two-week double celebration in 1909 to mark the 300th anniversary of Hudson’s dropping anchor in New York Harbor, as well as the 100th anniversary of the first voyage of Robert Fulton’s paddlewheel steamboat, Clermont.

This citywide party put Hudson and Fulton front and center. But it was also a message to the world highlighting New York’s might and power at the start of a new century.

Among the festivities were fireworks, a naval flotilla on the river bearing Hudson’s name, parades, pageants, signal fires, and the nighttime lighting of over a million incandescent bulbs on Gotham’s best-known monuments, bridges, and buildings.

A new bridge, eventually named the Henry Hudson Memorial Bridge (below postcard), which connected Inwood with Spuyten Duyvil, was proposed. Statues commemorating Hudson were also in the works, including one placed at Riverside Drive and 72nd Street.

Because Hudson docked at Spuyten Duyvil during his voyage up the river in 1609, civic leaders on the celebration committee decided that a promontory with scenic views would be an ideal setting for a truly glorious Henry Hudson monument.

“The committee broke ground at the donated memorial site in 1909, and the massive Doric column was erected in 1912,” wrote NYC Parks. Karl Bitter, a prominent Austrian-born sculptor who created the Franz Sigel equestrian statue on Riverside Drive and 106th Street, was tasked with designing a statue of Hudson that would be hoisted on top of the column.

But as all New Yorkers know, plans for public works often go awry. A lack of funds kept Bitter from finishing the sculpture; he died in 1915 after being hit by a runaway car outside the Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway.

For decades, the Hudson Memorial remained unfinished. In the 1930s, parks commissioner Robert Moses completed the Henry Hudson Memorial Bridge (with a very different design than the original proposal in the above postcard), then turned his attention to finishing the memorial.

Moses acquired the land around the promontory, which became Henry Hudson Memorial Park. “Sculptor Karl H. Gruppe, a student of Bitter, redesigned the bronze figure of Hudson and the two bas-reliefs at the base of the column, and the completed Henry Hudson Memorial was dedicated on January 6, 1938,” stated NYC Parks.

Since then, a 16-foot Henry Hudson in 17th century pantaloons has stood on top of this 109-foot Doric column. One bas-relief shows the explorer looking at a globe with his men, one of whom is gripping his sword. The second bas-relief depicts Hudson attempting to trade beads for the furs carried in the arms of a Native American.

Monuments to explorers have fallen out of favor; note that no one proposed a 400th anniversary celebration in Hudson’s honor in 2009.

But this memorial in a lovely and scenic pocket park is a commanding one, showing Henry Hudson in “magnificent isolation,” as one newspaper put it.

[Third image: MCNY, F2011.33.549; fourth image: MCNY, F2011.33.2123H]

The intrigue and elusiveness of two 1930s photos of New York’s skyscraper skyline

The 20th century skyline of Manhattan—dominated by gleaming, crisply defined skyscrapers like the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building—was a frequent subject for photographers of the 1930s and 1940s.

“New York Skyline Evening Haze,” 1936

But few have the depth and texture of these muted, murky skyline images by Paul J. Woolf: one of the city with the sun descending in the evening, the other during the daytime.

Woolf is a new name to me. Born in England in 1899, he studied photography at the University of California at Berkeley and then began working professionally out of his studio in New York in the 1930s, states the Keith de Lellis Gallery, which exhibited Woolf’s work in 2017.

“City Symphony,” 1935

Taken at different times of the day, both photos seem to present a city shrouded not just in haze but in romance and intrigue. It’s a dreamlike city of shadows, darkness, and pops of light—a stunning New York of unknowable mystery.

The Smithsonian website says that while Woolf maintained his artistic career, he also worked as a clinical social worker. Indeed, a Paul J. Woolf was the director of the Family Service Association in Mount Vernon, New York, per a 1953 newspaper writeup.

Did the hard work of helping families in need influence his artistic vision and direction? It’s another mystery concerning a photographer not as well known as he should be.