The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It 9780823289448

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The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot

THE NEIGHBORHOOD MANHATTAN FORGOT Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It Matthew Spady

AN IMPRINT OF FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

2020

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com/empire-state-editions. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020910123 Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 First edition

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for my mother, my father, and Scott

CONTENTS

A Word about Place Names and Street Names Introduction: Humanizing the Landscape 1 1 Triumph and Tribulation on White Street 2 The Land before It Was Minnie’s 3 Arcadia Found . . .

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4 . . . and Too Quickly Lost

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5 Audubon Park Begins to Bloom 6 Fruit Basket Turnover

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7 Audubon Park’s New Power Brokers 8 The Hemlocks

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9 Three Widows, Three Households 10 Reconstructing the Park 11 A Gilded Lily

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12 Panic 159 13 Halcyon Days

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CONTENTS

14 Waning Days of Summer 15 Exit Strategy

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16 Partition Suit 216 17 Clinging to the Past . . . 228 18 . . . and Facing the Future

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19 Rapid Transit, Rapid Transformation

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20 When the Bloom Faded 272 Postscript

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Acknowledgments 313 Notes

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Bibliography Index

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Additional photographs follow page 180

A WORD ABOUT PLACE NAMES AND STREET NAMES

Over the centuries covered in the following narrative, the geographic region surrounding the Audubon Park suburb had multiple, often overlapping names. For centuries, the Native American Lenape called it Penadnic. When European settlers pushed northward from their farms on the Harlem Plains, they called it Jochem Pieter’s Hills, in honor of an early settler, and later, Harlem Heights. That was the name in use when the Audubons moved to their farm in the spring of 1842, though Richard Carman was already promoting Carmansville as a name for northern Manhattan. By mid-century, Fort Washington and Washington Heights equaled Carmansvilles in popularity, so people living side by side might, and did, use any one of the three in city directories. At the turn of the twentieth century, Washington Heights was the official city designation for the area, with a southwestern boundary at 135th Street. Today, Washington Heights defines the area between the Harlem and Hudson rivers from 155th Street to Dyckman Street, where Inwood begins. Fort Washington survives in place names such as the avenue, library branch, park, and local post office, but excepting a playground and Weatherbug.com location, the Carmansville name is extinct. During its lifetime, Audubon Park’s boundaries varied depending on who was describing them. For the purposes of this history, that name will refer to the land west of Broadway between 155th and 158th streets. St. Nicholas Avenue, a name dating to an 1880s real estate boom in northern Manhattan, originated as the Wickquasgeck Trail, which the

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A WORD ABOUT PLACE NAMES AND STREET NAMES

Lenape people developed for north-south travel on the island of Manahatta. European settlers continued using it and called it, successively, Harlem Lane, the King’s Road, and the Kingsbridge Road. Tenth Avenue became Amsterdam Avenue in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Eleventh Avenue, present-day Broadway, did not exist north of 155th Street until after the American Civil War, when the Central Park Commissioners began developing streets west and north of the park. The Boulevard (or Grand Boulevard) initially ran from 59th Street, where Broadway ended, to 155th Street. A few years after it opened, the street commissioners extended it to 156th Street and then veered west to continue up the Hudson River’s shore. Confusion arose when the commissioners opened a second “Boulevard” north of 156th Street paralleling Tenth Avenue. That roadway appeared on maps and in city directories as both Eleventh Avenue and the Boulevard until February 14, 1899, when it became Broadway. The original portion carried various names, including the Public Drive, the French Drive, and the Boulevard Lafayette, until the Riverside Drive extension absorbed it in 1911. Beginning with the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan, Twelfth Avenue appeared on maps and as a coordinate in deeds. The city street commissioners never graded or opened it through Audubon park, but present-day Riverside Drive runs along the line of Twelfth Avenue between 155th and 157th streets. In the late 1850s, the Audubons built a private road following Twelfth Avenue between 155th and 158th streets. Its northern end is still in use as an unnamed alley servicing garages beneath apartment buildings facing Riverside Drive and Riverside Drive West. The Boulevard Lafayette name became obsolete when the Riverside Drive extension opened in February 1911. The city named the block between 157th and 158th streets Audubon Place, renaming it Edward M. Morgan Place in 1926, to honor the first city postmaster to rise to that rank from postal deliveryman. In 1928, Riverside Drive West opened on a viaduct connecting 155th and 162nd streets and bypassing the original Riverside Drive’s serpentine route through Audubon Park. When the Henry Hudson Parkway opened in 1937, the northbound side absorbed Riverside Drive north of 181 Street, though a three-block section still remains at the northern end of Fort Tryon Park.

The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot

INTRODUCTION

Humanizing the Landscape

For nearly sixty years, from about 1850 until 1910, a tract of land in upper Manhattan was known as Audubon Park.

As the year 1850 came to an end and John James Audubon’s illustrious life with it, his wife, Lucy, and sons, Victor and John, argued about the fate of Minnie’s Land, the family farm nine miles north of New York’s City Hall. The business-minded Victor saw Minnie’s Land as a liability that burdened the family’s finances with taxes, insurance, and upkeep, while yielding small dividends. He wanted to sell any or all of it and believed survival lay in family unity and continued loyalty to carrying on his father’s work. John saw Minnie’s Land as a rare opportunity to show his true grit. Often patronized by the rest of the family as an erratic hothead whose short temper derailed his good intentions, he had succeeded in carving fields, orchards, and a homestead from raw woodland and learned in the process that he could be happy as a portrait-painting farmer. He threatened to uproot his wife and children, abandon the Audubon family business, and start afresh elsewhere if his brother sold the fields and orchards and robbed him of the means to contribute to the family’s welfare. Lucy saw Minnie’s Land as her reward for years of hardship while her husband pursued his dream painting and cataloging the Birds of America. She was, after all, “Minnie” (a Scottish term for “mother” that her sons had begun using sometime in the 1830s while the family was living in Edinburgh), and the land, at least the greater part of it, was legally hers. When Audubon bought

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the property in 1841, he had registered it in her name, and soon the adjective-noun combination describing Minnie’s land had morphed into its name. Lucy had spent the last decade as mistress of all she surveyed and saw no reason that her sons could not forge a viable plan that would enable her to continue life as it was. Ironically, her husband’s vision of a family-run business and her own domineering spirit had deprived Victor and John of the experience and business skills they needed to develop that plan. Victor had already speculated in Brooklyn real estate and invested in a foundry, and John even led an expedition to California in search of gold. But each of these ill-timed ventures failed. Now, all that was left was land and competing ideas on how to use it. Eventually, a compromise emerged. They would sell part of the farm and, with the capital, build houses they could lease for continuing revenue. John would stay in the family fold—at least until the real estate plan was complete—and be in charge of developing the property and building the houses. As a reward, he could build a house for his growing family. Victor would build one, too, and the family would consolidate itself along the river’s edge. Lucy would live six months of each year with Victor and six with John while enjoying rents from letting her own house. Within four years, Italianate villas, stables, and other dependencies had replaced fields and orchards—a house even rose in the old chicken yard— and Minnie’s Land had disappeared beneath a suburban enclave bearing the evocative name “Audubon Park.” While the Audubons’s plan transformed the landscape, it did not, in the end, yield the financial results they had hoped, and by 1864, with both her sons dead, Lucy sold her remaining property and left. That same year, John’s widow, Caroline, lost her house in foreclosure proceedings. Victor’s widow, Georgianna, hung on with the assistance of her brother-in-law, Edward Talman, but after he died in 1878, she also moved, and no Audubons remained in the park that bore their name. In the first years of the twentieth century, the Grinnell family sat in the center of Audubon Park, their family home besieged on a battlefield of their own making. Like the Audubons fifty years earlier, they had found themselves the owners of extensive property that was not yielding sufficient income to pay taxes, insurance, and maintenance. And like the Audubons, they planned a strategy for controlled change that would have an unexpected ending. On the southern side of the Grinnells’s property, an army of workmen was blasting a cavernous foundation for Archer M. Huntington’s Hispanic Society Museum, an exercise as unpredictable and disruptive as cannon fire. Snaking around the western and northern sides of the

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Grinnells’s property, a separate, but equally destructive army had demolished a house dating back to the 1850s, and when they were done, began leveling trees to open a roadbed for Riverside Drive, which in some places would push against a stone retaining wall more than forty feet high. On the east, another army would soon appear. Though it may have seemed benign, this was the army that would destroy the Grinnells’s way of life. For soon, subway kiosks would begin disgorging legions of solidly middle-class New Yorkers lured north to new apartment buildings designed specifically for their aspirations. Squeezed on all sides by the progress they had encouraged, the Grinnells surrendered their property to developers, who completed the process of urbanization that Audubon had unwittingly set in motion seventy years earlier. Within less than two years, Audubon Park had disappeared, and its name had faded into legend. The study of Audubon Park’s origins, maturation, and disappearance is at root the study of a rural society evolving into an urban community, an examination of the relationship between people and the land they inhabit. The park’s predecessor, Minnie’s Land, was never as remote from the city as later generations romanticized it to be, but it did offer the Audubons an opportunity to meld with the land and water in a way they hadn’t enjoyed since they owned property on the Ohio River more than thirty years earlier. Within a decade, however, their Arcadia crumbled. The residents who replaced them weren’t seeking an agrarian existence. Influenced by midcentury thinkers such as Catherine Beecher, Henry David Thoreau, and Andrew Jackson Davis, they sought a simpler, healthier life than they believed possible in the confines of a city. The park’s villas, set among spacious lawns under a canopy of aged shade trees and connected by gracefully curving drives, symbolized economic as well as social acceptability. But men spending their days in offices or mercantile operations had no time for tilling the soil, fishing the river, or hunting the woods. They didn’t depend on the soil for sustenance, and they didn’t particularly mourn its disappearance beneath their elegant villas. While the park promised them privacy and security, its houses offered them the luxury of light, ventilation, and views, as well as space that none of them could have afforded in the city’s fashionable residential districts. Stepping deeper into Audubon Park’s history prompts a look at how its people reacted to their environment, economic cycles, technological developments, personal and family crises, and the many seemingly innocuous occurrences that elicit personal reflection and a change of course. The transformation from farm to suburb had taken a dozen years. The passage from suburb to city would take more than five decades. One reason for this

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disparity was surely the park’s isolation, tucked away on a slope above the river far beyond the city’s northern edge. Another was the Audubons’s attempt at regulating land use through covenants that prohibited a variety of “dangerous noxious unwholsome or offensive trades” and restrained population density (while assuring the park’s exclusivity) by prohibiting “any building or tenement of less value than $2,000” and any “tenement or tenement house for laboring men.” The strongest factor resisting change, however, was one man: George Blake Grinnell, a long-term real estate investor, who accumulated more than two-thirds of the park’s land and houses and showed no interest in subdividing lots, opening streets, building houses on speculation, or making any improvements beyond those that would ensure his family lived comfortably. Not until his children assumed control of the family property after his death did the park complete the final leg of its journey from farmland to city.1 Numerous themes wind their way through Audubon Park’s history and provide milestones and measuring sticks for its evolution. Bookending its lifetime and recurring throughout it as catalysts for growth are developments in streets, roads, and particularly mass transportation. The Audubons may have loathed the Hudson River Railroad, which spewed soot and disrupted their peaceful surroundings as it passed by their door on its way from lower Manhattan to Poughkeepsie and beyond, but when they began converting their property to a suburb, regular train service delivered desirable neighbors to their door, respectable families whose best option for escaping the crowded conditions in the city was jumping over the fashionable (and expensive) residential districts to possibilities beyond. Ensconced in newly constructed villas fitted into a parklike setting—with a gate at the main entrance to emphasize their separation from working-class Carmansville—these young families inhabited Manhattan’s first railroad suburb. Five decades later, when the Grinnells began dismantling Audubon Park, another railroad—this one running underground—carried their plans forward. The Grinnells embraced the subway, agitating with fellow property owners and enlisting their political connections to ensure that when it opened and brought the population explosion Washington Heights had been awaiting half a century, the entrance to the 157th Street city-bound station would sit in their former vegetable garden. Changes in population density and housing stock charted Audubon Park’s transition from farm to city, expanding quickly before the American Civil War and then slowing to a crawl before exploding during the first decade of the twentieth century. Initially, eight Audubons and their servants lived in the homestead, the coachman and his wife lived in a small

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cottage, and a few men who worked the farm lived in huts near the fields and orchards. By 1850, eight grandchildren had expanded the family, and the federal enumeration found twenty-five individuals in Minnie’s Land, with three generations of Audubons living under one roof. In the decade between Audubon’s death and the Civil War, while New York City’s population grew by 57 percent, the park’s population expanded 388 percent, to 122 individuals. The number of houses jumped from two to a dozen. Then, growth in the park stopped. Between 1860 and 1900, while the city pushed its physical boundaries up the island and into the sky and its population jumped from 800,000 to 1.85 million, the park’s population density remained virtually unchanged—fluctuating only slightly with the size of families moving in and out. Its net gain in houses was one. Population density increased significantly in the years just before the city engulfed Audubon Park, with lodgers renting the Audubon houses along the river and a convent of thirty nuns leasing a villa from the Grinnells, but the sea change came with the first apartment building in 1910. Overnight, more families could live in one apartment house than had previously lived in the entire park. Equally telling, each apartment house occupied roughly the same footprint as one of the previous houses and its gardens.2 Population growth was exactly what land investors, land speculators, and community boosters (often the same individuals) had wanted for lower Washington Heights. In the 1880s, property owners had organized themselves and promoted northern Manhattan for its healthy air, cool breezes, semirural lifestyle, and spectacular views, all at prices significantly lower than those closer to the city—selling points northern Manhattan’s property owners had been using since colonial times, and still do today. They also established religious and cultural institutions and lobbied the city government for improved water supply, sewers, lighting, and schools. Above all, they pushed for mass transit that would expand the population and drive the area to its full potential as a first-class residential district. The tipping point arrived at the turn of the twentieth century when the subway opened just in time to bring New York City’s unprecedented population surge to new homes in northern Manhattan. The advantages of living distant from the city center were the same for the Audubons in 1841, the Grinnells in 1880, and the first apartment dwellers in 1910—and they remain the same for renters and condo owners in the twenty-first century. “Drawn by the Prices, Betting on the Neighborhood,” the title of a 2004 New York Times article about living in northern Manhattan, could apply to almost any period in the area’s history. In 1841, fourteen acres of farmland cost the Audubons a tenth of what they would have

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paid for the house they were leasing on White Street. And in 2018, the money a co-op or condo owner spent for an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side would purchase two to three times more space in an apartment in Audubon Park’s twenty-first-century footprint. But equally true is that over time, each dollar has purchased less space. The $352.75 per acre ($10,500 in 2019 dollars) that Audubon paid for Minnie’s Land in 1841 would not have bought the acre his son sold Wellington Clapp for $5,400 ($181,000) a decade later, much less the three-thousand-plus square-foot co-op apartment, roughly 0.07 of an acre, that an owner in the Audubon Park footprint sold in April 2017 for $2.1 million.3 Once apartment buildings erased most of Audubon Park in 1911, any remaining interest in the old neighborhood’s connection to the naturalist shifted to a narrow strip of land hidden on the lower side of Riverside Drive’s retaining wall. There, between the wall and the river, barely accessible except by a wretched alley some called “Audubon Lane,” sat the old Audubon houses, which owners had crammed with renters—starkly contrasting with their illustrious pasts and with the luxury apartment buildings along Riverside Drive forty feet above. Accelerating the downward spiral, sheds and warehouses—Garage Village—sprang up like weeds among the old houses. When the penultimate set of apartment houses claimed Audubon’s homestead in 1932, the last vestige of earlier times, the Audubon Park name quickly receded from memory except for a few references in Audubon biographies, guidebooks, and footnotes to New York histories. Then, in 2009, after a decade of lobbying from neighborhood preservationists, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated an Audubon Park Historic District, protecting a trove of architectural treasures, reviving an evocative name that had lain dormant for a century, and rekindling interest in the neighborhood’s rich history. The seed that grew into this book began germinating in 1998 when my partner, Scott Robinson, and I bought a co-op unit at the Grinnell, an imposing brick and stone apartment building designed by architects Schwarz and Gross and dating to 1911. That seed took root and grew during the years I helped prepare a request for evaluation and advocated for the Audubon Park Historic District. I had lived two blocks away from the Grinnell since 1987 and had a vague knowledge that John James Audubon had lived nearby sometime in the distant past, but I had not sorted through the timeline or details. Pursuing the simple question that Scott posed, “Who or what was Grinnell,” started me on the journey that culminates with this book. Over the twenty-plus years I’ve been studying and sharing Audubon Park’s history, I’ve delved into thousands of deeds,

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censuses, church records, wills, and newspaper articles. I’ve studied scores of photographs and maps and read hundreds of pages from letters, journals, and memoirs. Being something of a completist, I have yet to run into a bit of “Audubon Park” information that I didn’t find fascinating, but keeping in mind some sage advice from biographer John Taliaferro (who began and completed a biography of George Bird Grinnell while I was finishing this book), I’ve constantly reminded myself that I’m telling a story, not writing an encyclopedia. So I’ve sifted through and chosen the kernels that I think best move the narrative forward and illustrate the key themes in Audubon Park’s journey from farm to cityscape. The Audubon family dynamic is key to the development of Audubon Park, so the narrative begins with the Audubons returning to America in 1839, taking up residence in New York City, and grappling with family events that led them to move to Minnie’s Land. Since Minnie’s Land did not emerge from a void, some backstory is necessary to explain what the Audubons found when they moved to northern Manhattan, how they forged a farm from a rocky wooded hillside, and how that farm evolved into the railroad suburb that was to come. Audubon Park will emerge in Chapter 4 and remain at center stage for the duration of the story. The postscript begins during the Great Depression, just after the old Audubon homestead disappeared from the streetscape, and continues through the decades when the Audubon Park name fell into disuse. It ends in the twenty-first century with the name repurposed in today’s Audubon Park Historic District, a multiethnic, multiracial urban neighborhood far removed from the homogeneous, Eurocentric Audubon Park suburb. Audubon Park’s path from forest to city followed many twists and turns. At any one of them, the score of acres that eventually comprised Audubon Park might have deviated from its path to urbanization and evolved into a very different footprint from the one existing today. If Manhattan’s earliest European settlers had migrated from north to south as the Lenape people had done before them, Audubon Park might now be at the heart of the business district rather than an outlying—albeit increasingly popular—residential enclave. If Richard Carman and James Conner had been successful in their 1835 land speculation scheme, New York City’s aldermen might have preempted the Trinity Corporation and established a rural cemetery twice the size of the present one, erasing Audubon Park’s entire existence and history. Had the auctioneers Cole and Chilton put Minnie’s Land on the block as scheduled in October 1851, the Audubon farm might have evolved into two hundred row houses on English basements stretching down a steep hill to Riverside Drive, rather than a series of Beaux-Arts

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apartment and museum buildings sitting in an irregular footprint disrupting Manhattan’s grid. And, if the Grinnells had failed in their well-laid plans at the turn of the twentieth century, Audubon’s house might have survived long enough for well-organized, well-funded preservationists to save it, either in situ or somewhere nearby. But neither these nor the many other possible variations played out. Instead, the chain of events that John James Audubon set in motion in 1841 moved forward inexorably to the streetscape that emerged seven decades later. The story of how that happened makes up the pages of this book.

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Triumph and Tribulation on White Street

When Lucy Audubon left 86 White Street on a bright April morning in 1842, bundling her two granddaughters, Lulu and Hattie, and their new stepmother, Caroline, into a barouche that her husband had recently bought with borrowed money, she may have breathed a sigh of relief that she was leaving the leased house and its sorrows behind her and heading out of town to a new home.1 Four years earlier, when work was nearing an end on the Birds of America and the accompanying narrative text, the Ornithological Biography, Audubon had already planned what his family would do next and was deciding where they should settle. If the thought occurred to him that his sons, Victor and John, might want to strike out on their own—and nothing about his actions ever suggested he did—he subdued it. He had already conceived two new works that would continue the family business for another decade: a small, lithographed version of the Birds in octavo format (which Audubon called “the little work”), at a price that would draw a new set of subscribers, and the Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, a lithographed companion piece for the Birds, that would catalogue the continent’s mammals. Audubon’s Charleston friend the Reverend John Bachman, whose daughter Maria had married Audubon’s son John, would collaborate on the Quadrupeds, as would Victor and John, just as they had on the completion of the Birds.2 A few days after his engraver pulled the last print for the Birds, Audubon took off for Edinburgh to work with his editor, William MacGillivray,

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on the Ornithological Biography, leaving the rest of the family in London— Lucy, Victor, John, and Maria, who amid celebrations surrounding Queen Victoria’s coronation, gave birth to the first Audubon grandchild. She and John named their daughter Lucy but called her “Lulu” to distinguish her from her grandmother. John was eager to take his wife and daughter home to America, but his father had other ideas. He thought John should “remain about one Year longer in Europe,” where he could “become better master of his Art and enter on his career as a Portrait Painter.” Victor agreed. John liked the idea of specializing in portraiture, but this wasn’t the first time family consensus had dictated his future, nor would it be the last.3 From Edinburgh, Audubon wrote Lucy that the family should join him as soon as possible because accommodations were much cheaper there than in London. Lucy, never one to mince words when complaining about family finances, wrote her father’s cousin Euphemia Gifford that it had been “so very disagreeable as well as expensive” for the family to be split between the two cities. As soon as her health permitted—she had been unwell for almost three years with a complaint the doctors could neither diagnose nor treat—they would all move to Scotland. But America was the frugal place for a family of their “limited means,” so once Audubon completed his work, that’s where they would go.4 At the end of the year, expecting that he would complete the Ornithological Biography and a Synopsis by the following spring, Audubon sent Victor to scope out suitable cities where the family might settle in America, with an eye to the eastern seaboard. Audubon was not yearning for urban life. Despite his success in British cities, where he had exploited Europe’s fascination with the American wilderness and the men who roamed it, he had voiced his opinion often and vehemently that he found city living repugnant. Even so, the Audubons’s subscription business demanded that the family remain in an urban center, where Audubon could collect from existing subscribers, canvass for new ones, and be in close contact with lithographers, colorists, printers, publishers, and distributors. John and Maria departed with Lulu for a brief trip to Paris and then continued to New York, where John promptly set up shop as a portrait artist at 300 Broadway. Victor was already in New York, but still dithering about where the family should live, so he waited “for the arrival of Papa with hope we may come to some conclusion soon after his arrival.” Victor wanted to invest in property, but as he wrote his friend Mary Davis in Charleston, given the family’s financial state, bathing in the sea at the Battery was the only luxury he could afford, so purchasing a house was out of the question for the time being.5

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For personal as well as practical reasons, Victor wanted the Audubons to winter in Charleston with the Bachmans. While the families were together there, he could marry his fiancé, Maria’s sister Mary Eliza; Audubon and Bachmann could plan the Quadrupeds; and Maria, who was pregnant again, could have her second child in familiar, and familial, surroundings. Lucy was amenable to living in either New York or Charleston as long as Victor could find suitable accommodations—meaning not with the Bachmans if they traveled to Charleston and not with her sister Eliza Berthoud if they remained in New York. After years of living in other women’s homes, often as governess, Lucy was not willing to relinquish her recently reclaimed status as head of her own household. Audubon wasn’t interested in Charleston, but in early September, when he and Lucy arrived in New York on the George Washington, he still hadn’t decided where the family would live—Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or New York City. The determining factors, as he wrote to Samuel G. Morton, his agent in Philadelphia, were “Rent, Markettings &c and also of the probable share of Success as to subscribers obtainable on the appearance of the first numbers of the two works” he and his sons would produce next. He was ready to begin “the little work,” and wherever he decided to live, he wanted his sons there to help. John would reduce the drawings with the camera lucida, and Victor would assume more responsibility for canvassing and collecting. Audubon “was a good father, a loving father, but he would not let go” of his sons, observed biographer Shirley Streshinsky. He “had always believed that theirs should be a family enterprise, that their futures should be inextricably tied to his. One thing was obvious: The money that supported all of them came primarily from his labors.”6 The question of whose talent and money supported the family would reappear in the coming decade as the burden of wage-earner shifted from a physically and mentally incapacitated Audubon to his sons. The wild card in the deck was the demanding and money-conscious Lucy, whose long years of experience with her husband had convinced her that no amount of wealth was enough. She would outlive all three men in her life and eventually put her own spin on the term “breadwinner.” But those events were still years in the future; in September 1839, the question was where to live. After spending a few weeks in Mrs. Waldron’s boardinghouse on Broadway, Audubon reunited the family about a mile uptown at 86 White Street, a house he leased two blocks from Broadway and, in 1839, near the city’s geographic center. Within a decade, as the city continued expanding northward, White Street would become a mercantile center, but when the Audubons settled there, it was still a residential neighborhood with three- and

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four-story houses lining both sides of the street, their façades a continuous street wall. Number 86 was in the center of a block of houses that stretched halfway into their lots, leaving room for dependencies and small gardens behind. Windows on the street faced south with bright sun for a large portion of the day, rendering them suitable for Audubon to use for painting, but John’s camera lucida work required abundant light, which he may have found by retreating to the garden or even going into the street.7 In an era when New York’s population—more than 300,000 strong—had outpaced housing stock, many urbanites were “trying out a variety of types of ad hoc multiple dwellings.” With three generations sharing 86 White Street, the Audubons were no exception. Audubon described the house as “large,” but his English engraver, Robert Havell, and his wife, immigrating to America, soon joined the Audubons while they hunted for a home, and at the end of October, Maria increased the family with another daughter, named Harriet Bachman in honor of her maternal grandmother and called “Hattie.” In addition, four female servants, including a nurse for the babies, lived in the house; sleeping in the attic or perhaps the basement kitchen, overseen by Lucy’s careful eye, they worked at the myriad tasks that kept the household running.8 Beyond cramped conditions, limited light, noise from neighboring Broadway, and the inconvenience of primitive waste disposal, White Street was perilously close to one of the city’s seamier districts. In 1839, a relatively prosperous year wedged between the Panic of 1837 and the depression of the early 1840s, government, religious, and civic leaders argued about responsibility for the poor, while overcrowding and unemployment bred slums with “rising rates of crime, pauperism, and immorality.” The house at 86 White Street was seven blocks—a few-minutes’ walk—north of City Hall, and even closer to the notorious Five Points, “narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking every where with dirt and filth” where destitution, disease, prostitution, high infant mortality rates, and violent crime smothered any chance of human dignity. Though the Audubons had no cause to venture into Five Points, nothing kept its undesirables from traveling in the opposite direction. Equally obnoxious, mid-century New York City was a maelstrom of activity, noise, and odors—most of it unhealthy. In the absence of zoning regulations, tanneries, foundries, distilleries, and slaughterhouses lay close enough to residential neighborhoods that their horrific noise added to the cacophony of wheels crunching on paving stones, horse hooves clanging, and competing omnibus and street railroad drivers shouting curses at each other as they jockeyed for passengers; manufacturing’s pungent odors competed with the stench of garbage,

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sewerage, and horse droppings. Roaming pigs would have been more objectionable had they not proved robust street cleaners.9 With the White Street house as an anchor, the Audubons remained a peripatetic group. Audubon traveled the East Coast canvassing for subscribers to “the little work” and promoting the Quadrupeds. When Victor received word that Eliza’s health had taken a turn for the worse, he dashed to Charleston and married her there in early December. His parents, realizing that Victor planned to remain with the Bachmans for the winter, quickly wrote suggesting—with a directness that was clearly a command— that he bring his bride back to the “best of medical aid and fine warm house” in New York. The elder Audubons’s wheedling and demands brought Victor and Eliza to White Street for a reunion with her sister that had a positive effect on Eliza’s health, but did nothing to help Maria, who had been in a physical decline since Hattie’s birth. Alarmed at her condition, John took her to Charleston in the second week of February. Fully aware of the constraints his parents had placed on Victor, he took his camera lucida and painting supplies so they couldn’t accuse him of shirking his responsibility to the family’s business.10 John and Maria took Lulu with them but left the infant Hattie in Lucy’s care, a practical move, but one that would have lifelong consequences for the entire Audubon family. Lucy interpreted this temporary guardianship, given “by a dying mother,” as license to treat Hattie—and Lulu when she returned—as her adopted daughters, figurative replacements for the infant girls she had birthed and buried three decades earlier in Henderson, Kentucky. Lulu’s filial relationship with her grandmother would alter somewhat after she married and gave birth to the next in a long line of Lucys, but Hattie, who remained single, lived in the same house with her grandmother and slept in the same room with her for the next thirtyfive years.11 Maria’s failing health forced the elder Audubons to acknowledge the obvious: she and Eliza suffered from consumption. They had likely contracted it from their father, who moved to Charleston from Schaghticoke, in upstate New York, because the southern climate improved his weakened lungs, a result of “tuberculosis in young manhood.” Mycobacterium tuberculosis was little understood in the early nineteenth century. Until the 1820s, physicians treated its symptoms—fatigue, fever, lesions, and telltale bloody sputum—as separate diseases. By 1839, when J. L. Schönlein named these various consumptive diseases “tuberculosis,” it had become the most rampant fatal illness among city dwellers. Treatments that Hermann Brehmer developed in the 1850s emphasized fresh air at high

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altitudes and nutrition and gave rise to the sanatorium but came too late for the Bachman sisters.12 A trip inland to Aiken, South Carolina, for treatment had no effect on Maria, and back in Charleston, “she breathed her last on Tuesday the 15th [of September] at about one o’clock.” The family buried her in the cemetery attached to St. John’s Lutheran Church, where her father was pastor, and John immediately sent the news to White Street. Victor relayed it to his father, who was traveling, and in the same letter expressed fears about Eliza’s progressing illness. Perhaps, he suggested, he should take her to Havana in the winter. Audubon adored the lively Eliza, who reminded him of his half-sister Rose—he even called her “Rosy”—and gave his consent, but as he had never traveled to Cuba, he expected Victor to use the trip to research the local birds. Within days of Maria’s funeral, John brought Lulu back to New York so that he could assist his father while Victor and Eliza sailed south. They stopped in Charleston where Maria Martin, Eliza’s aunt, joined them on the next leg of the trip to New Orleans. There Eliza rested and Victor collected from existing subscribers and canvassed for new ones before the trio traveled on to Cuba.13 With one daughter-in-law dead and the other critically ill, year-end celebrations at 86 White Street were subdued. Young George Burgess arrived from England just before Christmas and “called upon Mrs. Audubon, a very nice old lady,” who was “very warm in her invitations.” Christmas Day, he joined the Audubons’s dinner table along with Lucy’s sister Eliza Berthoud and her children (“a very nice family”), noting in his journal that John, a widower of three months, seemed “in much grief.”14 Burgess had come to America to establish a thread manufacturing enterprise, and Audubon (“a very fine old man indeed”) encouraged the venture, dismissing Burgess’s penury and assuring him that capital was easily obtained “for legitimate purposes,” though out of his hearing, he voiced concerns that the young man could succeed. The Audubons pressed Burgess to visit them often and not stand upon the formality of an invitation; “come just as you would to your father’s house.” Taking them at their word, he returned to White Street for New Year’s Eve and again two days later for dinner, sealing a friendship that would deepen over the years and continue after Audubon’s death when he became one of Lucy’s trusted advisors.15 Burgess also called on James Hall, a British expatriate living in New York City and operating an import business with his brother John. The Halls had also been friends with the Audubons in England and had renewed their acquaintance in New York. On New Year’s Day, 1841,

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Burgess visited Hall in Brooklyn, when he went “to make some calls according to the custom of the town.” In mid-nineteenth-century New York, gentlemen called upon as many households as possible on New Year’s Day—twenty or thirty being routine—while the women stayed at home and offered their gentlemen guests refreshments. At Hall’s home, Burgess “was ushered into a very handsome room into the presence of Mrs. Hall and Miss Hall two very elegant women who were exceedingly polite”— most likely James Hall’s wife, Mariah, and his sister Caroline. During the next few weeks, whether Burgess visited the Halls or the Audubons, he found the two families together. John clarified the reason at the end of January, when on the way home from dinner with the Halls, he told Burgess that “he was engaged to be married to Miss Hall.” Maria had been dead four months.16 That spring, either because of his growing wealth from mounting subscriptions for “the little work” or because Maria’s death reminded him of his own mortality, Audubon made a will leaving all of his “real and personal property of whatever nature or kind soever” to Lucy and his sons, who would “share and share alike” as joint executors, the only exception being “household furniture Articles of Silver and Silver Plate” that went to Lucy.17 At the beginning of May, Victor, Eliza, and Maria Martin returned from Cuba, stopping in Charleston, where the Bachman family realized that Eliza was dying. Once again, Audubon and Lucy wanted Victor back in New York to help with business and manipulated him there with a breathtaking callousness to Eliza’s health and her family’s feelings. I cannot help thinking my Dear Eliza [Lucy wrote to her daughterin-law] that you are much the better for your trip to that beautiful but seemingly unoccupied land, Cuba—but your dread of the New York winter is rather more than it need be for this has been a very mild season on the whole and our having nothing frozen within doors contrary to last year is a proof of it and yet we have had only half the fires under our roof. I heard from your mother a few days ago, she strenuously objects to my plan of your coming home direct, but I still wish it.18 Eliza returned and died in New York a month later, on May 25, hundreds of miles from her parents, at the age of twenty-two, surviving her sister by less than a year. The pall of death hanging over the house on White Street may have pushed Audubon to find a permanent home outside the city.

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The idea wasn’t new. Victor had been pressuring his father to invest some of his earnings in securities or property ever since the family had returned from abroad, but Audubon had urged him to go slowly and “part not with your Money without full Confidence that you are not taken in.” For most of the nineteenth century, when land speculation was the only form of gambling sanctioned by polite society, buying property was a far sounder proposition than buying securities. Just one year before the Audubons leased 86 White Street for $800 per annum, Edwin Lord had bought the house from Adolphe Le Barbier for $15,000. Half that sum would buy a house and substantial acreage farther from the city center.19 Audubon’s aversion to investing ran deep. Two decades after his bankruptcy and brief stay in a Kentucky debtor’s prison, despite “the little work’s” promise of a steady and healthy income, he refused to consider securities, but as he freely acknowledged, the family was poor and needed to leave the city. I will do all in my power to ennable you to purchase a house pretty soon as well as to Collect our back debts, but for your own Sakes and Mine, do not buy a single Share in Any Stock Whatever until further advise from me! Think of the 2000$ We have as dead in Kentucky Bank Stock, Would not that Sum assist in the purchase of a House?— No No Keep your Money at Home.20 In July, Audubon’s friend and subscriber Edward Harris told him about twenty-five acres of farmland near his home in Moorestown, New Jersey, that were available for $3,500, adding that it was a bargain price; when Robert Havell had recently looked at the property, the owner was asking $5,000. Audubon rejected Moorestown. Perhaps he thought it was too far from New York’s harbor, or maybe Lucy vetoed the location because she was reluctant to leave city life. In March, while Victor was pressing his father to buy a house, she had written him that “Papa and John still wish to try the country next year by taking a place for a year. Mr. Wheelright wants to sell his house to us indeed there is plenty to buy just now and yet the bells of Broadway seem gayer than ever and there are many new kinds of goods to be seen in the shops.”21 The other possibility is that Audubon had already found the wooded hillside he would buy. Isolated, nine miles from the city at 155th Street, the street farthest north when the city fathers laid out the grid in 1811, it was still close enough to town for commuting and for Lucy’s shopping trips. The land had been farmed since the late 1600s, but this particular bowl carved out of the terrain where the heights fell in irregular terraces to the

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river—with mossy brooks running downward through forest trees, rocky outcroppings, and scrub-fringed clearings—was relatively untouched. Exactly when Audubon first saw the parcel is not clear. In 1905, his granddaughter Mary Eliza Audubon—“Miss Eliza” to a generation of school children—invented a poetic account for the New York Times. Conflating several Audubon episodes into a heroic parable that had only a passing acquaintance with fact, she wrote how Audubon had returned home in the 1830s . . . to procure a number of drawings, left for safekeeping in his brother-in-law’s counting house in New York. A tragedy nearly put an end to his work. Rats had devoured most of the toil of years, and the pictures were but a few fragments of dusty paper. What did he do in this dark day of trial? This is the entry in his diary. “For one morning I gave way to my grief and despair, but in the afternoon I took my way to the upper part of the island where, soothed by the calm and beauty of nature, I became strengthened for the task before me, and at daylight next morning I took my pencil in hand and commenced anew the work which the rats had destroyed.” It seems to me that this was being a very great man indeed. But as to this “upper part of the island.” He probably never forgot that day of memorable wandering, and when at last prosperity, honors, and fame had come to him, he selected a spot there, close to the river, where everything he loved in nature could be his.22 Much more probable is that Richard Carman introduced Audubon to his future home. The two men had known each other since at least April 1833, when Carman subscribed to the Birds. A few years after that, he began accumulating land in northern Manhattan and in the summer of 1841 was developing a village he would name “Carmansville.” Audubon’s presence would add luster to his real estate venture. After Audubon had inspected the property, Lucy rode uptown with Lulu to give the location her approval. She did not record her thoughts after that first visit, but decades later, she wrote that it was the kind of spot “a lover of Nature would choose for his closing days.”23 October 1841 brought a flurry of activity for the Audubons. On Friday the first, Audubon handed over $4,938.50 to the New York Bowery Fire Insurance Company for a fourteen-acre tract that would become the family’s new home. The next day, the Audubons and Halls gathered in Brooklyn, where the Reverend Edmund Barry of Jersey City married John and “Carolyn Hall of Loughbro’, England.” Two weeks later, the city registrar

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entered the deed in the New York City Registry, managing to misspell “Audobon” three times. Audubon had registered the property in Lucy’s name, a safeguard against foreclosure should he suffer bankruptcy as he had in Henderson, Kentucky, following the Panic of 1819. But equally important, registering the property in Lucy’s name was Audubon’s thanks for the emotional and financial support she had given him during the decades he pursued his artistic dream and could not provide her a permanent home. Further honoring Lucy, the Audubon men decided to call the farm “Minnie’s Land.” While they were living in Edinburgh, Victor and John had begun calling their mother “Minnie,” a Scottish term for mother, and since the new property was indeed hers, “Minnie’s Land” was an accurate, as well as descriptive, name for it.24 In many ways, Minnie’s Land was a return to Henderson where, more than three decades earlier, the Audubons had been pioneers facing a far harsher challenge than carving a farm out of an uncultivated hillside in northern Manhattan. There, they had enjoyed their first years of marriage, self-sufficient landowners with a layout foreshadowing the one they would develop here: “several buildings, an excellent orchard,” and meadowland stretching between woods and the south bank of the Ohio River—their “guns and fishing lines were the principal means of [their] support as regards food.” Lucy transformed her first home, a log house, into an “outpost of civilization. The cherry-and walnut pianoforte was in place, along with tables, chairs, and bedsteads that had been her dowry.” China, silver, linens, and Lucy’s library may have seemed out of character in frontier surroundings, but the proud Lucy Bakewell Audubon had no fear of pretensions. These were the accoutrements of a cultivated home whether it be a log house in Henderson or a homestead in northern Manhattan.25 In Henderson, when Audubon was not drawing, tramping through the forests, or adding animals to a menagerie he kept in a meadow by the house, he and Lucy swam in the Ohio, rode their horses, or made music at home—all activities they would now pursue again. Within a few years, they had prospered and counted themselves among the leading citizens of the town. Audubon told his sons that those years could “never be effaced from [his] heart until after death.” For Lucy, those years were the measuring stick against which she gauged comfort and happiness, and she was never reticent about reminding Audubon what she had lost when she left there. Had it not been for the Panic of 1819, which amplified ill-advised business choices, the Audubons might have continued to prosper in Henderson. Instead, they lost their home, their business, and their livelihood, and

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Audubon had no choice but to start life anew, his passion for birds becoming his life’s work.26 Now, after years of financial hardship and frequent separation, with the Birds complete and new business ventures successfully underway, Audubon “invested all the money he had made by his publications up to that date” to regain Lucy the home, comfort, and prestige she had enjoyed in Henderson. At least, that’s how Lucy told the story many years later. In all likelihood, the Audubon who was wary of Victor investing money in either securities or property, and who had himself invested every available dollar in publishing the Birds, would not have used all his cash to purchase a farm, though he may have spent a large part of it in hopes of obtaining the self-sufficiency he and Lucy had enjoyed in Henderson. For self-sufficiency is what Minnie’s Land offered the family: land for crops and orchards, a freshwater brook flowing through the property, woodland supplying game, and the Hudson River yielding a variety of seafood. That Audubon “raised his own vegetables, and at one time killed his own meat” was not because “the journey to New York was by no means an easy one,” but rather a practical solution for satisfying life’s basic needs. While New York City marched toward the interdependency of a commercial society, the Audubons, like the majority of families stretched across rural America in the nineteenth century, looked for autonomy and self-sufficiency in bucolic isolation.27 But this new home was not entirely idyllic. Taming the land was arduous, and taming it required. John was the man for the job. In the months between October 1841, when the deed was registered, and May 1842, when the family moved from White Street, Audubon and Victor attended all aspects of the business while John and a small group of workmen hewed a farm out of the wooded, rocky hillside. By 1841, John’s workmen were, of course, white and free, not the enslaved people who had cultivated this land in earlier centuries. That is not to suggest that the Audubons were unfamiliar with the institution. To the contrary, they had a long relationship with slavery that stretched back to Audubon’s birth on the island of Saint Dominique. There, his French father, Jean Audubon, cultivated sugar cane on his plantation and processed it in his refinery, all with the enforced labor of African slaves. On occasion, he also bought and sold slaves on speculation.28 Jean Audubon’s familial relationships were complex, though not unique among Frenchmen with investments in Saint Dominique. At the time of his son’s birth, he had an established household in Perche, where he and Catherine (“Sanitte”) Bouffard, his mixed-race mistress, had two daughters. He also had a French wife at his home in Nantes, Anne Moynet, who

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was fourteen years his elder, and at the time they married, a widow with her own business interests in the Caribbean. John James Audubon’s birth mother was neither Sanitte Bouffard nor Anne Moynet. She was Jeanne Rabine, a young woman from the French countryside who had traveled to Saint Dominique as a chambermaid on a boat that also carried Jean Audubon on a return trip from France. Apparently, the two met, because in late 1783, when Jeanne’s relationship with her employer turned sour, she appeared on his doorstep seeking shelter. She joined his household and, within the year, was pregnant. She delivered Jean Audubon’s only son on April 26, 1785, naming him Jean Rabine, because, as a bastard, he could neither use his father’s name nor inherit his property. Jean Rabine’s mother died six months after he was born, and for the next three years, he lived in his father’s Perche household with his halfsisters and their mother, surrounded and tended by enslaved Africans. In 1778, with a slave uprising on Saint Dominique a near certainty, Jean Audubon sent his son to live with his wife in France. The following year, he also sent his youngest daughter Rose (born to Sanitte in April 1787). Apparently, her skin was fair enough to pass as white in French society. He left his other two daughters on Saint Dominique with Sanitte. In 1794, Jean Audubon “legalized” Jean and Rose through a French adoption and later had them baptized in the Catholic Church. No biographer has ever decisively determined “what Audubon at different times believed to be true, and what he wished to make known to his family or to the public” about the circumstances surrounding his birth and early years on Saint Dominique. What is certain, however, is that he successfully promulgated a false narrative that obscured events from those first three years of his life. Not until Francis Hobart Herrick published his biography of the naturalist in 1917 did the public learn about Jeanne Rabine, Audubon’s original name and birthday, and his mixed-race half-sisters.29 John James Audubon’s relationship with slavery did not end when he left Saint Dominique. Slaves also worked in the Audubon household in Nantes, though writing years later in “Myself,” a pseudo-autobiographical essay for his own sons, he portrayed them as “faithful servants” who had helped his father escape the “negro insurrection,” and then dutifully followed him to Louisiana and France—as if they had a choice in the matter. By the time Jean Audubon sent his son to look after his Pennsylvania property, Mill Grove, in 1803, slavery was a dying institution there; the state had passed a Gradual Abolition Act, the first such law in the United States, in 1780. Slavery was still thriving in Kentucky when Audubon brought Lucy there

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in 1808 and would remain so until ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1814, Audubon bought nine black people who performed heavy manual labor for him and helped Lucy with chores in the house and garden. No doubt, they also tended his sons, just as enslaved blacks had once looked after him. Audubon sold his slaves to pay his debts when his fortunes took a downturn after the 1819 Panic, but that did not end the family’s proximity to slavery. Lucy worked as a governess on plantations in the deep south while Audubon was in England producing the Birds, and later, the Audubons were deeply intertwined with the Bachman household in Charleston, which also ran on the labor of enslaved people.30 Free black people were living and working in New York City when the Audubons returned there in 1839, but Lucy Audubon hired only white women to run her household on White Street and would continue that practice once the family moved to Minnie’s Land. John did the same when he hired men to build the farm, though the available labor pool may have governed his choice more than considerations of race. At least one of his team, John (Jack) Tone was from a local family; John’s father, Richard, had farmed that same land, leasing it from a previous owner.31 John and his men first built “two or three little cottages” at the highest part of the property between Tenth and Eleventh avenues in an area that had long been a pasture. The workmen would live there while they cleared a spot near the river for the homestead. Most of the upper-class citizenry of northern Manhattan built their houses on high elevations so that they could take advantage of cooling river breezes and panoramic views—and avoid the problems of low-lying areas: mosquito-borne diseases and run-off from higher elevations. A half century later, the Real Estate Record and Guide was still reminding its readers that it was “common for real estate brokers to place stress upon the healthiness of a house which is located on high ground. It is a fact that buildings on low ground do not usually rent well, for people have an instinctive dread of the possibilities that may arise, from a sanitary point of view, to endanger their health in such a locality.”32 But the Audubons located their house near the river at their property’s lowest elevation, only twenty feet above the river. With an expansive view stretching in front of it, the house benefited from the wooded hill buffering its eastern side, lending privacy and dulling any noise from the infrequent traffic passing on Tenth Avenue or the Kingsbridge Road. Another, even more compelling reason for the choice was the property’s shape: a large right triangle beginning where 155th Street intersected Tenth Avenue. Its longest side stretched almost 1,900 feet down the hill along 155th Street

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and out to the high-water mark in the Hudson (then called the North) River. There, the property line made a right angle and ran north up the shoreline parallel to a planned, but never constructed, Twelfth Avenue. At a point midway between 157th and 158th streets, it made a slight jog and then followed an ancient farm boundary to its starting point. At its highest elevation, the property sloped gently west, dropping about forty feet in its first four hundred yards. The plateau near Tenth Avenue would have been a convenient and logical place for the house except that it was the point where the triangular property’s hypotenuse met the adjacent side—too narrow for a dwelling. And it lacked privacy. The homestead was forty-three feet on each side, an unimposing structure, but large enough for the Audubon family, their servants, and their guests. A hall running east to west through the center connected the two piazzas and divided a parlor and dining room on the southern side from a library, study, and pantry on the northern. Stairs rose from the central hallway to five bedrooms on the second floor, where another staircase led to five additional bedrooms under a low-sloping roof on the third. Large windows gave light and air to the rooms on the first and second floors, but the quarter-sized windows on the third allowed minimal light and provided only a limited view of the woods and river. In the English basement, tall windows lit a large kitchen, the center of household operations: there, in addition to manifold other tasks, female servants would soon boil gallons of water for laundry and scrubbing, hauling it up and down stairs several times a day. Adjacent to the kitchen were a coal cellar, storeroom, and, under the parlor on the south side of the house, a laundry.33 Minnie’s Land offered plenty of land for Victor and John to build their own houses, but for the moment, while the coachman and his wife lived in a little cottage and the workmen had rustic dwellings up the hill, all of the Audubon family would live in the homestead under Lucy’s watchful eye. Audubon and Lucy would take the large bedroom above the parlor with views of the river and Palisades on the Jersey side, and Lucy reserved the other large bedroom, the sunniest in the house, for guests. Thirty-year-old John and his wife, Caroline, six months along in her first pregnancy, would have the middle bedroom on the opposite side of the hall, and the thirtythree-year-old Victor, still mourning Eliza’s death, had the front room with river views. Lulu and Hattie would sleep in a trundle pulled from beneath Lucy Audubon’s bed. On March 25, Audubon wrote to Victor, who was canvassing and collecting in Philadelphia, that John had finished building the road, so they could begin the move. A few days later, while Victor was in New Bedford,

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Woodcut of the Audubon Homestead from Homes of American Authors, 1851 (Author’s collection)

Massachusetts, Audubon wrote him that John was up at Minnie’s Land getting the house ready, Lucy was “out,” and he himself was tidying up loose ends so that they could leave White Street when the lease expired on May 1, Manhattan’s traditional moving day. He had sent all the copper engraving plates used for printing the Birds to the Hall brothers’ store on William Street, paying a few dollars to increase the insurance on them, and then packed ten crates of books and wrapped “all the numbers of the little work in Parcels (marked on the outside) so that stock could be taken in a few minutes.”34 As often happened, Audubon found himself low on cash and borrowed $225 from Richard Carman so that he could buy a barouche for Lucy. A four-wheeled carriage popular in the mid-nineteenth century, it seated four, two facing two, and required a pair of horses. A barouche was purely a pleasure vehicle for drives in the country or traveling about town for social calls. No doubt, Lucy had pointed out to Audubon that if she were living nine miles from town, he couldn’t expect her to walk back and forth

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when she needed to shop, visit friends, or look for new servants—one of her constant chores—and a farm cart would not befit her status, so he bought an expensive carriage that then required a coachman and pair.35 All these expenses were part of Lucy’s reward. After years of deprivation, years serving as governess, a working guest in other people’s homes, years in which her husband’s dream demanded as much of her hard-earned money as she could give him, years in which their long-distance quarrels, carried on through anguished letters, grew so severe they seriously considered parting ways, Lucy Bakewell Audubon was once again the mistress of her own home. This time, it was hers legally as well as figuratively. Her list of blessings was a long one: the prestige of a famous husband who was recognized on the street wherever he went; a home she could fill with fine furniture, china, her beloved piano, and guests; a farm, servants, a carriage, and a coachman. Minnie’s Land must have seemed like a dream come true. And, for a few years, it was.

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The Land before It Was Minnie’s

Minnie’s Land did not evolve from a void. Although the Audubons left their permanent imprint on their small slice of northern Manhattan, they were not the first people to inhabit it. The rocky tract was less conducive to encampment or planting than the flatter, sunnier plateau on the heights or the shoreline by the river, but the Native American Lenape had found it an adequate hunting ground, waves of Europeans settlers had deemed it satisfactory for grazing livestock, and for a few days in 1776, the Continental Army had trusted its uphill climb would put King George III’s troops and mercenaries at a severe enough disadvantage that they could repel them. The peripatetic Lenape had sheltered on the mainland in winter and returned to the island of Manahatta in the spring, spreading themselves among encampments connected by the Wickquasgeck Trail, a north-south passageway with side paths branching to planting fields and seasonal fishing camps like the one they established at the foot of present-day 158th Street. European colonists disrupted the Lenape’s centuries-old migration patterns and relationship to the land, displacing them from the southern end of the island and then moving north onto the fertile plain they would call New Harlem. Over the next centuries, with successive land transactions, Europeans would divide the land into increasingly smaller units with increasingly higher values.1 In 1636, ten years after Peter Minuet paid the Lenape 60 guilders for Manahatta, Huguenot Jean de la Montagne established a farm on that fertile plain, calling it Vrendendal (Quiet Dale), and three years later, Danish

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Captain Jochem Pietersen Kyuter (often called Jochem Pieter) established Zedendaal (Blessed Valley) on nearby land he received for delivering a shipment of cattle to the colony. Even though Kyuter’s grant did not include the deeply wooded hills stretching northward along the plain’s western edge, an area the Lenape had called Penadnic, they eventually took his name. Making use of the Weckquasgeck Path, New Harlaem’s villagers ascended Jochem Pieter’s Hills to hunt game and fowl, but also to cut timber that they crafted into stockades, barriers that kept their livestock in and the Lenape out. Clearing and laying out fields, building houses and barns, and then enclosing them in stockades, these settlers were re-imagining and humanizing the landscape, a concept unknown to the Lenape and threatening to their way of life. During the next several decades, the farmers in New Harlaem and the Lenape kept an uneasy truce, conflicting world views occasionally erupting into fighting and bloodshed. On more than one occasion, the Lenape forced the settlers to abandon their village, but they continually returned, expanding their farmlands, widening and “improving” the Weckquasgeck Trail, eventually renaming it “The King’s Road.”2 In 1691, three years after Colonel Stephen Van Cortlandt negotiated a purchase that displaced the Lenape from their “primeval homes, fields and fisheries” in northern Manhattan, New Harlem’s landowners drew lots for parcels on Jochem Pieter’s Hills, soon to be called Harlem Heights. The lot containing the future Minnie’s Land fell to Jan Dyckman, whose family would farm it over the next seventy-five years until his grandson divided and sold it in 1767. John Watkins, a British import merchant with business interests in the West Indies, bought the northern portion, and British Major General John Maunsell bought the southern. The two men’s wives, Lydia Watkins and Elizabeth Maunsell, were sisters, two of six daughters of New York merchant Richard Stillwell and his wife, Mercy Sands. The six sisters’ families and descendants would weave through the Harlem Heights narrative into the twentieth century.3 Watkins built a farmhouse at present-day 156th Street, with the Maunsells’s spacious house about a quarter-mile south and Mount Morris, the colonnaded mansion that Colonel Roger Morris and his wife, Mary Philippse, had built overlooking the Harlem River, a quarter-mile north. The three couples were all acquainted—Morris and Maunsell had served together in the Seven Years’ War—and had multiple connections to the

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colony’s other powerful families. As was customary on Harlem Heights, they positioned their houses to capture the best panoramic views, but oriented to the north-south passageway, by then known as the Kingsbridge Road, for easy access to the city ten miles south. John and Lydia Watkins lived on their farm year-round, but the Maunsells migrated to town for the winter season and returned to the heights in the summer to escape the city’s heat and perennial epidemics. In the city, they leased a “pleasant, healthy and convenient house and five lots of ground, containing 26 acres of land” in Greenwich, not far from Chelsea, the home of another Stillwell sister, Mary and her husband, Colonel Thomas Clarke, who had also served with Maunsell in the Seven Years’ War. The Clarkes’s daughter Charity would inherit Chelsea and live there with her husband, the Right Reverend Benjamin Moore, second Episcopal bishop of New York, rector of Trinity Church, and president of Columbia College (later University). Their son Clement Clarke Moore, a writer, professor, and theologian, is most remembered for his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” (Rounding out these entwined family connections, parishioners at the Church of the Intercession still honor Moore and his poem at a yearly Christmas festival in Trinity Cemetery, which occupies land his grand-aunt and -uncle Watkins once owned.)4 In the late 1760s, Maunsell sold a large part of his Harlem farm to St. Croix resident Charles Aitken and lent Watkins money to expand his property with the thirty-acre “Low farm” that lay between it and the Morris estate. Maunsell held the Low farm as collateral. Besides additional meadows, the purchase gave Watkins a large marsh on the eastern side of the Harlem River containing Spartina patens, an indigenous saltmeadow cordgrass that was an important source of fodder, animal bedding, and mulch.5 When fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Maunsell boarded a ship bound for England with loyalists Richard and Mary Morris, leaving his wife behind. By all appearances, he had cast his lot with the crown, but in fact, he was working to “stop the Effusion of Blood, and the Harms and Calamaties of a Civil War, which [had] already had such terrifying Effects.” Although he was unsuccessful in his peacemaking attempts, he did secure “an appointment at Kinsale, in Ireland, which relieved him of fighting against his friends and family in America.” Once he retrieved his wife from New York, they resided in Ireland for the war’s duration, maintaining contact with their far-flung family despite the difficulties of communicating.6

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John Watkins had also traveled to the British Isles “in order to protect interests he had just inherited. He thought that the war would be of short duration and that a way would be found to reconcile differences between the American provinces and the mother country.” That, of course, didn’t happen, and his wife, Lydia, left to her own resources, fled with her younger children to her sister Anne Bartow de Vismes at the Hermitage, near HoHoKus, New Jersey, leaving her slaves to protect the family’s house and possessions. Lydia’s son John enlisted and served with the Continental Army, while Anne’s son-in-law, James Marcus Prevost, died fighting for the British in Georgia and South Carolina. When his widow, Theodosia Bartow Prevost, learned that George Washington was near HoHoKus, she prudently invited him to use the Hermitage as his headquarters, a move that would guarantee the women and children a modicum of protection. Washington’s retinue included young John Watkins as well as his superior officer (and Theodosia’s future husband), Aaron Burr. Despite these varied and shifting allegiances, the six Stillwell sisters and their interwoven families managed to preserve their strong family ties during the conflict.7 In the summer of 1776, when Lydia Watkins and her children abandoned their farm for New Jersey, the Continental Army was constructing fortifications in northern Manhattan where Washington focused his efforts, realizing that he had little chance of defending the city at the foot of the island. He confiscated Roger and Mary Morris’s mansion for his headquarters, and his junior officers commandeered the Watkins farmhouse, which sat between their second and third lines of defense across the island at present-day 153rd and 162nd streets. Despite this strategic planning, when the British reached Harlem Heights in November, they pushed Washington’s army across the river into New Jersey with minimal effort. Hessian mercenaries under commanding officer Wilhelm von Knyphausen occupied northern Manhattan for the duration of the war, establishing encampments around Harlem Heights and renaming Fort Washington in honor of Knyphausen. He replaced Washington in the Morris house, and his officers bivouacked at the Watkins farm, constructing additional barracks around the house. For decades afterward, farmers tilling the soil unearthed bullets, buttons, bits of crockery, and other reminders of the battles and occupation. Coping with exceptionally cold winters during those years, the Hessians denuded Harlem Heights of its trees, floating logs down the Hudson for use as firewood in the city below. When George Washington passed up the river in July 1781 “to reconnoitre the Enemy Posts and Encampments at the North end of York Island,” he recorded that

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the landscape was “totally stripped of Trees, & wood of every kind; but low bushes (apparently as high as a Mans waste) appear in places which were covered with Wood in the year 1776.” In the hollow on the western slope of the Watkins farm, he observed that “a few Tents and many Dragoon Horses seemed to be at Pasture in the low land.” By the time Audubon bought this property six decades later, reforestation was so complete, family and visitors alike remarked on its towering elms, oaks, and pines.8 After the war, British troops occupied the island until Evacuation Day, November 25, 1783, when General Washington made a triumphant return to the city, reversing the route of his retreat and reclaiming Fort Washington on Harlem Heights before moving south to the city. Until then, mercenaries quartered on the Watkins farm, and the family lived temporarily at Chelsea with the Moores. John Watkins died a few weeks before the last troops left the island, so his widow turned to her brother-in-law John Maunsell for advice on reclaiming her property—and most likely to assess his feelings about the outstanding mortgage. Still in England with Elizabeth, he advised her to consult Aaron Burr, who had recently married their niece Theodosia Prevost. Perhaps to set Lydia’s mind at ease about the mortgage, Maunsell concluded his letter, “You may rest assured that my wife and myself are your sincerest and most disinterested friends, and your happiness shall be our first and only object.”9 Burr, a practicing attorney in New York, must have advised Lydia to liquidate her assets and pay her husband’s debts, because advertisements for the farm’s sale soon appeared in several newspapers. One, from the Independent Journal, enumerated selling points that would continually attract new residents to northern Manhattan into the twenty-first century: an elevated location, beautiful views, and access to the water, all at an affordable price. To be Sold. The Farm on the Heights of Harlem, belonging to the Estate of the late John Watkins, containing about 300 Acres, bounded by the East and North River, where are plenty of Fish, Oysters, etc., and is remarkably well watered by living springs. The healthiness of the situation, with the beautiful prospect it commands, renders it an inviting purchase to a gentleman: The goodness of the land, and the large quantity of hay ground on the Farm, will make it a profitable one to a Farmer.—It will be sold as it is at present, or divided into such parts as will suit the purchasers. For terms apply to Mrs. Lydia Watkins on the Premises.10

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The property didn’t sell either in parts or as a whole, and New York’s Chancery Court ordered it auctioned several times over the next few years. Lydia’s son, Charles, finally bought it at auction in 1792 for 2,000 pounds and immediately conveyed it to his uncle John Maunsell for the same amount, leaving the Watkins family with the cash and Maunsell with the property. Despite the transfer, Lydia remained on the farm until her death nearly twenty years later. Well before then, in 1795, when Maunsell was seventy years old, he wrote her that he wanted to take advantage of the “unforeseen and unexpected high price of land” and exchange the Low farm for “a house in town, an object much to be desired by me, and which, without selling this small farm I could not accomplish for want of sufficiency of cash.” Before he could sell any part of the farm, he died, leaving his property to his widow. Elizabeth Maunsell established herself on the Low farm, in a comfortable house slightly north of her sister’s, that came along with a barn, shed, hen house, and stone house for storing ash, a necessary ingredient for soap making.11

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Given their close relationship and similar needs, the sisters likely integrated their households for daily as well as seasonal chores. The Gradual Emancipation Act of 1799 freed slave children born after July 4 in that year but required them to work as indentured servants until they were adults. Even so, the two sisters still owned slaves and relied on them to maintain their households and farms, as did their neighbors Alexander Hamilton and Samuel Bradhurst. In 1800, the enumerator for the Federal Census counted eight slaves in the Watkins household and four for Maunsell. In 1810, as emancipation took effect, the numbers had dropped to six and three, respectively. Each of the households also numbered several individuals in the “All other free persons” column, which could have included freedmen as well as boarders. Lydia Watkins’s 1811 obituary suggests as much: “Hospitality dwelt in her house, industry and prudent economy secured its residence; and to the indigent and necessitous passenger, daily discharges of her benevolence.” With proximity to the Kingsbridge Road, which was now a leg of the Albany Post Road, travelers to and from New York City may have stopped for overnight accommodations, just as they did at Mount Morris, a wayside inn known as Calumet Hall, until 1810 when French merchant Stephen Jumel and his wife, Eliza Bowen Jumel, bought it.12 Lydia suffered from ill health in the few years before her 1811 death and was probably unaware that John Randel Jr. had surveyed her farm on behalf of the Commissioners of Streets and Roads in the City of New York. Frustrated at its inability to impose order on New York’s rapid development after the war, the city aldermen appealed to the state legislature for help in 1807. In response, the legislature appointed a three-man commission of Simeon De Witt, John Rutherford, and Governeur Morris to lay out “streets, roads, public squares of such extent and direction as to them shall seem most conducive to public good.” The commissioners hired Randel, who with a team of assistants spent the next three years surveying the island and then preparing a map of the commissioners’ plan, which they unveiled in April 1811.13 Though many of the actual streets would not appear for decades, the regular grid, with its east-west streets crossing south-north avenues, established a framework for charting the city’s northward growth into the twentieth century. The commissioners ended their grid at 155th Street, so part of the Watkins farm lay inside it and part lay out. They acknowledged that some might wonder “that the whole island has not been laid out as a city,” while others might be amused that the plan “provided space for a greater population than is collected at any spot on this side of China.” They believed, however, that the space was adequate because it was “improbable

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that (for centuries to come) the grounds north of Harlem Flat will be covered with houses . . . to have gone further might have furnished materials to the pernicious spirit of speculation.” The city would, in fact, grow beyond 155th Street in less than a century, and land speculation in northern Manhattan was never dormant.14 Lydia Watkins died that same spring at the age of eighty-one after “a long and painful illness, which she bore with great firmness and patience.” Despite having forfeited land two decades earlier, she died a wealthy woman, still engaged in farming. She left bequests of clothing and jewels to her married daughters, Elizabeth Dunkin and Lydia Beekman, and directed her executors to sell her “Livestock, Hay, Grain, Farming Utensils, Chaise, Sleigh,” and other property. After they invested $2,500 “for the support and maintenance” of her unmarried daughter Mary, the remainder and the income from a lot in lower Manhattan would be divided among her daughters, her son Samuel, and her late son Charles’s five children. She left her eldest son, John, her “blessing only,” because he had “already had a large proportion of his father’s Estate to the injury of [her] other children.” In a codicil, she left each of John’s sons $25.00, when they came of age.15 Lydia’s will also stipulated that within a month after her death, her executors were to free her slaves Hannon and Jane and three of their four children. Their son Peter was to serve Lydia’s son Samuel until he was twenty-eight years old, when he was also to be freed. Robin, who possibly was already a freedman, would be “at L[iber]ty to go where he pleases & to live with any of my children whom he may choose to serve, but that he shall not in any wise be sold.”16 War worries were already sweeping the young nation the summer that Lydia Watkins died, and by the following year, New Yorkers were organizing work crews to repair old breastworks and forts, especially those on Harlem Heights. Throughout the War of 1812, New Yorkers lived in fear of an invasion, particularly in the spring and summer of 1814, after the defeat of Napoleon’s armies freed the British to focus more resources on the American conflict. By that summer, the “Special Committee of Defense” had notified the ruling Common Council that the militias should establish an encampment on Harlem Heights that would “prevent the approach of the enemy in the most exposed quarters; will ensure the men to arms and discipline; will serve as places of rendezvous for the militia in case of alarm, and will give a decided tone and countenance to public confidence.” Alarmed at the burning of Washington City and warships off Sandy Hook, a brigade took position on Harlem Heights in September, reinforced by several thousand New Yorkers from the state’s interior. With few preparations

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made “to provide for so large a body of men,” local inhabitants let the officers and men use “their dwellings and barns” and gave them “vegetables and food.”17 While the war was raging, Robert Macomb was engaged in his own local battle, one less bloody but arguably of much greater consequence for northern Manhattan. In 1813, he petitioned the Common Council for permission to construct a bridge and dam between his property in Westchester County (present-day Bronx) and Bussings Point, which lay in line with the grid’s 155th Street. Macomb’s immediate purpose was capitalizing on water rights his father had purchased on Spuyten Duyvil Creek at Manhattan’s northern end, but his actions would disrupt population growth on Harlem Heights for decades to come. The legislature granted Macomb’s request for a dam but denied a bridge because it had awarded those rights to Lewis Morris. Macomb built a grist mill on his property, dammed the Harlem River to power it, and ran a roadway across the dam’s top that, by any name, functioned as a bridge. Despite provisions for a lock, the dam blocked traffic on the river, flooded the salt meadows north of it, and reduced the flow on its southern side to a piddling stream, all to the annoyance of Macomb’s neighbors on both shores. Before the state legislature could consider his 1817 request for tolls, the venture failed, and the Renwick family bought the mill and dam at auction. They fared little better than Macomb, in large part because incensed neighbors attempted to dismantle the dam by ramming it with large boats. In 1839, under court order,

Macomb’s Dam Bridge from Valentine’s Manual, circa 1864 (Author’s collection)

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Renwick constructed a draw that rendered the dam useless, though the name remained the “Macomb’s Dam Bridge.” More important than the dam or the name, the bridge provided easy access to the Morrisania section of lower Westchester County, and over the next century, it encouraged real estate development and population growth there to the detriment of northern Manhattan. Elizabeth Maunsell survived her younger sister by four years. When she died in 1815, she left her northern Manhattan property to three of the surviving Watkins children, stipulating that they should have equal shares, but that her nephew Samuel would have first refusal on her house. The forty-seven acres he chose included her house, his mother’s house, the outbuildings, and seven acres of salt meadow. Lydia Beekman, who lived at “Mount Pleasant” with her husband, James Beekman Jr., took the southern forty-seven acres, and Elizabeth Dunkin, named for her benevolent aunt, received the middle forty-seven, encompassing the future Minnie’s Land.18 Samuel Watkins, who had earned his medical degree at Rutgers, may have lived part of the year on Harlem Heights while conducting his apothecary business in the city, but by 1828, he had permanently relocated to Salubria, New York, a settlement at the head of Seneca Lake that his brother John had founded in the mid-1790s as an experiment in topography’s effect on agricultural colonization. Samuel practiced medicine in Salubria, which he renamed Jefferson. Honoring his decades of service, his former neighbors changed the town’s name to Watkins after his death in 1851 (later to Watkins Glen). Elizabeth Dunkin was also an absentee owner, living for many years in Chester, Pennsylvania, before moving to her daughter’s home in Albany. Neighboring landowner Richard Tone leased and farmed her Harlem Heights property. In August 1835, she sold the entire forty-seven acres to James Conner, a printer who had earned a fortune from a stereotype edition of the Bible that he had produced for the American Bible Society. Conner was by all appearances exactly the kind of land speculator the street commissioners had sought to avoid when they ended their 1811 grid at 155th Street.19 In 1835, when Connor bought Dunkin’s land and increased his total holdings to nearly ninety acres, New York City’s Common Council and Board of Aldermen had just resumed debate on establishing a public cemetery far beyond the city’s northern edge. Within days of Conner’s purchase, a group of citizens petitioned the Common Council to establish a permanent cemetery in Manhattan, modeled on Mount Auburn in Boston and Père Lachaise in Paris, a landscaped “rural cemetery” that blended tombs and funerary monuments with forest trees, water, and suitably dry soil for interments. Conner, professing to have considered establishing a

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public cemetery for several years—he had prepared plans for walks, plantings, and sites for tombs on the Watkins farm—offered to sell his newly purchased land to the city. When the council asked for a survey of the soil’s suitability, Richard Tone (who had leased Elizabeth Dunkin’s farmland and likely continued the arrangement with Conner), tested twentynine places “to the depth of ten feet” and found an appropriate soil except in two spots toward the “lowest part of the land.” Despite finding a rock in one of the openings, he stated that “not another piece can be found on this Island, so well adapted for the purpose of a Public Cemetery.” Given the amount of Manhattan schist that still protrudes from the area and Tone’s relationship with Connor, that seems like an overly optimistic assessment, but the council accepted it at face value and moved forward with its plans.20 The cemetery, as the aldermen envisioned it, would have stretched across the width of the island from river to river and incorporated all of the numbered streets and avenues between 151st and 155th streets except Tenth Avenue and the Kingsbridge Road, which were already laid out and in use. Apparently believing the 1811 street commissioners’ prediction that the island’s population would not expand beyond 155th Street for several hundred years, the aldermen claimed “no serious detriment to the public would result” from restricting access to northern Manhattan. In an era when water travel afforded the quickest passage around the island, they couldn’t envision a day when the journey would be quicker over land. The proposed acreage, which would be “enclosed and could be set apart and perpetually appropriated to the uses and purposes of a public Cemetery,” offered “a very high elevation of land, rising some fifty or sixty feet above high water mark, and from its summit commanding a most extensive and beautiful view of the Hudson and of the surrounding country.” With natural trees and shrubbery that could “easily be much improved and ornamented by art,” no other site on the island “could be rendered more attractive by being tastefully laid out and ornamented with tombs and shaded walks.”21 The following summer, perhaps anxious that the aldermen had studied and debated the site for a year without reaching a decision, Conner sold a half share in his land to Richard F. Carman, who was already accumulating real estate in northern Manhattan. Verifiable details about Carman’s life are sparse. The legend he fostered and that survives him is that from humble beginnings as a poor (possibly orphaned) boxcutter’s apprentice he learned carpentry and made his first fortune rebuilding houses and businesses destroyed in New York City’s Great Fire of 1835. He then made a

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View of Trinity Cemetery from Benson J. Losing’s The Hudson, From the Wilderness to the Sea, 1866 (Author’s collection)

second fortune in insurance and banking before turning to the favorite gamble of the nineteenth century, land speculation.22 In the fall of 1836, the cemetery venture failed when negotiations with the aldermen came to a screeching halt, leaving Conner and Carman with heavily mortgaged land. The summer of 1839, the two men lost forty-three of their acres when the New York Bowery Fire Insurance Company foreclosed. Conner sold his remaining land to Carman and abandoned land speculation in northern Manhattan. Carman continued buying. Less than two years later, the Bowery Fire Insurance Company sold the forty-three acres it had repossessed. On October 1, 1841, while Audubon purchased fourteen of those acres for Minnie’s Land, Carman repurchased the remaining twenty-nine. Before a year had passed, he sold twenty-four of

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them—all the land between 153rd and 155th streets west of Tenth Avenue—to Trinity Church for $9,576.00. The church’s vestry then hired James Renwick Jr., architect for St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Grace Church, and the Smithsonian Institution Castle Building in Washington, D.C., to lay it out as a cemetery. It would be the only rural cemetery ever established in Manhattan.23

3

Arcadia Found . . .

For five years, merely half a decade, the Audubons enjoyed their bucolic existence in Minnie’s Land, if not entirely isolated from the city’s “hot bricks and pestilential vapors,” at least comfortable in their quiet corner of Manhattan, nine miles from the city’s edge and a quarter-mile from any traffic on Tenth Avenue. Their distance from town and the benefits of subsistence farming encouraged self-sufficiency. Audubon’s bankruptcy was decades in the past, but near in memory, and for Lucy, a constant and lifelong fear. The convenience of mercantile enterprise in Carman’s village at the top of the hill was still several years in the future, so the Audubons had their own dairy, smoke house, and carpenter’s shop and made their own candles in “tin candle moulds, for six candles in a group.” Step by step, individually and as a family unit, the Audubons and their cadre of house and farm workers tamed their wooded hillside, every choice and chore strengthening their bond with the land, while gradually erasing its rugged individuality.1 Though Minnie’s Land evoked many of the pleasures the Audubons had enjoyed in Henderson, by the end of the decade, it had brought them the same financial grief. The cost of living remained relatively stable in the 1840s, and prices for many items even dropped, but with ten grandchildren by 1849, the family’s overall expenses had increased, and the time had already passed when Victor and John would need houses of their own. Insurance, a necessary expense in an era of frame structures and locally organized firefighting units, was a persistent expense, both at Minnie’s

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Land and at the lower Manhattan office, and taxes came due like clockwork. Low real estate prices during the depressed years of the early 1840s had favored Audubon when he bought Minnie’s Land, but in response to falling values, the city government had increased the tax rate, “by 38 percent in 1842,” the first year that Lucy Audubon owned Minnie’s Land. Mid-decade, ever hopeful that money was around the corner (despite Audubon’s increasingly irregular behavior), the family continued employing a large staff and hosting a steady stream of visitors at Minnie’s Land.2 From the start, John took charge of the farm, substantially aiding the family’s financial independence with produce from his fields and gardens; eggs, milk, poultry, beef, and pork from domestic animals he raised; and fish and shellfish from the river. He and his men tilled and planted the fields on the eastern, flattest side of the property and west of there, just where the land began to drop in uneven terraces to the river, planted “nearly two hundred peach, pear, apple, quince, apricot, plum and nectarine trees”—some coming from Audubon’s new friend from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, nineteen-year- old Spencer Fullerton Baird (future assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution). Eventually, John dug a flower garden on the east side of the homestead and enclosed it in a picket fence with an arched gateway covered in trumpet vines. Whether “securing the road from washing” (“Johnny’s Road,” as his father called it) or raising “a tolerable lot of ducks chickens turkeys &c-plenty of peas, beans, squash, cucumbers, strawberries, raspberries, potatoes . . . [and] a good quantity of corn, melons, tomatos,” John seemed very content with his new role in the family and was highly skilled in dealing with his workmen. “He had the rare gift of keeping men friends, while he was perfectly understood to be the master,” his daughter Maria later wrote, “they were thoroughly at home with him, yet never familiar.”3 When John wasn’t occupied on the farm, he manipulated the camera lucida for “the little work” reductions or painted specimens for the Quadrupeds. Painting the Quadrupeds “from nature” as Audubon had done with the Birds meant that in the early years “bears, wolves, foxes, deer, moose, elk, and many smaller quadrupeds” lived in enclosures up the hill near the fields and orchards. The children steered clear of the larger animals but fed potato slices to a muskrat that “would pile all that he couldn’t eat in the corner of his cage.” A captive deer proved particularly tedious, so Victor shut it up “in the chicken yard,” but the deer continued escaping and grazing among John’s crops and gardens.4 Audubon took credit for most of the Quadrupeds animals and logically so, since he was the brand that sold the subscriptions, but John painted

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nearly half of the specimens and Victor most of the backgrounds, sometimes on the same canvas and sometimes as two separate works that the lithographer combined into one image. Until John built a separate painting house, the Audubon men equipped a painting room on the homestead’s first floor, a convenience that proved hazardous when the model for one of the paintings drove the ladies out of the house “for a more congenial atmosphere.” When the Audubon men finished a canvas, they hung it on the wall to dry, converting the rambling farmhouse into an ever-changing art gallery.5 Victor managed business operations in an office Audubon opened at 77 William Street, a few blocks north of the Hall brothers’ import emporium, but quickly wearied of the travel and preferred “being in town only twice a week” if he could avoid going more often. Occasionally, he hitched a ride downtown in Carman’s buggy. Victor, who had apprenticed to his uncle William Bakewell and related to him as a surrogate father, gravitated to businessmen like Carman. His letters to Audubon in the early 1840s brim with news and gossip about his comings and goings. “Carman is building a small home nearly opposite to Camby’s, on the Haarlem River side of the road. . . . I rode down with Carman today. . . . Carman has got a sail boat in our care—about twice as big as ours and very well finished but I do not yet think her a very fast boat. . . . Carman has gone off with his wife and daughter on a tour.”6 Even though income from “the little work” provided the family a healthy revenue stream, Victor (like his mother) constantly worried about the family’s cash flow and the vagaries of a subscription business. “There is no change in our financial state,” he wrote his father in 1842. “We are as poor as rats just now, altho’ so much is due to us from various quarters.” He sometimes thought of other, steadier occupations. “I have as yet not determined what I shall do for a livelyhood & indeed cannot fix on anything before my Fathers work is completed & his plans decided,” he had confided to his uncle William in 1837. “You may therefore judge how comfortable the assurance of something quite equal to my wants & wishes must be to me.” 7 Chatelaine at last, Lucy welcomed a steady stream of guests, who might come for dinner or for months at a time. “Dr. Mouton & son from Phila. spent one evening and night with us and we were much pleased.” “We had a visit from Colo[nel James Watson] Webb & his wife, & Sir Wm Stewart.” “Dr. [James] Trudeau was out at Minnie’s Land night before last with his wife.” “Mr. [Edmund] Barry is here, and leaves for Boston tomorrow.” The second-floor bedroom above the dining room—a choice room with

ARCADIA FOUND . . . ·

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Romanticized View of the Audubon Homestead from Valentine’s Manual, 1864 (Author’s collection)

southeast exposure enjoying the first morning light and sun all day—“was occupied by various connections of the family, changing from time to time.” Some of the third-floor rooms were for servants, but “the others were for visitors, and they were never empty.” One of Lucy’s cousins visited so frequently, the grandchildren dubbed her bed chamber “Cousin Atterbury’s room.” Caroline’s brother James and his family were also frequent visitors. “Mr. Hall is talking of going to town next week with his family as his Brother wants to sail on the 4th Septbr. . . . Mr. Hall and family are quite well and were here today. . . . We have Mr. And Mrs. Hall with us yet and they will probably not leave for a day or two.”8 Lucy, never one to demur, had great confidence in her nursing skills and promoted Minnie’s Land as an Asclepion, where her relatives might find a cure for any ailment. “Try and come to this sheltered spot of ours and see what change of air, and sea bathing which we have at our door, and which has benefitted so many,” she wrote to her brother William in 1845. “Besides you know I am a pretty good nurse and I hope you will persuade Alicia to come.” Alicia Bakewell eventually heeded the call from Louisville—and from Charleston, so did a host of Bachmans.9

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Tied to the Audubons through family, business, and friendship, the Bachmans had ample reasons for visiting Minnie’s Land, but as often as not, they arrived with medical problems. Jane, the third daughter among the fourteen children, made annual pilgrimages to New York for consultations with renowned “occulist” Dr. Edward Delafield, founder of the New York Eye Infirmary (operating today as the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai). She was already at Minnie’s Land in June 1842 when her mother and aunt arrived for consultations with Rhinebeck physician Federal Vanderburgh. Harriet Bachman suffered from tic douloureux, a chronic facial neuralgia, and Maria Martin endured headaches and various other nervous complaints—“my mind has always been too powerful a stimulant to my physical organization,” she once wrote. They brought the young and “rather delicate” Catherine Bachman along because Maria thought a short change in scenery might benefit her. By August, Harriet and Maria were under the care of Audubon friend and Quadruped subscriber Dr. James Trudeau. Beyond some aggressive treatments—Trudeau clipped Harriet’s palate to remedy her cough and applied electrical currents to relieve her facial pain—his “teetotal system” was not far removed from Vanderburgh’s homeopathic remedies.10 Amidst these comings and goings, Audubon’s travels dictated the cadence of family life as they had for decades. During the family’s first year at Minnie’s Land, Audubon was away from the farm as often as not, canvassing the American northeast into Canada, looking for subscribers to the Quadrupeds and “the little work” and purchasers for several remaining sets of the original Birds. In early July 1842, with Bachman’s encouragement, Audubon began planning a western expedition that would attempt to follow Lewis and Clark’s footsteps over the Rocky Mountains. His purpose was observing quadrupeds in their habitats and collecting skins for study and painting, but this time, adventure lay at the heart of the expedition. As a preliminary, he wound his way down the Atlantic seaboard to Washington, D.C., asking for letters of introduction. He found Richmond “almost empty, the greater portion of our subscribers absent,” though he did collect from a few men “who had not previously paid and of whom our Friend General Richardson had no good opinion.”11 Audubon then reversed course and, after a brief stay at Minnie’s Land, traveled into New England. En route, he learned that Caroline had given birth to a son on August 18 and named him John James Audubon, but his first namesake survived only one day. Caroline was still recuperating when Audubon stopped by Minnie’s Land for a brief visit after New England but joined the family on the lawn to wave at his steamer as he journeyed north

ARCADIA FOUND . . . ·

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Croton Water Celebration, 1842 (From the New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl .org/items/510d47da-231a-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)

to Quebec. In mid- October, around the time Harriet and Maria left for home, New York turned out to celebrate the opening of the Croton Aqueduct and its long-awaited supply of potable water. Croton water did not immediately replace the Audubons’s springs and wells, but in the long run, it fostered northern Manhattan’s urbanization; without a remedy for firefighting, filthy streets, and water-borne epidemics like cholera and yellow fever, “New York’s population could not have doubled between 1835 and 1845,” and its citizenry would have had no compelling need to push inexorably up the island.12 One Sunday morning that same fall, New York journalist Parke Godwin hiked the nine miles from the city’s edge to Minnie’s Land for a visit with Audubon in his retreat. The essay Godwin crafted after his visit contrasted the “town with its masses of perpetual unquiet life” and Audubon’s rustic farm, his house “not entirely adapted to the scenery, yet simple and unpretending in its architecture, and beautifully embowered amid elms and oaks.” It also memorialized Audubon’s indictment of city life.13 . . . I wonder that men can consent to swelter and fret their lives away amid those hot bricks and pestilent vapors, when the woods and fields are all so near? It would kill me soon to be confined in such a

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prison-house; and when I am forced to make an occasional visit there, it fills me with loathing and sadness.14 As Christmas approached, Victor’s mourning for Mary Eliza formally came to an end when he proposed to Georgianna Mallory, who like Caroline was of English ancestry, though her family had lived in the United States for decades. The Audubons had known the Mallorys in 1820 when they were in Cincinnati (Audubon once autographed Georgianna’s sister’s album “To Eliza Mallory the Dear Daughter of a Dear and highly respected friend. . . .”); Victor took Georgianna’s brother Henry on as an office apprentice, and the extended Mallory family, like the Halls, entwined their lives with the Audubons’s and treated Minnie’s Land as a second home.15 The Hudson’s cool summer breezes turned into window-rattling winds in winter, but John had built the homestead to remain snug, and the cold did not penetrate the family’s first Christmas celebration there. On Christmas Eve, George Burgess and Clifton Augrave, an Audubon friend and Quadrupeds subscriber, traveled to Harlem on the street railway and walked the rest of the way to Minnie’s Land in the biting cold. They found the house full of holiday guests and Christmas revels, which as usual included music. In an age of limited access to public performances, people routinely made their own music. Musical skill (if not necessarily talent) was a status symbol, as was posing for a family portrait around the piano, often the most expensive piece of furniture in the parlor. Lucy played the piano, keeping hers tuned even when other financial needs were more pressing, and taught her grandchildren to play as well. (Hattie practiced religiously for an hour daily into her ninth decade.) Audubon, who in his early life had taught dancing lessons, played the violin and flageolet (a woodwind member of the fipple flute family); Victor played both the piano and violin; and Caroline had “an exceedingly sweet and well cultivated voice.” John played the violin until a few days before his death and possessed a unique singing voice “capable of expression in any key of which the vocal organs are capable.” Gifted in mimicry, he often led family revels.16 Georgianna wasn’t part of the Audubons’s Christmas feast that year, but in late February, her family joined Victor’s to celebrate their marriage at Saint Stephen’s Church on the corner of what are now Broome and Chrystie streets. Two weeks later, Audubon and a small party left New York City for his western expedition, which would keep him away from home for the next nine months. New York City’s winter dragged into March that year, with “the seventh snowstorm of the season” arriving on the sixteenth and blocking the Audubon’s road—“4 feet deep in many places.” The wind was so

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fierce, “it carried off the roof of the Catholic church at Haarlem!” Victor traveled to the office by sleigh and found “the streets in some places filled with snow 3 and 4 feet deep—so that they have cut passages to cross at in some instances.” When temperatures finally lifted toward the end of the month, John repaired the seine to reap a harvest of shad that were headed up the Hudson to spawn. Fishing proved abysmal that year. John and his men caught “only a few flounders” near the shore, so he bought shad from fishermen, who caught them farther out in the river. He delayed planting and began the season repairing the road, which wound down the steep hill like a goat path, crossing the incline at angles to lessen the grade and reduce erosion. Even so, melting snow had carried parts of it into the Hudson.17 At the end of April, the Halls arrived for another lengthy visit while “busy fixing at their new abode” in Manhattanville, about a mile south of the twenty-four-acre cemetery that Trinity Church had opened adjacent to Minnie’s Land on May 1. As soon as the weather broke, John manured a garden near the homestead, planted eighty new apple trees, and began building a dock, which Lucy complained was “a miserable concern” that robbed her of the previous year’s swimming place. Victor diplomatically wrote his father that while the dock was “rather unsightly,” it was useful for workaday tasks like hauling away loads of manure that John didn’t need for the farm. It was also practical for hailing steamers. After one stopped for an Audubon guest, Victor wrote his father that he could land at the dock rather than travel all the way to the island’s southern tip, as long as he alerted the captain before he bought his ticket.18 Despite a scorching drought that summer, John provided baskets of vegetables and berries well into the fall. He hatched plenty of chickens and turkeys (but had little luck with his ducklings), and he and Victor tested some homegrown beef on a “salting apparatus” that George Burgess hoped to patent in the United States with their financial backing. The apparatus did the job, but the business went by the wayside when John calculated the high expense of patenting and producing it.19 The morning of August 19, Caroline delivered a baby girl. With no Episcopal church nearby, Edmund Barry, who had married John and Caroline and who visited the farm occasionally, traveled from Jersey City to baptize her “Maria Rebecca,” honoring John’s first wife, whose portrait hung over the washstand in his and Caroline’s room. Throughout her life, Maria would claim pride of place as the first Audubon grandchild born in Minnie’s Land.20 The six-year depression following the Panic of 1837 had inhibited land transactions, but by 1843, Samuel Watkins was ready to sell his large property holdings in northern Manhattan, including the acreage he inherited

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from his aunt Elizabeth Maunsell in 1816. Initially, he intended leaving the land to his wife, Cynthia Ann, charging her with chartering a female college to “elevate women to an equality of rights and privileges with men.” After his 1843 sales, he modified his will, asking her to use part of her inheritance to “promote the intellectual and moral elevation of her own sex.” While the bequest’s wording suggests that the budding women’s suffrage movement prompted his largesse, he may also have been taking a paternalistic attitude toward his young wife and her prospects after his death. He was nearing seventy years old when they married in 1840; she was twenty-six. Although Cynthia Watkins did not establish a women’s college in northern Manhattan, other institutions would take advantage of the region’s space and affordability, and by the end of the century, the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, the Hospital for Incurables, and the New York Juvenile Asylum had established headquarters there.21 Victor and Georgianna bought a small portion of the Watkins’s property in 1843, enlarging Minnie’s Land to just over twenty-one acres and squaring the original triangle into three interlocking rectangles. Their parcels doubled John’s tillable land at the top of the hill and added two acres to “the point,” which jutted into the river and afforded spectacular views north and south. The old Watkins farmhouse came along with the deal, but soon disappeared from maps, so was probably unsalvageable. Carman, who had retired to Fort Washington to “turn farmer,” also added a strip of the Watkins farm to Carmansville. Matthew Morgan (another Quadrupeds subscriber) and his wife, Lucinda, bought the bulk of the Watkins farm on speculation and resold a portion of it six years later for three times what they had paid for the entirety.22 A new grandchild, an expanded Minnie’s Land, and a cemetery outside his bedroom window were changes awaiting Audubon when he arrived home on Monday morning, November 6, 1843. He traveled uptown on the Harlem Railroad and rode the rest of the way in a carriage. John’s road branched toward the bottom of the hill, so when the family heard carriage wheels “some ran one way and some another, each hoping to be the first to see him; but he had left the carriage at the top of the hill, and came on foot straight down the steepest part, so that those who remained on the piazza had his first kiss.” Dressed in a green blanket coat that highlighted his flowing white hair and beard, Audubon was twenty-two pounds heavier than when he had left home. John immediately demanded that he keep his hair long for a few more days so that he could paint his portrait.23

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Audubon had returned long on yarns and short on valuable specimens and observations. Bachman couldn’t hide his frustration. “I have been disappointed and mortified at my not having been able to receive from you a single word of information in regard to the animals collected on your western expedition,” he complained from Charleston. Audubon shrugged off his friend’s grumbling and, in early 1844, was off again canvassing. He had always seen the Quadrupeds as a source of income for his sons and was now ready to hand the project over to them. “He painted little after his return from the Yellowstone River,” Georgianna wrote in her journal. Looking at his son’s animal paintings, he said, “Ah, Johnny, no need for the old man to paint any more when you can do work like that.” Aside from pride in his son’s abilities, Audubon was probably relieved that he could paint when and what he wanted. He would sell subscriptions and let his sons and Bachman figure out how to produce the lithographs and text. At the end of May, after they published the last five numbers of “the little work,” the men turned their full attention to the Quadrupeds.24 John’s second spring of farming was far more congenial than his first. By May, the field and garden were flourishing, James Clements (one of the workmen) and his wife had a new baby girl, John’s dog Phoebe delivered nine pups, and at the top of the hill, “the potatoes &c [were] up, the peas in blossom, and the carrots, up!” Fishing with the seine only produced “eels & flounders” that summer, game was scarce, and John’s fowl didn’t lay well, but his crops flourished and his fruits and vegetables produced so prodigiously, he sold “a little garden stuff every day to the neighbours to help pay expenses on the garden.” (In his spare time, he painted “a portrait of the Piano tuner’s wife.”) Grubs on the nectarine trees were the only orchard failure; Victor and Georgianna’s brother Henry Mallory dug them out, but the trees died anyway.25 The New York City Board of Aldermen allocated funds for improving 158th Street from Tenth Avenue west to the river that year. When open, it would provide direct access from the homestead up to Tenth Avenue on a city-maintained street. As Minnie’s Land grew “better and better, prettier and prettier,” it evolved farther and farther from the rocky hillside that had originally drawn Audubon to northern Manhattan, but none of the Audubons seemed to mind.26 In preparation for that season’s guests, Lucy oversaw Caroline, Georgianna, and the ever-changing staff of female servants turn “the carpets upside down . . . tho’ not the house,” Victor observed in one of his wryer moments. Before a couple of months had passed, Lucy would fire one servant, promote another, and hire a new cook. With a stream of visitors on

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the way to Minnie’s Land, the family assembled on the river’s edge to wave as Audubon “passed by in the [steamboat] Troy” bound for Albany. Victor traveled in the opposite direction, canvassing and collecting in Philadelphia, though with little success, since most subscribers had left the city to escape the heat.27 By the fall of 1844, Lucy had begun teaching six-year-old Lulu and fiveyear-old Hattie the three Rs. A public school wouldn’t open in Carmansville for several more years, and even then, home schooling would remain the standard for middle-class families. Lucy, who had schooled her two sons and worked as a governess, now taught her two surrogate daughters. “If I can hold the mind of a child to a subject for five minutes,” she reportedly claimed, “he will never forget what I teach him.”28 In late October, Georgianna delivered a daughter. She and Victor named her Mary Eliza for his first wife. After Christmas celebrations had passed, the Rev. Edmund Barry once again traveled to Minnie’s Land, where the Audubons and Mallorys had gathered for a christening. By the Audubons’s third spring at Minnie’s Land, Carmansville was also growing. Stagecoach service to and from lower Manhattan began that year, every hour from seven in the morning to seven in the evening. Commuting from the city to Minnie’s Land was now possible, if not particularly comfortable, for anyone who could pay the 18¾ cent fare. Edward Harris and Spencer Baird visited just before Audubon and Victor took off for a month or more of canvassing in the southern states, “for the two fold purpose of collecting our dues and increasing our Subscribers, that we may be rather more at ease than as things are now,” wrote Lucy to her brother William. Just before planting season, John suffered a bout of influenza but recovered in time to get his crops in the ground. Reflecting on his family life, he wrote Thomas Lincoln, who had accompanied Audubon on his 1833 Labrador expedition, that all the Audubons were living “in the same house with Mamma as the head of the family affairs and our two wives living with us as her Children.” One day, when Lucy was no longer “head of family affairs” and Audubon’s temperament no longer balanced hers, seeds of conflict sown in those early years would fracture the family when it needed unity most desperately. For the moment, though, with their children and grandchildren gathered around them, the elder Audubons basked in their Arcadia.29 Caroline delivered a baby boy on Friday, July 18, 1845; this second namesake of John James Audubon (everyone called him Jack) would live into adulthood. Muting the family’s joy, a fire broke out hours later in a whale oil warehouse on New Street and soon engulfed 345 structures,

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including the warehouse where the Audubons kept the copper engraving plates for the Birds, damaging many. Audubon hurried the surviving plates to Minnie’s Land and stored them in the “cave,” a cellar dug into the hill between the house and John’s chicken yard. They remained there for the next two decades, under lock and key. The fire’s relatively short duration and limited destruction confirmed Croton Water’s value in fighting fires and the effectiveness of building codes that restricted wood-frame construction in favor of brick, stone, and iron. Those codes did not apply beyond the city’s limits, however, and frame construction predominated in northern Manhattan through most of the century. So did fires and high insurance rates.30 In August, Jane Bachman arrived for a full year of Dr. Delafield’s treatments, bringing her sister Julia with her. Several weeks later, Bachman stopped by Minnie’s Land to fetch Julia on his way home from a Lutheran General Synod—perhaps the first time he noticed signs of Audubon’s developing dementia. His daughter Catherine wrote forty years later that after Audubon’s western trip, her father had “marked, with deep concern, a lack of that noble enthusiasm in his work,” but attributed it to the taxing journey. In 1845, however, his “observant eye and loving heart detected in Audubon the unusual absence of mind, that for some time, had been noticed by his family and friends.” But watching the sixty-year-old Audubon paint “Leconte’s Pine Mouse,” Bachman rationalized that perhaps rest would “restore Audubon to health of mind and body.” In any case, Audubon continued canvassing, painting, and corresponding for another year before Lucy marked a noticeable decline in his mental agility.31 While Bachman was at Minnie’s Land, he voiced his concern about the lack of specimens for completing the Quadrupeds and suggested another western trip. Audubon wasn’t able to go, and Victor was central to running the business, so all eyes fell on John. Comfortable with farm life and the father of a three-month-old son, John didn’t want to go. With a MexicanAmerican war a distinct possibility (one would begin the following April 25, 1846), Texas was not a frolic. Encounters with Native Americans presented problems, but “even more danger might be apprehended from the white men of desperate character, who had drifted to that region either to escape punishment for previous crimes, or to find themselves so far from law and order that they could commit fresh ones in safety.” In the end, the pliable John gave in and was on his way, taking the Audubons’s coachman, James Clements, with him.32 That winter, with snow keeping the Audubons housebound, Elizabeth Atterbury came for her annual visit, Willie Gordon stopped by on his way

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to New Orleans, and Dr. Delafield traveled uptown twice a week to treat Jane’s eyes. Audubon wrote to Spencer Baird that in John’s absence, he had been “drawing pretty constantly” and finished six plates for the engraver. Lucy, perhaps looking for signs that her husband’s mind was not deteriorating, thought he was “happier and better for it.” Amidst these comings and goings, Georgianna gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Rose after Audubon’s half-sister.33 John was ready to come home by the middle of February, but didn’t arrive until April, around the time President James Polk’s vision of America’s “manifest destiny” erupted in war on a severely unprepared Mexico. At war’s end, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo awarded America nearly onethird of Mexico’s territory, including most of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. Audubon, despite how little he himself had reaped from his western trip, complained that John’s paltry specimens had cost $200 each. Besides the skins, John brought home Henry Clay, a mixed-race Native American, who had been a guide and hunter on the expedition. Clay, who proved “very skillful in the care of the animals, a splendid boatman and fisherman and very valuable about the place,” remained at Minnie’s Land several years before returning to Texas.34 Even before John’s return, Victor and Bachman were planning to send him to Europe to research and paint “about 20 species” they couldn’t find in the United States. So, instead of spring plowing, John spent April 1846 painting a weasel from the Platte River and preparing for another journey. At least this time, he could take Caroline, Maria, and Jack with him. (Lulu and Hattie remained behind with Lucy.) Caroline and the children could visit her mother in Loughborough while John worked. By June, they were on their way. Before they returned, Caroline would conceive and deliver another son, this one named in honor of Lucy’s brother William Bakewell.35 Just about the time John and Caroline boarded a steamer for Europe, Samuel F. B. Morse (or men working with him) arrived at Minnie’s Land to run telegraphy experiments from the basement laundry room. By then, Morse’s jubilant “What hath God wrought!” was two years old, and the Magnetic Telegraph Company was sending messages between Philadelphia and Fort Lee, which lay across the Hudson from Minnie’s Land. Morse was looking for a way to span the river with telegraph lines and chose Jeffrey’s Hook (a point of land where the George Washington Bridge now spans the Hudson) as his test site. Victor probably arranged for him to use the Audubons’s house as a headquarters, since he managed family affairs and knew Morse through the National Academy of Design. Morse was a founding member, Audubon had been an honorary member since 1833, Victor had

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just moved up from “associate” member to Academician, and John would be inducted as an Associate in 1847. The telegraph experiments from the laundry room fascinated Hattie, who was about seven at the time. Long afterward she remembered one of Morse’s workmen giving her tightly coiled rolls of telegraphic paper that she could stretch into “fairy wands.”36 Bachman and his wife, Harriet, had planned to visit Minnie’s Land in early July, but before they set sail, Harriet died of consumption five and a half years after the disease had claimed her two eldest daughters. The Audubons were left to console Jane, who, despite her misgivings, bowed to Trudeau’s judgment and remained at Minnie’s Land into the fall, as originally planned. By then, her sister Julia was exhibiting the disease’s familiar symptoms. Exhausted by developments at home, Bachman lost patience with John’s lack of communication from abroad and wished he were “as willing to write as he is to paint.” John was a painter, though, not a researcher, and his continued recalcitrance left Bachman to complain, “It is impossible for me to give names to things which I have never seen.”37

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With John in Europe and Audubon in his own world, Victor shouldered the entire burden for the family and business. Adding to his myriad worries was the Hudson River Railroad, which was laying tracks up Manhattan’s western shore. By the time he realized trains would pass within fifty yards of the house, he could do little to stop it. Besides, the family could use the $2,500 cash settlement. When Victor learned that the agreement allowed them to claim damages if the railroad proved a health hazard, he solicited help from his uncle William.1 We have a reserved claim for damage if our place becomes “unhealthy” in consequence of the d__d Road passing—and so if you hear of anyone willing to get sick and have a moderate billious fever, or a putrid ditto, for their board and lodging next summer, you can send them on here, provided agreement be made to the “terms.”2 Disruptive though the railroad was for property owners along its route— the tracks crossed the Audubons’s little bay, converting it to a pond and cutting off access to their dock—plans for commuter service from Carmansville to lower Manhattan spurred growth in the village. Richard Carman still held a tight rein on property ownership, but by mid-decade, an expanding population encouraged tradesmen to open shops, some on the ground floors of their Tenth Avenue homes. In an upward spiral, commerce encouraged population growth, which in turn led to the first of several neighborhood churches.

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In 1846, the growing number of Episcopalians on the northern end of the island tired of traveling to St. Andrew’s in Harlem or St. Mary’s in Manhattanville and began holding their own services. Initially, Richard M. Abercrombie, rector of St. Andrew’s, officiated at evening services in John Morewood’s house on the Kingsbridge Road at 155th Street. As the fledgling congregation grew, they moved into a room Carman lent them in a building on Tenth Avenue at 155th Street. Earlier attempts at establishing an Episcopal church for the scattered population in northern Manhattan had failed—most notably St. Ann’s, which served the Fort Washington neighborhood from 1827 to 1837—but this time population density had reached a tipping point, and in December 1847, the congregants officially formed as the Church of the Intercession, with Abercrombie as its first rector. For the next three years, he served both Intercession and St. Andrew’s.3 Harried though he was, Victor still found time to cofound the church with the Morewoods, Carmans, and several other families. The Audubons had often attended services at St. Andrews but were of mixed religious backgrounds. Audubon was Catholic by baptism, but in practice more Deist than any other sect. Lucy’s father and grandfather followed Joseph Priestly, a founder of the Unitarian Church, while John and Victor had strong associations with the Lutheran Church through their first wives’ family and the Episcopal Church through their second. Religious reasons aside, the Episcopal Church, one of the two churches of the rich in the nineteenth century (Presbyterian was the other), was a business opportunity. Among its founding members Carman, Hickson Field, John Maunsell Bradhurst, and James Monroe (lateral descendent of President Monroe) all became Quadruped subscribers. Except Audubon, whose dementia would have prevented his following the Book of Common Prayer’s intricacies, the family attended services and recorded their baptisms, confirmations, weddings, and eventually funerals in the church register. Victor was a mainstay from the congregation’s earliest days. Besides certifying the organizational meeting, he served as the vestry’s recording secretary, inscribing minutes in his precise, cramped handwriting, and was a member of the first building committee.4 The vestry soon built a church. In May, Carman deeded Intercession a fifty-by-one-hundred-twenty-five-foot lot in the heart of Carmansville for a token one dollar. John, who arrived home with his family on July 12, 1846, and Richard Carman both had building experience and probably guided work on the Gothic-style frame church. By September, the new building was ready, and Lucy bought pew number fifteen for the family’s use, paying a yearly rent of fifteen dollars. From its inception, Intercession had an

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First Edifice to House the Church of the Intercession, Repurposed as Coughlin Lumber Co., 1932 (Charles Von Urban / Museum of the City of New York. 33.173.541)

unusual relationship with Trinity Church. James Renwick’s 1843 design for the cemetery had provided space for a chapel just inside the Tenth Avenue gate, directly across from Intercession’s new church building. Trinity had intended using its chapel for funerals and as a gathering place for northern Manhattan’s Episcopalians. In 1846, however, they were occupied building their own new church, and when Intercession’s founders preempted their plans in the cemetery, they devised a different solution. Trinity would use Intercession’s new building for its funeral services and pay an annual stipend toward the rector’s modest salary. The congregation would depend on Trinity’s support for years to come.5 Victor was thirty-eight years old when he helped found Intercession. Except for the six years he had spent apprenticed to his uncle William in Louisville, he had devoted his entire working life to the family business. He fully understood the pitfalls of a subscription-based business model and must have been painfully aware that while his father could “induce many to subscribe who would not do so for any one else,” he and John lacked that

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charisma and would never enjoy his success no matter how diligently they applied themselves. Still seeking his own way, he hinted to his uncle William that perhaps he might come to New York so they could pursue a business venture together.6 What are your plans! I often have puzzled my brains to find out whether something could not be found in or near New York that would be acceptable to you so that you could be near us. It is always with affection that I think of you and I shall never forget your kindness to me. We are now at a period in our business here which makes me feel uncertain what John and I may have to do hereafter to keep the old folks comfortable: I have sometimes thought of going into business in New York as a Co{mmission} Merchant. What do you think of this? Anything [seal hole] would be a more permanent occupation [seal hole, than?] our present one I should prefer for it is very different in America to make a comfortable & respectable living by Painting, so that possibly I may be compelled to give up the brush except as an amusement some day, although I am one of the National Academicians here, and stand pretty well among the artists.7 William, recently widowed, soon arrived for a visit, followed shortly by his and Lucy’s sister Ann Gordon and her husband. The Bakewell clan was still at Minnie’s Land when Georgianna’s mother and sister arrived for the birth of her son, Victor Gifford, on August 22, 1847. A few months later, Abercrombie christened him as well as John and Caroline’s infant son William in the new church.8 Railroad construction was progressing the following spring when Bachman brought his daughters Lynch and Jane to Minnie’s Land so that Jane could have more eye treatments. While there, he could work with Victor and John on the Quadrupeds. Bachman reported to the rest of the family in Charleston that the young people were light-hearted and Lucy was “as straight as an arrow—in fine health” though “much worried—what with her particularity in housekeeping—her looking over advertisements for maids—(plenty of trouble in these changes) & taking care of the poor old Gentleman, [who was] a most melancholy case.” The outlines of his countenance & his general robust form are there, but the mind is all in ruins. . . . Imagine to yourself a crabbed restless uncontrollable child—worrying & bothering every one & you have not a tythe of a description of this poor old man. He thinks of nothing

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but eating—scarcely sits down two minutes at a time hides hens eggs—rings the bell every five minutes calling the people to dinner & putting the old Lady into all manner of troubles.9 Bachman left for home in the early summer, but Jane and Lynch remained into the fall when their brother Wilson arrived to apprentice under Victor. By then, Audubon needed the “care and attendance of a man” to guide him about the farm and ensure he neither wandered away nor created a scene in the village. Lucy had converted the painting room into a bedroom where Audubon could sleep under the watch of his manservant. Any nighttime wanderings would not disturb her, or more importantly Lulu and Hattie, who still slept at the foot of her bed. The two girls were growing and advancing in lessons with their grandmother, but Victor noted “a sort of country-manner” in them that he thought would benefit from the services of a “Maitre de danse.”10 As the year ended, the Audubon finances were in such a desperate state, only a pot of gold could save them, and that is exactly what their neighbor, former mayor Ambrose Kingsland, offered. With gold-rush fever sweeping the city, he, his brother, and merchant Cornelius Sutton had put up $27,000 seed money for a company comprising nearly one hundred men under the leadership of their friend, fifty-five-year-old Mexican War veteran Colonel Henry Livingston Webb. Kingsland’s country seat looked down on Minnie’s Land from a prominent hill a quarter-mile north, so he knew John and decided that his previous explorations would balance Webb’s military discipline. Kingsland and his brother wanted John to go along as commissar. The company supplied everything but the personal belongings of each man and his horse, and he in return was supposed to repay with legal interest his share of expenses when he reached the El Dorado, and to this end his work and his earnings were the company’s for the year from the time of signing. If when the contracts expired there were any profits, these were to be divided in a certain ratio.11 John was emerging from a long illness that had followed his trip to Europe and had no inclination to leave Minnie’s Land, but Victor prevailed, and once again he prepared to be away, this time for as much as two years. Victor’s hope was that he’d return with “at least $20,000 worth of the gold!” John figured that whether the company struck gold or not, he could spend at least half of his time collecting specimens and making sketches of the unknown countryside, so at the end of January, a few days before the company was scheduled to leave New York City, John signed a one-year contract

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as commissar. Following his lead, his cousin John Howard Bakewell, his friend John O. Stevens, Victor’s brother-in-law Henry Mallory, James Clements, John Henley (Jack) Tone, and a few men from Carmansville signed on as well.12 On February 8, 1849, ten days before Caroline gave birth to their fourth child, Jane, John left Minnie’s Land for California. Jenny, as everyone called her, would be walking before her father returned. In time, “Webb’s California Expedition” would be known as “one of the most poorly planned on record,” quite a feat given the number of ad hoc expeditions that set out in 1849. Averse to the overpopulated Panama route, Webb chose to cross Texas and Mexico, which he knew from the Mexican War, rather than travel the California Trail or take a sea voyage around Chile’s southern tip. That was his first mistake. His second was choosing recruits almost entirely “from inexperienced city dwellers, utterly ignorant of the meaning of an overland journey.”13 A month after the company left New York, cholera struck. A disease rising out of poor sanitation and dirty drinking water, it can be as mild as some minor intestinal discomfort or as severe as diarrhea, vomiting, cramps, and death, all in a few hours. Within days, eight men in the company died, terrifying the survivors and eroding morale. Convinced that their campsite was unhealthy, John moved the men into Rio Grande City and, on local advice, entrusted his saddle bags to a barkeep. That night, thieves made off with the company’s $12,000. For the next two weeks, John cared for the sick, comforted the dying, organized burial details, and said prayers over the graves, all while tracking and retrieving about $8,000 of the stolen money. Webb called on local officials, purchased supplies, and stayed as far from camp as possible. After he sprained his foot and suffered a moderate case of cholera, he and a dozen men turned back. The remainder decided, “Let’s go on with Mr. Audubon.” So, on April 28, two months behind schedule, forty-eight of the original company set off for California under John’s leadership, fortynine ’49ers, whose problems were far from over. Until this point, national newspapers had reported on the company’s progress, passing information from one paper to another, with James Gordon Bennett, who lived a mile north of the Audubons, gleaning nearly daily reports for his New York Herald. After April 28, news of the expedition stopped until the men arrived in San Diego six months later. Not until they returned would their families learn the full story of their struggle across the parched desert and mountains, of the thieves who robbed them of their horses, mules, and supplies, or the unpredictable weather that swelled streams so high, the company might wait days to cross. When

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the bedraggled men finally arrived in San Francisco four days before Christmas, they found that it was no El Dorado. In the year since James M. Marshall discovered gold flakes in the American River at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the town’s population had grown from 1,000 to 25,000, with migrants from around the world. Chaos reigned among hastily constructed boardinghouses that sat among brothels, saloons, and gambling houses. The expedition’s agent had sold most of the supplies, claiming “expenses had eaten up the money processed by the sales,” and what he didn’t sell lay rotting in the mud. The best most men could do was hire themselves out as day laborers.14 John worked alongside his men digging for gold through February, but then dissolved the company and set out to explore the West Coast, “making drawings and sketches” and collecting any specimens he could find. By June, when he left for home, he had accumulated almost two hundred sketches and watercolors, which he left behind for shipping later. Debilitated from bouts of cholera, emotionally weary, and without any gold, John arrived home in July to find a house full of his in-laws, eager to hear news of Henry Mallory, who had remained in California. (Jack Tone also remained, and his descendants still occupy the land he settled in 1850.)15 The John who returned was not the one who set out on the expedition, and the Minnie’s Land he found was very different from the one he had left. The farm had suffered neglect in his eighteen-month absence, and another growing season was nearing its end. The Hudson River Railroad, under construction when he left, had begun service to Poughkeepsie and within the year would run all the way to Albany, with a commuting station at the foot of 152nd Street. Change wasn’t without its casualties. John Morewood and his wife, Sarah, founding members at Intercession, had decided that they could not “remain long in the Country, when its locality be at all accessible to the City,” and in September 1850 they bought a twohundred-and-fifty-acre farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. (Sarah’s reputed lover, Herman Melville, bought the adjacent farm, and a few months later, her cuckolded husband witnessed his contract for “The Whale,” published in 1851 as Moby-Dick.)16 Perhaps the saddest part of John’s homecoming was finding that his father barely knew him and had no interest in what was happening around him. Audubon’s frequent railing at the passing trains—probably more a reaction to the unfamiliar iron beast spewing cinders than to the concept of a train despoiling his little Eden—paled in comparison to the day he wandered down to Pinehurst and, brandishing a knife, chased young Henry

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Bradhurst around the grounds until “some gardeners and men at work near by” subdued him.17 In John’s absence, Victor had attempted to improve the family’s financial outlook with two investments, both ill-timed. The less damaging of the two was Brooklyn lots he bought on speculation, probably instigated by James Hall, who had lived in Brooklyn in the early 1840s and again in 1849. Midcentury, the bustling city, visible across the harbor from lower Manhattan, was far more enticing to speculators than land lying north of 155th Street— out of sight and out of mind. But Victor’s lots had not appreciated as he expected, and by the summer of 1850, he wanted out, even at a loss. More costly was his investment in the Minnesota Iron and Brass Foundry. Earlier in the decade, James Bogardus had kickstarted the industry with his patented methods for producing prefabricated architectural elements for existing brick buildings and, later, complete cast-iron buildings. Victor invested in John D. Dale’s “iron and brass foundry, scale factory and machine shop” on West 26th Street near Tenth Avenue. The Minnesota Iron and Brass Foundry covered six city lots and employed between fifty and seventy-five workers to smelt “vast quantities of copper ore from the Minnesota Mines” into pipes for machinery, water, and gas. It also had a machine shop for everything from iron railings to engine parts and manufactured bronze castings. Ironically, proximity to the despised Hudson River Railroad tracks and freight yards at West 30th Street made the foundry a viable prospect.18 But dozens of businesses, including behemoths like “the sprawling Novelty Iron Works on the East River shore at the foot of 12th Street,” posed competition. When Victor saw that his cash infusion couldn’t salvage Dale’s overexpansion, he assumed management, hoping to retrieve at least part of his investment. By the time John came home an injunction threatened to close down the foundry, and Victor was left to decide whether to cut his losses and sell or hold on a while longer to try to recuperate at least part of his investment. In desperation, he mortgaged part of his Minnie’s Land property to neighbor Shepherd Knapp. Fourteen months later, he and Georgianna sold their eight acres to Lucy, who paid them $5,000, subject to the outstanding $2,537 he owed Knapp. Now, Lucy owned the whole farm.19 With no further assets to leverage, Victor decided the family’s best hope was monetizing Minnie’s Land, their only fungible asset. Taxes, insurance, and upkeep had long since outstripped the land’s subsistence value, particularly since numerous travels had pulled John away from farming. Victor’s plan was elegantly simple. The Audubons would sell part of the farm and invest the proceeds in houses they could lease for a steady income. The

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Hudson River Railroad that had boosted Carmansville and the foundry could now aid his real estate development scheme. Victor’s first task was convincing John and Lucy to go along with the plan—and that was not easy. Swayed by pride of ownership and the conviction that her farm was her most valuable asset, Lucy wanted to keep her land intact. Years later, she would claim that her financial “embarrassments” had “arisen from her liberality toward her sons” because she had sold most of Minnie’s Land to pay the debts on their “unsuccessful businesses.” In truth, she benefitted from all the family’s land transactions, including parcels she sold to her two sons at market value. Intrafamily financial dealings over the next fifteen years would strongly suggest that while the “family” was constantly struggling, Lucy was not, no matter how many times she pleaded poverty.20 Ironically, Lucy and her son Victor were at cross purposes. His primary reason for selling any part of Minnie’s Land was to guarantee his parents’ financial security. “There is danger of the proceeds of our whole place being frittered away,” he confided in John, “and that (to say nothing of your family and mine) the Capital should be invested for fear of our old Father and Mother coming to want in their old age, should any accident happen to us . . . it is better for us to pinch ourselves now and secure something while we can.”21 Victor wanted to sell John’s fields and orchards first, the easternmost portion of Minnie’s Land and the most expendable, at least in Victor’s eyes. John rebelled and threatened to buy his own farm, abandoning the Audubon enterprise entirely. Whatever misgivings Victor had about his brother’s business sense, he was well aware that John had multiple mechanical talents, and “in emergencies, he could turn his hand to many things.” As the brains of the Audubon operation, Victor was smart enough to know that John was the brawn. In earlier days, Audubon would have mediated this dispute and focused his family on a common goal. Absent his mediating hand, family dysfunction slowly devolved into financial ruin.22 For the time being, though, the fear of bankruptcy prevailed, and late in 1850, while Victor was traveling in Boston, John negotiated the sale of his planting grounds to sugar refiner Dennis Harris. Dissatisfied with John’s negotiations and obsessed with profit, Victor cautioned him that if anyone else asked about property, “to ask higher prices—The rates sold at would not come up to our mark by 5 or 6 thousand dollars, on the whole property.” But, in an attempt to mollify John for the loss of his orchards, Victor added that Harris might let him transplant “some of the apple & cherry trees” to the Audubons’s part of the property.23

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John also began talking to merchant Samuel Downer about leasing a house he would build in the old chicken yard. When Downer told John he wanted to buy rather than lease, Victor, confident that prices might rise, told his brother in no uncertain terms to “make a contract with Mr. Downer to rent a house.” James Hall also wanted to move to Minnie’s Land and had his eye on the point stretching into the river at Minnie’s Land’s northwest corner. Again, Victor insisted that John work out a lease, not a sale. Beyond reaping profits, a logistical problem with opening Minnie’s Land to new residents was keeping Audubon’s mental state as quiet as possible. Any hint that he was incapacitated, like the news articles circulating in 1850 that he was blind, could hurt sales. The Halls were already woven into the family fabric and knew the Audubons’s various problems, so their moving to Minnie’s Land would merely formalize (and monetize) their frequent presence there. The Audubon brothers also knew Downer, whose import business was directly across Beaver Street from the office they shared with Hall.24 As the year wound to an end and problems mounted, Victor’s rage filled his letters. They may have begun “My dear John” and ended with variations on “Affectionately yours,” but between lay a barrage of orders and complaints. Among daily quizzing about the foundry, discounting notes, and the Brooklyn real estate were unrelenting complaints about John’s decisions. For his part, Victor devoted himself “entirely to the looking for subscribers,” which was a major source of his anxiety. He wasn’t finding them in New Bedford because “the novelty [of the Audubon works had] worn off.” In another act of desperation, Victor began negotiations for a woodcut version of the Birds that would pay the Audubons a flat fee for the copyright and a portion of each copy sold. That idea died quickly.25 In Victor’s defense, John could be infuriatingly unfocused. While Victor was trying to salvage the forge and negotiate land deals, John was talking to a contractor about unnecessary improvements like building a bathing house and filling in the pond that the railroad tracks had created between the house and the river. He also publicized the remarkable idea that he was thinking of converting Minnie’s Land into a zoological garden, which a New Orleans newspaper seized upon and endorsed. Victor’s response was simple: “Let us economize—we have a very large debt to pay off!” Goaded into anger—fully aware that the money they owed for the failed California expedition was a large part of that debt—John pushed back. His half of the correspondence is lost, but Victor’s reply clearly indicates what he had written.26

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As you say I cross you at every effort, & fail myself when I have my own way, I think it best to say at once that you had better act on your own judgment without further consultation with me, and I will only add on this subject, that you seem to me to have a regular fright on the subject of selling just now. . . . You will see by the above that as far as I can, I give you entire control of the place, therefore act without farther [sic] reference to me—and exercise your cool judgment— you are as much interested as me and I will be satisfied.27 Christmas approaching, 1850 wound to a dismal close for the Audubons. In mid-December, John applied to be his father’s guardian. “Would to God it were not so—I hope at all [costs?] that it will not be the occasion of making his melancholy case known more than it is at present,” fretted Victor. “Do the best you can to keep it quiet.” Family embarrassment was one concern, but the greater worry was the effect his father’s incapacity might have on already weak Quadruped subscriptions.28 Audubon gave no sign that he was aware of his surroundings or recognized anyone in the family except Lucy’s brother William. When he arrived during Christmas, Audubon exclaimed, “Yes, yes, Billy! You go down that side of Long Pond and I’ll go this side and we’ll get the ducks!” His mind was back in Henderson, decades earlier. Muddled and lost in the past, blissfully unaware that his family was in jeopardy of losing his beloved Minnie’s Land, Audubon may have been the only member of the family to enjoy Christmas that year.29

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Any necessity for keeping Audubon’s mental condition secret ended when he died on Monday, January 27, one of those unseasonably warm days that Manhattan sometimes enjoys in January. Lucy would later remember that in her husband’s final moment, his eyes “rekindled into their former lustre and beauty. . . . And the departing man reached out his arms, took his wife’s and children’s hands between his own, and passed peacefully away.” A contemporary family account, that he died “without a word or sign of mental consciousness on his part,” is a more likely scenario given his advanced dementia. All the New York newspapers carried laudatory obituaries. Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune described Audubon as distinguished, illustrious, remarkable, and “possessed of an indomitable spirit,” while James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald memorialized large parts of his invented biography in a story recounting major events from his life.1 By Wednesday, the day of the funeral, “a dull, cold cheerless sky . . . threatened snow, but instead finally dissolved in a dismal rain,” leaving the streets “in a woeful condition.” Family and friends gathered in the parlor at Minnie’s Land where Intercession’s rector Abercrombie read the Episcopal burial service, and then the mourners trudged through the rain into Trinity Cemetery, bearing a coffin with “a plain silver plate” on which was written, “John James Audubon | Died January 27, 1851 | Age 76 years.” Despite Audubon’s long decline, the family had made no preparations for a burial place, so Victor had hastily scraped together $97.10 and bought a cemetery plot due south of the homestead. Through the bare trees, Lucy could gaze

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Audubon Family Vault in the Southwest Corner of Trinity Cemetery, circa 1893 (Original Audubon Family Vault Entrance, Trinity Cemetery, New York City from Forest and Stream [April 27, 1893]: p. 395, Library, New-York Historical Society. [Photograph by Glenn Castellano.])

on Audubon’s gravesite from her bedroom window; when spring returned, she and her granddaughters could plant ivy and shrubs around the vault’s entrance.2 Audubon buried, Victor and John resumed work on the octavo edition of the Quadrupeds and, even before they completed it, began publishing a second edition. Amidst juggling creditors and salvaging what they could from the foundry and Brooklyn real estate, they grappled with where the family would live. That all of them could not remain under one roof was assured. John and Victor now had ten children between them, and Georgianna was expecting another in the summer. But where their separate roofs

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would be—Minnie’s Land or elsewhere—was another question altogether, and the sooner they settled it, the sooner they could regroup and move forward.3 A month after Audubon’s funeral, Victor prevailed upon his mother to sell five acres of John’s fields and orchards to Dennis Harris. She complied and then immediately repurchased one twenty-five by one-hundred-foot lot where a spring bubbled to the surface and flowed down the hill to feed a garden cistern near the house. Altogether, Harris paid less than $150 per lot; he gave Lucy $4,500 down, and she held a mortgage on the remaining $5,000, which provided about half of the annuity Victor had been trying to arrange for her. Beyond the annuity, Lucy fared well with the deal by bundling two of the seven acres she had bought from Victor and Georgianna in September, selling them to Harris for more than two-and-a-half times what she had paid her son and daughter-in-law.4 Harris was a bricklayer by trade, an ordained Methodist minister by vocation, and an ardent abolitionist by persuasion. He and his wife, Ann, had immigrated to the United States from England in 1832 onboard the Cosmo, where they befriended sugar refiner and abolitionist Samuel Blackwell. Once in New York, Blackwell hired Harris for several odd jobs and taught him the refining business. While managing Blackwell’s refinery at 345 Washington Street and another on Chambers Street, Harris continued his ministry, breaking from the Methodists over the question of slavery to become a leader of New York City’s Wesleyan Methodists. In 1837, he bought the Washington Street refinery and a few years later purchased what was left of the Congress Refinery after it burned nearly to the ground. Harris built the “New Congress Refinery” into a thriving business that also gained fame and notoriety as an active station on the Underground Railroad system.5 The “New Congress” burned again in April 1848, and Harris built it once again, but this time he turned his sights to northern Manhattan, where he expanded his sugar operation and leveraged his wealth into speculative real estate. In November 1849, he bought Ambrose Kingsland’s estate (just about the time Kingsland’s gold-rush expedition reached San Diego), paying him $32,000 for his mansion and twenty-six acres of land stretching from the Kingsbridge Road to the Hudson River. The next month, he advertised “several elegant building sites, located near the Hudson River, in the Village of Carmansville” and recouped $8,000 of his outlay with a sale to John King, who built a house on a three-acre lot on the river just north of Minnie’s Land. Later in the year, Harris moved his large household to the old Kingsland mansion and, when Matthew and Lucinda

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Dennis Harris’s New Congress Sugar Refinery on the Hudson River at 160th Street, circa 1853 (Yale University Art Gallery)

Morgan decided to sell the old Watkins farm, paid them $50,000 for a fiftysix-acre parcel that expanded his property to the Harlem River.6 Harris could see as easily as the next man that Carmansville was landlocked on the east by the bluff above the Harlem River; on the west by the Hudson River; and on the south, by Hickson Field’s estate Woodland. The only route for expansion was northward along Tenth Avenue in the direction of his property, and the only barrier was the eastern arm of Minnie’s Land, so once he bought it, he carved the old farmland into building lots and prepared to sell them when prices rose. Even before he completed that purchase, Harris had built a new refinery on the river at 160th Street (also named “New Congress”), with a wharf to service it. Then, he bought a steamboat that he christened the Jenny Lind in honor of the “Swedish Nightingale” who was then storming the city and initiated passenger service between lower Manhattan and Poughkeepsie, with a stop at his 158th Street wharf. His brother William, who had also learned the sugar refining

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trade, captained the steamer. (Lind had her own Audubon connection that year. In gratitude for a $3,000 donation, New York’s Firemen presented her “a complete copy of Audubon’s ‘Birds and Quadrupeds of America.’ ”) Establishing steamboat service to compete with the Hudson River Railroad for passengers among Carmansville’s sparse population was a risky business decision, but Harris probably had another purpose in mind: creating a new Underground Railroad stop. After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, New York City had become increasingly dangerous for escaped slaves, so the new refinery and steamboat could have extended Harris’s effort to move them farther up the river on their journey to freedom in Canada.7 The large surviving body of Audubon correspondence contains few references to the increasing sectional divide between free and slave states in the decade leading to the Civil War, but that and slavery must have been topics of conversation in their household, particularly when the Bachmans visited from Charleston. Sprinkled through that family’s correspondence, and undoubtedly their conversation, was evidence of their dependence on their “servants”—the same euphemism Audubon used when writing about his father’s slaves—as well as their general disdain for black people, whom Harriet Bachman paired with yellow fever as “the two evils which our unfortunate Country is doomed to have.”8 Writing in 1840, Maria Martin complained to her niece Eliza (Victor’s first wife) about the ongoing “inconvenience” of running the Charleston household with slave labor. You complain my dear girl of our not writing frequently, but I assure you that your mother Jane and myself have scarcely a moment at our disposal. When I tell you that Venus has never done the most trifling things since you have been away, and that Thomas is obliged to supply her place in the kitchen, and that Nancy is in a particular way which you know always makes her lie by for three or four months at least, and she is now in her chamber and of no use, you will be able to form some idea of the inconvenience we are suffering, and although Mrs. Audubon complains of having to change her servants we cannot but think that you are much better off as we are burdened with sick ones, and have a parcel of noisy little blacks about the premises to annoy us.9 Apparently escaping Martin’s reasoning as she complained about Nancy’s incapacity and the boisterous black children in the household was that each of them, including Nancy’s unborn baby, carried a value the Bachmans

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could use as loan collateral or redeem for cash on the auction block at the slave market. Around the time Victor was negotiating the sale to Harris, Martin (by then Bachman’s second wife) reported to her stepdaughters in Charleston that the black freedmen who waited on the breakfast table in Detroit were “very genteel n____s,” prompting her to want to “ask their white brethren how it is, that, while they are so clamorous for equality we never find any of them elevated to higher stations than Barbers & waiters, the truth of the matter is, that like water, they must & will find their level.” That whites still wielded the power to oppress blacks, even when they were free, was not an element of her thinking.10 Any qualms the Audubons might have had about an abolitionist neighbor were secondary to their need for money, though Harris’s cash infusion into Lucy’s annuity did little to relieve the family’s deepening financial problems. Throughout 1851, Victor’s conviction grew that the best solution was converting the entire farm into cash and then investing it. “We now pay over $500 a year for insurance, on property that brings no income,” he complained to John. At the end of April, he drew up an advertisement for auctioneer Anthony J. Bleeker and told John to map out a plan for dividing Minnie’s Land into lots. John did as his brother bid him, despite his frustration at losing his cherished farmland. In return, Victor chided him for setting prices too low and not approaching the matter “like careful folks.”11 Stress had taken its toll on Victor, and he began treating his frequent headaches and digestive problems with quinine as well as blue pills and Calomel, mercury-based compounds used to treat everything from syphilis and tuberculosis to constipation, toothache, and the pains of childbirth. His anxiety was not unfounded. John’s mind often wandered. Rather than focus on the Quadrupeds, he toyed with the idea of running for assistant alderman (“Do not think of it for a moment!” wrote Victor. “Tell Camby you have too much to do, or make any excuse you choose”); tinkered with his boat (“I am sorry about your boat—I wish you had let her be as she was, with the two schooner sails—however it is evidence, for the 2d time, that it is useless to alter an old boat”); and decided to publish his California journals, illustrating the text with his plein air paintings; “drawn from nature,” he advertised, borrowing from his father’s success. Most of John’s paintings and sketches were still in California, but he had a sufficient number to illustrate the first volume of text.12 Victor offered a few suggestions about the number of plates for each volume and a price for each installment but reminded John that his top priority was “the little quadrupeds.” Only after he had produced it “with

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great care, forethought, and system” could he devote any time to his California scheme. Predictably, John rebelled. This time, when he threatened to buy his own farm, Victor didn’t argue. Instead, he suggested that he should wait until after the auction and then consider whether a city house might not be a better option: “You will see numerous advertisements in the paper of farms to exchange for city property—not one of the city property to exchange for farms.”13 Expecting that the auction would yield an average of $250 per lot, Victor rebuffed Harris’s offers to buy land on the point and ended negotiations with Downer and Hall for the lots they wanted to buy. In June, a few weeks before Georgianna delivered another daughter (the second granddaughter named Lucy), John and Maria Bachman stopped at Minnie’s Land en route to Niagara Falls. When Victor told his former father-in-law about his plans, Bachman cautioned him to wait because the land would appreciate, but Victor went forward with the sale anyway. In early October, auctioneers Cole & Chilton (not Bleeker) advertised “200 full lots of ground, two commodious dwelling houses, and other buildings . . . beautifully located near the One Hundred and Fifty-second street station of the Hudson River railroad, and a steamboat runs from the dock foot of One Hundred and Fiftyeighth street to the business part of the city. . . . Sold in lots, with large privileges, and on liberal terms.” A lithographed map for prospective buyers showed two hundred building lots, twenty-five by one-hundred feet, oriented to future streets and avenues—a continuation of the 1811 grid. If the Audubons could sell the entire farm at the prices Victor set for the lots and parcels, they would gross more than $37,000.14 But then, nothing happened. The auction date came and went, and the Audubons still owned Minnie’s Land, still lived there, and still had mounting debts. Why Victor canceled the auction is not clear, but the problem was certainly not lack of interest. Prior to the auction, Hall had claimed lots on the point, Dennis Harris and Shepherd Knapp marked off theirs along the future Eleventh Avenue, and Isaac P. Martin, a lawyer who knew Victor through the Intercession vestry, claimed a parcel fronting the future numbered streets. If that were not proof enough of interest in the area, the next week, Harris began selling building lots on the land Lucy had sold him the previous year. Within a month, he had grossed $16,100 from selling about three-quarters of the parcel he had bought for $9,500. Most of his purchasers took bundles of four lots, though his brother William bought ten lots fronting Eleventh Avenue and 155th Street, and Harlem florist Andrew Maythorn bought a plot including seven lots on the corner of Tenth Avenue

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Map Showing the Division of Lots for the Minnie’s Land Auction, October 1851 (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

and 156th Street. In an era before zoning regulations, Harris inserted covenants into the deeds that prevented noxious and offensive businesses such as slaughterhouses, tanning operations, breweries, distilleries, and (reflecting his Methodist roots) “any store or tenement for the sale of ardent spirits of intoxicating drinks by the glass or in small quantities.”15 Confirming the 1811 street commissioners’ worry that expansion into northern Manhattan would encourage speculation, Harris made a healthy profit, selling the lots for an average of $400 each, having done little, if anything, to improve them. Most of his buyers were also speculators. Except Edward Archer, who moved into a house he built facing 155th Street, and Maythorn, who built a two-story house with gardens and greenhouse where the old Watkins farmhouse had once stood, none of the buyers moved to the village, so the flurry of real estate activity had little immediate effect on Carmansville’s population—or on Richard Carman. He remained on the sidelines, parting with only a few parcels—one to widow Sarah Watson, another to James Griffen, and a third to Sheriff Thomas Carnley, who was accumulating land on Tenth Avenue on the

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village’s southern edge. Otherwise, Carman developed the property himself, adding a lumberyard on Tenth Avenue and opening a hotel next to the Hudson River Railroad station, aimed at long-term boarders and shortterm seasonal vacationers.16 Carmansville continued luring residents, though. The same year Harris bought part of the Watkins farm, thirty-six-year-old merchant Abiel Buckman Mills bought Elizabeth Maunsell’s old house and soon had entrenched himself in the Carmansville community, opening a branch of his Cortlandt Street grocery on Tenth Avenue, joining the Intercession vestry, donating a lot on the corner of 157th Street and the Kingsbridge Road for the neighborhood’s first public school, and, in 1852, becoming Washington Heights’ first postmaster, a position he held for the next nine years.17 Fixated on getting the best possible price for Minnie’s Land, Victor must have seethed when Harris began selling his lots for more than twice what he had paid—one week after the Audubons’s auction fell through. Still determined, he renewed his efforts; this time, they paid off. In November, Lucy sold Harris a thirteen-lot parcel on the point, stretching west along 158th Street from Twelfth Avenue to his dock on the river. Harris paid $400 per lot and a few weeks later bought a thirty-foot-wide strip of the street for an additional $250. At the same time, Lucy carved four lots out of John’s remaining orchards and sold them to Harris’s brother, William, for $300 per lot. The Audubons retained ownership of a right-of-way over Twelfth Avenue and John’s road into Minnie’s Land. Following Harris’s lead, they inserted restrictive covenants in the deeds and added proscribed businesses, protecting themselves from toxic runoff: smithies, forge furnaces, steam engines, brass foundries, nail or other iron factories, sugar bakeries, cow stalls, and any business that produced soap, candle oil, starch, varnish, petrol, glue, ink, turpentine, or lamp black.18 While Harris constructed a house on the point, his son-in-law, lumberman John Dalley, built one up the hill at the future Eleventh Avenue, though three years would pass before Harris formally deeded him the land. Both men faced their houses north, away from Minnie’s Land, and aligned them to 158th Street, which was now open, graded, and “McAdamised,” a paving process binding layers of stone with tar or bitumen, named for its Scottish inventor John Loudon McAdam and later known simply as macadam. A swath of forest trees lined the street between their houses, buffering Minnie’s Land from developments on its northern border, just as the cemetery did on the south. At the end of the year, Lucy sold her sons all that remained of Minnie’s Land except the homestead with its thirty-six lots and a parcel of about

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fifteen lots on the point. Those she kept for herself. Victor and John each took twelve lots along the river, where they would build homes for their families and split the rest, with John taking the southern fifty-two lots and Victor the northern seventy-two, splitting the streets until the undetermined time when they might be opened. Lucy didn’t sell cheaply. Between them, John and Victor paid her about $300 a lot, increasing the principal on her annuity to more than $50,000, far exceeding Victor’s previous goal. Victor and John paid their mother cash for everything except their riverfront lots. Where or how they could come up with tens of thousands of dollars during those lean times is not clear, but Audubon intrafamily finances were always convoluted, and successive sales confirm the lots were “unencumbered” with mortgage obligations.19 Victor’s scheme was that he and John would now each build a house for his family, and when they were ready, Lucy would live six months of the year with one and then six months with the other, while letting the homestead. John would also build a house on the point that she could let. The rental income would cover her living expenses—including the room and board she would pay to whichever son was her host. Although the plan reduced Lucy’s financial liability and provided her a healthy income, she complained to her frequent correspondent, Martha Dillingham, that her sons had wheedled her into an arrangement she regretted before it even began.20 My sons wish me to live alternately with them, but I have several objections to the plan, and time and years has I am persuaded altered the disposition and mind of us all, to say nothing of clashing interests, I do not therefore see one bright ray before me, but reflect with gratitude on the past—I shall have no home! when I leave this of my own.21 Intentionally or not, Victor had reduced his mother’s independence. When she complained about “suffering from the rheumatism,” he suggested that Caroline take charge of housekeeping. When she worried about finances, he arranged to convert her property to fungible assets. What Lucy wanted, though, was the social status and independence that came with owning and managing her own home.22 At the turn of the new year, still plagued by the unsold Brooklyn property, debts at the foundry, and land that was not yielding sufficient income, Victor steamed south to Charleston to work on the Quadruped’s letter press with Bachman, who was still lacking essential source material. John remained behind to cope with the family’s business. True to form, Victor sent frequent and detailed orders. For his part, John tended the office and built a house for his family and another that he could let. He also drew

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plans for a house for Victor and one that his mother could lease to James Hall. While John had proved that he was fully capable of designing and building houses, this great burst of construction activity would not have been possible without his collaboration with John Harden, an English immigrant who had settled in Carmansville and, over the next decade, would work with the Audubons on numerous projects while establishing himself in the neighborhood as a master carpenter and builder. From Charleston, Victor wrote about building a house for “Mr. Everett” (probably bank cashier John Everitt, who lived nearby), but those plans never materialized. In his spare time, John worked on his California project and toyed with the idea of publishing a new edition of the Birds. Victor nipped that idea in the bud, reminding John that they needed to find more subscribers for the Quadrupeds before they could attempt any other projects.23 In March, John found Lucy’s first tenant, Irish-born Alexander Munkittrick, a merchant living in Brooklyn. Before he moved into the homestead, he wanted repairs, painting, and alterations, including a “bathing room,” which was still something of a luxury. Victor saw no reason to “go very far in meeting Mr. Mukstricks (sic) demands” and suggested he should look after the alterations himself in exchange for a few hundred dollars deducted from his rent.24 The first number of John’s Illustrated Notes of an Expedition through Mexico and California appeared that spring. German-born Karl Gildemeister had translated John’s drawings into the lithographs that Nagel & Weingaertner published. Despite a national fascination with California and the continuing power of the Audubon name, John couldn’t gather enough subscribers to justify the remaining nine numbers. His consolation prize was selling Minnie’s Land lots to his two collaborators.25 Around 1849, Nagel & Weingaertner had lithographed some of the prints in the Quadrupeds Octavo; John had probably crossed paths with Louis Nagel in San Francisco, where he, along with numerous other lithographers, was documenting the gold rush. Although Nagel built a house near 156th Street, he didn’t change his address in the city directory, so he may have let it rather than live there himself. Gildemeister and his wife, Wilhemina, built a small house for themselves facing 155th Street near Eleventh Avenue. That same year, Gildemeister changed his occupation from artist to architect and with George J. B. Carstensen won a contract to design the Crystal Palace. The iron and glass pavilion, modeled after a building of the same name at London’s Great Exhibition, would sit west of the Croton Distributing Reservoir (today’s Bryant Park) and house America’s first world’s fair, the 1853 Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations.

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“The Night Watch,” from John W. Audubon’s Illustrated Notes of an Expedition through Mexico and California, 1852 (Image Courtesy of John James Audubon State Park, Henderson, Ky.)

Coinciding with John’s sales, Victor sold two lots to Georgianna’s brother-in-law, Edward Talman, for $800; Delia Talman and Georgianna were sisters. Like the Halls, the Talmans had been frequent visitors to Minnie’s Land and, lacking their own home—they were living on Greene Street with Delia’s parents the Mallorys—favored building a house near family. Before they could begin, though, Delia’s father died, and they decided to remain with her mother. So they sold the lots back to Victor, who soon built a rental house on them.26 In the fall of 1852, John sold the largest parcel yet. Dry goods merchant Wellington Clapp paid $5,400 for eighteen lots, including a spring, due east of the homestead. Clapp and his wife, Cornelia, had been living in Brooklyn, but northern Manhattan’s economic benefits and pleasant surroundings lured them, just as they had the Halls, Gildemeisters, and Downers. Over the next months, Clapp built a spacious house on his property, similar enough to the Italianate villas John built for himself and Victor that it may have followed the same drawings and specifications. Clapp’s house ignored

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the grid and fit into the topography, oriented east to west with piazzas to capture breezes coming from the river and placed at an elevation that would afford it a fine view of the Palisades.27 By October, Lucy, Lulu, and Hattie were spending their first six months in John’s new house, and Victor had moved his family into his. Finally master of his own home, he wrote Maria Bachman that he and Georgianna were “at housekeeping,” marred only by “sticking fast of newly painted windows, dust from workmen, and paint from green shutters.” Victor’s three-story house with a full English basement sat on sixteen lots, with a one-hundred-and-thirty-foot frontage along the river. Its ten rooms exceeded 6,000 square feet, not counting the full basement with kitchen, pantries, laundry, and storerooms. An eighty-foot piazza wrapped around the river-facing sides and another stretched across the front—the side facing east.28 John’s house was similar to Victor’s but situated obliquely in the landscape. He had diverted the old brook (the house sat almost exactly where it had previously divided to form a little island) and added fill along the coastline before he built his house near the water. He angled it so that the front faced toward Hall’s new house and the curving piazza looked toward his brother’s. Even before he had finished the house, John used it as collateral for a loan from Shepherd Knapp. Part of the cash may have gone to publishing the Illustrated Notes, but most of it likely financed another house. This one would sit at the top of the hill near the entrance gate on twenty-six lots of land, with Gildemeister and Nagel to the east and Clapp on the west.29 Like the other houses, it conformed to the topography and sat on a stepped elevation that provided ample light, air, and views. A circular wing protruding from a main rectangle looked very much like the houses John had already built, but in this version, the verandas flanked the rectangle’s long sides rather than enfolding the circular northern wing. Lucy liked the house but lamented its lack of folding (pocket) doors, a common feature for opening rooms into larger spaces for social events or closing them to contain heat and keep children at bay. She fretted that John might sell it to merchant Henry A. Smythe for as low as $13,500, which is exactly what he did, closing the sale in early May, around the same time he sold William Harris a hundred-foot-square parcel adjacent to the one Lucy sold him months earlier. With those two sales, John depleted all the real estate he had bought from his mother, without realizing a significant profit. “With respect to business, John will tell you all and does all he possibly can, but no two persons ever together think alike, much less when [a] thousand miles are between them,” Lucy wrote Victor in benediction.30

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The Smythe House in Audubon Park, 1904 (Private collection, Schuyler M. Meyer Family)

Smythe moved his wife and three young daughters into his new home just about the same time Warren Hastings leased the house John had built for Victor on the Edward Talman lots (Hastings volunteered to pay half the cost of papering the house). Lucy, who was not completely a disinterested observer, since she would spend six months of every year with Victor, wondered that he hadn’t taken this beautifully situated house and gardens instead of the one he had built close to the river.31 Smythe, Hall, Hastings, and Munkittrick were all young merchants with growing families and an allegiance to the Episcopal Church, similarities suggesting that not only were the Audubons protecting their land with covenants, they were restricting leases and sales to their own social class—or more precisely, to the social class to which they aspired. They were also ensuring that their interests were represented in the church they had helped found and build. All four newcomers joined the Intercession vestry after the Easter 1853 elections and often hosted vestry meetings in their homes. Over the next year, they guided the congregation as it grappled with the competing priorities of paying its increasing debt and expanding its building to accommodate neighborhood growth. All the while, they were searching for a new rector to replace the Reverend William Stewart,

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who had followed the Reverend Abercrombie to the pulpit and then resigned after only a year of service. In April, they hired J. Howard Smith of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and bought a “building in the rear of the church” from Abercrombie, which they could use as a Sunday School building.32 Just as the Audubon Park contingent was joining the vestry, one of Intercession’s mainstays left northern Manhattan for New Jersey. James Monroe, nephew of the fourth president and former member of both the New York State Assembly and U.S. House of Representatives, had been a founding member of the congregation and vestryman during its early years. He and his wife, Elizabeth, had bought property at 162nd Street in 1842 and built a large home there (now the site of New York Presbyterian Hospital). After Elizabeth died in 1852, Monroe retired from public life and moved to Orange, New Jersey, selling his thirty-seven-acre estate to the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. He asked them to retain the name “Fanwood,” which derived from his daughter Fanny, who legend holds loved walking and playing in the woods. Over the next few years, the Institution, which dated to 1816, built more than two acres of

New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb from New York and Its Institutions, Rev. J. F. Richmond, 1872 (Author’s collection)

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buildings for classrooms, assembly halls, dormitories, and dining facilities capable of accommodating five hundred pupils. Other institutions would move to northern Manhattan’s elevations in the next decades—the Colored Orphan Asylum, the New York Juvenile Asylum, and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York—but the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb would always retain its pride of place for having been there first.33

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In barely two years, the Audubons had transformed their farm into Manhattan’s first railroad suburb. For once, Victor’s timing was impeccable. By mid-century, families tiring of the city’s chaos were leaving it for affordable homes in the countryside beyond. The Hudson River Railroad brought them right to the Audubons’s door. In short order, orchards, crops, and animal enclosures gave way to a dozen Italianate villas with John’s road winding among them in a series of connecting circles, ovals, and curlicues. Geometrical gardens adorned with grape arbors provided these new families with fresh fruit, vegetables, and flowers. Paradoxically, foundations and English basements erased the very elements of the topography that had dictated where the new owners would build. The Audubons’s new neighbors entertained social aspirations requiring a more evocative name for their home than Minnie’s Land. Lucy wrote years later that “some of the gentlemen, friends of the Audubon family, who resided there after the naturalist’s death,” had instigated the change, probably meaning a cohort comprising Hall, Smythe, Hastings, and Munkittrick, but the Audubons must surely have consented. The name was likely common parlance before it first appeared in print when James Hall died suddenly in May 1854 at the relatively young age of forty-four and his New York Times obituary listed Audubon Park as his home. Hall’s funeral took place at Christ Church, his former Brooklyn parish, and his family buried him in Green-Wood Cemetery, where even today, faintly visible on a timeworn funeral monument atop a grassy hillock, is his place of death: Audubon

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Park on the Hudson. The transition from one name to the other was gradual and sporadic. As late as 1856, Lucy referred to “the ladies and gents of the park,” while heading her correspondence with “Minnie’s Land,” and businessmen living there listed their city directory addresses as either Carmansville, Washington Heights, Fort Washington, or by street coordinates until 1860, when Audubon Park finally became the standard designation. By then, that was the only address necessary to ensure that mail reached its recipient.1

James Hall Funeral Monument, Green-Wood Cemetery (Author’s collection)

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The number of new children in the park expanded Lucy Audubon’s classroom beginning in the fall of 1852. Teaching was in her blood. She had taught her sons on the frontier, worked as a governess while Audubon was preparing the Birds, and, more recently, had been teaching her grandchildren reading, writing, and arithmetic. After she leased the homestead to the Munkittrick family and moved into John’s new house, she opened her classroom to outside students, charging around eight dollars per quarter for each child. Her former student George Bird Grinnell later wrote that because Victor and John were “in no sense money makers, and had no notion whatever of the value of money,” Lucy had opened the school to support the family, just as she had once supported Audubon. Writing from secondhand information gleaned years after the events, Grinnell misinterpreted both the Audubon sons’ attempts to keep the family afloat and the primary reason for Lucy’s school, which was simply to educate her grandchildren, a task mothers and other female family members assumed in nineteenth-century America even after public education was widely available.2 Granted, Lucy did generate some income from her teaching, but in the labyrinthine architecture of Audubon family finances, Victor and John paid their mother to teach their children and she paid them for her room and board. Any pittance she earned from teaching three or four neighborhood children could not possibly have supported the large Audubon household. It could, however, provide a few “extras” for Lulu and Hattie. Grinnell’s error was not in recounting that Lucy supported her family, but in understanding exactly who her “family” was. Lucy taught her students individually, “passing from one child to another, seeing that each was properly at work, helping, explaining, encouraging. During the hours of school each child received a personal supervision that was practically continuous.” When her granddaughters were advanced enough, they became her assistants and taught their younger siblings and cousins, the equivalent of student teachers. Eventually, all the Audubon granddaughters except Lulu would spend some time as teachers in public or private school, and, for most of them, teaching was a career.3 The winter Lucy formalized her school was an emotionally difficult one for the family. Most of the Audubon grandchildren suffered through chicken pox and whooping cough (pertussis). On February 18, 1853, Caroline gave birth to another baby, Florence, who was born on her older sister Jenny’s fourth birthday. Two months later, Jenny died of whooping cough, the only Audubon grandchild to succumb to one of the common diseases

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that, before vaccinations and antibiotics, contributed to high mortality rates among children.4 Victor’s best-laid financial plans did not go completely awry, but by the middle of the decade, they had not proved fully successful, either. Balancing rental income against taxes, insurance, and upkeep was no easier than subsistence farming, particularly when tenants were slow in meeting their obligations. Lucy despaired when Munkittrick, Hall, and Conklin were behind in their rents. (Conklin and his family lived in a house John had converted from the old stable.) With housing stock growing in northern Manhattan and Westchester beyond, the Audubons were often making concessions to keep tenants so they wouldn’t be forced to look for new ones. One of the first renters to leave the park was Samuel Downer, who moved to Farmington, Connecticut, where he and his wife raised their five children. Within a few months after they left the park, John had found a new tenant. Insurance adjustor Henry Ward Johnson was neither a merchant nor a member at Intercession (though he was Episcopalian), but his occupation and social standing still fit the Audubon Park mold of respectability. In the spring of 1854, he moved there with his wife, Caroline, their two children, Caroline’s mother, and two female servants. The Connecticut-born Johnson had come to New York City when he was a teenager and, after working with several marine insurance companies, formed Jones and Johnson, with Walter Restored Jones Jr. At the end of 1853, Johnson formed Johnson & Higgins, a marine insurance adjusting company, with A. Foster Higgins.5 Rentless months and the expense of concessions to entice new tenants drained John and Victor’s energy and ate into desperately needed income. And when Victor most wanted to sell his property, he couldn’t. John may have sold his portion too quickly and cheaply, but Victor had been slow off the mark and now found that no one was interested in paying $400 for an undeveloped lot. Adding to these woes, early in the morning of March 5, 1854, a fire broke out in the basement of number 8 Spruce Street. The City-Hall bell ringer alerted the fire department, but despite prompt action, the fire spread to an adjacent bindery where copies of the Quadrupeds were awaiting covers. A few days earlier, Victor had arranged for a $1,500 policy with the Excelsior Fire Insurance Company, but the fire destroyed the building before the company had made out the policy and before Victor had paid the premium, so they refused to honor the agreement. Victor and John sued the company, and appeals dragged into 1859; eventually, they paid hefty legal fees and collected nothing.6 Lack of interest in Victor’s lots didn’t prevent Nagel from finding a buyer for his house in April 1854 or from turning a profit after owning it only two

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years. The buyer was New York merchant Lemuel Hayward. A Bostonian by birth, he had graduated Harvard in the class of 1845, where he was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club and staged its first musical offering. Hayward had brought his wife, Martha, to the city when he signed on with Francis Skinner & Company, a mercantile firm dealing in cotton fabrics. Henry Smythe, who managed the firm’s New York office, probably told Hayward that the house adjacent to his in Audubon Park was for sale. Although not large, the house was well-fitted, comfortable (with the folding doors Lucy had bemoaned for Smythe’s house), and large enough for a young couple. Hayward’s ad offering the house for temporary let a few years later provides a description, noting its convenience, pleasant location, and easy access to transportation.7 To Let—For Six Months, in Audubon Park, Carmansville, a furnished house well adapted for a gentleman and his wife. On the right of the hall on the first floor is a good-sized parlor with dining room connected with folding doors: on the left in a wing is the kitchen with good pantries, etc.: on the second story are four good-sized chambers with closets. There are half an acre of ground handsomely laid out, a good stable, with harness room, carriage house, and finished room for the man. Outside windows are fitted nearly all over the house. There are two large cisterns of soft water and a well of hard water on the premises. The house is of the Italian villa style of architecture, and the situation and neighborhood unsurpassed in the vicinity of NewYork. The Hudson River Railroad station at 152nd-St. is less than five minutes’ walk from the house.8 By 1855, the Audubons had taken out additional mortgages on their property, and Victor was reassessing what else they might sell to improve their circumstances. While he was on the road canvassing, he left John in charge of selling one of the rental properties but typically became impatient with his brother’s efforts. Reverting to his knee-jerk response, John made noises about buying his own farm, but by then, his cries of wolf fell on deaf ears, and Victor’s response was to send him on his own canvassing tour. Strapped for cash, though, Victor mortgaged his rental house to his brother-in-law Edward Talman—the same lots Talman had briefly owned three years earlier, but now improved with a house and rental income.9 The day Victor closed his deal with Talman, an unflattering article appeared in the New York Times about another of John’s brainstorms. He had drawn up a prospectus for a company that would establish and run a New York Zoological Garden and school. Estimating the cost at $300,000,

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he had priced shares at $100 and found thirty men who would subscribe to one share each. Whether or not John had really miscalculated the number of subscribers he needed, the Times took great delight in portraying him as a country bumpkin—capitalizing on rising regional tensions and the gentle southern accent John retained throughout his life. Four decades would pass before New York City finally had its zoological gardens.10 None of these problems harnessed Lucy’s spending or entertaining. Cousin Atterbury, the Bachmans, and assorted other relatives continued to arrive for extended visits, even though Lucy was no longer mistress of her own home. When the tuner recognized Lucy’s piano as one his “old master” had built, she immediately wanted to contract him “to put it in as good and agreeable [order?] as when it was new.” And when she worried that she didn’t have enough time to polish Lulu and Hattie, she paid for them to have dancing and singing lessons. Ever on the lookout for income, she prevailed upon Massachusetts senator Edward Everett to urge Congress to buy Audubon’s original paintings for the Birds. Congress wasn’t interested, but Lucy did not give up on the idea of preserving her husband’s legacy—at a profit.11 In the years Audubon Park was emerging from Minnie’s Land, Carmansville’s population and the businesses and institutions serving it had expanded. By the time Roderick Knox enumerated northern Manhattan for the New York State Census in 1855, the Twelfth Ward’s fifth election district included eight hotels, indicative of its seasonal appeal as a resort for people “in town,” seven barrooms (“groggeries”), six groceries, and seven retail stores, along with a wax bleacher, carriage maker, and tinsmith. Not all of these businesses were situated in the heart of Carmansville, but most of the growth was concentrated in the blocks radiating from the Hudson River Railroad station at the foot of 152nd Street and in quick walking distance, if not sight, of Audubon Park. One of the least attractive additions to the neighborhood was a tenement that Dennis Harris built on the park’s eastern border. Sitting on 157th Street, with its back facing toward the Audubons’s growing suburban enclave, the fifty-by-forty-foot, multistory building housed men working in the refinery and their families. Locals called it the “Dutch house” (a Yankee attempt at deutsch) because of the number of Germans living there.12 New York City tenements dated back to the 1820s, but midcentury, as land grew scarce, landlords embraced a new form that increased their profits. Cramming up to twenty families into a five- or six-story building that filled an entire 25-by-100-foot lot was far more lucrative than building a single row house with setbacks on the same footprint. Lacking suitable

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light, air, or sanitation, tenements developed a dark reputation that would hinder middle-class acceptance and growth of French flats and apartment buildings later in the century. Harris’s building was a cut above the usual tenement, in no small measure because it was freestanding and offered light, ventilation, and, remarkably, views on all four sides. Even so, with long storage sheds enclosing two sides of an entry courtyard and a prominent privy forming the third, it was a jarring contrast to Audubon Park’s gentility. Testament to its resolute offensiveness, shortly after Harris completed it, when his brother William sold adjacent lots to his son (also named William), he inserted a covenant in the deed prohibiting “any tenement house for tenants or Laboring men or any house of less value than Two Thousand Dollars.” For the immediate future, though, the Dutch House remained a blot on the horizon.13 Along with new businesses, Carmansville’s population supported two schools, four churches, and two halls large enough to entice companies like “Sanford & Co’s. Celebrated Ethiopian Opera Troup” to stop and perform as they made their way north from New York City to Boston. A public school sat east of the Kingsbridge Road, and Mademoiselle Bertha Aubert opened a day school for girls with a few boarders on 158th Street near Tenth Avenue. Lucy bought books from her, most likely for her own classroom. Within a few years, a Mrs. Freeman opened a “seminary” on 152nd Street, advertising “the advantages of the country, best city masters, salt-water bathing, with the comforts of home.” She also offered music lessons with Professor John A. Sconcia, famous for his hundred-page treatise “An Introduction to the Art of Singing: Upon a New and Improved Method, Illustrated by Clear and Scientific Rules, the Result of Long Experience and an Acquaintance with the Best Italian, and Other Modern Authors.”14 Intercession, the oldest church in the neighborhood, was no longer the largest, even though it had grown to 100 communicants, counted 200 regular attendees at services, and owned a building and land valued at $10,000. The Dutch Reformed Church on 152nd Street closely matched the Episcopalians in value and size but could seat 500 people and counted 250 regulars in its pews. Sixty Methodists rented a hall from Abiel Mills, and Congregationalists met, apparently rent-free, in a building Dennis Harris owned on Tenth Avenue a few lots north of 155th Street. The Washington Heights Congregational Society (their name reflecting the shift from “Carmansville” to “Washington Heights”) had formed the previous year in John Dalley’s parlor. Despite just 23 communicants, 125 people regularly attended services in the temporary chapel they used while planning a

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permanent church on the adjacent lot they bought from William and Angeline Wilson.15 Neighborhood growth did nothing to improve the Audubon family’s finances, since they had already sold most of their land and produced neither goods nor services they could peddle in the growing village. John may once have sold extra produce from his fields, but now his gardens produced only enough for the family. With all other business prospects looking dim, in 1856 Victor and John turned to what they knew best and produced a second octavo version of the Birds and a third edition of the octavo Quadrupeds.16 Nineteenth-century New Yorkers were a restless breed who changed houses often, and Audubon Park, despite its natural beauty, was no exception. Beginning in the summer of 1855, when merchant Daniel Post, his wife, Julia, and their four children replaced the Conklins in the converted stable and Alexander and Lillie Munkittrick decided to try life in Riverdale, the park’s households experienced a general fruit-basket turnover that didn’t settle again until the beginning of 1857. The Munkittricks liked Riverdale enough to stay there until the end of the Civil War. Munkittrick maintained business ties with Audubon Park, though, and in 1865 added several men there to his subscription list for the Guardian Fire Insurance Company of New York. (He returned to England in 1869 to establish the Equitable Life Assurance Society and died there in 1892, at the age of eighty-three.) The Munkittricks gone, William Foster moved into the homestead. Born in Connecticut, he had come to the city to make his fortune in the lucrative cotton trade and, once established, married Caroline Macomb, the adopted daughter of Robert Macomb, of Macomb’s Dam Bridge. The Fosters also had an adopted daughter, and Caroline asked Lucy Audubon to take her as a student.17 That same summer, Warren Hastings moved into Carmansville, and Victor leased his empty house to grocer Robert A. Haggerty, a longtime acquaintance of George Burgess’s. Haggerty’s downtown store proved useful as a mail drop while Victor and John were traveling, though Lucy found his service lacking. “That Hag,” as she called him, left town while Victor’s letters languished in the store, and his negligence with a check forced her to send a messenger to him “on Friday night to know if he had attended to it.” Haggerty threw himself into local life, though, volunteering with his neighbors for the Carmansville Fire Department, buying a horse, and much to Lucy’s annoyance, riding out with the local gentry.18 At the turn of 1856, Lucy complained to George Burgess that “owing to [John’s] carelessness” in writing a lease for James Hall, his widow, Mariah,

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still rented the house two years after he died. Taking advantage of the situation, she had moved her family back to her father’s home in Brooklyn and was subletting the house to Robert Perry at a profit—collecting $1,200 per annum, paying Lucy only $560, and asking her to “pay all repairs which in her husbands own writing he agreed to pay.” Lucy’s only benefit was that Perry sent his daughter, Alice, to her school. Even more perplexing for her, John had frittered away an entire year of Mariah’s rent on a new barn that he built near the homestead. What Burgess did about the Hall situation isn’t clear, but within a few months, Perry was gone, and Lucy had leased the house to William Almy Wheelock, whom she would eventually count among her trusted advisors.19 Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1825, Wheelock descended from early Massachusetts Bay settler Reverend Ralph Wheelock and Eleazar Wheelock, the founder of Dartmouth College. His family came to New York City when he was twelve years old, around the time Audubon was in Edinburgh completing the Birds. Wheelock graduated New York City College, paying his way either by “waiting on table and doing various menial jobs” or teaching, or perhaps both. Then, he joined dry goods importer Merritt, Ely & Company as an unpaid apprentice and worked his way up the ladder to partner in 1850, when it reorganized as Merritt, Bliss & Company. That same year, he married Harriet Effner, his wife for the next fiftyfive years.20 In April 1856, the Gildemeisters sold their property back to John for $600, approximately what they had paid for it, and returned to Brooklyn. A year later, when Gildemeister’s commissions dried up, he and Wilhemina repatriated to Germany. John leased the house to Haggerty and his wife, and once they had moved up the hill, as far as possible from Lucy without leaving the park altogether, William Moser Burgoyne and his family took the space they had vacated. Born in Charleston in 1812, Burgoyne was a first-generation American; his parents had taken citizenship after they immigrated from England. As a young man, he traveled to Havana and London and then, with his brother Benjamin, set off for the California Gold Rush in February 1849, departing New Orleans on a steamer just six days before John left Minnie’s Land. Despite the long trip around Cape Horn, his party arrived in early June, nearly five months before John’s expedition. On the day he debarked in San Francisco, Burgoyne and fellow passenger John Visscher Plume set up Burgoyne and Company, California’s second bank and an influential player on the “western Wall Street.” Burgoyne quickly engaged in the San Francisco community. He presided over the founding meeting of Grace Parish (ancestor of today’s Grace

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Cathedral) and won election as an alderman. He didn’t serve, however, because soon after the election, he returned to New Orleans to marry Margaret Duncan. They traveled back to San Francisco, where their first son was born, and then to New York City, where Burgoyne set up an eastern branch of the company, Burgoyne and Plume, around the time their second son arrived. They were living on East Fourteenth Street in February 1855 when Burgoyne and Company failed on “Black Friday.” Burgoyne was in California at the time but returned to New York by the beginning of October and decided to forsake his lease in town for cheaper housing. John would have been hard-pressed not to have met Burgoyne in San Francisco, given the size of the city when he was there and his being in charge of the expedition’s money, but even if they were not already acquainted, their San Francisco experiences and Burgoyne’s Charleston connection would have been sufficient entreé for the Burgoynes into Audubon Park.21 The month after they arrived, a court-appointed referee auctioned off a block of lots William Harris Jr. had bought from his father less than a year earlier. The suit also named Harris Sr., suggesting some family-wide financial problems. Lemuel Hayward bought four lots that expanded his property to the western side of Eleventh Avenue, and merchant William Hubbard bought the entire block front on the opposite side, for $275—the remarkably deflated price of $37.00 per lot. A few months later, Lucy sued the elder William Harris for default and, in another court-ordered auction, repurchased four lots on Eleventh Avenue, adjacent to the old Gildemeister house that John was leasing to the Haggertys. She paid $232 per lot, close to the previous market value. With that purchase, the Audubons had retrieved a house and six lots that they could restore to their underperforming real estate portfolio.22 Perhaps inspired by the mobility around him, at the end of 1856, Wellington Clapp decided to move his family to a house on West Eighteenth Street in the city. His family may have wanted a respite from the park after his coachman, “delirious from excessive drinking,” tried to kill himself with laudanum, hanging, and jumping from a third-story window—all unsuccessfully—before a justice “sent him to the lunatic asylum.” Hedging his bets in case he wanted to return to the park, Clapp leased his house to George Blake Grinnell, a business acquaintance. Grinnell and his wife, Helen Alvord Lansing, were well-connected members of the merchant class with impeccable pedigrees. Grinnell traced his American roots to English emigrants Matthew Greenell and Rose French, who landed in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1636, and his wife’s family tree rooted itself in Dutch immigrants who had founded Lansingburgh, New York.23

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Like many of New York’s nineteenth-century merchant class, Grinnell built his fortune on hard work and sterling reputation, rather than inherited wealth. Born in 1823, the second of George and Eliza Perkins Grennell’s eight children (his father preferred an alternate spelling of the family name), he grew up in rural Greenfield, Massachusetts, on several hundred acres of farmland his grandfather Grinnell had begun assembling in 1776, when he purchased “stock in trade” from a Tory merchant who had volunteered his services to the British army. George Grennell’s decade in the United States Congress earned him respect, but not much else, so after sending his eldest son, James, to Amherst College, he apprenticed his younger sons to relatives. George Blake began his career in his uncle James Seymour’s bank in Auburn, New York, where he attended the Reverend Dirck C. Lansing’s Presbyterian Church and met his future wife, the preacher’s daughter. He moved to Brooklyn in 1843 to clerk for his cousin George Bird at his wholesale dry goods business across the harbor in New York City and, five years later, married Helen Lansing, who had come to Brooklyn with her father when he answered the call at the Clinton Avenue Congregational Church. Their first child, George Bird, was born the next year, a few months before Grinnell rose to partner in his cousin’s firm. Over the next few years, as the family expanded to three sons and a daughter, they moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan’s West Twenty-First Street and then to Weehawken, New Jersey. Two years before George Grinnell moved his family to Audubon Park, he and his brothers William and Thomas partnered with Levi P. Morton in Morton & Grinnell, a commission business dealing in New England cotton goods. Cementing the business relationship with family ties, Grinnell named his third son “Morton,” and William married Levi’s sister, Mary.24 The Grinnells moved to the park on January 1, 1857, with a three-year lease on Clapp’s house. Eldest son George Bird, whose memories and myths would inform future generations’ understanding of Audubon Park, recalled the day in an unpublished memoir he began in 1915, but never completed: G. B. Grinnell had set out from Weehawken early in the day alone and a little later Mrs. Grinnell, with Hannah, the black nurse, carrying the baby and the three boys, drove to the Hoboken ferry and up north on New York Island. Amos, the coachman, drove the two bay horses, Selim and Emporor, to a closed carriage; on the seat by his side lay a little yellow dog that belonged in the stable, while Hector, the big white and black “mastiff” followed on foot. Snow was falling

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and the Bloomingdale road was deep in mud and slush. At Manhattanville, the horses were so tired that it was necessary to stop at a stable and procure another pair and so with lead bars and long reins the coach drove up to the Clapp house as a four-in-hand.25 Nothing about the Grinnells’s arrival that snowy New Year’s Day suggested the power the family would eventually wield in Audubon Park or the role they would play in bringing down the curtain on a unique time and place in northern Manhattan’s history. For the moment, George and Helen Grinnell were just one more middle-class couple in search of affordable housing and a healthy environment where they could raise an expanding family.

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Eighteen fifty-seven wasn’t kind to anyone in Audubon Park. The year hit the Audubons particularly hard and continued the downward spiral that would strangle their finances, rob them of their property, and eventually expel them from what was once their Garden of Eden. A global problem that year was the gold supply. The California Gold Rush may have been a bust for John Audubon, but it hadn’t been for everyone. In the early 1850s—a heady time in America after the Mexican War opened new territory for western expansion—steady shipments of the precious metal had fueled manufacturing and land speculation, particularly in the Midwest, where railroad construction promised growth along both sides of the tracks. In those same years, Europe sent its farmers off to fight in the Crimea, creating an agricultural shortage that America was able and eager to fill. By mid-decade, however, the war ended, farmers returned home, and Europe needed less of the bounty American fields had to offer at the same time the supply of West Coast gold slowed. The elements were in place for an economic panic, the third and largest of the century to date, and the first on a global scale. An early sign of coming trouble was a general recession in 1856 that rippled into every business in the country and engulfed the Audubons’s neighbor Dennis Harris, though poor judgment and speculative schemes also played a role in his undoing. Three days before Christmas 1856, the sheriff and auctioneer arrived at his house on the edge of Audubon Park to sell “a large assortment of household furniture, rosewood and mahogany

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suits, bedroom furniture, kitchen furniture . . . one rosewood piano, one organ, one melodeon . . . carriages and harness, sleighs, bells, [and] robes” to the highest bidder. Sarah Harris, his wife of only a few weeks (he had remarried after his first wife, Ann, died in July 1855) must have been mortified to find she was a codefendant in the legal proceedings and to see her household goods scattered across the lawn. Harris had already sold his steamboat, the Jenny Lind, and his sugar refineries to Harris & Company and transferred large blocks of property to relatives—perhaps to shelter it from the coming financial storm—but he was still liable for large business debts. In the early 1850s, he had joined the boards of several insurance companies and banks, along with Judge John Newhouse, who had built a home near the sugar refinery on land he bought from Harris. Details in the newspapers and court records suggest that unscrupulous partners used Harris’s cash and exploited his reputation, though his selective amnesia on the witness stand suggests that he may have been a more willing participant than his lawyers wanted him to admit.1 His legal problems dragged into the next decade, but in the short term, court-appointed referees auctioned off large parts of his property to pay his debts, often at prices markedly below what he had paid. Grocers George T. Plume and Charles A. Lamont, partners in business and related through their wives, who were sisters, took over the sugar refinery, and though they had no apparent experience in the business other than retailing sugar in their stores, kept it running for several more decades. A new wave of speculators snapped up other Harris parcels: commission merchants Sheppard Gandy and Howell L. Williams; Cuban-born millionaire Don Leonardo Santos Suárez; businessman Moses Taylor, who would soon own controlling interest in the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railroad; and Spanishborn Bartolomé Blanco de Lema, who had emigrated to the United States in the early part of the century and amassed a fortune from the slave trade—another layer of racial history on land that slaves once tilled and abolitionist Harris had previously owned.2 Shepherd F. Knapp paid $6,050 for Harris’s house near the foot of 158th Street. His father, also named Shepherd, had come to New York City from Massachusetts as a fourteen-year-old and apprenticed to his cousin, leather merchant and politician Gideon Lee. After making his own fortune in leather and building a house next to the old Kingsland mansion, the elder Knapp expanded his horizons. He became president of the Mechanics’ Bank and, between 1849 and 1853, served as chamberlain of the city. The younger Shepherd also made a fortune in the leather business before expanding into other ventures. He would entwine himself in Audubon Park

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society much more than Harris had ever done. Knapp and his wife socialized with the other couples, their children played together, and Knapp would become a leader in the Presbyterian church and in the community.3 The Knapps also held mortgages on Audubon property. In 1857, interest payments on those mortgages were but one of the problems besetting the Audubons. Any and all economic tightening harmed their business; subscribers were harder to obtain, publications were harder to produce, and receivables were harder to collect, so the downturn hampered success with the octavo editions. The more devastating problem, though, was Victor’s deteriorating health. As early as 1832, William Bakewell had worried that his twenty-three-year-old nephew’s “constitution [was] too delicate for such a companion” as Audubon, who had sent his son to England to oversee the Birds while he searched America for additional specimens. Over the next two decades, Victor drove himself hard, and stress took its toll. “It is now about 12 o’clock & I have been too sick with that awful pain over the eye to do anything but lie down till just this few minutes ago,” he wrote to John in January 1851. “I took 10 grs Calomel this morning and I hope to be better by night. Do not be uneasy about me I will take good care of myself.” Later that month, he wrote his mother that he had “been rather under the weather or I should have written to you sooner—I gave the Bottle of Scotch Whiskey to Mrs. Bowen—She has been very kind to me—and yesterday evening I took a little of the whiskey aforesaid in the shape of a hot toddy when I went to bed, & I slept very much better than for several nights past—I hope to be quite right by tomorrow. But you know how provokingly obstinate that local intermittent (sic) of mine has occasionally been.” Lucy’s concerns about Victor grew in the mid-1850s, and she urged him to try an unspecified treatment that had helped their neighbor Sheriff Thomas Carnley. At the same time, she acknowledged to George Burgess that she had little control over the situation and her best course was “to hope for the best and at any rate be resigned.”4 And then, at the end of 1856, Victor fell and injured his spine. Details about the accident vary in the telling. Decades later, Hattie told Alice Jaynes Tyler that “Uncle Victor tumbled on the little path to his house and hurt his back,” and Jacob Pentz, who lived with John’s family in the early 1860s, wrote in Shooting and Fishing Magazine that Victor fell “from a railroad train.” Francis Hobart Herrick, who had interviewed longtime neighbor John Harden, referenced both stories in the epilogue to his Audubon biography and added that Victor had fallen into an unguarded light well for a basement window. The sad truth each discreetly omitted was that

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Victor stumbled and fell because he was drunk. He was an alcoholic and apparently had been for some time. That fact would hardly have been a secret in and around a small village like Carmansville, where neighborhood gossip informed and enlivened daily encounters. That John “kept a barrel of whiskey in the cellar” but rarely imbibed, that Victor was the intemperate member of the family, that John Harden once pulled a drunk Victor off the railroad tracks from in front of a train (fortunately not moving at the time) would have been common knowledge, though the village’s code of politeness helped protect the family’s secrets from wider circulation.5 Seemingly unaware of the severity of Victor’s accident, Bachman wrote him encouraging words from Charleston through the winter and spring; in the summer he invited him to “come to us about the first of Oct. & We will cheer you up.” Bachman must have realized something was amiss when John once again engaged Bleeker to sell the family’s property: “several commodious and handsome houses, with Coach-houses, Gardens, &c., and choice plots of ground in Audubon Park.” Bleeker repeated longstanding selling points like accessibility, views, and the “healthy position” along with special mention of “forest trees of many species and large size” and “fine lawns with greensward and groups of evergreens.” Buyers could pay cash or take out a mortgage with the Audubons on “one of the most desirable spots for suburban residences on the Island.”6 The sale was ill-timed. Depressed land prices and cheaper options in the neighborhood hindered John’s efforts to unburden the family of its albatross. Richard Carman offered “large and commodious” accommodations at the Carman House, where families and single gentlemen could enjoy “good boating, bathing and stabling,” while Shepherd Knapp and lawyer Augustus Smith were letting brick and frame cottages within walking distance of the 152nd Street train station. Building on their success, Hickson Field converted his mansion and thirty-acre estate, Woodland Park, to a summer resort, complete with a “water cure.” Carroll’s New York Directory of the Hotels of Note gave the neighborhood its seal of approval.7 Carmansville, situated upon a rising ground on the Hudson River, in the vicinity of Fort Washington and commanding an extensive and delightful view, forms one of the most popular of our suburban resorts. The facilities for reaching it, both by railroad and stage, are rapidly augmenting its population. It is nine miles from City Hall and is reached by Hudson River railroad, fare 15 cents, or by steamer Edwin from Warren street pier; or by Sixth Avenue Railroad to

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junction of Sixth Avenue and Broadway, thence by Manhattanville stages. Fare through, 25 cents.8 The Audubons’s chances of recovery sank in August when the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company’s New York branch failed, victim of speculation, overexpansion, and embezzlement. Morse’s telegraph quickly spread the news to other cities, where fear accelerated business failures. New York banks teetered on disaster while they awaited the steam-powered paddlewheeler S. S. Central America, which was delivering 30,000 pounds of California gold dust, nuggets, ignots, and coins to shore up paper currency. But on September 11, the “Ship of Gold” sprung a leak in an Atlantic hurricane and the next night sank 160 miles off the coast of North Carolina, taking the gold and more than four hundred passengers and crew to the bottom of the sea. Among the missing was John O. Stevens, a member of John’s California expedition, who was returning east and bringing the two hundred drawings and paintings John had left behind for safekeeping. Within days, the Audubons learned Stevens’s fate: he had gone down with the “Ship of Gold” and so had John’s treasure, his artwork. Depositors quickly ran banks in Philadelphia and Baltimore. On October 13, New York City’s Ocean Bank closed its doors at 10:30 in the morning, and by the afternoon eighteen banks had failed. The next day, the stock market collapsed, and the New York Times blared “Panic” from its front page. In the park, Lemuel Hayward immediately offered his house for let. So did Robert Haggerty, whose ad suggested he was leaving permanently.9 House to Let and Furniture for Sale—At Audubon-park, 9 miles from Chambers-st., by Hudson River Railroad. The house is nearly new, in fine order, of moderate size, with well and cistern-water in the kitchen, and cistern-water in second story; heated by hot-air furnace; location within five minutes walk (plank) of the 152d-st. Station; house surrounded by very fine trees, both Evergreen and Deciduous. Furniture plain but good, and will be sold cheap. Apply to R. A. Haggerty, No. 135 Greenwich-st.10 Neither man left the park, though, and during the next year, grocer Haggerty took advantage of the recession that followed the panic and set himself up as a Merchants Exchange auctioneer “for the sale of stocks, bonds, real estate, ships, etc.” He was also equipped for “the letting of houses, stores, &c. and the collections of rents. Money loaned and borrowed.” Haggerty’s social climbing may have once annoyed Lucy, but it

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paid off. Wellington Clapp, Lemuel Hayward, Shepherd Knapp, and Henry Smythe all endorsed his new venture.11 Other park residents also found ways to thrive in the wake of the panic. William Wheelock rose to partner when Merritt, Bliss & Company reorganized as Bliss, Douglas, Wheelock & Company, and Henry Smythe founded the commission house Smythe, Sprague, & Cooper. First, though, he toured the continent for several months, encountering Herman Melville on a coach in Switzerland and traveling with him from there to Heidelberg. The trip evolved into an acquaintance that would eventually prove much to Melville’s financial benefit.12 Throughout October, New York Times reporters charted the economy’s collapse in a series of articles entitled, “Hard Times in the City.” Back orders would take a few nimble businesses through the end of the year, but the majority resorted to putting workers on “short time,” halting production until difficulties had passed, or laying off workers entirely. Few industries were exempt, and tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs. Superintendent Frederick Law Olmsted dismissed Irish, German, and Italian immigrants building Central Park, and thousands of garment industry workers found themselves unemployed: hat makers, mantilla and cloak makers, tailors, seamstresses, and particularly piece workers, who completed precut garments in home workshops. Leather businesses like the Knapps’s were in peak production season when dropping sales left their warehouses full. Even so, retaining highly skilled workers was “more economical than to risk losing their services.” James Conner & Sons’ Type Foundry (the same Conner who had once partnered with Carman in the failed cemetery venture) hastily completed contracted jobs, only to find they couldn’t collect. Confectioners and restauranteurs initially thought “eating is a luxury people will not dispense with, even when the banks are broke,” but within days, they were reporting that men had developed “more ladylike appetites” and laborers were not showing up to their usual haunts, prompting the Times to predict “a rush upon the tin man for Sandwich boxes.” When hotels noted 30 percent fewer guests than a year earlier, some began offering the European plan (“furnishing what is called for, and charging for it alone”) in place of the American prix fixe system. Jewelers did surprisingly well because some people were converting any extra cash into “watches, breast-pins and other ornamental conveniences, assured that they are less likely to break than banks, and that when they are worn out they are as ‘good as gold.’ ”13 The real estate market slowed significantly. William Wheelock attempted to let his eleven-room house for nine months at $1,000 (Haggerty was the

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broker). Despite the promise of large closets, a bathroom with hot and cold water, central heating, and “the best of furniture, china, glass, etc.,” no one was interested. On 158th Street, the Knapps did expand their property, and Charles R. Parfitt built a speculative house just west of John Dalley’s, but the syndicate that bought Parfitt’s house soon lost it in foreclosure. One of the syndicate members bought it and sold it to chair-maker Benjamin J. Harrison, but only for $3,400, less than the land alone would have brought a few years earlier.14 Twice in the years the Audubons had lived in northern Manhattan, John had considered running for public office, and twice the family had told him to focus on business. In early 1858, Mayor Daniel Tiemann offered him a position as First Clerk in his administration, and this time he took it. What he did in the role isn’t clear, though perhaps this is when, as Herrick later reported, he “took charge of lighting the streets.” Equally possible is that Tiemann, a longtime family friend, offered John a sinecure to help the Audubons through difficult times. The next month, the Audubons joined a group of neighbors petitioning the state legislature to “determine and lay down the number of avenues and streets north of 155th Street.” That may have been a function of John’s role, though a cynical New York Herald editorial suggested the petitioners had fallen for a land speculation or road jobbing scheme. In any case, the legislature took no immediate action. For the present, residents could console themselves with a laudatory Herald editorial. Possibly authored by the paper’s editor and proprietor James Gordon Bennett, whose estate lay north of Audubon Park, it was a forerunner of many similar pieces over the next four decades.15 This is the most picturesque region in the immediate vicinity of any large city. There is nothing in the suburbs of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna or any city in Europe to compare with it. If it is kept out of the hands of jobbers and speculators, and allowed to grow up, as it is doing, under the direction of the proprietors, it will become in ten or fifteen years one of the most beautiful faubourgs of any city in the world, and infinitely a superior location for the fine residences of merchants and others to Fifth Avenue or the Central Park. It is removed from the city, and free from the rowdies and loafers, whose presence renders a residence further down town almost insufferable.16 Beyond political dabbling in 1858, John began planning the first doubleelephant-folio-sized edition of the Birds since his father introduced the original publication thirty-one years earlier. He envisioned, and advertised in 1859, forty-four installments, each with ten plates “printed on seven

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sheets of double elephant paper” at only “$10 per number—the total cost of the entire work, including seven volumes of letter press, being one-half the cost of the first edition.” John contracted artist Julius Bien, who had immigrated to America following the 1848 student revolt in Germany, to render the tints in his father’s original watercolors using chromolithography (color printing), an emerging printing technology that many believed would “surpass previous printing techniques in its ability to reproduce the effects of painting, whether watercolor or oil.” Bien, who, perhaps inadvertently, lent his name to the edition, transferred Havell’s copper engravings to lithographic stones, a separate stone for each color of ink. John’s partner in this new edition was Roe Lockwood & Son, a second-generation New York publisher and bookseller.17 Materials, especially ink and the fine paper that John promised subscribers, and extensive experimentation with colors and registering the stones so that they aligned properly on the print, required a large initial investment. Had Victor been able to advise John and Lucy, who cosigned the business agreements with Lockwood, he might have explained the project’s high risk and the hundreds of subscribers John would need to sign before he saw a return on the family’s investment. Sadly, by the time John had fully committed himself to the project, Victor’s deteriorating physical and mental capacity left him unable to offer advice. Georgianna tried to help but lacked firsthand experience with the family’s business. John was on his own. Amidst these trials, the Audubons celebrated Lulu’s marriage to Delancey Barclay Williams, whose father, Abraham, was a respected physician, former Alderman, art connoisseur, and naturalist. The young couple began courting while Delancey was studying at Columbia and, in 1856, stood as godparents for Lulu’s youngest half-brother, Benjamin Phillips Audubon. A few months later, Bachmann sent his best wishes to his granddaughter, joking that Hattie needn’t worry; he would find her a suitable husband in Charleston. Lucy probably favored the match until she learned that Delancey intended to become a farmer rather than follow in his father’s footsteps. If Hattie ever married, Lucy confided to her sister-in-law Maria Bakewell the summer after the wedding, she hoped it would not “be quite a similar affair.” She admitted, however, that Lulu seemed “quite contented & happy” as a farmer’s wife, despite the hardships. Oddly, given their very close relationship, Hattie was not at her sister’s wedding. In October, she had left Audubon Park for several months and did not return until the early summer, just in time to be with Lulu when she delivered her first child.18

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At the beginning of 1859, the editor of the New York Evening Post reviewed the first prints for the Birds and declared them “exceedingly good.” The Richmond (Virginia) Enquirer, quoting John’s prospectus, wrote that they were “superior in softness, finish and correctness of coloring to the plates in the first edition.” Accepted wisdom in ensuing decades held that the Bien edition was inferior to the Havell engravings because the paper was of poor quality and the colors, which often did not properly align, were garish in comparison. Joel Oppenheimer, in an essay accompanying his 2013 reproduction of the Bien Chromolithograpic Edition, argues that John had scrupulously supervised and examined the first Bien edition as keenly as his father had the original Havell edition. Oppenheimer attributes this long misunderstanding about the Bien edition’s quality to poor prints in later editions that the Lockwood family produced without John’s involvement, confusion about which surviving prints came from which edition, repetitions of Francis Hobart Herrick’s negative assessment of the Bien edition in his biography of Audubon, and a general misunderstanding about what John aimed to achieve. His intention, as Oppenheimer described, was that the chromolithographic prints “would be superior to the Havell edition not because they would copy the subtlety of the aquatint and detail of the engraving (although these were important components) but because they would be more faithful to Audubon’s original watercolors.” Despite John’s attention to detail, the lithographs were not superior to the engravings and the project was doomed—though not solely because of quality.19 The Audubons’s financial affairs were a stark contrast to those of their neighbors up the hill. The nascent company of Morton and Grinnell had been flexible enough to survive the Panic and was once again on firm financial footing. In March 1857, Helen Grinnell’s father, Dirck C. Lansing, died in Cincinnati, and his widow, Susan (Helen’s stepmother), had joined the Grinnell household. Among her contributions to the family were daily lessons with her grandsons Frankie and Mortie in her bedroom, mirroring Lucy’s classroom down the hill.20 A few months after Grandma Lansing arrived, Helen began keeping a journal for each of her five children—George, Frank, Morton, Helen, and William—“to read when they shall become older.” Over the next decade, while recording the comings and goings in her household, she also chronicled the bonds forming among the families she playfully named the “A.Parkites.” The Grinnells’s social life revolved around impromptu dinners and outings with their park neighbors (“A lovely day—the Knapps, Burgoynes, Posts, & Mrs. Foster dined with us [on english mutton]”), occasional trips to the opera and theatre (“Went to the opera and I must confess

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I was disappointed; it was Don Pasquale and I wanted ‘La Traviata.’ We came home in a snow storm”), and frequent visits with extended family (“Tonight Grandpa Grinnell came up to spend the Sabbath: he came down with Aunt Hattie last night.”). Central to these activities was regular church attendance. On Sundays, the Grinnells often attended Episcopal services in the morning and Presbyterian in the evening. Between the two, Helen usually gathered her brood around the parlor piano for an afternoon hymn sing. “To day has been fine—we could not have our usual singing on acct. of my cold, but we have heard two good sermons.” Like most women of her class in nineteenth-century America, Helen oversaw her children’s religious education as well as their schooling. “You know dear Frankie,” she wrote in his journal, “I have often told you that we should not fail to thank God, every day of our lives, for His wonderful goodness to us, especially should we begin the day with prayer and this I want you to remember. It is my earnest desire that my children should be sincere Christians.”21 Religion was central to Carmansville’s spiritual as well as its social life, but the village’s fledgling churches struggled in the aftermath of the panic. In 1856, the Congregational Church asked the New School branch of the Presbyterian Church to accept them and help build “a new and convenient church edifice.” That plan failed, so they broke ground and laid a foundation themselves. Money soon ran out, and they abandoned work in 1857 with only the walls completed. A few months later, the church’s founding pastor, the Reverend O. H. White, abandoned his flock in their hour of need and joined the Presbyterians without them. The floundering congregation moved out of Dennis Harris’s wooden chapel (which he then rented to the Methodists) and into Cuthell’s Hall on the corner of 156th Street and Tenth Avenue, continuing a Sunday school and having preaching when they could obtain a minister. For nearly two years, until the congregation joined the Second Presbytery of New York, the incomplete building loomed over Carmansville like a Gothic ruin. Encouraged by an improving economy and Presbyterian families moving into the neighborhood—including the Park’s William Wheelock—the church’s seventeen active members installed the Reverend Charles A. Stoddard as their permanent pastor in September 1859. The next year, they dedicated the new Washington Heights Presbyterian Church with a day of services: Stoddard preached in the morning, the Reverend O. H. White in the afternoon, and the Reverend William Hodge in the evening.22 Seven years older and founded with a larger base of Episcopalians, Intercession was in a better position to weather the economic storm. Even so, the congregation had outgrown its church building and, like the Presbyterians,

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had limited resources for building a new one. Over the next few years, while the vestrymen negotiated support from Trinity Church, they planned a $1,250 enlargement of the existing structure that they would fund by selling the “Sunday school house in the rear of the church,” opening a subscription book, and asking the ladies of the church to hold a bazaar. In contrast to earlier years, only two members of the vestry, William Burgoyne and George Grinnell, represented the park, and neither lasted very long. Burgoyne resigned before his first vestry meeting, and Grinnell, who was treasurer, attended a few meetings and then resigned his office. He remained a vestryman but didn’t attend any further meetings that year.23 The economy, real estate, and local institutions might be faltering, but Audubon Park’s families continued to grow. “The residents of Audubon Park were prolific,” George Bird Grinnell wrote in his 1915 memoir. Twenty-five children were living in the park when the Grinnells arrived in 1857 and added five more. Eleven of them were Audubons (not counting Lulu and Hattie, who were then nineteen and eighteen). Over the next decade, another baby arrived almost every year. Family celebrations marked each year’s passage. Park children exchanged Valentines in February (“You have rec’d and sent two,” Helen wrote in Frank’s Journal, “one to Nellie Smythe, and one to Julia Post”), played traditional tricks on April first (“We were all sailing around at an early hour this a.m. in the most dignified manner with long white appendages floating from our skirts, while you youngsters were choking with laughter”), and made maximum noise on Independence Day.24 Well, Master Frank I wonder if you will be satisfied with this 4 of July: you have had as many torpedoes and firecrackers as you could wish and have done nothing but race and romp all day. This afternoon I treated the little boys and girls around here to lemonade cake and raspberries and this evening all hands up stairs and down had as much of the same as they could wish for with the addition of [cook] Diana’s ice cream.25 Birthday parties fell nearly every month, though Helen put a moratorium on them after her children caught colds at Billy Knapp’s. “Was up half the night with Mortie who had the ear ache. Helen [Mortie’s sister] was taken this morning with the same complaint and cried hard for two hours with it. I shall be glad when you all get over the bad effects of the party a week ago.” Later that month, she wouldn’t let Frankie and Mortie attend Annie Audubon’s party (“I don’t care about having another siege of sickness in consequence of party going”), but relented for William Burgoyne’s and

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then returned her neighbors’ hospitality when Frankie turned six, serving a supper of “tiny biscuits with tongue between cold water, cake, motors(?) candies almonds raisins and ice cream.” A few months later, she hosted thirty children for Georgie’s tenth birthday: “You enjoyed yourselves very much and I have never seen a merrier and more joyous group.” Florence Audubon introduced a variation of the piñata when she turned seven in 1860—perhaps a tradition John had discovered during his Mexico adventures. “You told me about it this a.m.,” Helen wrote in Frank’s journal. “How they had a paper bag suspended from the ceiling filled with candies and each child was blindfolded and led up to give the bag one knock and whatever candies fell out, were given to them: this you considered very fine.”26 Although Helen spent most of her waking hours in chores and overseeing her staff, she found time to take her children and their friends on the steamboat Edwin (the Jenny Lind’s replacement), to Niblo’s Garden for Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer, and on walks through northern Manhattan’s countryside.27 Ah! Master Frank, what a nice time we all had at the picnic to day: Mrs. Knapp and Willie: Mrs. Burgoyne, Willie and Alfred: and Mama, Georgie, Frankie and Mortie: we took our refreshments and went to the High Bridge, and there you raced and romped and we had our picnic and before we came home we went down the rocks under one of those splendid arches and you all paddled in the water with your bare feet and had a very splendid time. I went again after dinner with Papa and Uncle Tom and felt pretty well used up on returning home having been up and down during the day 450 steps besides climbing over the rocks. Uncle Tom was delighted with the High Bridge and with the surrounding scenery.28 Helen’s duties also included disciplining her children. She did not shy away from corporal punishment, particularly with Frankie, whose impulsive adventures (usually with his willing shadow, Mortie, in tow) frequently earned his mother’s disapproval. “I tied you up to day for half an hour, or rather I tied you in a chair: on going into the nursery a short time after I found you walking around the chair accompanying you in your perambulations as you could not conveniently free yourself from it.”29 Fortunately, Helen was not aware of what her eldest son was up to in those days. Her “Georgie” journal has not survived, but his Memoir has. “The little boys of Audubon Park—all of them—ought to have been sent to some reform school,” he wrote. “For they were bad, not perhaps judged by a boy’s standard, but by that of an elderly man. They wanted excitement,

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The Road to High Bridge from Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, September 1854 (Author’s collection)

and were determined to have it.” Excitement in his definition included stealing chickens to roast in the woods, cigars from their fathers, food from their mothers’ pantries, “anything edible from the village grocery store,” and on one occasion, even a “silver coin from a maid servant’s trunk.” Georgie and his friends lobbed names and stones across the fence at “the small boys who occupied the Dutch House” and in the fall gathered and ate enough chestnuts to give themselves stomachaches. When they weren’t otherwise engaged, they enjoyed “sliding down hill and skating in winter; swimming, crabbing, fishing and picnicking in summer.”30 And they played fireman. Most of the fathers “ran with the engines” at the Carmansville fire department, so in imitation, the boys cobbled together their own “machine” from some old tires and an old axle and, donning red shirts their mothers provided (“some even had a genuine fireman’s helmet”), they put out imagined fires.31 Real fires were always a threat to the wooden houses in Carmansville and villas in Audubon Park. We had a terrible fright last night [Helen wrote in her daughter’s journal]. At 1/4 before 2 o/c, we were awakened by shrieks from the servants, and we found that the house was on fire. I was very much

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afraid that the lower part was nearly gone. I prepared you all for escape from the upper piazzas and papa ran down stairs to see about it. He found the hat stand in flames and ran up again for water which the girls brought as fast as they could. The flames were soon subdued and our hearts comparatively quiet. The house was filled with firemen, policemen, and all the neighbors came in and were very kind. We are thankful I hope for our wonderful deliverance. We found in the morning two more places that had been fired, evidently the work of some revengeful person.32 Feeling flush again in 1859, George Grinnell and his business partner Levi P. Morton built a speculative house in Riverdale. That same year, George gave Helen an imported music box that played “twelve most exquisite airs” and presented her with his portrait painted by James Bogle, a student of Samuel Morse and associate of the National Academy of Design. He also arranged sittings for Helen. She loved his picture after Bogle redid his right eye but was very dissatisfied with hers. “I have said nothing to any of you with regard to my portrait, which has been finished six weeks and is a perfect failure as no one recognizes it and I shall not take it,” she wrote in her daughter Helen’s journal. “It is a frightful thing.”33 When May Day rolled around that year, Haggerty moved into Carmansville, and John sold the vacant Gildemeister house to Manhattansville residents Lewis and Maria Miner. Before they and their two children moved in, the Miners also bought Lucy’s lots at the corner of 155th Street and 11th Avenue, doubling the size of their property. True to form, Lucy profited from the deal and John didn’t. She had initially sold the lots to William Harris, held a mortgage on them, and then repurchased them when he defaulted; John still owed the city chamberlain $1,565.62 in property taxes on his house, dating back to 1853, before the Gildemeisters bought it.34 By the summer of 1859, Lucy had forsaken any idea that real estate could guarantee a secure future and focused, instead, on investments. “Could I sell my property, I could live very comfortably on the interest, and might go and see you all,” she wrote her sister-in-law Maria Bakewell a few weeks after the Miners bought her lots. For the near future, though, she divided her days between Victor’s bedroom on the first floor in his house and a dozen pupils in her own bedroom on the second floor, “for being idle does no good to anyone.”35 “My poor sons total loss of mind is grievous indeed,” she wrote to Maria. “And in addition to that, his want of the power to move, or help himself makes the case doubly painful. The Dr says he may remain as he is long,

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but dear as he is to us I can not say it is right to wish it; to us he is already gone, his body we care for and tend, but how sad the fulfillment of such a change.” The relationship between Victor’s accident and the subsequent paralysis and insanity is unclear, though the combined symptoms suggest that beyond alcoholism, one possibility was that he was suffering from paralytic dementia, a neurological disease occurring in late-stage syphilis.36

8

The Hemlocks

In early September 1859, the Grinnells’s landlords, the Clapps, announced they would be returning to Audubon Park in the new year. “We are greatly disappointed but we will try and make the best of it and look out for another home,” wrote Helen. For the next few weeks, eight months pregnant with her sixth child, she and George toured the neighborhood looking at houses. None suited them. The best possibility was the “large and commodious” house the Johnsons had been renting from Georgianna until they left the previous March. Besides being in the park and having “all the modern improvements except gas,” it had a beautiful view of the river, a large lawn and gardens, and a dense stand of trees that eventually inspired its name: the Hemlocks. The Grinnells liked the house— “Butchers, grocers, bakers, icemen and milkmen call daily at the door for orders”— but thought it was too small.1 While they were considering it, John, who was now managing both his and his brother’s properties, left for a months-long canvassing trip. With Victor incapacitated and none of the Audubon grandsons old enough to take charge of the household, he asked twenty-five-year-old Jacob Pentz to care for his family while he was away. John had met Jacob at the Carman House where he and his eighteen-year-old wife, Edith, lived. Intending to stay a few months, the Pentzes would remain with John’s family for the next several years. Canvassing was tedious for John at the best of times, but now Southerners were focused on sectional tensions and the approaching presidential election. “I get daily a name or two,” he wrote to his sister-in-law

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Jane Bachman from Louisville. “But it is slow work for another hundred & fifty, yet still they come, & I now feel almost sure that I shall be able to see my poor Brother’s family comfortably settled, pay up my debts and once more work for myself.”2 The Grinnells halted house hunting in early November when Helen delivered another daughter, naming her Laura after her late mother. One week later, Mortie came down with scarlet fever, a streptococcal infection that sometimes proved fatal before the advent of antibiotics. The disease spread among the Grinnell children, only sparing Georgie. Mortie and Helen escaped with relatively mild cases, but Willie developed a severe bronchial infection, and Frankie “lay at the point of death for two or three days.” Nursing baby Laura, Helen could only lie in her room, waiting for reports and listening as Hannah, Grandmother Lansing, and Grandma Grinnell, who came down from Massachusetts to help, cared for the sick. “Dear Papa did not take off his clothes for five nights during Frankie’s low state and good faithful Hannah did not undress for three weeks at night, only catching naps in her chairs during Willie’s illness.” Dr. Williams visited regularly and prescribed laudanum, paregoric, and quinine along with wet poultices and a special brew of beef tea, port wine, and arrowroot. The Grinnells celebrated little at Thanksgiving and Christmas that year but were grateful that all the children survived. Recuperations were slow, but by spring, they were all active again.3 Early in 1860, George agreed to lease the Hemlocks if John would enlarge it. Perennially optimistic that he could recoup his outlay, John hired John Harden to add a wing on the house’s west side. That same spring, Lemuel and Martha Hayward advertised their house for sale when they decided to move to Bandera, Texas, and raise cattle. George Bird Grinnell later remembered their house as “tiny,” but Lemuel had added a kitchen with pantries and a servant’s room, as well as cellars for meat, wine, and coal, a library on the first floor, and a “tower room” on the second. The property included a stable and carriage-house, with accommodations for the coachman. The Haywards didn’t need to look long or far for a buyer. Within a month, Henry Smythe bought the property as an investment, paying them $8,500 for it, and added it to his adjacent acre and a half. The Haywards left that spring and spent the Civil War raising cattle in Texas.4 By moving day 1860, the Grinnells were in their new home, the Clapps were back in theirs, William Foster had taken his family to the northern side of 158th Street, and Manhattanville merchant Charles Trask had signed a lease on the homestead. Like the Grinnells, Trask and his wife, Martha, responded to the improved economy by hiring a governess for

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their four children. They also kept a coachman, whose duties included chauffeuring the family, caring for the harness and horses, and looking after any other “man’s” job the cadre of female servants couldn’t do. The Grinnells’s coachman, Amos Hoven, spent his spare time retrieving the family’s mastiff from dog fights and teaching the Grinnell boys how to swim in the Hudson.5 Once the Clapps returned to the park, Frankie quickly bonded with their second son. “If Freddie Clapp ever grows up, I fancy that I will tell him of some of the trouble he has caused me,” Helen wrote in Frank’s journal. “The little mischief, getting you into more scrapes and leading you into danger, if you are not run over by the [railroad] cars I shall be thankful.” Little did she know that at the same time, elder sons Harry Clapp and Georgie had secretly begun hunting together “because no doubt our parents would have forbidden any use of firearms if they had known of it.” They borrowed a military musket from Carmansville tailor Tom Harden (John’s brother), bought “shot and caps at a store in the village,” and then stole away to hunt in the wooded areas as far north as Tubby Hook (today’s Inwood).6 In the spring of 1860, northern Manhattan landowners once again petitioned the state legislature to lay out streets north of the original grid, this time in support of a bill already working its way through the legislative process in Albany. All the park’s property owners signed, as did Richard Carman, Eliza Jumel, and leaders in the local churches. They were unanimously anti-grid. The peculiar natural formation of the island north of 155th-st., the elevation being from 100 to 300 feet above water level, and composed mostly of granite, presents insuperable difficulties to the adoption of the rectangular system of laying out streets and avenues; and if such rectangular system were adopted, the land would be rendered almost valueless, and the city would be put to an enormous expense.7 On April 7, the legislature passed an act appointing commissioners to lay out “that portion of the City and County of New York lying north of 155th Street.” All the commissioners were local property owners: James C. Willet, John A. Haven, Isaac P. Martin, Isaac Dyckman, Charles M. Connolly, Henry H. Elliott, and John F. Seaman. Over the next four years, they spent more than $40,000 on a survey and topological map, but made no headway with specific recommendations for streets, roads, public squares, or places. Their main legacy was the Blackwell Farm Map, a spectacular set of maps rivaling John Randel’s farm maps in detail and beauty; along with it came

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hundreds of sketches detailing measurements for each residential and commercial building with its surrounding barns and stables and, in Audubon Park, curving drives, open lawns, and formal gardens complete with grape arbors.8 On August 10, William Tone (whose brother Jack had accompanied John to California) visited the park to enumerate its residents for the eighth United States Federal Census. On the eve of the Civil War, he counted

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thirteen families (the Hayward’s house was empty) comprising thirty adults, forty-five children, and fifty-six servants. For each, he recorded name, age, sex, and color. The Grinnells’s nurse, Hannah, had retired, so the entire park was “white.” He also recorded an occupation for anyone older than fifteen, personal and real estate property values, and each person’s place of birth. In the final columns of his sheet, Tone noted who had married or attended school within the year; anyone older than twenty who was illiterate; and anyone with physical or mental impairments. In that final column, he wrote that Victor was “intemperate and insane.”9 Seven days later, Victor was dead. He earned a few sentences in the local paper, mainly as his famous father’s “son and assistant,” though the Commercial Advertiser did mention his membership in the National Academy of Design and encouraged its members to attend his funeral on Sunday afternoon, August 19. Although Victor was a founding member of Intercession and had served faithfully as clerk of the vestry during the church’s formative years, the rector did not record his burial in the sacramental register. Perhaps the former rector, Richard Abercrombie, traveled from his New Jersey parish to read the funeral service in Victor’s parlor as he had done for Audubon years earlier. A few weeks later, John Durand and William J. Stillman printed an obituary in their art publication the Crayon, along with a tender memorial John composed for his elder brother. In it, he wrote that Victor had died after a “painful series of paralytic strokes,” which was perhaps technically accurate, but also avoided any revelations that would have caused the family further embarrassment or pain. Weeks later, despite grieving for her elder son, Lucy wrote Maria Bachman that she was “never in better health and [was] teaching 13 children.”10 Victor left his entire personal estate and one-third of his real estate to Georgianna; he left the other two-thirds to his children. John soon put Victor’s house on the market and began helping Georgianna “find a more economical residence.” Despite his best efforts, the rambling house with “modern improvements” and “well shaded with forest trees” did not sell, and Georgianna couldn’t find a cheaper place to live, so once again, all the Audubons remained where they were. The next month, when a payment to Lockwood came due, Lucy mortgaged the homestead for $20,000 and gave him every penny of it. Lawyer and neighbor Isaac P. Martin arranged for his daughter’s father-in-law, J. Woodward Haven, to hold the mortgage on the homestead for his wards Louisa, Richard, and Frances Griswold. With other debts outstanding, Georgianna and John sold Wellington Clapp a half-acre lot carved from the lawn between the Burgoyne and Grinnell houses.11

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That fall, New Yorkers rolled out the red carpet for the nineteen-yearold Prince of Wales, future King Edward VII. Hundreds attended a ball at the Academy of Music. It was “a magnificent affair and . . . very select,” Helen wrote in her journals. “Where the Prince was, there was the jam, and where the Prince was not you could swing a cat around with comparative comfort, not that a great number tried the experiment but I merely mention what could have been done.” A few days later, as the prince sailed up the Hudson to visit West Point, the A.Parkites gathered at the river shore, cheering and waving their handkerchiefs. “The Prince of Wales has departed,” Helen wrote, “and the poor New Yorkers will have to fold their hands, and wait patiently as Mr. Micawber did for ‘something to turn up.’ ” For the Grinnells, that something was Christmas. Despite rumblings of war, Helen staged a memorable family feast.12 The billiard room was sweetly dressed with greens and our tree, placed in the bay window, was beautiful, it was eight feet high, dressed very prettily and all our gifts arranged thereon. I had purchased them fifty or sixty in all, two, and for some of our friends four and five presents: all the Grinnells were here. [Grand]Father (and by the way it was his birthday), [Grand]Mother, Uncles Jim, Will, Tom, and their wives, Hattie and Ella, Georgie came to the table and the other children had a good dinner in the nursery. After our friends had come from town, we collected them in the drawing room and then as the gas was turned suddenly on from the meter, the sliding doors were thrown back. The sight was beautiful, the shutters all being closed gave the same effect as night, the tree was filled with candles, the billiard table covered with a fine white table-cloth held all the largest and choicest gifts. After some time passed in admiring the tree, the presents which were all labeled were distributed: a happier set of people and children I have never seen and a happier time, dinner and all, I have never enjoyed. Every thing passed off in the most charming manner. May we never cease to be thankful for all our comforts, and never cease to love the great and good Giver.13 A week later, the Commercial Advertiser announced that George was withdrawing from Morton, Grinnell & Co. and partnering with his cousin Jonathan Bird in the new dry goods commission business of Geo. B. Grinnell & Co. Jonathan’s father had hired George as a clerk when he first came to New York City. In February, optimistic about the business’s future, George gave Helen “a very handsome pair of horses . . . dappled grey, sixteen hands high, and handsomely formed . . . rather small, although perfect

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in other respects.” In March, the Grinnells’s coachman hitched the horses to the sleigh so Helen, Harriet Wheelock, and their combined eight children could take the season’s last ride through the snow. In April, the Grinnells sold the horses, released their coachman and several other servants, and looked for other ways to economize. The Civil War had begun, and the cotton trade that supported the Grinnells’s comfortable life had collapsed.14 New York, with its natural port, highly developed financial infrastructure, and vast web of insurance companies, had long been at the center of the “Cotton Triangle.” Its fleet of packet lines plied trade up and down the East Coast, sending mercantile goods south and hauling cotton north. Prosperous merchants like Clapp, Grinnell, Smythe, and Wheelock sat on the boards of banks that extended credit to cotton producers and insurance companies that covered every stage of cotton production and trade. By one estimate, forty cents of every cotton dollar went into the pockets of New York businessmen, who ran most of the trade on credit. Although the Southern states had threatened secession for years, few Northerners seemed prepared for the cotton trade’s sudden collapse or Southerners reneging on their debts.15 “Our country is in the most fearful state,” Helen wrote a month after Fort Sumter. “War, without doubt being just upon us with all its attendant horrors: We expect to [economize], and do it cheerfully, in fact, as far as I am concerned I have felt very little unhappiness in regard to being poor, excepting for dear Papa, and I must say I feel very unhappy for him: it is hard to toil for years for nothing. The present times are fearful and nine tenths of the merchants in New York I suppose will fail.” Some merchants survived by shifting their merchandise from silks and laces to canvas and blankets, pursuing army contracts, and in some cases making fortunes on shoddy goods. Neither George B. Grinnell & Company nor Morton, Grinnell & Company took that path, and both failed.16 Even in hardened circumstances, families like the Grinnells did not go to the workhouse. They might economize, perhaps get behind in quarterly rent, and run up bills with vendors, but even in straitened circumstances, they remained in their homes and kept skeletal staffs. Unfortunately, Grandmother Lansing had recently gone to live with another daughter for a while, and Helen was left with all the family sewing as well as her children’s daily lessons. Georgie’s studies did not go well—“quite impossible to teach him, for it made me down sick”—and in September, Helen sent him to “Grandma Audubon.” In ten years of journal entries that carefully chronicle her children’s education, this was Helen’s only mention of Lucy

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Audubon’s school, contrary to Georgie’s recollection that all his siblings had studied there. His tenure in Lucy’s classroom would be measured in months, not the years he later remembered.17 In 1861, publication of the Bien edition ceased after John and Roe Lockwood & Son had completed only the seven-volume letterpress and first volume of prints, fifteen of the forty-four parts John had advertised. The Audubons long maintained that the project failed because of the war. “The gun that was fired at Ft. Sumpter put a fatal end to their enterprise,” Eliza Audubon recalled decades later. “Nearly all of the subscribers were at the South. Fifteen hundred repudiated their debts, and of course my uncle and mother were ruined as Roe Lockwood had to be paid, though there were not enough subscribers who met their obligations to cover the expense of the bindings.” Herrick echoed a similar sentiment, writing that the war “completely ruined the [Bien] enterprise, so that but few copies of the work were dispersed and an immense stock of plates was rendered useless.” He blamed the “unscrupulous dealing of business partners” for John’s failure with the project, writing that “one of the publishers [presumably Lockwood] who was not satisfied with the surplusage of books and plates left on his hands . . . placed encumbrances upon the Audubon estate.”18 Land transactions from 1861 tell a more nuanced story. In March, when the Trasks moved from the homestead before their lease expired, John couldn’t find anyone to take it, so he advertised the house for sale. No one would buy it, either. A month later, two weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter, Roe Lockwood bought a dozen Audubon Park lots along with the house the Posts had been leasing. As John had done with Nagel and Gildemeister a decade earlier, he sold the property outright, but probably returned the entire $10,000 to Lockwood to offset the costs of producing the Bien edition. Five days later, Georgianna and John sold Lockwood four more lots “to pay the debts owing by . . . Victor G. Audubon at the time of his death.” That $6,000 undoubtedly went back into Lockwood’s pockets as well. Coming so closely after the firing on Ft. Sumter, the sales suggest that John and Lockwood were negotiating the land transactions before the war began and that Lockwood had halted printing because the Audubons owed him money, not because Southern subscribers had canceled sales or reneged on payments—though eventually they would do both.19 In the midst of John’s land negotiations with Lockwood, the Audubons’s friend Anthony Philip Heinrich, self-styled as the “American Beethoven,” fell ill and died in his squalid rooms in lower Manhattan. Audubon and Lucy had first met the Bohemian-born Heinrich when they lived in Kentucky and he was an itinerant musician, absorbing the frontier’s sights and

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sounds into his highly original, if sometimes eccentric, musical compositions. Like Audubon, Heinrich had come to his artistic calling only after failing in business, was mostly self-taught, and was original in his approach to his chosen medium. Although he had chaired the organizational meeting of the New York Philharmonic Society the year the Audubons moved to Minnie’s Land and had enjoyed success in the United States during the 1840s and in Europe in the late 1850s, by 1860, when he was nearing eighty, he was penniless and in failing health. When Lucy learned he had died and would be buried in a mass grave in a pauper’s cemetery, she took charge of his body and had him buried in the Audubon vault in Trinity Cemetery. That summer, while George Grinnell liquidated his business, his family economized, growing fruits and vegetables in the garden and producing butter from their cow. Even so, they indulged in a few pleasures: a trip to Nyack on the Campion (the refitted steamer Edwin); an excursion for George and Georgie to the “Mountain House” in Catskill; and piano lessons for Georgie and Frankie with Georgianna’s oldest daughter, Eliza Audubon, a genteel assistance that would not appear to be overt charity. Georgianna was proving resourceful. Besides selling lots and collecting rent on the Hemlocks, she boarded a Mr. Diefendorff along with Lucy and Hattie, collecting $27.00 a week from him, if he paid the same as they did. Within the year, Eliza would begin earning a salary as a teacher at the local elementary school.20 War’s reality reached the park that fall. Sixteen-year-old Victor Audubon, named for his father, had already served a three-month stint as a private (possibly a bugler) with the New York Twenty-Second Infantry Regiment, and now Helen Grinnell’s young brother Edward Lansing was taking an officer’s commission. “We are feeling very poor, as we have failed, and present prospects of future success, are not at present strikingly brilliant—and then the war! the war!” she wrote in Frank’s journal a few weeks before the family went downtown to see Lansing off to join General Burnside. The war hung even heavier on John’s shoulders. A Southerner by birth—“to the very last he retained the Southern clipping of the ends of words”—he asked his uncle William in Louisville, “What must be the feelings of a man like me, who considers the whole U.S. his home; whose blood flows in the veins of his forefathers north and south.” Even so, he continued in that same letter, “Should I be able to save from the wreck; every thing, I shall leave yankie land & come HOME!!” But he was “tied hand and foot” with a $40,000 investment in the Bien edition and could go nowhere.21

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John was valiant, but no match for the hand that fate had dealt him. In the fall of 1861, he began looking for someone to buy his father’s original drawings for the Birds. He communicated with the British Museum while Lucy wrote the New-York Historical Society. A month later, John began selling his library, including his father’s copy of the Quadrupeds and his hand-selected Double Elephant Folio of the Birds, which included thirteen composite prints found in only a few other sets. The buyer was lawyer and railroad man John Taylor Johnston, who, among other artistic endeavors, was the founding president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Several decades later, Eliza Audubon explained to Johnston’s son that when her family was in the depth of despair, his “noble father bought these books. I was too little to remember much personally of those dark days [she was seventeen at the time], but I know what the sale of those books was to my uncle—harassed as he was, and I know that he was glad that since he could own them no longer, they should be in the possession of such a man.”22 The homestead had lain empty for six months when John finally found a tenant in February. Cornelia Nelson and her husband, John, had been leasing one of Richard Carman’s houses for four years, but with seven children and four servants, they needed more space. Carman had offered the Nelsons a $150 a year rent reduction, but Cornelia had befriended several of the A.Parkites and was as anxious to join their gated enclave as they were to have her in it. Before she and John could agree on terms, he died. “Worn out in body and spirit, overburdened with anxieties, saddened by the condition of his country,” he went to bed with a cold and, a few days later, succumbed to pneumonia on Friday, February 21, 1862, at the age of fifty-nine.23 “I can hardly realize that my kind good son John is no more!” [Lucy wrote to her brother William] “After a severe five days illness he breathed his last in my arm, as quietly as an Infant he went to sleep, his last long sleep and I trust his broken spirit was received by his Heavenly Father. Poor fellow worn down by mortification, disappointment and sorrow his body gave way and brain fever [a nineteenth century term for delirium] soon released him from care.”24

9

Three Widows, Three Households

Several weeks after John’s death, Lucy wrote Edward Harris, a longtime friend, who had accompanied Audubon on his western expedition, that the experience had been so “harrowing and unexpected [she] could not for some time realize and collect [herself] at all.” Despite that, two days after John’s funeral (like Victor’s, absent from the Intercession Sacramental Register), she had pursued Cornelia Nelson’s interest in the homestead. After a few weeks of dickering on the price, Nelson agreed to take it for a year at $750, if Lucy would pay for replastering, repairs, and upgrading the gas and water service. Lucy also renewed William Wheelock’s lease on his house and promised him the right of first refusal if anyone else wanted to buy it. She welcomed the rental income, but sorely resented the mortgages—“in a few years the interest will take all I have to support Harriet and myself.” Looking at her options, she considered selling the mortgages she held on her sons’ houses “even at a loss” and selling Wheelock’s house “even at a sacrifice.” She could then pay down the mortgage on the homestead so that she and Hattie could live off its rental income and whatever they earned from their school. Where they would live was undecided.1 “Willing to sell anything that will pay what is owing,” Lucy wanted to find a buyer for “the Coppers [the original engraving plates] . . . so very beautiful as they are and of the purest metal.” Though she often feigned ignorance in business and continually sought advice from men, even those she barely knew, Lucy was shrewd enough to know that she should sell

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them soon because “all metals will fall in price should there be peace.” Even more important was selling Audubon’s drawings. Lucy offered them to American bibliophile James Lenox, whose books would become a foundation for the New York Public Library, and to New York entrepreneur William Henry Aspinwall, who cofounded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neither was interested, but the British Museum, Audubon family friends in Philadelphia, and both the Prince of Wales and the King of Portugal were—or so she claimed in her correspondence with the New-York Historical Society. Lucy was not above fabricating in her negotiations, nor did she blush at depicting herself as an impoverished widow supporting her orphaned granddaughter. “Another weight upon my mind is Harriet— given to me at her birth my sole care since then and if I am taken away without anything left for her support, without friends almost what will become of her.” When Lucy wrote that maudlin description, Harriet was a few months short of her twenty-fourth birthday and earning a salary teaching school with her grandmother.2 Edward Harris supplied Lucy $420 to cover her next interest payment on the homestead. Thanking him for the assistance, George Burgess, who was helping Lucy with her finances while advising Caroline about John’s estate, wrote him that the three widows were “getting along pretty(?) comfortably all things considered.” But until they assessed their debts, determined who owned what, and disposed of some property, they would be “cramped for ready cash for daily current living expenses.” He also admitted that no matter what their resources, “three widows and their families being suddenly left without a single male relation seventeen years of age anywhere near them is a very trying position.” It was, indeed. John’s death would prove a turning point for Lucy, Caroline, and Georgianna. Time and again over the next few years, each proved her stamina and resourcefulness. Had they united in one household, as they had done for a decade, and combined their resources, they may have clawed their way back to financial stability. But old animosities and new disputes were too strong. Divided into three isolated family units, they struggled.3 Caroline was the beneficiary of a $14,000 life insurance policy as well as the Burgoynes’s rents, but John had left nothing in the bank, and his books were in a “very tangled and confused state.” While Burgess sorted out the details, Caroline moved her family into “a smaller and much cheaper house on the top of the hill,” probably leasing the old Hayward place from Smythe. The Pentzes moved to a house Carman was building for them on 155th Street, just outside Audubon Park’s gate. Three months after John’s

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death, Caroline let her house to Addison G. Jerome, a former dry goods merchant in the midst of an astonishing run in the stock market.4 Caroline offered Lucy a room in her house but refused to take her stepdaughter Hattie. Why is unclear, but the house was smaller than the old one, and Lucy’s relationship with Hattie may have rankled. Complicating matters, Lucy held a $6,000 mortgage on Caroline’s house, and the women were disputing who owned plates from the original Birds and whether $4,000 Lucy had given John was a gift (Caroline) or a loan (Lucy). Caroline may have known that Lucy had asked Burgess to write a will leaving all her personal effects to Hattie “except Books and Pictures,” which she and Lulu would divide. Hattie would also inherit the lot and well at the top of the hill and all the proceeds from Lucy’s two houses “necessary to make [her] quite comfortable.” The other twelve grandchildren would divide “whatever there may be left after that.” Lucy resented paying Georgianna sixteen dollars each week for a “cold room and many very disagreeables besides,” but separating from Hattie was not an option, so she refused Caroline’s offer. The relationship frayed, and by the next year, Lucy avoided even seeing “Mrs. John” when she could help it.5 While the Audubon widows sorted out their affairs that spring, the rest of the park was on the move. William Wheelock retired from his mercantile business, a wealthy man at the age of thirty-seven. Lockwood let his house to George H. Tracy after the Posts vacated it, and Henry Smythe leased his house to Rodman G. Moulton, a fellow director with the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. Smythe then took his family to Europe. George Grinnell sublet the Hemlocks to his brother William and moved his family to Brattleboro, Vermont, “a charming village surrounded by mountains, built in a neat and tasteful manner” only twenty miles from Greenfield, Massachusetts, where his parents lived. Suffering from melancholia as he tried to rebuild his business, George needed a change of scenery. He also needed to economize and probably found that the rent for the “large, commodious” house was reasonable, since the Southerners who owned it had returned to New Orleans when the war began. “There are no poor people here,” Helen wrote of Brattleboro, intimating the same was not true of Carmansville. “No hovels, or broken down shanties: every body seems to be well off.” Frankie, Mortie, and Helen attended school directly across the road from their house, and the rector at the local Episcopal church tutored Georgie in Latin, French, and geometry.6 At the end of August, Julia Jerome’s seventy-five-year-old father, Phares Gould, died in Audubon Park, a few days before Lucy took to her bed with one of the nerve-related complaints that had plagued her since her days

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with Audubon in England. While she recuperated, she decided to retire from teaching, sell everything, and move somewhere cheaper so that she could regain her “health and at least rest awhile.” Hattie, of course, would go along.7 After weeks of negotiations, Wheelock bought the house he had been leasing on November 1, and Lucy spent the $13,000 on back taxes, repairs to the homestead, and paying down the balance on its mortgage. Two days later, she and Hattie left for Philadelphia to visit longtime friend Dr. George Harlan (Audubon had named Harlan’s Buzzard for his father, Dr. Richard Harlan) hoping to find cheaper boarding there than near Audubon Park. On the way, they stopped in Moorestown for a bedside visit with Edward Harris, who would die the following June. Lucy may have wanted to rest, but she spent her days in Philadelphia feverishly planning her future. Unaware or uncaring that Louisville was a potential war zone, she wrote her brother William, asking if she and Hattie could board with him and his wife, Maria, for twelve dollars per week, all amenities included except washing, which they would do themselves. She also visited “four of the leading Professors of the Scientific Academies,” who were interested in Audubon’s drawings but didn’t have the funds to buy them. Engravers and publishers in Philadelphia advised her to sell the coppers for scrap metal, since they would deteriorate over time and lithography had taken the place of fine engraving.8 Restless and unwilling to wait for a response from her brother, Lucy returned to New York, where her “unhappy affairs” were no better than they had been before. Her arrival coincided with a visit from tax assessor Homer Franklin. Several months earlier, the United States Congress had passed the Revenue Act of 1862, which imposed the country’s first income tax and excise taxes on luxury and “sin” items. Most of Carmansville’s working class fell below the income tax’s $600 threshold, but in the park, William Foster and Lewis Miner paid 3 percent, while William Wheelock and Wellington Clapp paid the top 5 percent rate. Neither Lucy nor Caroline owed any taxes, but Georgianna paid $4.65 for her 155 ounces of silver plate, and other park families paid assessments for their silver, carriages, and billiard tables. North of the park, publisher James Gordon Bennett also paid $550 on his two yachts.9 The last day of 1862, the Grinnells returned from Brattleboro, one day short of five years after they first arrived in the park. Changes awaited them. The Burgoynes had moved to a house on the Kingsbridge Road, and the Dudley Fergusons had replaced them. Farther down the hill, Roe Lockwood had leased his house to importer T. R. McConnell, and on the

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opposite side of 158th Street, William Foster had developed into a man of mystery when his friend President Abraham Lincoln appointed him to the Secret Service with vague but “important duties in investigating the questions of uniforms and army supplies.”10 A few weeks after the Grinnells returned, Georgie, Frankie, and Mortie began classes at the “French Institute” in Montagnie Ward’s old house at 170th Street. Years later, George Bird Grinnell recounted his time there.11 All the instructors were French or Spanish. The principal was Fr. Lespinasse. One of the teachers was reported to have been a soldier under Napoleon and to have been in the retreat from Moscow. He looked the part, for he was tall, slim, erect, and wore a fierce mustache and imperial. The students were a few Americans, a few French and a larger number of Mexican, Cuban, and South American lads, perhaps forty or fifty in all. I recall that one of Park[e] Godwin’s sons was there, two boys named Rivas, who many years later were more or less important banking people, and two or three sons of A. B. Mills, who was a merchant in the village of Carmansville. They were a harum-scarum lot of lads who played very hard and studied not at all, making all sorts of fun of two or three instructors, but in deadly terror of the Spanish teacher and the old Napoleonic soldier, who in enforcing discipline used only their eyes.12 A raging war didn’t prevent the A.Parkites from focusing on local needs. In the spring of 1863, property owners met at Abiel Mills’s Hall in Carmansville to “advocate the construction of a distributing reservoir for the upper end of the City.” Shepherd Knapp presided over the meeting, Lewis Miner was acting secretary, and the vice presidents included Wellington Clapp and Henry Smythe. With northern Manhattan’s rapidly expanding population concerned about sanitation and firefighting, access to Croton Water had become “a matter of absolute necessity.” Many property owners had given up square footage so the aqueduct could cross their properties, and now they wanted access to the water flowing through those pipes. Legislation stalled at the state capital, but by 1869, northern Manhattan’s residents would enjoy the water that had bypassed them for decades. In the process of obtaining Croton water, they realized their political clout, and in future, would use it to advocate for the public services they expected.13 Later that spring, Lucy refused Addison Jerome’s offer of $15,000 for the homestead, even though she was forced to borrow $50 from Wheelock to pay for three weeks’ board at Georgianna’s house, her washing, and oil for her lamp. Still unhappy with her arrangements there, she decided that

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Croton Aqueduct at High Bridge, circa 1870 (Author’s collection)

when Hattie finished teaching her three pupils in March, she would sell all her furniture and move to Louisville with her brother. But when April came, she and Hattie were instead living in “Mrs. Price’s boarding house” on West 152nd Street at the southern end of Carmansville, and Georgianna was again trying to sell her house. She had no more luck selling the house than in earlier years, and Lucy, following a pattern she would repeat for the remainder of her life, decided she must move because Mrs. Price’s accommodations were as annoying and expensive as Georgianna’s.14 A bright spot appeared in May, when Lucy finally agreed to sell Audubon’s drawings to the New-York Historical Society. She had initially asked $5,000 but accepted the $4,000 the Society had raised on subscription. Burgess credited her account with the funds at the beginning of June and by the end of the month had invested all the proceeds for her in a 6 percent United States savings bond. Two weeks later, young Victor rejoined the Union Army. He had served for four months in the summer of 1861. This time, his five-week stint would coincide with the New York Draft Riots, as close to bloodshed as Audubon Park would come during the Civil War.15 In March, the United States Congress had passed the Enrollment Act, which affected every male citizen between the ages of twenty and fortyfive and all immigrants in that age group who had filed for citizenship. Coming two months after the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the act immediately stirred controversy, particularly in urban areas

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The Savings Bond Lucy Audubon Bought with the Proceeds from Her Sale of Audubon’s Drawings to the New-York Historical Society, 1863 (New York Public Library, Manuscripts Division)

like New York City, where white working-class men, many of whom were recent immigrants, feared that freedmen would take their low-paying jobs. Further inflaming the issue, anyone who could pay $300 for a substitute could forego service—an amount the white working-class found insultingly low. Despite unrest, New York City’s first drawing on Friday, July 11, met with grumbling, but no violence. Monday the thirteenth would prove significantly different. Fueled with a weekend of speeches and alcohol, a large crowd gathered at the provost marshal’s office on Third Avenue at 47th Street, where the drawing was to take place. Engine men from one of the volunteer fire departments were on hand to incite the crowd, which dislodged and threw paving stones through the building’s windows and then broke in and set it on fire. The rioters’ anger quickly shifted from the draft to the city’s freedmen. Before the day ended, an unruly hoard broke into the New York Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, looted and ransacked it, and then burned it to the ground—fortunately after the superintendent and head matron had led the children out a back door to safety. News quickly spread to northern Manhattan, where businessmen finally straggled home, some in their carriages, others on foot. Grinnell family legend held that the elder George only reached home “by crossing over to New Jersey, driving up to Fort Lee and being rowed across the river.” On Tuesday, police dispatcher Seth Hawley summoned the Carmansville force downtown to help control the looting, but when a mob formed in the

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village on Wednesday, the Carmansville precinct captain wired for his men to come back. Reinforcements came up the river and persuaded the crowd to disperse without resorting to force.16 Earlier in the month, Helen had taken her children to visit their grandparents in Greenfield. Unable to return home, they boarded at a farm in Gill, Massachusetts. “The city was in a terrible state for a few days last week,” Helen wrote while there. “Riots, murder, incendiarism, robbery and bloodshed taking the place of law and order—the people were determined to resist the draft and from that arose the trouble: it is all quiet now I am glad to say.” At the end of the month, George traveled to Massachusetts to escort his family home.17 A few months later, more than two hundred African American orphans arrived at Hickson Fields’ former estate on the southern side of Trinity Cemetery. Although the mansion was spacious and the property offered ancillary structures—the old bowling alley became the children’ school—it was in disrepair and barely furnished. With no other place to go, the children and the orphanage’s staff remained there four years until a new headquarters was ready on Tenth Avenue at 143rd Street.18 The summer of the Draft Riots, Addison Jerome’s meteoric rise in the stock market crashed at the hands of rival stock operator Henry Keep. Addison, like his younger brothers Leonard and Lawrence, enjoyed a successful career as a merchant before turning to the stock market. By some accounts, the “Napoleon of the Open Board,” as he was called, parlayed an initial $500 investment into millions, operating exclusively on the Public Stock Board, one of four exchanges during the Civil War. George Henriques, who presided over the Public Board and charged admission to the “Coal Hole,” its basement headquarters on William Street, was sedate, shrewd, and had a poker face that “seldom lit up with the least expression.” Even so, every member of the board watched him closely throughout the entire session. Many described Addison similarly. During 1863, he had successfully cornered several railroad stocks, buying enough shares to manipulate their price, and then began a run on Michigan Southern Railroad. Keep, who was that company’s treasurer, called a secret meeting of the directors and convinced them to increase the company’s stock by fourteen thousand shares, as allowed in the company’s charter. Once Addison had run up the price, Keep produced his “secret” shares, and “the price suddenly fell from about 110 to 77.” Addison and his ring of investors reportedly lost more than four million dollars, but more significantly, he had lost prestige on the street. His career was over.19

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Dealings of that sort were common throughout the nineteenth century, but a quirk to the story is that the previous June, Addison had dissolved A. G. Jerome & Company and then invested $100,000 as a special partner in his son’s venture, Jerome, Kellogg & Company, so he was not officially in business when Keep “ruined him.” Whether the elder Addison was trading for himself or the younger Addison was Keep’s victim is not clear, but all sources agreed about one part of the story: Addison’s wife, Julia, was a wealthy woman in her own right. During his career, Addison had given her a portion from each success, included her as a silent partner in each ring he formed, or had given her a tidy sum for a birthday present—again, details varied with the teller. After Addison retired, his son took over the family home on West 20th Street, and he and Julia began spending more time in the park with their younger children. Addison was in failing health, and Lucy visited often, asking for financial advice between solicitations for his health. Their acquaintance became friendly enough that she promised him that if he died while the ground was frozen, his body could lie in the Audubon vault until warmer weather. When he died on the penultimate day of the next year, she honored that promise.20 At the end of 1863, the Historical Society bought Lucy’s remaining Ornithological Biographies for a dollar a volume, and Lockwood bought her copies of the Quadrupeds, except a few she kept as gifts for friends. Despite steadily accumulating investments, she complained that she couldn’t buy winter clothes and had no idea how she would pay the next interest payment on the homestead. Perhaps that’s why she sold the mortgage on Caroline’s house to John Haven. At the end of the year, he began foreclosure proceedings. In January, a judge found in favor of Haven’s wards and assigned referee Stephen Merrihew to sell Caroline’s property at auction. Perhaps feeling a pang of guilt, Lucy promised Caroline and Georgianna each several thousand dollars and immediately complained to Burgess, “I grieve to see that both my Sons wives appear to grudge me the possession of anything; not for a moment reflecting on how I have been robbed on every side.” A few weeks later, she covered the interest payment on the homestead by selling Wheelock a stretch of Twelfth Avenue running beside his house. In March, Merrihew advertised Caroline’s property as “a rare chance to buy for investment or a private residence.” At $15,000, Julia Jerome was the high bidder. Caroline had a six-week grace period to remove any remaining belongings from the property.21 Events in the park that spring confirmed an improved economic outlook and strengthening real estate market. Henry Smythe, who had moved his family to East 14th Street and let his Audubon Park house after he returned

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from Europe, became the founding president of the Central National Bank of New York; William Wheelock sat on the board of directors. George Grinnell still didn’t list a business for himself in the city directory, but he had sufficient resources to send Georgie to Mr. Churchhill’s Military School in Sing Sing (later renamed Ossining to distinguish it from the prison) for “physical discipline as well as close mental application.” The Fergusons’s son Paul was his roommate. Helen taught Laura her ABCs and engaged Hattie as governess for Frankie, Mortie, Helen, and Willie. Lucy initially approved of the arrangement but then fretted because Hattie only had one weekend a month to visit Lulu in Westchester. Perhaps the bigger issue was that Lucy disliked spending so much of the day by herself. So Hattie quit that job and formed a small school that gave her more flexible hours. Helen sent Willie and Helen to Hattie’s new school and Frankie and Mortie to a Mr. Taintor, who had just opened a school of his own in Carmansville.22 Helen’s arrangements, and frequent changes, for her children’s education not only reflect her varied options, but also the potential gaps in their educations while shifting among homeschooling, governesses, tutors, and private schools. One option neither Helen nor her Audubon Park neighbors ever exercised was Grammar School No. 46 on the Kingsbridge Road at 157th Street. In 1864, the local citizenry gathered to discuss “the failure of the managers to raise it to the proper standard.” As a result, most families “sent their children to private schools, or to other public schools at a distance from their homes.” The principal’s job at the public school had recently become vacant, and residents overwhelmingly supported the vice principal at a neighboring school, Carmansville native John Graff, for the position. A local official had appointed him principal at Number 46, but then the local school board had inexplicably removed him in favor of a stranger, “who was known to have had his license as teacher revoked by the former Superintendent of Public Schools . . . for ‘immoral and unchaste conduct.’ ” After community leaders organized a meeting at Abiel Mills’s hall—“There never has been a public meeting at Washington Heights upon any matter of public interest better or more respectably attended,” noted the Times—the Board of Education ordered Graff reinstated with full pay from the time of his dismissal, once again proving to the citizens of Washington Heights that they had political clout when they worked together.23 In the spring of 1864, the war’s dampening effect on Audubon Park’s real estate began lifting. Addison Jerome again asked Lucy if she would sell the homestead, perhaps intending to buy it for his eldest daughter, Julia, who had married the previous December. His interest ended when Lucy

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Jesse Benedict’s Family Gathered on the West Piazza a Few Weeks after He Bought the Audubon Homestead from Lucy Audubon, 1864 (Author’s collection)

told him “not less than 24,000.” She also told Cornelia Nelson that her rent was increasing to $1,000. In reply, Cornelia went to her house in Poughkeepsie and sent word to Lucy that she intended to stay there. Lucy considered countering with $900 if the Nelsons paid for a new roof on the house and leaders for the barn, but that proved unnecessary. At the end of May, Jesse Benedict bought the homestead, its thirty-six lots, and the well lot at the top of the hill for $24,000. Half paid Lucy’s remaining mortgage on the homestead; she used the other half to pay any outstanding debts and then added what was left to her investments.24 That same year, Benjamin Harrison sold his house to schoolmaster John MacMullen for $4,375, and Georgianna, still settling Victor’s debts and trying desperately to save the house he had built for his family, sold the Hemlocks to George Grinnell for $14,000. After seventeen years of married life, all of it in leased houses, George made a gift of the property to his wife, Helen, just as Audubon had done when he bought Minnie’s Land. Also like Audubon, George used Helen’s ownership to shield the property in the event of bankruptcy. The Hemlocks’s forty-five lots gave the Grinnells a significant share of the park’s acreage. The sale complete, they set

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off for the White Mountains with Georgie, the Fergusons, and their son Paul. In the fall, the two boys would return to Churchill’s School. That year, Frankie would go, too.25 On September 1, Henry Smythe finalized his break with the park when he sold both of his houses and all his land to clothier Frederick Kirtland, who had been his tenant for more than a year. Kirtland paid him $42,500 and, five months later, sold the old Hayward house to Charles H. Kerner for $12,300. For the first time in the park’s history, a different family owned each house—until Kerner bought the Miners’s house a few months later. That purchase extended his holdings across the entire Eleventh Avenue frontage between 155th and 156th streets, a total of thirteen lots. Later that year, Kirtland and Kerner bought the block front on the opposite side of Eleventh Avenue between 155th and 156th streets and split it between them, suggesting prior business deals or perhaps a familial relationship.26 Occupations among the A.Parkites were more varied than in earlier years. John MacMullen ran two private boys’ schools, counting George Putnam and the Roosevelt brothers Elliott and Theodore among his students. Jesse Benedict had come to New York from Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1836 and worked in the watch business before reading for the law and forming the firm of Benedict and Boardman. He and his wife, Frances, produced nine children before they moved to the park; another daughter would arrive a few years later. Wealthy and philanthropic, he was also a renowned biblical scholar and in time would become a mainstay of the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church.27 Frederick Kirtland had also migrated to the city from Connecticut. He had established himself as a clothier and, by 1856, operated stores on both Park Place and Murray Street while living at the Collamore House, an upper-class residential hotel. Kirtland and his wife, Cornelia, were in their late forties when they moved to the park, but, rather than a house full of children, had one daughter, seven-year old Eveline. Charles and Emma Kerner were in their mid-twenties and hadn’t yet begun a family. Charles was born in Hamburg, Germany, and had immigrated to New York with his parents when he was eighteen years old. His father, Gerrit, leased and managed the Clarendon House, one of the city’s finest residential hotels. When he died in 1863, Charles graduated from head clerk to “proprietor.” Located on Eighteenth Street near Union Square, the hotel catered to “the nobility and gentry of the Old World” and musical and theatrical stars—it was American opera singer Clara Louise Kellog’s preferred residence when she was singing in the city. Charles built upon his father’s reputation and “expended tens of thousands of dollars on valuable

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improvements” such as elevators, ornate room decorations, and an excellent dining room.28 Amidst the park’s changing guard in 1864, the three Audubon widows ended the year in discord. Caroline, evicted from her home after Lucy sold her mortgage, moved her children to New Haven, Connecticut, where they would live with Hall relatives until she could establish her own home there. Eventually, she would settle in Salem, New York, after her eldest daughter, Maria, inherited a house from her close friendship with New York City school mistress Mary Louise Comstock. Although Lucy had told Burgess to hold onto Georgianna’s mortgage “even if she waits until I am in the Vault,” when her November board came due, she sold it to Edward Talman at a premium. She invested the proceeds and suggested that Talman could recoup his outlay by selling the house and collecting his sister-in-law’s back interest. At Christmas, perhaps as a peace offering, Georgianna sent her three youngest daughters to Mrs. Price’s to take their grandmother a present of “two almanacks (sic) and a pair of garters.” Although Lucy hoarded every dime, she bought gifts for all of Georgianna’s children and “succeeded in giving some pleasure to all but Master Willie who remarked he had already a knife but would keep it.”29 Twenty-three years after Audubon bought Minnie’s Land for Lucy, not one square foot of the original fourteen acres remained in her possession. Ironically, that was the moment when a “unanimous petition of the residents along the line of the [Hudson River Rail]road, from 150th to 162nd Streets” persuaded the directors to give the 152nd Street depot a new name: “Audubon Station.”30

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In the new year, a series of decisive Union victories raised hopes that the war’s end was near. “Such rejoicings everybody is perfectly happy, flags are waving cannons firing, and everyone delighted,” Helen wrote in early April. “Mortie has just bought a cannon and a can of rifle powder! They have been firing now for an hour or two. The children are all wild with delight and so are the grown people.” Most of the fighting ended two weeks later with Grant’s decisive victory over Lee near Virginia’s Appomattox Court House, but jubilation was short lived. Seven days later, actor John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln as he sat watching “Our American Cousin” in Ford’s Theater. The telegraph relayed the news across the country, and the shocked nation went into mourning. Intercession’s rector Howard Smith purchased $88.75 worth of crepe, and on Sunday morning, parishioners arrived at service to find “the pulpit was heavily and tastefully draped with black cloth.” Helen wrote in her daughter’s journal that during the service, “my heart was full to bursting and I could not control my sobs and weeping. The whole country seems crushed and overwhelmed with sorrow.”1 The Grinnells observed a national day of prayer and fasting on the twentieth, and four days later, George and Helen took their three eldest sons “to see the last of President Lincoln” lying in state at the City Hall. “The face was quite unnatural, discolored, wasted and sad,” Helen wrote. “The manner of death must, I presume, have interfered with the embalmer’s success.” The next day, Helen took her eldest sons downtown again, this time

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to see “the grandest, longest, and most imposing [procession] ever seen in N.Y. . . . we thought it imprudent considering the crushing crowd to take younger members of the family.” Before they returned home, the funeral train bearing Lincoln had passed the park on its way north to Albany, one of the stops on its long and winding route to Springfield, Illinois, where the fallen president was buried. After a suitable period of mourning, Smith removed the black fabric from the church, and the vestry authorized him to distribute it “among the Poor of the Parish.”2 Neither war, nor victory, nor mourning hindered the New York State Legislature from attending to its work. In the spring of 1865, legislators were again considering a street plan for northern Manhattan. The 1860 Street Commission had accomplished precious little; one of its members had died, another had quit, and all that the rest had to show for five-year’s effort was survey maps and some unpopular recommendations. The Herald had seized upon the latter and brought attention to the commissioners’ “barbarous attempt” to lay out ten avenues that would “cut up Washington Heights and destroy the attractiveness of that beautiful region,” solely for the benefit of “speculators in corner grocery lots”—the very thing the 1811 commissioners had sought to avoid by ending the grid at 155th Street. Even worse was a plan for a street railroad running up the center of the Bloomingdale Road to Kingsbridge. Calling the commission “unnecessary and unwise . . . criminally neglectful or willfully ignorant,” the Herald pressed for its termination. The legislature obliged. On April 24, while thousands respectfully filed past Lincoln’s casket in City Hall, legislators in Albany passed an act dissolving the 1860 commission and giving Andrew Haswell Green and the Commissioners of Central Park the “exclusive power to lay out streets, roads, public squares and places” north of 155th Street “of such width, extent and direction and upon such grades as to them shall seem most conducive to public good.” Green had already demonstrated his ability at developing the land west of Central Park with streets and avenues “in accordance with topographical peculiarities [that would] make in time the most charming locality for residences in the vicinity of any city upon the globe,” or so thought the Real Estate Record and Guide, a magazine that came into being in 1868 specifically to cover the postwar building boom. Now, the commissioners would extend their work northward. Green fully appreciated the topography he was to develop. His description in the 1866 report on the commission’s work in Central Park touched upon all the standard points in previous (and future) sales and rental advertisements.3

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The southernmost part of the territory is being rapidly subdivided. The exceedingly picturesqueness of this part of the island, the varied scenery comprehended within its wide horizon, and the unrestricted movements of the healthful currents of air over the adjacent waters, are among the characteristics that have, during the past century, rendered it a favorite resort of much of the wealth and intelligence of the city; the occupants of the beautiful retreats that now adorn these grounds are watching with interest the steady approach of improvements that are pushing towards and will soon surround them.4 The 1865 act mandated two scenic drives. One would stretch northward from 59th Street (where Broadway then ended) to 155th Street. The other would circle the northern end of Manhattan, beginning and ending at Central Park and highlighting the views along the Harlem and Hudson rivers. The Herald waxed poetic about a ten-mile drive along the “most picturesque and romantic part” of the Hudson “opposite those rare and wonderful rocky formations the Palisades, on the Jersey shore. . . . The entire distance will be one of rare beauty, diversified by forest and river views, lovely meads and pastures, and the charming villas and flowery parterres of our wealthiest and most public spirited citizens.” Among those public-spirited citizens was the paper’s publisher, James Gordon Bennett. Green saw no reason to lay out the full drive yet. “In actual working,” he wrote, “it should conform to the conditions of the land, and, so far as practicable, to the convenience of existing proprietorships and settlements.” A half century and reams of legislative and legal paperwork later, the city would finally open Riverside Drive, which would have a lasting impact on Audubon Park.5 The more immediate result of Green’s mandate came from the Grand Boulevard (usually called simply the “Boulevard”), which would run from Broadway’s terminus at 59th Street to 155th Street, the northernmost street in Randall’s grid and Audubon Park’s southern border. For decades, the cemetery’s wooded expanse had insulated the park from Carmansville’s southern arm and kept all north-south traffic at the safe distance of Tenth Avenue. Now, that traffic could pass through the cemetery and approach the park’s front gate, a boon to A.Parkites who wanted a faster route downtown, but a challenge to their cherished privacy. The Central Park Commissioners had already opened Eleventh Avenue to 144th Street (though only one hundred feet wide) and had plans to open it to 148th Street, so only a few blocks remained before it reached Trinity Cemetery, “through which,” Green wrote, “the drive following the avenue will naturally pass.”

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“Naturally” was a matter of viewpoint. Trinity Church would not gladly cede the city land through its cemetery, and for good reason. James Renwick had designed it as a whole from Tenth Avenue to the river, and grave sites already dotted the Boulevard’s intended path. Moving them would be tedious and costly.6 Supporting Green’s mandate was the West Side Association, a group of property owners representing interests between 59th and 155th streets, as well as David Knapp, who owned a long stretch of woods on Audubon Park’s northern side, and James Monteith, a Carmansville property owner, teacher, and vestryman at Intercession. (Monteith had immigrated to the United States from Ireland when he was a boy in the 1830s and enjoyed the benefit of a public-school education. While working as a teacher, he began working with another Irish immigrant, Andrew McNally, on geographical textbooks.) Besides improvements to parks and streets, the West Side Association’s Members supported construction of a steam-powered underground railroad like the one that had just opened in London. They envisioned a route under Broadway from the Battery to 59th Street and then northward to join the Hudson River Railroad “at the upper part of the island.” Audubon Station at 152nd Street was a logical place for a connection. The idea gained traction, but the city’s political apparatus, the Tweed Ring, received large kickbacks and licensing fees from omnibus and surface railroad companies. With no compelling reason to slaughter their cash cow, they stalled the idea of rapid transit for decades. Even so, the idea was planted.7 By the time wartime production gave way to postwar expansion, the park’s merchants had successfully made a transition into banking and brokerage. Although they invested a large part of their new riches in the booming stock market, they diversified a portion into real estate. In June, William Wheelock bought a large parcel on the northern side of 158th Street, and a few months later, William Foster bought the house he had been leasing since before the war. Of all the park’s residents, however, none had a more dramatic recovery than George Grinnell. In June 1865, when Charles Elliott came around to assess taxable items, he declared three watches, a piano, a billiard table, 208 ounces of silver, and most significantly, an income of $20,679.60. In previous wartime assessments, he had claimed no income. His neighbors Wellington Clapp, Frederick Kirtland, and William Wheelock all made similar statements of value, and even Georgianna, who no longer owned rental houses, reported her piano and watch as well as an income of $600, probably from her boarders. Lucy also paid taxes on her watch and piano, which she had taken with her to Mrs. Price’s boardinghouse.8

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“A peaceful fourth,” Helen wrote in July. “War has ceased—our soldiers have returned in great numbers to their homes, and with their wives and children are enjoying this happy day. We make up our minds to endure any amount of noise in the shape of torpedoes, fire-crackers, etc. etc. on this day—so far it has been unusually quiet.” While George continued to rebuild his reputation and business, his family lived simply, as they had for the last few years. “Our Christmas and New Years day passed off quietly and pleasantly, in much the same fashion as of late,” Helen wrote early in 1866. “Our chief pleasure has been in the society of our dear boys [home from school in Sing Sing]; Georgie has grown so staid and manly, so companionable, and laughter loving Frank entertains us with his jollity; they have been very happy at home.” Saturdays were particularly busy for Helen. She arose at 6:00 a.m. to take her younger children downtown on “the 7.38 train in order to reach Mr. Huss [young Helen’s piano teacher] at 8 1/2 o’clock.” From there, they went to dancing school before returning home midafternoon. The Grinnells occasionally attended the theater—George and Helen saw Edwin Booth in Hamlet several months after his brother assassinated the president—and they were likely present at Intercession one Wednesday in January when Cornelia and Wellington Clapp’s eldest daughter, Emma, now twenty-one, married Robert Cochran. The park’s first generation of children was growing into adulthood.9 In September 1866, seventeen-year-old Georgie entered Yale, and his father finally established a new firm, five years after bankruptcy. “Tomorrow your father is going into business with Mr. Clapp, and I am very glad of it for it relieves my mind from great anxiety,” Helen wrote in her daughter’s journal. Both men forming Clapp and Grinnell listed themselves as brokers in the city directory, but only George was a member of the New York Stock Exchange, which is probably why they re-formed the next year as G. B. Grinnell & Company. Horace Clark, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son-inlaw and trusted financial lieutenant, was their special partner, supplying capital and access to Vanderbilt’s railroad transactions. How Clapp and Grinnell became involved with Clark and Vanderbilt isn’t clear, though perhaps the common denominator was trotting horses. “In those days Eighth Avenue and Harlem Lane were dirt roads where men who owned trotting horses came to exercise their animals and to trot them against each other,” George’s son later recalled. “Close to Macomb’s Dam was a hotel. . . . And on the piazza of this hotel the drivers, putting their horses under the sheds of the hotel, sat and smoked and watched other people drive.” Vanderbilt exercised his trotters on that route daily, and amidst the drinking, smoking, and wagers on the hotel’s piazza, he and all the other businessmen were

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undoubtedly assessing each other as closely as they were their horses, measuring who would and would not be a trustworthy business associate.10 The same year Clapp and Grinnell went into business, William Wheelock assumed presidency of the Central National Bank. Henry Smythe had resigned the position after President Andrew Johnson appointed him collector of the Port of New York, the official responsible for ensuring that importers paid fair duties. The position had long been a lucrative sinecure for appointees who skimmed from the proceeds and doled out jobs as political favors, but what recommended Smythe to New York’s merchants was his unimpeachable character: “Honorable and truthful in his own conduct and actions, he demands a high standard of moral qualifications in others before they find favor in his eyes,” wrote the Times. “Stern and unyielding in views of right, he is one of the most benevolent and kind-hearted men.” Smythe wasted no time weeding out incompetent workers. A few months after assuming the job, he appointed his one-time traveling companion Herman Melville as “inspector of customs,” a post that earned him $4 per day. First, though, Smythe had the uncomfortable task of sacking the incumbent, George Swackhammer, who had grown up just north of Audubon Park. Smythe would have been hard-pressed not to have known George and his father, Conrad, whose pond was a favorite spot for ice skating. Despite Smythe’s reputation for honesty, barely two years into his tenure, the United States House of Representatives impeached him. The Senate was nearing the end of its term, so rather than bring him to trial, it ordered President Johnson to remove him from office. Johnson, already at war with Congress, ignored the order and let Smythe serve out his term. The Senate had the last word, though. When Johnson later nominated Smythe as ambassador to Austria, the Senate refused confirmation and then repeated the snub when Johnson nominated him ambassador to Russia.11 A short lull in real estate activity followed the park’s flurry of transactions at the end of the war, a marked contrast to the years when the Audubons repeatedly sold their land. Other than Kirtland selling Clapp a ten-foot-wide strip of land stretching between 155th and 158th streets, the only change in 1867 residency came when Harriet and William Wheelock moved into their new house on the northern side of 158th Street. Topped with an iron-crested, ogee-shaped Mansard roof, the brick and brownstone mansion sat close to the street and faced south toward the Wheelocks’s old home in the park. Oriels, balconies, and a tower ornamented the façade, and shaded piazzas allowed river breezes to flow through the house. The Wheelocks held onto their park property for several years before selling it, but subtly signaled that their move across the street was permanent when

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they changed their city directory address from Audubon Park to Washington Heights.12 With George Grinnell reestablished in business, his wife, Helen, was willing to splurge again and sent their daughter Helen to study piano with Eliza Audubon; she then began a cotillion “for those children in and around the park who can dance.” They continued through the summer and ended the season with a party at the Hemlocks. “This being the twelfth and last class I had promised to give them a soiree and allow them to invite their parents and brothers and sisters: we had a very pleasant time, there were forty or fifty here, and all seemed to enjoy it.”13 A few months later, George had the Hemlocks enlarged and the exterior rebuilt. “This morning the carpenters arrived en masse to commence the repairs and alterations on our house, the outside of which is to be remodeled,” Helen wrote. “I think it will be very pretty but I do not think we shall get through with everything before the last of November.” The builder was probably John Harden, who had supervised construction of the west wing several years earlier and was in constant demand in the neighborhood. The workmen finished just before Christmas. “I have been so unusually busy this fall that I have had no time for anything but looking after men,” wrote Helen. “Fifteen or twenty men at work on the place finishing the house, and changing the grounds. Carpenters, masons, plumbers etc. etc. but they have all gone. The house is finished and suits us well: the grounds are not yet finished, as the weather was too cold for the work.” They would resume in the spring.14 The same year George remodeled and enlarged the Hemlocks, the state legislature passed New York’s first tenement house law mandating fire escapes, an outhouse for every twenty residents, hall ventilation, a window in every bedroom, trash receptacles, and adequate sewage facilities, basic needs that highlighted the sharp contrast between housing expectations among the A.Parkites and those well below them on the economic scale. The law contained weak provisions for enforcement, so conditions improved little for the thousands crammed into shabby tenements, but it did acknowledge the problem and encouraged reform. Equally important, by reinforcing the idea that tenements were low-class housing, it endorsed the widely held belief that apartment and flat buildings were unsuitable for the middle class. At the beginning of 1868, William Wheelock shared his financial good fortune with the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church and donated money for an organ. In the church’s early years, a precentor had led congregational singing, but during the war, members of the congregation formed

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The Washington Heights Presbyterian Church from King’s Handbook of New York City, circa 1893 (Author’s collection)

a volunteer choir. Now, with Wheelock’s largesse, the elders commissioned J. H. & C. S. Odell to build an instrument “containing their celebrated patent pneumatic composition movement and reversible couplers,” only to discover that it was too large for the church. So, Wheelock then paid for enlarging the “rear of the pulpit . . . [adding] about $4,500 to the value of the church, besides contributing to the excellence of the services.” At the beginning of February 1868, organist Henry Eyre Brown demonstrated the instrument for the public while it was still in the factory, and the congregation heard it for the first time during service the following Sunday.15 Just about the same time, one block east on 155th Street, Frederic and Cornelia Kirtland sold a large parcel fronting the Boulevard to twentyeight-year-old Lavinia Hawley for $24,000, an extraordinary sum for a young woman with no means of income. Lavinia’s father, Seth, paid a symbolic dollar to release his legal claims to the property, and soon construction on a three-story house with English basement was underway. “Haughty” and “born aristocrats” in the estimation of a later generation, Lavinia Hawley and her mother (also named Lavinia) would always use

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Seth Hawley Jr. with His Children Blanche Steele Hawley, Seth Canfield Hawley, and Charles Gilbert Hawley in Front of Lavinia Hawley’s House at the Corner of the Boulevard and 155th Street, circa 1884 (Courtesy of Martha Alexanderson)

“Audubon Park” as their address, even though the house sat across the Boulevard from the park’s front gate and outside its acknowledged boundaries. Had they wanted a fitting name, they could have legitimately used “Minnie’s Land,” since everyone called the younger Lavinia “Minnie” to distinguish her from her mother, and, like the earlier Minnie, she owned the land.16 The Hawleys had moved to the city around 1860 and lived on the southern side of Union Square at a time when it had seen better days. Seth’s working career had begun in his father’s lumber business in Glen Falls, New York. He then, in succession, opened a law practice in Albany, represented Erie County for several terms in the state legislature, became part owner in a Whig-oriented newspaper in Buffalo, and had a stint at bridge building. Financially ruined by his southern contracts at the start of the Civil War, he accepted the position of chief clerk of the New York Police Department in 1863, with recommendations from Horace Greeley, William H. Seward, and Thurlow Weed. When the Draft Riots broke out shortly afterward, he distinguished himself with the “multifarious,

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constant and wearying” tasks of supervising clerks and providing arms for special patrolmen, executing the commissioners’ orders, providing for the wounded, refugees, and prisoners, and “acting as commissary for over four thousand police, military and specials assembled at Headquarters.” In recognition of his service, Lincoln appointed him consul to Nassau at a time when blockade runners were active there. He then served in New Orleans “when northern troops occupied that city” before returning to his role with the police. Once on the job again, a position he would hold for the remainder of his life, he protected the department from the “peculations which [were] the disgrace of nearly every other branch of the municipal Government.”17 However distinguished his career, Seth Hawley did not have money (or reason) to buy land and build a house for his daughter. Her benefactor was Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose son George was engaged to Minnie before the Civil War. After graduating from West Point, Vanderbilt’s thirteenth child and youngest son took a commission in the Union Army but left the post after contracting a lung disease and traveled to Italy in hopes the climate would improve his health. He died there the last day of 1863. Five years later, Minnie moved her family into the house she built at the corner of 155th Street and the Boulevard. Multiple sources agree that the elder Vanderbilt provided the cash, but his reason varies. One version of the story is that he gave Minnie a settlement for the marriage that never happened. But why wait five years? Another, which originated with Minnie’s brother, is that she believed Cornelius might marry her himself. That is unlikely, given that his first wife didn’t die until months after Minnie bought the property. Vanderbilt did, however—according to her brother—remain friendly with Minnie and gave her investment advice that made her rich; her family believed she was worth more than $100,000. Weaving those stories together, a likely scenario is that Vanderbilt settled a sum on Minnie soon after his son died and then helped her increase it through investments. Independently wealthy, she built her Audubon Park home and invited her family to live there.18 Even without the story of Minnie’s fortune, the Hawleys were a colorful lot. Minnie’s mother, Lavinia Steele Hawley, “had a keen mind” and was very interested in politics and public affairs. She was also “eccentric and had the odd attitude of being sort of an off horse toward her family,” favoring friends and acquaintances over her relations—not unlike Lucy Audubon’s occasional behavior. Also like Lucy, Lavinia was a demanding housekeeper, who kept “covers on everything when they were away” and “even made the maid dust logs in the fireplace.” The family kept a carriage,

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horses, and coachman, and Lavinia’s “chief diversion was to go driving.” Minnie showed musical talent from an early age and, according to family lore, would sit at the piano when she was “hardly more than four years old” and play so the elder Hawleys and their friends could dance until they put her to bed. As an adult, she had the stamina to play a full opera score “without resting.” She and her brother Charles both sang in the choir at Intercession. Besides a passion for music, Minnie had a penchant for expensive jewelry but also had “the bad taste to wear beautiful rings up to the knuckle on nearly every finger.” Like her mother, she was acutely aware of social position and on one occasion bought Tiffany’s writing paper with the Hawley crest upon it (likely with the Audubon Park address), mistakenly ordering twenty-four reams instead of twenty-four quires. For once, she shared with her family. The Hawleys’s older son Seth Jr. brought the sixth member of the household into the family fold. Ivan Tailof, who lived with the Hawleys for a quarter-century, was a Russian émigré who may, or may not, have been born into a noble family and, at the age of fourteen, fled his mother country to avoid being enlisted. Ironically, he served in the Union Army with distinction and fought in “every battle of the Army of the Potomac.”19 The year Lavinia bought her uptown property, the New York Times reprinted an article from the Charleston Daily News claiming that the Audubons were “in destitute circumstances, and soliciting subscriptions on their behalf.” Several days later, after the family wrote the paper to correct the article, the Times retracted it, explaining that the confusion arose because an agent, most likely Lockwood, had been collecting subscriptions in the South for an Audubon edition published just before the war. Whatever profits the agent garnered were not going to the Audubons. They were still selling their remaining bits of the park. A few weeks after the article appeared, Georgianna and her children transferred their claims on Victor’s house to Edward Talman (for a symbolic ten dollars), and the following June, George Grinnell paid Caroline Audubon $500 for a short piece of roadbed the auctioneer hadn’t sold earlier. For her part, Lucy was still looking for someone to buy the coppers and worrying that her investments were not enough to continue providing for her as she aged.20 Far from poor, the Grinnells were enjoying the hospitality of Horace Clark, “Papa’s special partner, who is very kind and pleasant.” In September 1868, he took George, Helen, and their three oldest sons to Niagara Falls. “We took a special car at Harlem, where we met Mr. Bishop [president of the consolidated New York, New Haven and Hartford railroads] and his wife and daughter with whom we travelled as far as Niagara,” Helen

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recorded in her daughter’s journal; “From Albany, we took the directors car of the N.Y.C.R.R. [New York Central Railroad] and to which a sleeping car was attached. We remained at Niagara for a day or two then Papa went to Lake Superior fishing with a party of gentlemen and we, the boys and self went to Auburn to visit Aunt Laura where we remained seven or eight days.”21 Back home in November, George bought several lots on 158th Street that a court had reinstated to Sarah Harris more than a decade after her husband lost them—and several months after he died. With land prices rising, David Knapp sold part of “the near woods,” and George bought thirteen of the eighteen lots. Knapp sold the remaining five to Andrew Soulard and John B. Miller, who followed common practice and registered the property in their wives’ names. The next spring, George bought the remainder of the near woods. The land was more expensive this time, $52,500 plus the assumption of Knapp’s $35,000 mortgage, but added a wide buffer on the northern side of the Hemlocks and gave the Grinnells direct access to 158th Street. In less than a decade, George had risen from the ashes of bankruptcy and replaced the Audubons as the park’s major landholder, but he wasn’t finished yet.22

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Four years after the war’s end, the Gilded Age had arrived in Audubon Park. Julia Jerome spent the summer sporting her “pair of large bays” and barouche at the fashionable Cozzen’s Hotel in West Point, and Helen took her three eldest sons on a grand tour of Europe. Before they returned on the China in early October, a new stable had replaced part of the “near woods.” Frederick Clarke Withers, of Vaux, Withers, & Company, had designed the two-story brick stable, which included accommodations for a coachman and his family. Withers, the only architect credited with designing a structure in Audubon Park, was born in England and had studied architecture there before coming to the United States in the early 1850s as a protégé of landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. When Downing died in a boating catastrophe on the Harlem River, his partner Calvert Vaux and Withers formed a new firm. Withers interrupted his work to serve in the Union Army and, at war’s end, returned to New York City and specialized in Gothic Revival buildings, particularly churches. When he took the commission for George Grinnell’s stable, he and his family were living at the Riverside House at the foot of 152nd Street; originally a resort, it had become a year-round residential hotel (another of the city’s answers to the middle- class housing crunch). George had ample opportunity to meet Withers in the village or commuting on the Hudson River Railroad but certainly knew him at Intercession, where Withers had recently joined the vestry.1

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The Grinnell Stable, Designed by Frederick Clarke Withers, circa 1893 (Private collection, Schuyler M. Meyer Family)

George also added a Mansard roof to the western side of the Hemlocks while Helen and their sons were in Europe. The Mansard (also hip or French) roof had first appeared in New York City around 1852, while John Woodhouse Audubon was building Italianate villas in Minnie’s Land. William Wheelock had introduced the fashion to the park when he built his mansion in 1867. The Soulards and Millers soon followed with one for their pair of semi-detached houses on 158th Street, and within a few years, most of the other park homes had acquired Mansard toppers, as did the new station house for the 32nd Precinct a few blocks away. The same summer builder John Scallon added a Mansard roof to the Hemlocks, John Harden was busy adding one to the old Audubon homestead for Jesse Benedict, along with bay windows and a new piazza on the river side of the house.

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Wellington Clapp even added one to his stable. Eventually, the New York Times had had enough of “mansard mania.”2 Before it came, we were happy barbarians, living in shapeless hovels of stone and mortar, tolerably fireproof to be sure, but woefully lacking in sweetness and light. But though they were contented with this groveling security, aesthetic souls still felt an aching void, an indefinable longing, which the plaster finials of Grace church could not satisfy, and which even the chaste splendors of the Fifth-avenue Hotel were powerless to quench. The Mansard roof appeared, and everybody felt at once that it was the very thing we had all been waiting and wishing for—a sort of architectural long-lost brother. It was seen at a glance to be like those books which no gentlemen’s library should be without. No edifice of any sort seemed complete without it; it looked equally well on a model pig-pen or a life insurance palace. . . . And, today, as every architect knows, to a gentlemen’s residence a Mansard roof is as indispensable an adjunct as a mortgage.3 Whatever its architectural merits, the Mansard roof expanded use of the third-floor bedrooms in the park’s old Italianate villas and gave the built landscape a distinctive look that appealed to nineteenth-century America’s fascination with everything Gallic: French food, art, literature, and even French heels. French flats were another matter. Many New Yorkers viewed horizontal living in flats and apartment buildings as one step away from tenements—indeed, all three shared the same Department of Buildings designation. The Times, on the other hand, promoted the format as an excellent alternative to the boardinghouse and residential hotel. “With land at a thousand dollars a foot for lot fronts, separate houses become like carriages and footmen, luxuries for the rich. People of moderate means . . . must be content with stories instead of houses, and for the sake of a pleasant neighborhood and good society, come down to four rooms and a common hall servant.”4 Accustomed to spacious homes and grounds that afforded them abundant light and ventilation, Audubon Park’s homeowners had no reason to experiment with alternative housing formats such as moving into flats or dividing their homes into “floors.” They were no doubt delighted when the working-class tenement that once sat opposite the park’s front gate came down during the war. The semi-detached houses the Soulards and Millers built on 158th Street were perhaps a curiosity, but in silhouette, still appeared to be one single-family house. Approached from the front, the simple entry porch, up three steps from the street, featured three sets of

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The Hemlocks, the Grinnell Residence in Audubon Park, circa 1893 (Private collection, Schuyler M. Meyer Family)

columns resting on low partitions that supported the roof and perfunctorily separated the two entry doors. Bay windows flanked the entry porch on the first and second floors. The cupola rising from the Mansard roof was an odd throwback to the park’s earlier Italianate villas. Two park properties changed hands in 1870. Frederick Kirtland lost the old Smythe property in foreclosure, and William Wheelock sold his old house. George Grinnell bought the Smythe property at auction for $71,750, adding another house and twenty-four lots to his domain. Within a few months, Kirtland had vacated the property and George’s brother William

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and his family moved in. The other exchange came when Levi and Jane Stockwell bought Wheelock’s house. Levi and his brother Alden (A.B.) had come to New York from Painesville, Ohio, after the Civil War and, within a few years, married Elias Howe’s daughters, Jane and Julia. When Howe died suddenly in October 1868, his son, Simon, and the Stockwell brothers formed the Howe Machine Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with A.B. as president and Levi as treasurer. Edging Simon out of the venture, the Stockwell brothers took control of nearly all the company’s stock and then used it as collateral for speculative ventures ranging far afield from sewing machines.5 In the summer of 1870, the enumerator for the ninth Federal Census counted fourteen families living within the park’s footprint, an increase of one over 1860, but with five fewer people (125 versus 130). The Millers and Soulards had increased the number of houses, but Charles Kerner had subtracted one when he replaced the old Gildemeister house with a stable. (It lasted into the twentieth century and sat in the same location as the house. Except for its double doors and hayloft, the stable strongly resembled an Italianate villa, so Kerner may have built it into the house’s shell.) Dispersed among the households were fifty-seven servants and fifty-six children, of whom eight were children of servants and three were students boarding with John and Alice MacMullen. Owners lived in ten of the fourteen houses. Widowed Susan Uhlarn leased the old Post house; Edward Griffin, whose wife, Fanny, was Jesse and Frances Benedict’s daughter, leased the “Burgoyne house”; George Grinnell’s brother William was in the Smythe house; and merchant Charles Frey leased from the Jeromes. Jesse Benedict valued his remodeled and enlarged house at $50,000, and both Clapp and Grinnell valued theirs at $100,000. An exception to the general prosperity was Georgianna Audubon, whose household included her sisters Eliza and Delia, Delia’s husband, Edward, Georgianna’s five daughters (all teaching school except Annie), son Victor (a coal dealer), and five boarders. In the absence of servants, Georgianna and her sisters managed the housework themselves. George Grinnell continued expanding his reach across Audubon Park in 1871. First, he bought the MacMullen house when John and Alice moved to a larger one on Tenth Avenue and, with more interest in an open vista than another house, demolished it. Next, he bought lots across from it on the northern side of 158th Street. Emma West had divided and sold a large parcel she inherited from her father, Judge John Newhouse, to George, William Foster, William Wheelock, and Isaac Martin. While George was expanding his Audubon Park footprint, he was also assembling a country

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retreat in Milford, Connecticut, buying it parcel by parcel, just as he was doing in the park. With Manhattan’s growing population pushing northward on the island, perhaps he was planning for the day when the city arrived at Audubon Park’s front gate and the bucolic enclave faced extinction.6 George may have thought another piece of the park was available a year later when Jesse Benedict died one Sunday morning in April at the age of sixty-two. Benedict’s will did provide for selling his house, but not until his wife, Frances, had a grace period of one year to determine where she wanted to live. Even then, Benedict’s executors (Frances, her son Coleman, and son-in-law Peter Carter) had the option of selling the house or leasing it, as long as the proceeds went into investments that would support Frances in caring for her children and mother “the same as in her judgment [Benedict] would have done if [he] had lived.” Within a few years, Frances moved from the house and spent her time among her children’s households, but the Benedicts didn’t sell the house until after she died. Sometimes a family member lived there; other times, the Benedicts let the house.7 Development around the park wasn’t limited to new roofs and semidetached houses. After several years sharing the Dutch Reformed Church’s building on 153rd Street and then leasing it after that congregation faltered, the Methodists felt they needed their own home. In 1869, they built a Gothic structure at the corner of Tenth Avenue and 153rd Street that local architect and church member Rembrandt Lockwood had designed. They dedicated it in November with a day of preaching. In the preceding year, they had raised $50,000 with the help of their Presbyterian and Episcopalian neighbors and, during the morning service, raised another $10,000 during a special collection. With the new edifice building complete, Carmansville boasted a church on each of the corners along its “main street,” the Methodists at 153rd, the Episcopalians at 154th, and the Presbyterians at 155th.8 Postwar expansion also extended to infrastructure improvements. As Christmas approached, workmen pressed forward with bringing Croton water to northern Manhattan. They had laid pipes from High Bridge down to 155th Street, and “as the contractor apparently [regarded] neither wind nor weather,” they would soon reach the endpoint at 144th Street. “By the Summer,” the Times reported, “the residents of Washington Heights may reasonably hope to be in the full enjoyment of the Croton.” Several months later, the Herald reported that after three years, the Boulevard was nearing completion, though one hundred and fifty men were still toiling their way through “obstinate rock” in the cemetery.9

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Washington Heights Methodist Church and Parsonage, circa 1915 (From Erastus B. Treat’s Fifty Golden Years of the Washington Heights Methodist Episcopal Church)

Trinity Cemetery is cut in twain, and about 155th street the deep brick vaults charged with human ashes are visible in the perpendicular cuts made in the embankments. Even the dead have to move from a long repose to make way for the advancements of the living, and those of Knickerbocker blood who have long slept in the old cemetery are disturbed in their grave by ruthless blasting.10 For years afterward, a story circulated through Carmansville that the cemetery’s watchman had come across Levi Stockwell and his coachman late one night, both roaring drunk and “having a rollicking time around open graves from which coffins were being taken preparatory to the street cut.” Decades later, when the Trinity Corporation was again rearranging burial sites, they discovered “that in several of these graves the coffins had apparently never been occupied.” By then, the Stockwell legend had passed from memory, and suspicion fell elsewhere. A spokesman for Trinity said that “when the bodies were removed forty-two years ago to permit of the extension of Broadway through the cemetery the workmen had been

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careless in the performance of their task, and in order to conceal the resultant confusion had buried empty coffins, so that the new graves might agree in number with the old.”11 Once the Boulevard bisected the cemetery, Trinity hired Vaux, Withers, & Company to design an iron suspension bridge to span the new roadway. Work began on the foundations in June 1871 and would eventually cost more than $112,000. The bridge, 177 feet long and 14 feet wide (carriages could drive over it), hung from arcade arches running between two Gothic towers 55 feet high. The structure was massive, impressive, and visible for blocks in either direction. It wasn’t, however, the only Gothic structure planned for the Boulevard.12 On Sunday, June 12, 1872, a large and expectant crowd assembled on the lawn at the Hemlocks: parishioners from the Church of the Intercession and their guests; the rector, William Postlethwaite; the Bishop of New York, Henry Codman Potter; and clergymen from local churches. At a designated signal, the Sunday school children and clergy formed a procession and, with the adults following, marched up the hill to the corner of the Boulevard and 158th Street bearing a Bible, a Book of Common Prayer, an Episcopal hymnal, two volumes of the church’s records and history, national coins and currencies, and copies of New York City’s newspapers for that day. Once there, Bishop Potter led the congregation in prayers and

Suspension Bridge over the Boulevard near the Corner of 155th Street, designed by Vaux & Withers, circa 1895 (Author’s collection)

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View on the Suspension Bridge over the Boulevard near the Corner of 155th Street, designed by Vaux & Withers, 1909 (Author’s collection)

psalms before he and the clergy laid the cornerstone for a new church edifice, depositing in it the items the parishioners had borne up the hill. Afterward, George Grinnell entertained many of the gentlemen at the Hemlocks, while another parishioner, William Harrison, “also had a select party at his residence” in Carmansville. The next day, the daily papers covered the festivities in detail. What none of them reported, but everyone in the congregation and Carmansville likely knew, was that the path to the new edifice had been long and rocky. Along the way, the congregation had gone through two rectors and now was in a tenuous relationship with the third. Perhaps more significantly, Audubon Park’s gentry had demonstrated that when united, they could bend their Carmansville neighbors, as well as the built landscape, to their will.13 Intercession’s congregation had outgrown its first church within a few years of occupying it in 1848, but twenty years later, despite numerous plans and proposals, the vestry still hadn’t built a replacement. The stumbling block was always money. Pew rents fell short of covering operating expenses, so any building project required fundraising by subscription—each

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vestryman soliciting donations from parishioners and friends. The model was as risky for a church as it had been for the Audubons. Beyond finding enough subscribers, anyone could renege at any time, leaving a gap in funding. Eliza Jumel, purportedly the richest woman in the United States, appeared to have solved the problem when she died in 1865 at the age of ninety-six and left the congregation a piece of her property on Tenth Avenue at 162nd Street, along with $70,000 for a new church and rectory. That sum would have built a grand structure. She also left $5,000 to Intercession’s rector, Howard Smith, and numerous bequests to other benevolent institutions. Eliza’s relatives immediately began legal proceedings, alleging that she was “of unsound mind and incapable of making a will,” and accusing Smith of “fraud and undue influence” on her. When Nelson Chase, Eliza’s son-in-law, offered Intercession a one-time settlement in exchange for dropping its claims on the estate, the vestry opted to take it, even though it would receive far less than $70,000—a wise choice, though, given that legal proceedings continued for decades and eventually a larger part of the estate went to the lawyers handling the suits than to the claimants. In the absence of Eliza’s bequest, vestryman Abiel Mills offered to sell the church eleven lots he owned on the eastern side of St. Nicholas Avenue at 156th Street for $2,500, but the vestry declined. They opted instead to enlarge the existing church “to meet the increasing demand for pews.”14 Another solution presented itself the next year when Mary and Richard Carman died within months of each other. Their heirs offered to pay Intercession $27,000 for its Tenth Avenue property (which Carman had originally given the congregation) and sell it twelve lots fronting the new Boulevard between 152nd and 153rd streets for the same amount. The congregation could keep the church building and either sell it or move it to the new site. The offer was not entirely altruistic. While the Boulevard lots held more potential value long-term, they were at the northern end of the new avenue, just before it entered Trinity Cemetery, and decades could pass—and in fact would—before real estate development would extend that far north. On the other hand, the deal would give the Carman heirs a valuable piece of real estate in the heart of the village.15 After some negotiating, the vestry agreed to the arrangement and spent the remainder of 1867 and all of 1868 debating how to pay for a new church. Parishioner Frederick Withers prepared a circular for the vestry to use with its subscription and, at the next annual meeting, earned a seat on the vestry and an appointment to the New Church Building Committee. By then, the church had a deed for the Boulevard lots, which included a

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stipulation that it must build a new church on the land within five years or pay Carman’s heirs a $12,000 penalty. Apparently, the heirs were aware of the vestry’s past failures. Five months later, the vestry had made no progress in raising funds and decided to “erect a chapel on the new site to cost not less than $15,000” and sell the old church building for the same amount. They would raise funds through a subscription for other necessary expenses, such as buying an organ from “Mr. Vanderbilt” to replace theirs, which was beyond repair. The vestry’s decision to build a chapel instead of a church was the last straw for rector Howard Smith. After enduring nearly two decades of vacillating and relatively ineffective vestries, he tendered his resignation.16 Easter fell three days later and the congregation’s annual meeting the day after that. Wellington Clapp, George Grinnell, and William Foster all won seats on the vestry, and for the first time in a decade, Audubon Park had representation. The vestry now had to grapple with finding a new rector and building a new church before the five-year grace period ended— they were well into year two. They appointed Clapp, Grinnell, and Edmund Whitman as a Ways and Means Committee to develop a plan for liquidating the church’s debt and providing for its operating expenses. At the beginning of 1871, the committee advocated reducing expenses to the income derived from pew rents and weekly contributions and selling the Boulevard property if the Carman heirs would waive the $12,000 penalty. As a first step in balancing the budget, the music committee fired the choir and took out a chattel mortgage on the organ, and the vestrymen each lent the church $300 to liquidate its floating debt. They would repay themselves when they sold the Carman property. The vestry also called Edward Anton, who had been serving the congregation temporarily, to become its next rector. He accepted in February, tendered his resignation in March, and left in April. That same month, the vestry called William M. Postlethwaite at a salary of $3,000 per annum. He accepted.17 The vestry’s vote to approve selling the Boulevard property had not been unanimous, and a rift soon developed between one faction of vestrymen living in and north of Audubon Park, who wanted to build a new church on the Boulevard at 158th Street, and another living in and south of Carmansville, who favored the lots the church already owned at 152nd Street. In each case, vestrymen were opting for a site closest to where they lived. Over the next year, staid vestry minutes belie the intense politicking those opposing groups must have waged between meetings. From October to May, momentum shifted at every meeting, usually depending upon which faction had the majority in attendance. Ultimately, the Audubon

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Park faction prevailed and purchased the 158th Street site from Isaac Martin (who had bought the lots from Emma West a year earlier). The architect would be fifty-seven-year-old Rembrandt Lockwood, who had designed the Methodist church a few years earlier. Architect Frederick Withers abruptly resigned from the vestry, followed by Abiel Mills, who had been a constant presence on the church’s governing body since 1850. The Audubon Park faction had won a Pyrrhic victory and would pay the price. For now, though, the vestry signed building contracts totaling nearly $80,000 and lay the cornerstone for the new edifice of “brown stone . . . trimmed with Berea stone of a light buff color” with a tower on the eastern side. Besides a sanctuary, it would include Sunday school rooms and a large room for lectures. The Herald predicted that when the edifice was complete “the Washington Heights folks [would] have as fine a church as can be found in the upper end of the island.”18 Full of optimism at its next meeting, the vestry “thanked Grinnell and others for their services rendered and also for the payments of expenses incurred” and then supplied each vestryman with a subscription book. The mason and carpenter had already submitted their first bills, and the vestry projected it would need $20,000 to cover building expenses over the next few months. In October, with $25,000 owing and subscriptions lagging, the vestry authorized the treasurer to borrow whatever each vestryman was willing to lend, using unpaid subscriptions as collateral—a recipe for disaster.19 Five days after the Intercession cornerstone ceremony, the vestry’s Audubon Park faction celebrated another victory when the state legislature incorporated Dr. Rufus Gilbert’s Elevated Railway Company. William Foster, an early proponent of rapid transportation, was the company’s first president, and George Grinnell, Isaac Martin, and Wellington Clapp were all incorporators. Fully aware that mass transit was key for promoting real estate development, they prepared for the time (sooner rather than later) when the city’s population pushed northward to Washington Heights. When it did, commuting would be even more convenient than it had once been on the Hudson River Railroad, and a handsome new edifice would await any Episcopalians in the throng. Gilbert planned a series of stately Gothic arches to carry tubular cars “propelled by atmospheric or other motive power” above Manhattan’s streets from the southern end of the island to the Harlem River. He estimated three years for completion. Until then, northern Manhattan’s boosters would have to rely on the Boulevard—“Broadway run out into the country . . . to enjoy a breath of fresh air”—to propel growth. As the Boulevard neared completion in 1871, J. F.

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Richmond, minister and author, gave the new roadway enthusiastic praise as a trotting course.20 We live in a fast age and New Yorkers are a fast people; hence, it seemed intolerable to some that the law regulating driving at the [Central] Park should restrict every man to six miles an hour and arrest summarily every blood who dared to disregard the rule. Nor was the private trotting course between the [Central] Park and High Bridge adequate to the demand. A great public drive, broad and long, where hundreds of fleet horses could be exercised in a single hour, was the demand that came welling up from the hearts of thousands. One was accordingly laid out on the line of the old Bloomingdale Road, beginning at Fifty-ninth street with an immense circle for turning vehicles.21 A trotting course was a welcome benefit of the Boulevard, but the primary goal was real estate development, which meant speculation, which meant graft and political corruption. Although workmen had graded the roadbed by the end of 1867, Boss Tweed and his infamous “Ring” were happy to prolong work as long as they could profit from kickbacks and padded contracts. Although the Boulevard opened “more or less on schedule, [it] failed to become a prestigious address,” wrote Robert Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman in New York 1880. “Part of the problem lay in its association with the Tweed Ring’s excesses, part in the city’s decision to pave it in gravel, a situation exacerbated by shoddy construction, which resulted in numerous craterlike ditches that frequently filled with water.” Another problem was a lack of mass transit to bring commuters to the area. Plodding omnibuses on the Boulevard and its side streets couldn’t manage the job, but there again, the Tweed Ring benefitted from leasing routes and extorting company owners, so they had no interest in promoting an alternative—unless they could benefit from it as well.22 In the spring of 1873, George Grinnell’s financial rehabilitation was finally complete when he repaid all the creditors from his 1861 bankruptcy, with interest. At the age of fifty, he was ready for his eldest son to assume control of the family business. After George Bird graduated from Yale— too old now for anyone but his mother to call Georgie—he had joined his father’s firm as an unpaid clerk. Harry Clapp had done the same, and in 1869, Wellington retired from the company, though not entirely from business. George Grinnell believed that after several years’ experience, his son was now ready to take over. With that in mind, the Grinnells announced a new firm on September 3, 1873. George Bird and Joseph C. Williams (the

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head cashier in the previous company) would partner in the new firm of George Bird Grinnell & Company, with the elder George as a special partner, contributing his membership in the New York Stock Exchange and $100,000. The similarity between the new name and the old (George B. Grinnell and Company) would provide continuity and engender trust among clients and on the street.23 That same summer, Lucy and Hattie Audubon had returned to New York City, a decade after having left the park. Lucy’s excuse was her granddaughter Delia’s wedding; her reason was that once again, she was looking for a home. Delia, “the beautiful sister,” in the estimation of her cousin Sarah Cleghorn, taught school, as did nearly all the Audubon granddaughters. Unlike them, she would not make it her life’s profession. Instead, she was marrying “Mr. Frank Tyler of New Haven, a scholar and man of affairs” on November 3. Lucy and Hattie were, of course, invited.24 Lucy’s journey since leaving the park had been full of dissatisfaction. In 1865, she and Hattie moved from Mrs. Price’s boardinghouse to the rectory of St. Mary’s Church in Harlem, where they paid the Reverend Charles Adams and his wife $1,000 a year for room and board. Adams began working with Lucy on a biography of Audubon, agreeing that they would split the proceeds evenly. Over time, Lucy grew suspicious that Adams wanted more than his 50 percent share, so at the end of 1868, she and Hattie left for University Place in lower Manhattan. Lucy shipped the completed manuscript to English publisher Sampson Low, who hired Scottish poet Robert Williams Buchanan to edit it. Buchanan severely reduced the manuscript for the English publication and never returned the original. Dissatisfied with Buchanan’s book, Lucy fashioned her own version (with relatively few changes), which Putnam published in the summer of 1869. A few weeks later, Lucy and Hattie left New York for Louisville, where they joined ten other boarders at her brother William’s house. Hattie ran a school there and, at the end of the year, published her own book, Famous Old Fairy Tales, in Words of One Syllable, an inventive five-volume set of children’s stories for beginning readers that remained in print for several decades.25 Although Lucy expected “to spend her last days with her youngest brother,” William died suddenly in March 1871, and Maria closed her boardinghouse. That summer, while Lucy visited her nephew Benjamin Bakewell near Pittsburgh, Hattie looked for lodgings in New York. August found both back in Kentucky, where Hattie found a new teaching position near Louisville. Lucy went along and predictably found the “domestic arrangements [were] not pleasant,” even though they were free, because she couldn’t keep “a sewing Girl in the house to repair [her] clothes,” and

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Rectory at St. Mary’s Church in Harlem, 2015 (Courtesy of Erik K. Washington, Photographer)

Hattie couldn’t travel: “no vacation allowed.” When the family moved to St. Louis, Lucy and Hattie rejoined Maria Bakewell, who offered Hattie free room and board in exchange for teaching her children and a few others in her new boardinghouse. Lucy grudgingly went along, paying $32.00 a month for room and board and thoroughly disliking her fellow boarders; “only one Person of education has been here since we came.” Within months, Maria and her children went to live with her stepfather in Shelbyville, and once again, Lucy and Hattie were homeless.26 In the late spring of 1873, Hattie again came to New York to explore possibilities. She and Lucy might live with Lulu and her husband on their farm in Westchester or perhaps board with Georgianna again. Lucy didn’t find either prospect to her liking. Lulu had no servants and did all the work “except the washing,” and Georgianna’s house was already full of family and boarders.

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Hattie’s chance meeting with George Burgess provided a solution. He offered them his New York house (he and his wife, Valeria, had moved to Scarsdale, but kept the New York residence for their daughter, Frances) and in late August, Hattie brought Lucy east for an open-ended visit. If she could find pupils and acceptable lodgings, they might remain permanently. All plans fell apart when Lucy fell and landed in bed, ironically, at Georgianna’s house. Afraid that she might die in New York where her Kentucky will wouldn’t be valid, Lucy summoned William Harrison, who wrote a codicil on September sixteenth confirming that Hattie was her sole executrix and beneficiary. Despite that precaution, Lucy insisted that she and Hattie return to Louisville.27 Two days later, Thursday, September 18, 1873, they left the city, the same day that bankers Jay Cooke and Company failed to meet obligations on their Northern Pacific Railway bonds, suspended operations, and brought the Panic of 1873 to American shores.28

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The Viennese Stock Exchange had thrown Europe into a depression when it crashed in May 1873, and America had been experiencing warning signs: Black Friday 1869, when James Fisk and Jay Gould failed in their attempt to corner the gold market; property loss in the 1871 Great Chicago Fire; an outbreak of equine influenza that brought America to a standstill in 1872; and the demonetization of silver. Most damning for the American economy, though, was speculation in the symbiotic twins, railroads and railroad securities. At the forefront were Cornelius Vanderbilt, his son-inlaw Horace Clark, and their broker George Grinnell. T. J. Stiles, in The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, makes a strong case that Clark often acted without his father-in-law’s knowledge and that Vanderbilt was not only innocent of any suspect dealings but also outraged when he discovered the extent of Clark’s speculation. By then, however, Clark was safely out of his reach; he had dropped dead of a heart attack in June 1873. Lacking his cash support, the Grinnells were left high and dry the following September, when the market crashed. During the two days following Jay Cooke’s collapse, twenty-three companies suspended operations, and panicked citizens began running banks. Late Saturday afternoon, the New York Stock Exchange’s governing committee suspended all trading for ten days, hoping the market would stabilize when trading commenced again. Each of those ten days, the daily papers carried long lists of failed companies. Conspicuously absent was “Vanderbilt’s broker” George

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Bird Grinnell & Company, even though it traded almost exclusively in railroad stocks.1 Four days after the stock market’s colossal failure and amidst great uncertainty in the city, nearly a thousand people gathered on the park’s northeastern corner to dedicate Intercession’s new edifice. The Reverend Stephen H. Tyng of St. George’s Church preached the dedicatory sermon, and Postlethwaite assisted in the service. As vestrymen and parish leaders, George Grinnell and Isaac Martin were certainly sitting in their prominent

The Church of the Intercession, Postcard View circa 1905 (Author’s collection)

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pews that day, each with his family gathered around him. By then, Martin may have explained to George what he must do to save George Bird Grinnell & Company.2 The Grinnells managed to stave off investors and creditors through the next week, but at the beginning of October, Henry Myers, a farmer and horse dealer from Pine Plain in Dutchess County, suddenly appeared and persuaded a court to force George Bird Grinnell & Company into involuntary bankruptcy. Voluntary bankruptcy would have resulted in a court’s liquidating the firm’s assets immediately; involuntary bankruptcy froze the company’s assets, including those that creditors held as collateral. The exchange’s governing body summoned the elder Grinnell and Joseph Williams to what might have been a routine investigation. George Bird was not a member and was not called. Heeding Martin’s advice, both Grinnell and Williams refused to answer any questions. The governors, ruling them in violation of the exchange’s laws, expelled both. Further investigation raised suspicions as to whether Myers had ever been the firm’s creditor. Legal proceedings dragged into December. By the time a court ordered George Bird Grinnell & Company’s assets liquidated in voluntary bankruptcy, the market had stabilized, in part because of Vanderbilt’s intervention, and stock prices had risen so that the Grinnells could cover all their debts and garner threequarters of a million dollars in profit. George Grinnell’s 1891 obituary claimed that the exchange’s governors soon reinstated him, and he made a triumphal return to the exchange floor, to his colleagues’ “hearty cheers.” Records in the exchange’s archives tell a different story. The elder Grinnell never regained admission to the exchange and never even sought it. Instead, he transferred his membership to his son George Bird. The company continued in business until at least 1875, with George Bird and Joseph Williams, who was reinstated, as its partners, even though George Bird soon returned to Yale “to work in the Museum as one of [professor Othniel Charles] Marsh’s assistants.” He finally sold his membership in 1877.3 “The winter [of 1874] was one of great suffering for the family,” George Bird wrote four decades later, breathtakingly oblivious to the suffering his father’s business dealings had helped create. The Grinnells may have been embarrassed by unpleasant newspaper coverage, but the elder George had saved his company, and his family was neither homeless nor hungry. Tens of thousands of others were. America’s postwar economy rested on its railroads, and “the fates of farmers, workers, merchants, and industrialists across the landscape were tied together as never before.” Such was New York’s financial reach that the Panic of 1873 affected the entire country. Sixty-five months of economic contraction followed, a record that is still

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unbroken. “The Great Depression” it spawned lasted through most of the decade and was the worst in American history until 1930, when another economic collapse appropriated the name.4 Twenty years after the Panic of 1873 and three years after the elder George Grinnell died, Isaac Martin’s obituary devoted three of its eight paragraphs to explaining how, “by his alertness and knowledge of the methods of Wall Street, [he] saved the firm of George B. Grinnell & Co. from complete ruin.” Rather than allow it to be “closed out under the rule of the Stock Exchange, Mr. Martin threw it into bankruptcy, had Vernon H. Brown [a Washington Heights neighbor] appointed assignee, and maintained control of the securities in this way until it was possible to dispose of them in a way that paid all the firm’s debts in full and left a surplus of over $750,000.” George Grinnell was not generally reviled for the way he salvaged his firm and protected his wealth. The exchange’s governors hadn’t expelled him for his business practices, but rather for refusing to answer their questions, and when the membership committee rejected George Bird’s first attempt to inherit his father’s membership, they didn’t question his character but rather asked whether he had sufficient collateral to do business. Once they were satisfied he did, they approved him and, a few weeks later, also reinstated Williams.5 One dissenting voice was the New York World, a leading mouthpiece for the Democratic Party. The day after a court dropped all proceedings in the Grinnell affair, its “Financial and Commercial” column indicted Grinnell’s business practices and advocated for improved bankruptcy laws. . . . the enormous gain, or saving, which the proceedings in bankruptcy enabled the Grinnell estates to make, directly at the expense of people who had lent them money upon well understood conditions, is calculated to invite other speculators when their load of stocks is declining in value, to vary the monotony of business negotiations by injunctions similarly framed and procured. . . . President Grant, in his recent message, declared himself much opposed to “speculating in stocks with other people’s money.” This is exactly what the Bankruptcy Court enabled the clients of the Grinnell firms to do; and as the President disapproves of such business, and also recommends the repeal of at least the law upon “involuntary proceedings,” it affords pleasure to couple his two ideas together more closely than is done in his message.6 Over the next year, more than one hundred railroads failed, and construction on new track nearly came to a halt, real estate values and

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corporate profits fell, and unemployment reached 8.25 percent. In New York City, infrastructure improvements stalled or stopped altogether. Plans for a Riverside Avenue (later Drive) from 72nd Street to 120th Street halted; building construction along the Boulevard north of 59th Street, already sluggish because of a lack of mass transit to the area, sputtered; and funding for Gilbert’s elevated railroad temporarily dried up. In Audubon Park, real estate transactions came to a standstill between October 1873, when Georgianna and her children transferred their house to Edward Talman, and February 1880, when Talman’s heirs sold it.7 The Great Depression was particularly painful for the Church of the Intercession. Pew rentals and weekly offerings had never supported the church’s operating expenses. Now, when the vestry most relied on parishioners’ generosity, wallets and pocketbooks snapped shut. At the beginning of 1874, George Grinnell and Isaac Martin, both vestrymen, brought suits against the church. The vestry tried to negotiate with them, but with no success. Flailing for answers, it appointed yet another committee to develop a “plan of action” that would “extricate the church from its present embarrassment and to provide an income adequate to the current expenses.” When vestry elections came around in April, Martin and Grinnell won seats, despite their suits against the church. At the next vestry meeting, they put forward a plan to sell the old church building, which was still sitting empty with a $5,000 mortgage. (The vestry had tried to sell it at auction the previous year and failed.) Vernon Brown, who had acted as receiver in George’s bankruptcy, was willing to buy it for $12,000, three thousand less than the vestry expected. Martin also proposed that the vestry consolidate its floating debt with a $45,000 mortgage, just as the Presbyterians had done with theirs a few years earlier. He had found a lender in the John Haggerty estate (possibly a relative of Robert Haggerty, who had been a thorn in Lucy’s side), and the vestry readily agreed to a three-year mortgage at 7 percent. As the meeting wound to a close that evening, Postlethwaite asked for four months’ leave so he could travel Europe, and the vestry granted his request.8 On June 18, a week or so after Postlethwaite’s departure, an era in Audubon Park’s history ended when Lucy Audubon died in Kentucky at the age of eighty-seven. Hattie and Maria Bakewell brought her body back to New York City for burial. The Reverend Dr. Abercrombie made the trip from New Jersey to assist the Reverend Mr. Thomas McClure Peters, rector of St. Michael’s on 99th Street, who read the Episcopal burial service. “The floral tributes were numerous, and of all designs,” reported the New York Daily Tribune, “the family of the deceased sending a bouquet of roses in a

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The Church of the Intercession, Interior, circa 1910 (Wurts Bros. / Museum of the City of New York. X2010.7.1.1231)

sheaf of corn.” George Grinnell, Shepherd Knapp Jr., and William Burgoyne represented the park as pallbearers along with Frederick DePeyster, who had helped Lucy sell Audubon’s drawings to the New-York Historical Society. Their duties were minimal, since Lucy’s body lay in the hearse outside the church during the funeral service; in its place a “catafalque was raised in the center aisle of the church and covered with a pall and floral tributes.” Afterward, the mourners followed the hearse in slow procession down the Boulevard to Trinity Cemetery, where the pallbearers placed Lucy’s body in the Audubon vault. Hattie spent the next few years boarding with Georgianna in Audubon Park, apparently putting up with any “disagreeables” that arose. When she eventually returned to Louisville, she established yet another school.9 A chapter in Audubon Park’s history may have closed, but Lucy Audubon’s myth would live long after her. Although Charles Stoddard had played no part in her funeral service, the following Sunday he delivered a “tactful eulogy upon the life and character of the venerable and beloved Madame Audubon” at the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church. Entitling his sermon “A Noble Woman’s Life,” he portrayed Lucy as her

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husband’s helpmate and, in her later years, a benefactress to those in need. He undoubtedly raised a few eyebrows when he described her lack of “that petty pride which sometimes stains a great name.” Stoddard must have been pleased with his sermon. The New York Times published excerpts from it the next week, and he published it in its entirety in the New York Observer, a religious weekly newspaper that his father-in-law, the Reverend Doctor Samuel Irenaeus Prime, owned. Prime had employed Stoddard as a member of his editorial staff in 1859 and promoted him to associate editor in 1869. When Stoddard became proprietor in 1873, he tendered his resignation to the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church, but the congregation asked him to remain, with reduced duties and salary. Twenty years later, he was still capitalizing on his acquaintance with Lucy Audubon. His tenacity and inventive prose made him a major voice in giving her a mythology that rivaled her husband’s.10 Postlethwaite returned to his congregation in the fall, but not for long. In December, he left Intercession, citing theological differences, but as the Herald soon reported, the real cause was “the financial embarrassment of the church.” Postlethwaite’s letter to the vestry, read into the minutes, is even clearer. “Under no circumstances will I, or can I consent to be a party for the continuance of church services in a parish when there is no provision made for debts constantly contracting. . . . My own salary has scarcely been paid when it was due, since I entered this parish and it all being needed for my expenses the constant embarrassment which comes from monthly bills to pay, when no monthly salary is received, is such that none of you could ask me to put up with.” Completely frustrated with the church’s affairs, William Harrison, a member the Carmansville faction, resigned from the vestry. Others would follow. (Postlethwaite’s concept of his importance at Intercession would evolve. In 1881, when he accepted the position of chaplain and professor of history and ethics at West Point, a Times article reported that he had accepted the call to Intercession “when the parish erected a magnificent large stone church for him.”)11 The vestry minutes do not clarify why George Grinnell’s debt took precedence over others, but the vestrymen clearly went out of their way to reimburse and assuage him. They signed their notes over to him, promised him any compensation the church might receive for the opening and widening of Eleventh Avenue, and forgave his $10,000 subscription “on account of the indebtedness of the church to him.” But by the end of 1874, George was no longer attending church or vestry meetings. Still smarting from the bankruptcy proceedings, he leased the Hemlocks to William Van Voorhis and his wife, Carrie (Jesse Benedict’s daughter), and moved his family to

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their farm in Milford. The decade would end before the Grinnells returned to the park.12 Throughout the winter and spring, the vestry extended calls to at least a half dozen prospective rectors but found no one interested in taking on a parish that was severely in debt and had little salary to offer. Easter came at the end of March that year, and on the Monday following, the men of the church elected a new vestry that included Audubon Park property owners Levi Stockwell, Wellington Clapp, William Foster, and amazingly, the absent George Grinnell. Two months later, while the vestry was grappling with repairs to the “heating apparatus” and chapel roof, both barely three years old, Elijah Winchester Donald, assistant rector at Ascension Church in lower Manhattan, accepted the call to Intercession’s pulpit.13 Morton and Frank Grinnell graduated Yale that year, along with their future brother-in-law William Page and cousin by marriage Edward Landon, and spent a leisurely summer in Milford before joining the family’s brokerage business as unpaid clerks. The first week of September, a local amateur baseball team found themselves lacking a player and invited Frank to substitute. The family athlete, Frank played baseball and had been a member of Yale’s first football team. While the teams were warming up before the game that Monday evening, Frank bent to catch a low ball just as a player in center field threw a ball to third base, striking him behind his right ear. The blow knocked him unconscious. Frank’s teammates took him to the nearby residence of the Grinnells’s friend William Bishop, while someone summoned a doctor and sent for George and Helen. The doctor determined that Frank’s skull wasn’t fractured, but the blow must have caused a traumatic brain injury. George and Helen arrived to find their son comatose. Except for a few moments, he remained that way until the following Sunday evening, when he died.14 On September 15, three weeks into his new role at Intercession, Winchester Donald read Frank’s burial service. Donald’s first fall at Intercession was somber. On September 6, he had read the funeral service for William Harris, who had long ago captained the Jenny Lind, and his two funerals after Frank’s were for a fifty-seven-year-old parishioner who had shot himself and a nine-year-old boy who had accidentally strangled “while playing alone.” George and Helen buried their son in the family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery. A few weeks later, they attended the Bishops’s silver wedding anniversary, but the shock certainly had not worn off. Helen had once marveled at her sister’s strength and Christian resignation when her children died of diphtheria and scarlet fever. Now, even with her deep faith, she must have wondered at the purpose of bringing Frank safely

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through scarlet fever and his adventurous childhood only to have her “laughter loving” child die from a freak accident before a game he was not even intended to play. If George’s despondency after his 1861 bankruptcy was any indication, one of the reasons he moved his family to the Milford farm was a return of his melancholia. Now, his second son, “a thoroughly good fellow and much liked in his class,” a young man who might have demonstrated the interest in business his elder brother had lacked, was dead. George Bird was traveling in the West and wouldn’t learn of his brother’s death until his old Churchill roommate, Paul Ferguson, met him in St. Paul and broke the news. He immediately left for home and joined his family in Milford. In the new year, George Bird returned to his studies in New Haven, Morton went to New York to clerk for Joseph Williams, and the remainder of the family traveled to California for a change of scenery.15 While they were there, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed George’s brother William as United States consul at Etienne, France, the beginning of a diplomatic career that would eventually keep him and his family in Europe. That was a good reason for the Grinnells to take their daughters, now of marriageable age, on the grand tour, so in the spring George applied for their passports. A few months later, Morton obtained his passport and escorted his mother and sisters in his father’s place. Perhaps George remained behind to settle his dispute with Intercession. In April 1877, he filed another suit against the church and refused the vestry’s request to delay legal proceedings. Isaac Martin, still George’s lawyer as well as a member of the vestry, suggested that they give him a seven-year mortgage on the church’s lands and building” with interest at “7% semi-annually.” In exchange, George wouldn’t foreclose or collect interest for three years. The vestry consented but still had to come to an agreement with the Haggerty estate so they could continue holding services in the church.16 The Presbyterians were faring far better. By 1876, they had secured the church’s debt, and the Sunday School had “nineteen classes, embracing more than two hundred scholars, a library of over one thousand volumes, and all the appointments of a first-class Sabbath-school.” Officers of the Deaf and Dumb Institution, the Juvenile Asylum, and the Colored Orphan Asylum had all been members, and “some of the deaf-mutes [had] been received as members of the church, and the children of the Asylums often [formed] a portion of the congregation.” Reaching into the community, the Presbyterians also sponsored a Wednesday evening lecture series.17 When the Grinnells returned to the Hemlocks in the spring of 1879, they found that much had changed in their absence. Wellington and Cornelia Clapp’s daughter Nellie, Georgie’s playmate on his first visit to the park

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in 1856, had married the Reverend Donald, and the couple had moved into a house on 152nd Street near the river. Seth Hawley Jr. and his new wife, Augusta Gilbert, leased a house directly across the street. Kate Knapp, Shepherd’s wife, had died in 1876, Edward Talman in January 1878, of brain cancer, and the month before the Grinnells returned home, Abiel Mills died of pneumonia at age sixty-four. In coming months Georgianna’s secondeldest daughter, Rose, would die of typhoid fever at age thirty-three.18 The Clapps were still the Grinnells’s nearest neighbors, but the German-born Degener brothers, Charles and Rudolph, were now leasing the old homestead from Jesse Benedict’s heirs. R & C Degener formed in 1871 and conducted “a large business in South America and Central America handling large quantities of cocoa, hides, india rubber, and other merchandise.” The sibling merchants and their two cousins Richard and Leopold were an anomaly among the A.Parkite families, four middleaged bachelors with a Bavarian cook, a Hessian waitress, and an Irish laundress, housemaid, coachman, and gardener. In the park’s northwestern corner, Levi Stockwell was bedridden with Bright’s disease, a nineteenth-century diagnosis for a range of kidney conditions now commonly called nephritis. With the help of three servants, Jane looked after him and their four children, who ranged in age from two to thirteen years old. As a safeguard, she hired a “watchman,” Patrick Callahan, who lived in the carriage house apartment with his wife and three children. Jane Stockwell had ample reason to worry about her family’s safety, as thieves sometimes used the river for easy access to their victims’ houses and quick getaways.19 Julia Jerome was once again in residence. With all her children married except her youngest daughter, Alice, she signaled her intentions of remaining in the park by hiring John Harden to build a one-story addition to the rear of her house. With a household including her son Eugene and his wife and three children, as well as her widowed daughter, Fanny, and her three children, she needed more space for the many visitors passing through her park home—including her niece Jenny Jerome Churchill and Jenny’s son Winston. Lawyer George W. Strong and his wife had replaced the Uhlarns in the Post house, but the Griffins were still in the old Burgoyne house. Fannie Griffin’s sister Carrie and her husband, William Van Voorhis, had moved out of the Hemlocks when the Grinnells returned and now leased Charles Kerner’s house. He and his family had moved to a new house he had built directly across the Boulevard from his old one. The other new park resident was Harvey Ladew, one of the city’s premier leather merchants; he had moved his wife, two sons, and a fourteen-year-old niece,

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Louise Fraker, into the Smythe house, which he leased from George Grinnell after the William Grinnells moved to France.20 The built landscape had also evolved while the Grinnells were away from the park. Along 155th Street, a handsome stone and iron fence surrounded Trinity Cemetery and complemented the Gothic bridge. From the park’s front gate, a graded and macadamized Boulevard stretched northward past Intercession and southerly to a grand circle at 59th Street, where it connected with Broadway. The biggest change was Georgianna’s house, remodeled and enlarged for Charles Francis (Frank) Stone, including an attic studio for his sister Mary Louisa Stone, an illustrator for children’s books. For the first time, no Audubons lived in Audubon Park.21 Edward Talman’s executor, his son, George, a stockbroker who lived on 37th Street, had never shown the close attachment to the park his parents did. With no claim to the house, Georgianna began looking for a new home within a month after Edward’s death. The best option was a large house at the corner of 152nd Street and the Boulevard that belonged to Richard Carman’s grandson Richard Carman Sage, an expatriate living in London. His lawyer, Jacob Lockman, had hired realtor J. Romaine Browne to manage the house. It sat in a large yard one block south of the cemetery, so

Detail of Fence Surrounding Trinity Cemetery, 1908 (Author’s collection)

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Georgianna was certainly familiar with it and knew that it was in poor repair. Even so, it was affordable and large enough to accommodate her family. It would also accommodate her daughter Eliza’s plans for “The Audubon School for Young Ladies and Children.” The Audubons moved to their new home on the first of May 1878 and spent the next two years complaining to the managing agent. “I think it is obligatory that landlords keep the roofs from leaking,” Georgianna wrote during her first winter in the house. “If these leaks are not mended it will injure the house, as well as my furniture, and ceilings. I have not asked for any other repairs, although scarcely a week passes, without its requiring something to be done. If you will please send some one out from the Insurance office to see if we can put up a stove, I shall feel much obliged as it is very cold in the 3rd story.”22 George Talman waited a year and a half after Georgianna moved before putting her former home on the market and then advertised it as “an elegant place in this magnificent and select park, with fine view of, and fronting, the river: easy of access by rapid transit to 155th-st.” Talman’s advertisement no longer meant the Hudson River Railroad when it cited “rapid transit.” The newest iteration was the elevated railroad that had

151st and 152nd Streets from the Hudson River, with the Audubon School and Its Cupola Partially Visible at the Top of the Hill (Right of Center), circa 1900 (Original 151st St. 152nd St. beyond. PR 002, Album File, Vol 261, Folder 2, pg. 27 (PR002-261). New-York Historical Society.)

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opened service to 155th Street. Work on Gilbert’s railroad had stalled in the immediate aftermath of the panic but gained momentum after the state legislature passed the 1875 Husted Act, also known as the Rapid Transit Act, which allowed county supervisors and city mayors to appoint commissioners to determine the most effective routes and mode of mass transportation. In the spring of 1876, with a New York City Board of Rapid Transit Commissioners in place, construction began on elevated tracks at Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street. Gilbert had realized that his idea for pneumatic propulsion wouldn’t work over the length of many blocks and had turned to steam-powered engines.23 The Record and Guide predicted that extending the elevated road north of 59th Street “into the heart of the section distinctively termed the West Side, [would] afford facilities of access such as this quarter of the city has never before known.” Despite that, the periodical was dismissive about development on the Boulevard.24 This magnificent monument of the era of fraud seems likely to become a standing menace and refute to corrupt officials and daring speculators, besides an expensive plague and constant distraction to property owners. The dreams and expectations of its originators have, so far, utterly failed of any adequate realization: and, as if to dispel them entirely, the first substantial improvements of the Boulevard consist of stores and common tenements [flat buildings], which have been erected within the past year at the corner of Sixtyseventh street. . . . Doubtless, imposing specimens of the apartment system will be here projected; but, in every case, we venture to assert, the first floor will be ultimately appropriated for business purposes.25 In 1878, real estate at the northern end of the Boulevard was still suffering the panic’s effects. That summer, Richard Carman’s heirs put the Riverside Hotel at 152nd Street on the market—“a handsome and wellappointed brick building, containing one hundred and twenty-five rooms and every accessory of a first-class hotel, with the Hudson River Railroad station in front.” Five years earlier, they had valued it at $85,000. Now, the highest bid was $22,000. “These prices establish ruinous rates for those who bought during flush times,” the Times wrote. It then predicted that many years would pass “before the acres and acres of building lots which fill up the space between Fifty-ninth and One Hundred and Fiftieth streets, Eight Avenue and North River are taken up and built on, and till this area is covered with bricks and mortar we can hardly look for rows of

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brown-stone houses in the neighborhood of Fort Washington.” Like the street commissioners in 1811, they would be proved wrong.26 The Sixth Avenue El opened three days after the Carman family’s aborted sale and was an immediate success. Thirty thousand riders packed onto the trains on its first day. The next day, the board of directors stripped Gilbert of his title. In an effort to obtain financing for his dream, he had carelessly signed agreements that allowed the directors to form a separate Metropolitan Elevated Company, swap stock, and force him out. In the thick of these dealings was William Foster. Two months after the Sixth Avenue El began operating, a New York Herald reporter spoke with Foster, who was regarded “as one of the most zealous advocates of rapid transit to Kingsbridge in the board of the Metropolitan Railway.” In response to questions, he emphasized the importance of extending the El northward, which he predicted would happen by the following spring. “Everybody can easily perceive by a moment’s reflection that our present terminus at Eighty-first street practically leads to nowhere,” he said. “It would have been a mere waste of money to have built it had it not been intended to push the road rapidly along to High Bridge.” Foster expected that extending the railroad to Washington Heights would improve traffic on the entire route. He was proved right in less than two years, when the 155th Street station reported receipts of 10,000 tickets in just one day. Park residents could travel from 155th Street to 50th Street during business hours and all the way to the end of the line at South Ferry on the “owl” trains between midnight and 5:30 a.m. Despite the annoyance of walking down a flight of steps to ground level at the 155th Street station and then up another set of steps to the top of the bluff—the equivalent of an eight-story building—mass transit to the eastern side of Washington Heights spurred construction along St. Nicholas and Tenth Avenues and brought urbanization one step closer to Audubon Park.27

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Compared to the Audubons’s turmoil in the 1850s, the Civil War in the 1860s, and the Great Depression in the 1870s, the 1880s would prove relatively stable inside Audubon Park, in large part because George Grinnell, by virtue of his majority ownership, exercised a steadying influence that belied the rapidly evolving city outside. Throughout the decade, population and housing density rose around Carmansville but remained stable in the park. Of the few parcels that changed hands, most were intrafamily, and though two new houses appeared, they were for the expanding Grinnell family, not newcomers. Outside the park’s borders, however, changes were afoot. Technological advances in building and transportation and a steadily growing population continually pushed the city’s boundaries northward. Catalyzing growth were those middle-class families with a yearly income of three or four thousand dollars and whose breadwinner usually worked for someone other than himself. When they couldn’t find housing in the city, those families usually moved to Brooklyn or New Jersey and only occasionally to Washington Heights. In 1880, however, they had incentive to remain in Manhattan as it expanded northward. Although the total number of plans filed with the superintendent of buildings the previous year had been about seven hundred fewer than in 1871, the Sun noted that they “far exceeded the total of any year” since then. More importantly, the number of plans for French flat buildings equaled the number for second-class houses—three- and fourstory dwellings purpose-built for several families on “floors”—so more

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housing units would come to the market. “The rapidity with which New York is filling up with these apartment houses proves how great is the demand for them,” wrote the Sun, “and it ought to result in a marked reduction in the rents of the flats, which now are disproportionately large.” Even people who could afford to rent houses were showing a preference for apartments and flats. Besides providing accommodations they couldn’t find “for anything like the same money” in a house, a first-class flat offered “striking architecture, marbles and tilings, cabinet finish, mirrors, and bureaus built in, and the thousand and one luxuries that [had] been developed by the building trades and concentrated in these modern palaces.” Some clever renters leased houses, let them, and then lived in flats, pocketing a profit.1 Article after article echoed these themes in the early part of the decade, and within three years of its 1880 apartment survey, the Sun reported that New York City was “very steadily becoming, like Paris, a city of apartment houses” where single-family residences were “destined to be occupied only by the rich.” Improvements in passenger elevators made the top floors of eight- and ten-story buildings more desirable, and an increased supply of apartments was pushing rents down so quickly that, in the near future, the Sun expected building owners would have to suffice with a 5 or 6 percent profit, enough to pay taxes and repairs, rather than the 10 to 12 percent they were currently reaping. The Tribune assured its readers that flatdwellers could enjoy many economies of scale and reduce the “vexations and practical bothers of domestic routine,” but the right location was key to success. “It is well for the flat-hunter to explore neighborhoods thoroughly,” it advised. “By all means walk around the block. . . . It is better to pitch upon a flat that stands somewhat isolated and that does not abut upon the rear of other flats; this touches the matter of privacy and ventilation.” As a corollary, the Sun noted that moving day was shifting from May first to the fall so that building owners wouldn’t be left with unrented flats during the summer exodus from the city.2 While the Sun posited that families of middling means might still afford single-family houses in northern Manhattan or the Annexed District (Kingsbridge, West Farms, and Morrisania in the West Bronx, which New York County had annexed in 1874), the Times believed—as did local property owners—that Washington Heights would be the purview of the wealthy as soon as it had quick and easy access from the lower part of the island. “It would be difficult to find in any city of the world a location more admirably suited for the abode of families of wealth and taste,” the Times wrote, “and it would also be hard to find a place possessing such natural

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advantages which has been allowed for so many years to languish for want of improvements.” With an eye to ensuring those improvements took place, community leaders agitated for municipal investment in northern Manhattan. Ad hoc assemblies, usually held in one of the neighborhood churches, led the way. At the end of 1881, Washington Heights Presbyterian Church hosted a community meeting with Central Park Commissioner Andrew Haswell Green, who spoke about the importance of mass transit in “the rapid extension of the City northward.”3 The assembly that evening unanimously approved Charles Stoddard’s resolutions for an improved foot bridge from the 155th Street elevated station to the heights, a suspension bridge north of High Bridge, a surface railroad along Tenth Avenue, and sewers for 156th, 157th, and 158th streets. Several weeks later, the citizenry gathered in the Methodist church to demand more service from the elevated railroads. Audubon Park’s Andrew Soulard chaired that meeting and “spoke earnestly” about the benefits additional service would bring to businesses as well as property owners. That assembly passed resolutions calling for the Second Avenue and Ninth Avenue Els to extend their lines to 155th Street and reiterated the need for a bridge from the station to the heights. Audubon Park’s property owners George Grinnell, Wellington Clapp, and William Foster joined many of their neighbors—including Seth Hawley, developer John Kelly, realtor J. Romaine Brown, publisher Irving Putnam, and most of Intercession’s vestry—in supporting a petition for a 155th Street cable railroad connecting the Metropolitan Elevated Railroad in the lowlands by the Harlem River to “the plateau of Washington Heights.”4 Despite expansion in Washington Heights, when Clarence Gaylor came around to count the park’s residents for the tenth Federal Census in June 1880, its population had only grown 11 percent since 1870, 139 individuals versus 125. The number of servants had dropped by three and the number of children younger than eighteen by sixteen; ten in that category were children of servants. Accounting for all of the “growth” were the fifteen young adults still living in their parents’ homes. Harking back to the days when three generations of Audubons lived in the homestead, Julia Jerome’s widowed daughter and married son lived with her, as did six grandchildren. Shepherd Knapp, Wellington Clapp, and George Grinnell all had adult children in their households—five of them “without occupation.” The number would have been higher, but George Bird was traveling in the west and William was still at Yale.5 The Grinnells’s gardener, German-born John Theodore Lutz, had worked at the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and

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Dumb before coming to the park. George must have valued his skills highly, as he provided quarters for him, his wife, Annie Miller Lutz, a former student at the institution, and their three children. A fourth would be born while they lived in the park. A significant change in the park’s ethnic makeup was the number of African Americans living there compared to the years when Hannah, the Grinnells’s nurse, was the only black person. African Americans Robert Magee, the Grinnells’s butler, and Fanny Mills, their cook, were born in Alabama in 1840, and the Ladews’s coachman, Henry Jackson, and his wife, Alberta, were born in Maryland in the 1850s. Very likely all four adults had learned their professional skills while in bondage.6 The Stones, who now owned Georgianna’s house, were very much of the Audubon Park mold, prosperous, religious, and prolific in childbearing. Charles Francis (Frank) Stone had attended prep schools and earned degrees from Harvard and New York University before traveling to Europe to study law in England, Germany, and France. In 1856, he began practicing law in New York City. His image, as passed down through his descendants, is that of a reticent, scholarly lawyer who let the other members of Davies, Stone & Auerbach enjoy the spotlight. “Davies had a golden voice and went into court,” Frank Stone’s daughter Minnie later recalled. “But C. F. Stone told him what to say.” In 1863, Frank married Sallie English, his first cousin once removed. After the birth of the sixth of their ten children, they decided that their home on East 57th Street was “too small for the growing family” and bought the Audubon Park house. On moving day, Frank and one of the children’s nurses brought some of the children uptown on the El, while Sally and the other nurse drove up in a carriage with their youngest daughters “and the little dog Prince.” The Stones were churchgoers, but uniquely among their neighbors, were Unitarians; Frank was both a founding member and trustee of the Unitarian Congregational Church at 128th Street near Madison Avenue. He was also a visionary businessman. Two years before moving to the park, he and broker Nathan G. Miller (who would become his neighbor three years later) had been incorporators of the Edison Electric Light Company. When Thomas Alva Edison’s initial experiments failed and some of the investors pulled out, Frank Stone stayed the course and provided funding for research that ultimately led to breakthroughs and success.7 Early park residents had sent their children to Lucy Audubon’s classroom; the Stones sent theirs to her granddaughter Eliza’s school on the Boulevard at 152nd Street. Minnie Stone began studies there at age seven and continued until she was fourteen. “In the corner of the infant class

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room was a series of large book shelves,” she wrote decades later, “on them the Audubon Books which were used in the Natural history Class on Friday, being shown to illustrate the animals. On the walls of the parlor were several paintings of animals—one, I remember, of flying squirrels.”8 The improved economy in the late 1870s helped Intercession climb out of its financial morass. In the spring of 1880, the vestry raised $20,000 on subscription to repurchase the church edifice. After settling a workman’s lien on the furnace and resolving George Grinnell’s outstanding claim with $2,500 notes from William Foster and James Monteith, the vestry paid the Haggerty estate and once again owned the church—and a new $17,000 mortgage. After seeing the congregation through its dark days, Winchester Donald returned to the Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue at Tenth Street, where he had been assistant when Intercession called him seven years earlier. Now, he would be the rector.9 He returned to Intercession a few months later to marry the Grinnells’s daughter Helen to William Drummond Page in a wedding that made New York’s society pages. Wearing “a cream-colored ottoman silk trimmed with point lace, the corsage cut square,” Helen processed into a church decorated with “palms and smilax intertwined with roses.” Other than her bouquet of “white roses and lilies of the valley . . . her only ornaments were diamonds and orange blossoms.” Like the groom, the groomsmen were all Yale men: Morton and William Grinnell, Isaac P. Martin Jr., and Newell Martin, who in a few years, would himself become entwined with the Grinnells. Following the wedding, George and Helen hosted four hundred guests at the Hemlocks, “which bore a resemblance to a flower garden, bedecked as it was with tastefully designed floral decorations.” Georgianna gave the couple an Audubon painting (probably Victor rather than John James), and Mrs. Horace F. Clark, widow of George’s former business partner, sent “a handsome set of small silver” from Paris. The guest list represented the park’s past and present: Lemuel Hayward, the Wheelocks, the Ladews, the Fosters, and several of the Audubons. With no vacant houses available in the park, the Pages set up housekeeping on 153rd Street.10 Not all of 1880s milestones were as happy as Helen Grinnell’s wedding. Audubon Park’s first generation of property owners were aging, and many of them died during the decade. Sixty-year-old Henry Johnson died in Greenwich, Connecticut, in the fall of 1881 and was buried in Trinity Cemetery adjacent to his former park home. A year later, Georgianna died of pneumonia on October 13, 1882, at the age of sixty-eight, followed by her sister Eliza Mallory, a frequent visitor to Minnie’s Land before moving to Audubon Park permanently after the Civil War. Both were buried in

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Trinity Cemetery, Georgianna in the Audubon vault and Eliza in the Talman plot higher on the hill. When Henry Smythe died in May 1884, Winchester Donald read his funeral service at the Church of the Ascension, where Wellington Clapp was among the pallbearers and William Wheelock prominent among the mourners. “Mr. Smythe’s friends describe him as a most interesting companion,” wrote the Herald, “and though in recent years he had suffered much, one of his afflictions being almost total blindness, his cordiality and pleasant manner to those about him did not change. He was a gentleman of wide information and an exceptionally extensive acquaintance.”11 When Seth Hawley died of pneumonia in November 1884, one day before he and Lavinia were to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, New York’s Police Department gave him full honors, and Washington Heights turned out for the funeral. After paying respects at the Hawley home, where Seth was laid out for viewing, hundreds of mourners assembled outside the Church of the Intercession to await a long procession of police superintendents, captains, commissioners, clerks, and officers. Intercession’s newest rector, Morton Reed, read the Episcopal burial service, and Charles Stoddard delivered a eulogy. Then, the procession marched back down the Boulevard to Trinity Cemetery, where the pallbearers and police honor guard deposited the body in a receiving vault. Later, Lavinia Hawley commissioned a gravestone distinguished by seven generations of Hawleys chiseled into its southern face.12 Two weeks after Seth Hawley’s funeral, Wellington and Cornelia Clapp, the park’s only remaining link to Minnie’s Land, sold their home of more than thirty years. Real estate agent Siegmund Meyer bought it and, in a simultaneous transaction, sold the Clapps five French flat buildings on East 52nd Street, an investment that would give them a steady income. The Clapps joined their daughter Nellie and her husband at Ascension’s rectory, where Cornelia died three months later. Wellington Clapp would live another decade, dying on Staten Island at the age of seventy-eight. Meyer held onto the Clapp property only three days before selling it to George Grinnell, who had leased it a quarter-century earlier when he first arrived in the park. The house and land increased the Grinnell enclave to more than one hundred and twenty lots—about two-thirds of Audubon Park’s footprint and most of the land west of the Boulevard to Twelfth Avenue between 155th and 158th streets. The exceptions were Charles Kerner’s twelve lots and John Dalley’s square parcel at the corner of 158th Street.13 On Christmas Day 1886, Shepherd Knapp died after an illness of several weeks. At fifty-four, he had been “a well known figure in Wall-street

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Wellington Clapp House in Audubon Park, circa 1895 (Courtesy of Paul Locher Jr., Washington, D.C.)

for many years, and his connection with the turf [had] given him a national reputation.” A laudatory obituary in the Times recounted his career from apprentice to leather merchant to Wall Street player and reported that his death resulted from an ulcerated tooth leading to blood poisoning. According to the Tribune, some of his friends reported that Knapp “had never fully recovered from the shock of the death of his favorite son,” also named Shepherd, who had suffered a heart attack while boating on the Hudson and drowned in sight of his family watching from the house. John C. Bliss, Washington Heights Presbyterian’s pastor, and Charles Stoddard, pastor emeritus, presided over the funeral three days later. “The plain little church had not been entirely stripped of its Christmas decorations,” reported the Times, “and a tall evergreen towered above the handsome coffin of dark blue velvet, with heavy silver ornaments. At the request of the family floral tributes had been omitted, and only a wreath of ripened wheat lay near the body.” The large assembly of judges, politicians, officeholders, city commissioners, and representatives of the Hoboken Turtle Club and Wawayanda Fishing Club then traveled to Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery for the interment.14

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Only after Levi Stockwell died in 1880 did his wife, Jane, realize that he and his brother A.B. had squandered her property. In debt more than one million dollars to Nathan and Darius Miller, who held mortgages on their Bridgeport Connecticut machine factory, A.B. had convinced Levi to use Jane’s Audubon Park deeds as collateral to salvage what they could from business losses and stock speculation gone bad. Nathan and Darius Miller were two of four brothers famed for spinning fortunes out of $700 their father had given each of them. Darius made his fortune in dry goods before turning to a variety of financial schemes, and Nathan was president of the Iron Steamboat Company and Eagle Lock Company and owned the Nickel Plate Railroad. He was also a fellow investor with Frank Stone in the Edison Company and, in the early 1880s, listed himself in the city directory as an exchange broker. When A.B. declared bankruptcy, the Millers took what assets they could, including Jane’s houses. Nathan bought both of them in foreclosure, but over the next three decades, he, Darius, their brother Frank, and Charles Adams (who may have been a relation) would pass the houses back and forth among themselves. Regardless of who owned the old Post house, Nathan and his wife, Agnes, were its most permanent residents, probably because of his business connections in the city.15 The same spring that Jane lost her property, the Ladews moved from the park, and William and Helen Page moved into the Smythe house, which they shared with Helen’s cousin Mary Grinnell (William’s daughter) and her husband, Edward Landon. Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, who had been leasing the old Audubon homestead from Coleman Benedict, also left that summer, and two of Coleman’s sisters moved back to the house where they had been girls. Thirty-three-year-old Laura and twenty-four-year-old Jessie Benedict were both single and found proximity to the railroad a disadvantage when husband hunting; “No sooner did a ‘beau’ start to commit himself,” one reportedly complained, “than a freight train would come by, and by the time the 100-odd cars had gone clanking past, the young man would think better of it.”16 Mid-decade, Washington Heights property owners and residents were still agitating for improved streets and expanded mass transportation, though many of them objected to plans for a cable railroad running up the Boulevard. Construction of a cable railroad had already turned Tenth Avenue into a minefield. “Rocks are blasted throughout its length and it is made wholly impassable, except at the risk of one’s life and limbs,” wrote lawyer A. V. Briesen in a published letter to the mayor. The commissioner of public works responded that his department had the impossible task of balancing “all the conflicting interests and opinions” of landowners who

John James Audubon (Author’s collection)

Lucy Bakewell Audubon (Author’s collection)

Victor Gifford Audubon (Author’s collection)

John Woodhouse Audubon (Author’s collection)

Lucy Audubon with Her Granddaughters Hattie (left) and Lulu (Image courtesy of John James Audubon State Park, Henderson, Kentucky)

Henry A. Smythe (New York Public Library https://digitalcollections. nypl.org/items/510d47da-247e-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)

George Bird Grinnell (Library of Congress)

Laura Grinnell Martin (Private collection, Schuyler M. Meyer Family)

John Theodore Lutz and His Son Louis (Courtesy of Kathy Collins)

Annie Miller Lutz (Courtesy of Kathy Collins)

Minnie Stone Martin (Courtesy of Cary StoneGreenstein and Susanne S. Page)

Charles Francis (Frank) Martin (Courtesy of Cary Stone-Greenstein and Susanne S. Page)

Patrick J. Tynan (Author’s collection)

The McGrath, McCulloch, and Bolger Children, Last Residents of the Audubon Homestead (Courtesy of Tom Lanagan)

Reginald P. Bolton (Author’s collection)

Peggy Gill Oakes (Courtesy of Peggy Gill Oakes)

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wanted streets opened to benefit their property and renters like Briesen, who wanted convenience without any discomfort.17 Competing interests between renters and property owners were not the only frictions in Carmansville. Although it was growing, some of its residents’ tiffs still seemed indicative of a country village. At the foot of 152nd Street, one of Richard Carman’s granddaughters was now taking in boarders at the old Riverside House. In the fall of 1883, she filed suit against the Carman Rowing Association because its boathouse blocked her boarders’ views of the river and boaters congregated there “at all hours of the day and night to their annoyance.” The association’s president told the Times that he “could not understand how the house could be a nuisance” to anyone because all of the members “were gentlemen and conducted themselves in an orderly and decent manner.” On the other hand, several club members remarked that “when the Riverside House was a well-conducted hotel the proprietor and his guests were well pleased to have a boat-house in front of the premises.” The boathouse remained.18 A scandal engulfed the Presbyterians when the Reverend Allen De Camp stirred up “a perfect hornet’s nest” by reading “The Deacon’s Week,” a short story by American author and poet Rose Terry Cooke, one Sunday morning during the communion service. Although the moral of the story was to put prayers into practice, it contained New England dialect, which De Camp mimicked during the service. Some in the congregation, including Audubon Park’s Edward Griffin, the church’s treasurer, and William Wheelock, its primary benefactor, were incensed at De Camp’s lack of propriety. Reporting on the controversy, a Times reporter soon realized that the real issue was a conflict between the congregation’s older members, who were still devoted to Charles Stoddard, and its younger members, who supported De Camp. The issue might have faded away, except for “malicious activity of older members of the church,” who circulated copies of Cooke’s story throughout the neighborhood to buttress their viewpoint. Eventually, De Camp decamped, and the following October, when the brouhaha had calmed, the congregation installed the Reverend Dr. J. C. Bliss, who would lead them into a new century.19 In 1884, George Bird Grinnell and Isaac P. Martin Jr. (son of the elder George Grinnell’s lawyer) began investing in neighborhood real estate, buying half of the block front on the east side of the Boulevard between 156th and 157th streets. Anticipating growth along the Boulevard and its side streets, they advertised that they intended to “improve” the property with buildings the next spring. Later in the year, George Bird’s youngest brother, William, joined with several family acquaintances, including William Foster

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and John MacMullen, to form the Washington Heights Athenaeum Society. Although the name suggested a cultural association, the corporation’s stated objective was “purchasing, holding, and improving of real estate, and selling or leasing the same in New York.” Perhaps the French cyclorama painter Paul Dominique Philippoteaux, who was leasing the Clapp house in 1885, had suggested the erudite athenaeum name to William Grinnell. Philippoteaux’s artistic bent—the Times reported that he had decorated his house with “furniture, specially imported from Paris” and “costly bric-a-brac and objects of rare art and taste”—suggests that Grinnell, with a degree in architecture from Yale and a budding interest in art collecting, had arranged for his stay in the park.20 The Athenaeum Society’s first purchase was a parcel stretching across the rear of Minnie Hawley’s property from 155th to 156th Street. William designed a building for the society with a main auditorium seating six hundred people and five assembly rooms for musical performances, dramatic readings, cotillions, and other community events. While construction was underway, the Record and Guide mentioned the building in an article comparing investors north of 135th Street with speculators south of that point, the distinction being that the former bought for the long term and the latter quickly sold to turn a profit. The article praised former politician John Kelly, “one of the pioneers up this way,” for his new, profitable houses on 154th Street and assured potential residents that the healthy altitudes, picturesque views, summer breezes, and soon-to-be-opened Athenaeum would more than compensate for “the somewhat greater distance from the centers of trade and commerce.” The article also reported that Joseph Loth & Company was building a silk factory on Tenth Avenue that would “give employment to a great many people”—most of whom would need local housing.21 On the evening of February 15, 1886, while New York’s theatergoers chose between The Gypsy Baron at the Casino, Edwin Booth playing Macbeth at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, David Belasco’s new play, Valerie, or The Queen of Sheba at the Metropolitan Opera, a line of carriages stretched up and down 155th Street, where “leading property owners” gathered to inaugurate the Washington Heights Athenaeum. Set back a few feet from the sidewalk, with a recessed porch a half-dozen steps above it, the building blended into the existing streetscape, despite its distinctive Queen Anne Revival style. The lot was part of the original Minnie’s Land, and the event would surely have pleased the culture-conscious Lucy Audubon. At the start of the evening, the president of the Athenaeum Society,

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The Washington Heights Athenaeum (after It Was Sold to the Washington Heights YMCA), undated (Author’s collection)

William Foster, took to a stage “handsomely decorated with expensive exotics and plants” and introduced local orator and assistant district attorney Colonel John J. Fellows, who delivered the opening address. Then, Miss Henrietta Beebe, John Barri, and the Columbia Glee Club presented musical selections, and a “Miss Runyon” concluded the performance with recitations. Afterward, the audience toured the new building.22 The Athenaeum quickly became a popular location for performances, social events, and cotillions. It also became the preferred location for community agitation. A few months after it opened, Washington Heights’ irate citizenry met to protest James J. Coogan’s removing the wooden foot bridge that connected the elevated railroad station and the top of the heights. Coogan, a local real estate manager, had the Common Council’s permission to grade 155th Street. Finding the bridge in his way, he removed it. (Although he earned contemporary fame in real estate and as Manhattan borough president, he is now memorialized in Coogan’s Bluff, where thousands of fans over the years watched the New York Metropolitans, Giants, Yankees, and Mets play baseball on the polo grounds.) “The bridge is not a picturesque object in the landscape,” reported the Times, “but it seems to have made itself dear to every man, woman, and

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child on the Heights, and they turned not [sic], every one of them, to cheer any and all words that might be said against its destruction.” Coogan won that battle, and for the next few years, the only route from the elevated train to the heights was to descend from the platform to street level near the Macomb’s Dam Bridge and then climb nine flights of stairs. But the war was not over. Enraged by Coogan’s act, the populace was emboldened to find a way to bridge the gap between the lowlands and the heights.23

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The spring of 1886 was a busy one for the Grinnells. Two months after the Athenaeum opened, Laura Grinnell married Newell Martin, who had attended Yale with her brothers and had been a member of her older sister’s wedding party four years earlier. Born in China, where his father was a missionary and teacher, Newell had graduated Yale, earned a law degree at Columbia, and was developing a practice in New York City. Intercession’s rector, Morton Reed, married the couple in a private ceremony at the Hemlocks, which was “decorated in a novel manner with screens of woven hemlock, cherry blossoms and lilies,” and then the Grinnells received 250 guests at a wedding dinner served by New York society’s favored caterer J. P. Pinard & Sons. Two weeks later, Morton Grinnell married Natalie Baldwin, whose father Nathan had sold the elder George Grinnell part of Beaver Brook Farm. Morton had completed his medical studies and the next summer would pass the civil service exam and become a police surgeon. Rather than move into the Hemlocks or rent a house nearby, he and Natalie followed the contemporary trend and leased an apartment at the Bella Flats, a fourteen-unit building with full services on Twenty-Sixth Street near Fourth Avenue (today’s Park Avenue).1 In October, George and Helen deeded a twenty-five by one-hundredfoot lot in Audubon Park to each of their daughters, and their son William designed a villa for each, which their husbands promptly filed with the Department of Buildings. In December, the elder Grinnells also deeded a lot to William and one to Morton and Natalie, though not one to George

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Bird. He was already investing in real estate on the park’s border, and perhaps the family tacitly understood that as the eldest—and at thirty-seven apparently a confirmed bachelor—he would always take precedence at the Hemlocks.2 Just as the Audubons had created a family enclave by placing their houses between Twelfth Avenue and the Hudson River thirty years earlier, the Grinnells grouped theirs between Eleventh and Twelfth avenues, aligning them along the future 157th Street. A year later, the Record and Guide gave William’s houses “considerable praise for the manner in which the design [had] been made to suit the situation, and for their quiet elegance.” Around the same time, William filed plans for “a number of three-story detached Queen Anne cottages, of brick and stone” in Bedford Park and then bought four of the undeveloped lots on 156th Street from his brother, George Bird, and Isaac Martin. At the end of the decade, he designed and built a speculative row of four Queen Anne houses on them as well.3 While the Grinnells were planning weddings and building new homes in 1886, George Bird devoted his energy to conservation. A member of the fledgling American Ornithologists’ Union and its Committee on the Protection of North American Birds, he used his national hunting magazine Forest and Stream as a bully pulpit for the cause. In February 1886, he invited readers to join the Audubon Society, whose goals were preventing (1) the killing of any wild bird not used for food; (2) the destruction of wild birds’ nests and eggs; and (3) the use of feathers as ornaments or decorations for

Newell and Linda Grinnell Martin’s House in Audubon Park, circa 1905 (Author’s collection)

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clothing. Women’s leadership would assist with the last injunction, and for that effort, at least on one occasion, he conscripted his mother. At the May meeting of the Ladies Christian Union of New-York, Helen Grinnell “gave an account of the Audubon Society, and spoke of the great work which it had accomplished, pointing out the benefits which would result from spreading of its doctrines among all classes of our people.” The ladies unanimously agreed to join.4 Although initially successful, within three years, the Audubon Society collapsed under its own weight. Response was enthusiastic, but maintaining its mailing list and a monthly magazine overtaxed George Bird and his Forest and Stream staff. In 1889, he regretfully ended the venture. His conservation work would continue, though, and within a few years, others would build on his early work, creating an Audubon Society that would last into the twenty-first century.5 In the late 1880s, George Bird also joined the effort to erect an Audubon monument in Trinity Cemetery. Professor Thomas Egleston, an engineer at the Columbia School of Mines, initiated the project after coming upon Audubon’s modest tomb in its remote, southwestern corner of Trinity Cemetery. Worried that pending work to grade and open 153rd Street could damage the vault, and perhaps inspired by a Times article about New Orleans schoolchildren raising funds for an Audubon monument in their city, Egleston urged the New-York Academy of Sciences to erect “a suitable monument” to the naturalist in New York City. Soon, the American Ornithologists’ Union, the Linnaean Society of New-York, and Grinnell’s Audubon Society joined the effort. Like the New Orleans schoolchildren, they set a goal of $10,000, and like Intercession’s vestrymen, they quickly discovered that signing subscribers was not an easy task. Several years would pass before they raised enough funds to commission the monument.6 The summer of 1886 also saw New York City’s first cable road open. It ran up Tenth Avenue from 125th Street as far north as 187th Street and was one more step in opening the area to growth. Slightly farther south, the city directory listed no fewer than 260 apartment and flat houses— each with its own distinctive name—as well as flats over businesses and in old houses “altered as to accommodate several families.” Giving flat and apartment buildings names like the “Bella,” a tactic real estate agents and builders used from the earliest examples, gave each a unique identity and layer of respectability. Among potential renters, single men were a prime target. The Tribune suggested that comfortable apartments were preventing bachelors from marrying because they could afford the “light, warmth,

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airiness, beauty, quiet, independence” of a small apartment “with almost no personal trouble.” 7 A year after Washington Heights citizens met at the Athenaeum to protest Coogan’s removing the wooden bridge to the 155th Street elevated station, the state legislature took up a bill for an iron bridge spanning the lowlands at Eighth Avenue to Washington Heights. Besides benefitting property owners, whose real estate investments now reached into the millions, the viaduct would alleviate the annoyance Coogan had created by his “mismanagement of the alleged improvements in the street,” which the Herald dismissed as nothing more than “a fat dirt moving contract.” The viaduct’s broad list of supporters included Audubon Park’s George Grinnell and William Wheelock, religious and civic leaders, and political sympathizers such as George’s one-time business associate Levi P. Morton (soon to accompany Benjamin Harrison on the Republican presidential ticket).8 While the viaduct bill worked its way through the legislature, Audubon Park’s Andrew Soulard joined a syndicate with a franchise to provide lighting to the twenty-third and twenty-fourth wards. In March 1887, as a promotional effort, the Harlem Lighting Company provided fifteen electric lights on 125th Street, free of charge for ninety days. The visionary company was short-lived. Within the year, its 125th Street plant burned, and its directors merged their remaining capital with the Manhattan Electric Light Company, which the Edison Electric Illuminating Company soon bought.9 Despite setbacks like the Harlem Lighting Company, agitation for local improvements accelerated in the next few years. In 1887, the park commissioners and Board of Estimate and Apportionment debated replacing the Macomb’s Dam Bridge with a tunnel; the Washington Heights citizenry met at the Athenaeum to call for an extension of the elevated railroad on the Boulevard to Kingsbridge; and property owners continued agitating for a 155th Street viaduct to connect them with the lowlands at Eighth Avenue. The next year, the Times began advocating for a “pleasant and picturesque” drive along the Harlem River, a plan with roots before the Civil War.10 Occasionally, a project was ahead of its time. In 1888, Trinity Church considered building a crematorium in uptown Trinity Cemetery. “At first, doubtless, the people in the immediate neighborhood will object to the erection of the crematory,” wrote the Record and Guide, “but once established, it is more than probable that they will be reconciled to this new departure in the methods of disposing of the dead.” As the publication suspected, the Christian doctrine of resurrection could not yet accommodate cremation—it smacked of a “return to paganism”—and Trinity shelved its plans. When the Trinity Corporation finally built a crematorium in the

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cemetery nearly a century later, it ran into a different problem. Neighbors complained about pollution from the ashes, and the operation closed after little more than a decade.11 With multiple ad hoc committees and projects, some northern Manhattan property owners and residents realized the need for greater organization and began forming groups to agitate for specific improvements. One of the most effective and enduring was the Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association, formed in January 1889 for the “improvement and development of the upper western portion of Manhattan Island.” Representing the park’s interests was William Foster, the organization’s first vice president. At its organizational meeting, the Taxpayers’ Association prioritized the 155th Street viaduct, an elevated railroad up the Boulevard, opening 181st Street between the King’s Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge, and preserving thirteen elms that Alexander Hamilton had planted adjacent to his home in honor of the original states. During its first year, the association published the pamphlet “Washington Heights In the Past, In the Present, In the Future” and sold it for ten cents a copy. The promotional literature lauded the “beauty, picturesqueness and healthfulness of Washington Heights” and succinctly described the area’s challenges and advantages.12 Until lately nothing had been done by the City Government, or private enterprise, to improve the section known as Washington Heights. No inducements were offered people to seek homes there. It was thought as much out of the way as the foot hills of New Jersey, except for a few rich people who had the use of carriages and horses. Yet, this section is within four miles of Central Park, and there is no river to cross in reaching it. The entire region is so interesting, picturesque, beautiful and healthful that, if it were not a part of the city and on Manhattan Island, it would be eagerly sought as a place of fashionable Summer resort.13 Continuing the refrain for rapid transit, the Taxpayers’ Association advocated for cable cars and a viaduct railroad running on stone arches from the Battery to Washington Heights and then north to Tarrytown. It would fly “over the tops of the houses and across the street, so that the trains [were] scarcely heard or perceived by the people below and there [would be] no annoyance from noise or smoke.” Echoing the Taxpayers’ Association, the Sun marveled at improvements west of Central Park, where thousands of dwellings had replaced what had been “little better than a wilderness of rocks and goats and swamps and shanties.” Summing up the situation, the Sun wrote, “Where the elevated and cable roads have gone

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on the west side buildings have followed. Where the elevated and cable roads have not gone there are no buildings.”14 Real estate development in Carmansville had spawned enough population growth that the area needed a new public school. In December 1889, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum band led a procession of one thousand schoolchildren to the corner of St. Nicholas Avenue and 156th Street for a cornerstone laying. The Times reported that the new building would be four stories tall and cost $200,000. Later in the year, when the Board of Apportionment and Estimate finally approved plans for the 155th Street viaduct, James Coogan retaliated with plans for “a garden and concert hall” about 250 feet from the new school. Aghast, the Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association, ministers of the local churches, the captain of police, the chairman of the Twelfth Ward School Trustees John Whalen, and speaking for Audubon Park, William Grinnell, all protested another saloon in the neighborhood. The area below the bluff around the Macomb’s Dam Bridge was already known for its taverns and roadhouses. Bending to local pressure, the Excise Board refused to grant Coogan a liquor license, and his plans fizzled.15 The viaduct didn’t. The city hired engineer Alfred P. Boller to design the structure and adopted his plans in May 1890. Following a standard formula, the city would pay for half of the estimated half-million-dollar cost, and property owners who benefitted from the improvement would pay the other half. In June 1890, the city also commissioned Boller to design a replacement for the Macomb’s Dam Bridge. It would connect with roadways on the lowlands as well as with the viaduct, creating a graded access between Washington Heights and Eighth Avenue, and between the two of them and the Annexed District (today’s Bronx) across the Harlem River. At Eighth Avenue, stairs would connect the elevated railroad station with the viaduct above and the street below. The “Street Built in Mid-Air” generated enthusiasm as well as awe. “It is believed the entire section thereabout will be immensely benefitted,” wrote the Times. Applauding improved access to the 155th Street station, the Record and Guide congratulated the Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association for its work in achieving “nearly every local public improvement” over the previous few years. The viaduct, which eventually cost more than $700,000, opened in October 1893, but because of design revisions resulting from soil conditions on the river bottom, the Central Bridge (the new name for the new bridge) did not open until May 1895.16 A change in the relationship between some of Audubon Park’s owners and their houses emerged as the ’80s progressed into the ’90s. In April 1888, the Benedict heirs sold their house at auction, and William Kramer,

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The Viaduct Connecting Washington Heights to the Central (Macomb’s Dam) Bridge from Scientific American, June 1890 (Author’s collection)

a German immigrant who had made a fortune with the Atlantic Theater and Thalian Hall, bought it. Kramer owned a splendid mansion on 152nd Street near Tenth Avenue and bought the Benedict house solely as an investment; he would let it for the next fifteen years. Nearly all of the park’s owners had let their houses in preceding decades, but they still treated them as primary residences and vetted their tenants carefully so they could ensure that temporary dwellers maintained their homes and adhered to a set of unstated, but generally understood social norms. Showing no intentions of moving to the park, Kramer would be an absentee landlord who might increase profits by dividing the old Audubon homestead into floors, so park owners probably breathed a sigh of relief when he leased the house to former mayor Daniel Tiemann and his wife in 1891. They had lived for decades in a house a mile and a half south of the park, and Tiemann “had hoped to end his days there,” but when the city opened 127th Street, it condemned the house, which sat squarely in the roadbed. The elderly Tiemanns had no choice but to leave.17

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At the beginning of October 1891, shortly after the Tiemanns had moved to the old Audubon homestead, the night’s calm was shattered when two trains collided on the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad tracks at the foot of 155th Street west of their house. One man died, another was seriously injured, and “five cars were smashed to kindling wood.” Carmansville’s police force spent the next day searching the neighborhood for more than two hundred pigs that had escaped the wreckage.18 The year after the Benedicts sold their house, Adeline Soulard sold hers to wine merchant and builder Louis Weber, who transferred it to developer Frank Koch for “the exchange of property and one dollar.” Over the next decade, while Koch and his wife, Isabella, lived in the house, he negotiated numerous real estate deals in the neighborhood. Minnie Hawley also sold her house to a developer in the late 1880s. A year or two earlier, when she was a spinster of forty-one, Minnie had become financially and emotionally involved with Dr. Charles Spencer Barney, a physician who had come to New York City from Glen Falls. Minnie was seventeen years older than Barney, and according to her nephew, only one year younger than his mother. The Times reported in August 1886 that Barney had left the state for “rest and recuperation,” only to have Minnie pursue him for more than $15,000 he owed her in cash and promissory notes. He had lost all of it speculating on Wall Street and then fled using $250 he borrowed from a friend. Whether true love prevailed or Barney’s financial condition left him no other options, he married Minnie—“for her money” was her nephew’s straightforward assessment. The couple lived in the 155th Street house for several years, and then Minnie sold it to Solomon Moses and moved with Barney to his hometown in Otsego County, leaving her mother, Lavinia, to fend for herself.19 After a year, Moses sold the house to Constance Isabel Oscanyan, a relative of the Burgoynes, who were still living near Carmansville. Her father-in-law, Hatchik (Christopher) Oscanyan, was a colorful New Yorker who had come to the United States from Constantinople for an education and then spent the next decades straddling the Ottoman court and New York society. While serving as the Ottoman consul in New York from 1868 to 1874, Oscanyan introduced Turkish culture and history to America through his books and lectures.20 Beginning in 1891, Frank Stone took his family to Washington Square for the winter, a process he would continue for several years while his daughters came out in society and attended a series of social events intended to introduce them to eligible young bachelors. Ironically, his daughter Elsie would marry Isabel Oscanyan’s son, Paul, who lived just up

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the hill from the Stones’s Audubon Park house. Even in winter, the Stones sometimes returned to their uptown home for occasions such as a Washington’s birthday luncheon Sally Stone gave in 1894 for the Daughters of the American Revolution. “Audubon Park is a long distance from the fashionable centre of town,” reported the Sun, “but the Stone home is famous for its hospitality, and besides the luncheon awaiting the guests at noon, music and addresses appropriate for the occasion are promised.”21 A week or so after the Stones moved downtown, George Blake Grinnell caught a cold at his farm in Connecticut. It developed into pneumonia after he returned to the park, and he died at the Hemlocks on December 19, the Saturday morning before Christmas, a month after his sixty-eighth birthday. All of the New York newspapers carried obituaries, as did several dailies across the country; he was a well-known businessman in his own right, but his death also proved newsworthy because his former business partner Levi P. Morton was now vice president of the United States. The number of years that had passed since George had “retired to his residence in Audubon Park, where he lived quietly” may account for several of the dailies mistakenly reporting that his son George Bird had died. On December 21, Winchester Donald read the burial service at Intercession, and then the family accompanied the coffin to Woodlawn Cemetery in Riverdale to bury George near his son Frank in the family plot.22 With George’s death, George Bird became titular head of the family, with all the duties and responsibilities attached. He and Morton were coexecutors of the estate with their mother, but she had health problems that left her bedridden for weeks at a time and unable to help. The elder George had left all his personal property to his wife and his extensive real estate holdings and securities to her and his five surviving children. George Bird and Morton received their portions outright, and George Bird was one of three trustees charged with investing the remainder for his mother, his brother William, and his sisters Helen and Laura. The other trustees were George Bird’s mother, Helen, who was unable to fulfill her duty because of her health, and his late uncle Thomas, who had died several years earlier from a self-inflicted bullet. That left the entire burden on his shoulders.23 As coexecutor, Morton helped his brother when he could, but was often not available, particularly in winter when he and Natalie traveled to warmer climates because of her health. Several months after his father died, Morton quit his job with the police department and moved to Milford, Connecticut, where Natalie’s parents lived, again citing her health. George consulted with him on matters related to his executorship but, as trustee, carried the entire burden of providing for the family’s needs, much as John

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Audubon had done after Victor’s death. Although George Bird was better equipped for the job, both in personality and business training, it proved no easier for him than it had for John. He soon found that this mother’s poor health also bound him to the Hemlocks. “I have not spent any nights away from home since Father died,” he wrote to his friend E. S. Dana a month after his father’s death, “and do not like to do so at present because I think Mother likes to have me within call.”24 George Grinnell’s obituary claimed that he had “never again entered business life” after settling his affairs in 1874, but that was not true. He had invested heavily in the Bosworth Machine Company, which made sewing machines for harness making, and George Bird soon became president in his place. “There are about 180 machines under lease and 12 more out on trial,” he wrote to one of the shareholders in April, 1892, “and I am not without hope that in the course of a year, the income will exceed the expenses of the business and the interest on the Company’s debt.” The shareholder must not have been satisfied with that answer because in a second letter George Bird wrote, “By becoming interested in this enterprise, my father was out of pocket more than $170,000 in principal and interest. I am trying to save for his estate and for the stockholders all the worth that there is in the business.” Fortunately, George Bird’s brothers-in-law William Page and Newell Martin provided business advice and legal services. Since their wives were beneficiaries of George Grinnell’s will, keeping the underlying business and investments healthy was in their best interests.25 George Bird was also responsible for managing the family’s property. His father had leased the Clapp house to Chicago grain speculator Nathaniel S. Jones, who had joined a Wall Street firm and needed a New York home for his family, and the Smythe house to Napoleon John Haines Jr., whose father and uncle operated the Haines Brothers Piano Company. While the Joneses were living in the park, their daughter Caroline married Benoit d’Azy, a French viscount, at St. Catherine of Genoa, a new Roman Catholic church on 152nd Street, barely five years old. Details in various newspapers made clear that she was not just another Dollar Princess, matched by social-climbing parents with a needy young noble. “Few American girls,” reported the Omaha Bee, “have become the bride of such a rich young man of old family and title.”26 George Bird continued both leases, but in 1894, when an agency inquired about the availability of park houses, he offered “one very large house with about twenty-eight lots of land, conservatory, grapery, superb view of the river, which I can rent at short notice for $2,500 a year to a desirable party,” likely describing the Smythe house that Haines was

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leasing. Haines remained, but a few years later, when he found himself in financial difficulties, George Bird was sympathetic, but firm. “No one appreciates, I think, better than myself, the hardness of the times and the difficulty of raising money,” he wrote, “but I, as trustee, must pay my bills, and I cannot do this without receiving income from those who owe it. I will wait until the end of the week without troubling you for this check, but if I do not receive it before Monday, I shall put the matter in Mr. [Newell] Martin’s hands.” Haines left the house that year.27 George Bird could be generous but was always practical. In late 1892, when a Mr. McLellan, who was living in one of the Queen Anne houses William built across the Boulevard from the park, asked permission to use George Bird’s corner lot as a playground, he agreed, providing McLellan would fence it and “keep the lots and the adjacent side walk and grass in good order.” He must also vacate on demand. “I have now no reason to suppose that I shall not be willing to continue it indefinitely,” George Bird wrote him, “but circumstances might arise which would make it necessary for me to use the property at once.”28 Potential circumstances did arise within a few months when the stock market crashed during the last days of Benjamin Harrison’s administration, though George Bird managed to see his family through the next few years without selling his Boulevard property. As with stock market crashes earlier in the century, multiple factors precipitated the Panic of 1893, including a decade of unsustainable growth built on rampant speculation in railroads, land, and commodities. An early sign of trouble came when the Reading Railroad, a major eastern line and one of the oldest in the country, went into receivership. European markets were already experiencing a contraction, and when fear spread to the United States, hundreds of banks and businesses dependent on the Reading Railroad failed, and the stock market plunged. Then, European investors, a major source of capital in the 1880s, pulled their funds from the United States. The ensuing depression lasted until 1897 and affected every part of the economy, particularly agriculture, which was highly dependent on railways. Thousands of businesses were ruined, and more than four million Americans were without work. The national unemployment rate remained above 10 percent between 1893 and 1897 and at times neared 20 percent. In January 1893, just as the effects of the Panic were becoming evident, the Knapp heirs sold twelve lots from their property—a plot long used to pasture their cow in the shade of an old chestnut tree—to August Cordes, the last transaction that would occur in the park until 1896. German-born Cordes was an architect with the firm De Lamos & Cordes, which designed

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such monumental buildings as the original Empire State Building, the Siegel- Cooper Dry Goods Store, and Macy’s department store in Herald Square, so he probably bought the land for his home or investment rather than with any ideas of building row houses or flat buildings on speculation. Whatever his purpose, the Panic suspended his plans, and the property lay fallow for the next four years.29 A few months after the Cordes purchase, long-time park resident Charles Kerner surprised New York when he ended his lease on the Clarendon Hotel after managing it for thirty years. “It was commonly supposed that he had a life tenure there,” wrote the Times. But Kerner’s profits had been falling for several years as new residential hotels sprang up in more fashionable districts farther uptown, so he retired and spent the next decade managing his real estate and breeding trotting horses.30 A few weeks after Kerner announced his retirement, more than three hundred people gathered at a small hillock inside Trinity Cemetery’s gates on 155th Street. Before them rose a twenty-six-foot-high monument draped in an American flag and, on an adjacent platform, sat a group of dignitaries and guests: Dr. Morgan Dix of Trinity Church, members of New York City’s scientific societies, and eight of Audubon’s ten surviving grandchildren. After appropriate speeches and expostulations, Eliza Audubon stepped forward and drew the flag aside to unveil a Celtic cross decorated with bas reliefs of birds and mammals. Eight years had passed since the New-York Academy of Sciences had begun raising funds for the monument. With little progress more than a year into the effort, George Bird had written Delia Audubon’s husband, Morris Tyler, asking if he might copy an etching of Audubon for a fundraising premium. Tyler must have agreed because the following January, the fund-raising committee offered “Turnure’s steel engraving of Cruikshank’s painting to anyone who gave one dollar or more.” During fundraising, the Trinity Corporation had given the Audubon heirs a new plot in the cemetery in exchange for their original vault by the river and, in December 1888, had moved the remains of nine Audubons and Anton Philip Heinrich to a new underground vault inside the 155th Street gates.31 The new location was not a random selection. The plan was to extend Audubon Avenue from its termination at 165th Street south to 155th Street so that Audubon’s monument would sit at the head of the avenue, facing his former home Minnie’s Land. An irony of the day’s celebration was that Audubon’s birth date inscribed on the monument’s base was May 6, 1780, the incorrect date Audubon cited most often for his birth. Not until Francis Hobart Herrick’s seminal biography of the naturalist appeared in 1917 was

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The Audubon Monument in Trinity Cemetery, Circa 2005 (Courtesy of Scott T. Robinson, Photographer)

the date firmly established as April 26, 1785, one hundred and eight years to the day before the monument dedication. Most likely, even members of the Audubon family were unaware of that coincidence.32 As had happened in 1873, the Panic in 1893 delayed public projects or halted them altogether, including the extension of Audubon Avenue. One project that did continue was a planned Harlem River Speedway stretching

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Unused Invitation to the Audubon Monument Dedication Ceremony, 1893 (Author’s collection)

along the island’s east side from Macomb’s Dam Bridge at 155th Street to Dyckman Street. The speedway would provide a venue where scores of wealthy men in the city could race their one-horse rigs. New York City’s “roadites” had been racing their trotters on Harlem Lane (later Seventh Avenue) north of 110th Street going back to the days when Shepherd Knapp and George Grinnell raced their rigs against Cornelius Vanderbilt’s. With increased growth on Seventh Avenue, the street was no longer safe or practical for racing; citizens complained, but the police were reluctant to give citations to men of wealth and power. The speedway was the solution. Mayor Thomas Francis Gilroy sold it as a public works project that would create thousands of jobs. As planned, it would include a twenty-foot-wide walkway on the western side and a fivefoot-wide walkway along the water’s edge. At Dyckman Street, the speedway would connect with the Western Boulevard (Broadway), Kingsbridge Road, Fort George Road, and others. Construction began on February 12, 1894, and the first thing jobseekers discovered was that machines would accomplish most of the work. The foreman only hired several dozen men. Although landowners along the route sought more compensation in court, work proceeded quickly, and the first section opened in November 1897. Roadites could race along the entire route to Dyckman Street by July 1898.33 William Page died in his office on William Street in the fall of 1893. He had been suffering from heart trouble since a severe case of flu in 1890 and had left home that morning despite his wife’s objections that he was “unfit

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Map of the Harlem Speedway Under Construction from Harper’s Weekly, May 1894 (Author’s collection)

to go to business.” The family buried him in the Grinnell plot in Woodlawn, and within a few months, Helen Grinnell Page moved her children and possessions into the Hemlocks, and George Bird advertised her unfurnished fifteen-room home for rent at $1,600 a year. William Page’s death was not only a shock to the family, it also robbed George Bird of a trusted adviser and helper in managing the family’s financial affairs. Now, as executor of his father’s estate and manager of Helen’s trust fund, he inherited responsibility for her and her children.34 Death haunted the park in the early 1890s. In September 1894, Isaac P. Martin died at his Fort Washington home, and the Grinnells’s neighbor Julia Jerome followed on November 29. A few days later, General Eliakim Parker Scammon, who had been living in the Clapp house with his daughter Mary Weir Jones since 1890, died of stomach cancer. A colonel in the Civil War, Scammon had commanded two future presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley, and for a while had been imprisoned in Richmond, Virginia’s infamous Libby Prison.35 The most significant death for Audubon Park’s future, however, came on August 23, 1894, when Helen Grinnell died at the age of sixty-eight. After a quiet funeral at the Hemlocks, her children laid her in the family plot at Woodlawn. In the three years between their father’s and mother’s deaths, the Grinnell siblings had forestalled any talk of selling property or leaving the park. Now, their mother’s death brought conflicting desires to light, just as Audubon’s had among his heirs when he died in 1851. For the remainder of the decade, George Bird would strive to keep harmony in the family while developing a strategy that would preserve the Hemlocks as long as possible—until after his death, if he had a say. When the time was ripe, he hoped the family would achieve the maximum profit from its sale. The journey would be strewn with pitfalls.36

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Exit Strategy

The Grinnell family’s problems—and disputes—following Helen’s death were uncannily like those that had bedeviled John and Victor Audubon four decades earlier, and all of them centered on their land. With the Grinnells dispersed among two houses in the park and letting three others, their property was not yielding enough income to pay maintenance, insurance, taxes, and mortgage interest—and the Beaverbrook Farm property multiplied the losses by two. “Undeveloped” lawn, gardens, stables, pasture, and a tennis court east of the Hemlocks befit the Grinnells’s social status but did nothing to improve their financial bottom line. And like the Audubons, the individual Grinnells differed in how to monetize their property or when to do it. Morton, Helen, and William all relied on income from their trust funds, which their elder brother George Bird managed. Lacking his deep attachment to Audubon Park, they seemed eager to sell it and live on the profits. Depressed land prices following the Panic of 1893 bought George Bird some time, but as the economy improved in 1897, the clock ran out. Fortunately, just at that moment, the city’s interest in two infrastructure projects—the extension of Riverside Drive and rapid transit— offered the exit plan he needed. The Record and Guide saw the promise of both and, in 1897, described northern Manhattan as “the land of future promise for the speculator and builder.” Exactly when that promise would fulfill itself was anyone’s guess; “Real estate developments have a habit of ripening suddenly and unexpectedly,” the Guide wrote, “and the city is growing so fast that it would be as

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equally rash to fix a distant date as to name a very near one for this fruition.” The only certainty was that north of 155th Street, demand for real estate rose and fell with prospects for rapid transit. That was the first part of the Grinnells’s exit strategy; ensure that rapid transit came up the Boulevard and a station sat near Audubon Park. The other part was ensuring that when Riverside Drive pushed northward along the river, adding “a long stretch to the high-class residence portion of the city,” they would benefit.1 Though 1897 would prove a pivotal year for the Grinnells, significant changes were already taking place around the park the year after Helen Grinnell’s death. At the beginning of 1895, the long-planned Boulevard Lafayette finally opened for traffic. The idea for a scenic drive along the Hudson dated back to Andrew Haswell Green’s 1865 vision for northern Manhattan, but nearly a decade passed before the state legislature mandated a roadway to Inwood Street in 1873 and nearly two more before the board of aldermen approved grading and opening it. Meanwhile, the winding drive appeared on maps under multiple names, including the Boulevard, Public Drive, Northern Boulevard, and French Boulevard. Although landowners along the route wanted the improvement for their property values, when the city calculated assessments in 1890, Isaac P. Martin, William Foster, and William Grinnell (real estate allies since forming the Athenaeum Society five years earlier) objected that the width made the assessments “altogether too high.” A forty-foot-wide roadway would suffice and be cheaper. They and their allies prevailed, and in January 1895, Scientific American reported that most of the work was complete. The drive should open by the following summer to a width of forty feet with sidewalks varying from ten to twenty feet wide, depending on how much schist protruded on the Boulevard’s eastern side. At Dyckman Street, pleasure seekers could travel north into the countryside beyond Yonkers or return south on the Western Boulevard, Fort Washington Avenue, or the Harlem Speedway.” Green’s promise of a roadway circling the top of the island was nearing fruition.2 Emphasizing that point a few months later, a Tribune reporter circumnavigated the top of the island in a “four-in-hand under the skilled direction of Lawson N. Fuller,” who styled himself as the “patriarch of Washington Heights.” George Bird Grinnell begged to disagree. “We who reside in the upper part of the Island know Mr. Fuller pretty well,” he wrote George Rice of the Rapid Transit Commission, rebutting sweeping statements Fuller had made on behalf of the Heights, “and understand that he represents no portion of the public there except himself. He is taken seriously by no one . . . you are at full L[iber]ty to quote me in this matter.”3

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Bird’s-Eye View of the Boulevard Lafayette from Scientific American, January 1900 (Author’s collection)

“Mr. Fuller knows the entire country,” wrote the awed Tribune reporter, “and he descanted on every object of interest as he drove along.” The first of those objects was a three-story, yellow-brick house at the corner of 158th Street and the Boulevard Lafayette. In 1894, coffee importer Arnold Schramm and his wife, Helen, had bought the 158th Street frontage between the Church of the Intercession and the Boulevard Lafayette and built a house facing south toward Audubon Park. Contrasting with the park’s Mansard-roofed villas spreading comfortably into gardens and lawns, the Schramms’s tall, narrow house huddled on the western corner of their property, with its three-story front tapering down to two stories and then one as it reached back to a two-story carriage house in the rear. A rounded bay on the left side partially balanced the double-height entry porch, stairs, and oriel on the right. From their flat balustraded roof, the Schramms could peer down at their neighbors in the park or gaze beyond them to the river vista and New Jersey shoreline.4 The Schramms’s house was the first of many buildings that appeared on 158th Street in the last years of the nineteenth century. At the end of May 1896, architect-builder-developer John P. Leo filed plans for eight “threestory and basement brick and stone dwellings” that he would build on Audubon Park’s northern border. Captain John Patrick Leo was a firstgeneration American, born to Irish immigrants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in April 1859. One of his earliest designs was the Twenty-Second Regiment Armory on the Boulevard at 67th Street (present-day Lincoln Center), which he completed while commissioned in the infantry. As a civilian, he chaired the organizational meeting of the Employers’ and Builders’ League of the Building Trades of the City of New-York in 1894 and served as its first president. Responding to accelerated development in Harlem and

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lower Washington Heights, the league’s goal was to”preserve, by conservative action, the interests of owners, contractors, and journeymen, and also by arbitration and discussion to remove all necessity for strikes, liens, lockouts, etc.” Throughout the 1890s, Leo bought lots in the West 130s and 140s (usually in his wife, Isabelle’s, name), then quickly designed, built, and sold rows of houses, leveraging his profits into more lots. Along the way, he moved Isabelle and their six children into one of his houses on 145th Street, and the family joined the Church of the Intercession.5 When Leo filed plans for the Audubon Park houses, he was still negotiating with August Cordes for part of the land he had bought from the Knapps three years earlier. At the beginning of June, they closed the deal, and Leo was ready to begin. Cordes kept an off-street parcel between the portion he sold the Leos and the Post house where Nathan and Agnes Miller lived, but it was too shallow to reach a future 157th Street, so he retained use of the Audubon’s old lane for access to 158th Street. He also signed covenants and restriction agreements with Leo that required the first structures on either owners’ land to be single- or double-family residences; other provisions prevented Leo from building within four feet of the lane, unless he wanted to design one oriel for the parlor floor. Leo must have rethought his design, because the next month, a new agreement allowed two oriels.6 Indicating that the neighborhood was yet to fully modernize, Leo also agreed to keep any outhouses or stables fourteen feet from Cordes’s property line. A few days later, Isabelle and the Grinnell estate agreed to restrict construction on their adjacent lots to single-family houses, at least three stories tall, and set back from 158th Street fourteen feet and eight inches. The Leo-Cordes covenants would run in perpetuity unless all affected parties agreed to revoke them, but the Grinnell’s covenant would expire on January 1, 1910, suggesting that George Bird, nearing fifty, was taking the fatalistic view that he would either be in the grave by then or living somewhere other than in the park.7 Signaling further changes afoot, in January 1897, developer William Topping filed plans for six five-story brick flat buildings on the eastern side of the Boulevard on 159th Street, some of the first purpose-built, multifamily dwellings in sight of the park. That same month, Leo completed his eight houses and began selling them. The first to go was the easternmost, Number 634. August and Martha Cordes bought it for $1.00 and “valuable considerations.” The main consideration was that the Cordeses would assume an $8,500 mortgage that the Germania Life Insurance Company held on the property. By the time Isabelle had sold all eight houses, each

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The John P. Leo Houses on 158th Street with the Shepard Knapp House at the Western End of the Street, circa 1897 (South Side of West 158th Street, Looking West to Riverside Drive West; from PR020 (Geographic File), box 37, folder: 150th to 159th Street, Library, New-York Historical Society)

with that same “valuable consideration,” Leo’s business partner, John G. R. Lilliendahl, had bought the Grinnells’s lots and commissioned Leo to build four more houses. They were ready in 1898, and Lilliendahl moved his family into one, number 630, and that summer, sold the other three just as developer Francis Schnugg began building six brick houses across the street. Accommodating the shallow lots between the Boulevard Lafayette and 158th Street, architect Louis Entzer placed the rounded fronts near the sidewalk line and a small garden behind each. The exception was the house on the southeastern end, which had a unique footprint to fit the irregular corner lot. Conscious that the rear façades would be “fronts” for the Lilliendahl and Leo houses, Entzer gave them more detail than row house backs usually displayed.8 The families moving into these eighteen houses attended the local churches, joined civic groups, rode public transportation, and lobbied for public improvements along with their long-established neighbors. The Leos and Shipmans (Number 636) rented pews at Intercession, and Reginald

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Pelham Bolton (Number 638) joined the Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association. Economically, these men were professionals with incomes of about $2,000 and enough savings to buy a house rather than rent an apartment farther downtown. Socially, they were a notch below the Jeromes and Grinnells, but certainly not publicity seekers like Patrick J. P. Tynan, the near-sighted, middle-aged Irishman renting Frank Stone’s house.9 In mid-September 1896, the French police arrested Tynan as the Fenian mastermind behind the 1882 Phoenix Park murders. Working with Scotland Yard, the police believed he and two accomplices were collaborating with “Russian Nihilists, to perpetrate dynamite outrages in Great Britain.” Their presumed target was none other than the Czar of Russia, who was visiting Queen Victoria. None of this was true, so after arresting Tynan and holding him in prison for more than a month, the shame-faced police released him. Far from being annoyed, Tynan relished the spotlight and used his newfound notoriety to republish The Irish National Invincibles and Their Times, a book outlining his mostly fictional exploits. In due course, he returned to the United States, and with $50,000 his brother had left him and incomes from his actor son and musical daughter, he lived another decade in the park.10 Leo’s brick houses on 158th Street—architecturally distinct from the park’s frame villas—marked a significant step in Audubon Park’s urbanization. Their inhabitants’ expectations also curtailed the Grinnells’s longstanding habits. Since George Bird rode the Amsterdam cable cars and El to his downtown office, he had released the coachman after his mother’s death (recommending him for a job as a “sweeper on the Washington Bridge”) and sent most of the horses to Beaverbrook Farm in Milford. He then leased the stable to Charles Shaw, a lawyer living on St. Nicholas Avenue, but asked him to arrange for frequent manure removal. “On one or two occasions the occupants of those houses have complained to the board of health,” he explained, “so that we are now obliged to be very careful”— much more so than when they had no neighbors near their stable.11 Until the mid-1890s, the Grinnells did not publicly lobby for local improvements. The elder George Grinnell had been an incorporator in Gilbert’s railroad scheme, and his son William was a founding director of the Athenaeum Society, but while Lawson Fuller and William Foster gladly pontificated to reporters about anything and everything in northern Manhattan, the Grinnells remained quietly in the background. Eighteen ninetyseven was the turning point. The catalysts were the two infrastructure developments they could hardly ignore: the Riverside Drive extension and rapid transit.

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Former First Lady Julia Grant and her sons had given Riverside Drive a boost when they agreed to place Grant’s monumental tomb near its western end overlooking the Manhattanville Valley and Hudson River. Pedestrians, equestrians, and cyclers already enjoyed the scenic drive along the river, and their numbers would increase as the monument encouraged new residential construction along the route. Increased use, however, highlighted Riverside Drive’s one defect. “The universal complaint,” wrote the Times, “is that the drive is too short, that it leads nowhere; but only turns on itself, leaving to horsemen and wheelmen no choice but to come as they went.” The answer was to extend Riverside Drive across the Manhattanville Valley and up the shoreline.12

Stereoscopic View of Riverside Drive and Grant’s Tomb, circa 1895 (Author’s collection)

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At the beginning of 1897—a propitious moment for the Grinnells, since their father’s former business partner Levi P. Morton was New York’s governor—the state legislature rejected a bill to extend Riverside Drive to the Boulevard Lafayette. Within weeks, William Grinnell, Newell Martin, and three other likeminded property owners incorporated the Riverside Drive Extension Association of New York City. The charter listed multiple improvements to the region between 122nd and 180th streets west of the Boulevard, but the association’s primary goal was extending Riverside Drive. Robert J. Hoguet, Francis M. Jencks, and Charles V. E. Gallup, the other incorporators, all owned property along the proposed route. The Grinnells’s problem was that they didn’t. If the extension followed the river, it would pass west of the old Audubon houses, which William Kramer, Frank Stone, and Julia Jerome’s son Eugene now owned. So the Grinnells’s task was not only ensuring that the legislature approved an extension, but that it also approved a route that crossed their property.13 The city’s newspapers vied with each other in praising the proposed extension. The Tribune predicted “constantly changing panoramas of beauty all the way,” while the Times was certain it would increase tax assessments because “it would embellish a part of the city in which the favors of nature must be enhanced by the art and skill of man before they can be fully enjoyed.” Although the railroad and a steep rocky hillside between 122nd Street and Trinity Cemetery rendered the land suitable “only for the poorer class of tenement houses,” proponents contended that when grades were established for numbered streets to the extension’s level, builders could develop better-quality housing. Boosters urged immediate action because of the approaching unification of New York City with the East Bronx, Brooklyn (Kings), western Queens County, and Staten Island (Richmond). “When consolidation has been effected,” wrote the Times, “and three million people look to the Government that will have its home in or near the New York City Hall for the execution of public works that will promote their comfort or convenience, there will be urgent demands from Kings, Queens, and Richmond in addition to the modest requirements of our own people in New York.” Trinity Corporation was another possible stumbling block—it had already ceded land in the cemetery for the Boulevard and was reluctant to give more—but it tentatively agreed that as long as graves were not disturbed, the vestry would not “throw needless obstacles in the way of the scheme.”14 On April 6, 1897, the state senate passed Chapter 665, Laws of 1897, a Riverside Drive extension bill. At the beginning of May, Governor Frank S. Black signed a bill creating the City of Greater New York to commence

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at midnight December 31 and, at the end of the month, signed “the extension of Riverside Drive to the Boulevard Lafayette” into law. Seven years later, with construction on the extension still ongoing, the Times explained how Chapter 665 came to pass. Although the date in the story was inaccurate—conflated with a later episode—the events were likely factual. On Christmas Eve 1897, as the Times told it, with Trinity opposing “a desecration of their [cemetery] ground,” members of the Riverside Drive Extension Association traveled to Albany. “Their advance on the State Capitol was very much in the nature of an invasion,” wrote the Times, “so grimly determined were they to leave the enemy only after he had acceded to their demands. . . . The bill was passed that day, the objection on the part of the Trinity Corporation being overcome by a compromise, which has since been criticized as entailing a tremendous increase in the cost of construction, while in time the cemetery could have been forced to give in entirely to the demands of the drive promoters.”15 The “tremendous increase in the cost of construction” was a cantilevered viaduct over the Hudson River New York Central Railroad tracks that assuaged Trinity’s reluctance to give up one hundred feet of the cemetery’s western edge. They would cede approximately a third of that amount, and the viaduct would carry the rest. It would also partially solve the topographical problem of the gap between 153rd and 162nd streets, high points that once marked the second and third lines of defense in the Battle of Harlem Heights. Precisely what transpired during negotiations at the state capitol in 1897—the spring, not the end of the year—is unclear, but the outcome was Chapter 665 mandating that Riverside Drive would maintain grade across a cantilevered viaduct as it passed Trinity Cemetery. At 155th Street, it would turn eastward and, following an S-shaped curve through Audubon Park, connect with the Boulevard Lafayette at 158th Street, not at 156th Street, to create a grand plaza where it originated and not at 162nd Street, where it would have connected if it had followed a straight route up the river. No sooner was the law published than observers began questioning that S-shaped curve. Noting that the path through Audubon Park was not the most direct route to the Boulevard Lafayette, the Record and Guide predicted, “That is hardly likely to be found on the final plans.” The Board of Street Opening and Improvement had noticed, too, and sensed mischief. Chapter 665 gave the commissioners six months to lay out the extension. When early November arrived and they had not adopted a plan, the Grinnells and their allies feared they would subvert the legislation by letting the clock run out, so they threatened legal action. The commissioners

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Cycling on Riverside Drive from Harper’s Weekly, 1890s (Author’s collection)

responded with a plan that would extend a viaduct from 122nd Street across the Manhattan Valley to 135th Street and then shuttle traffic to the Boulevard, where it could proceed north to the Boulevard Lafayette at 156th Street. The rest of the extension could wait “to a later time,” which the extension’s supporters interpreted as “never.” Property owners on side streets were just as upset as those along the route because, until the street commissioners established Riverside Drive’s grade, they couldn’t “sell lots or erect houses with any certainty that they [would] be in the right place.” At one heated meeting, Newell Martin became so overwrought he nearly got into a fistfight with a property owner, though both the Times and Tribune provided him anonymity by reporting the miscreant as “Martin Newall.”16 When the city’s corporation counsel decided that Chapter 665 was not mandatory but merely directive, the extension proponents sent their lawyer, John C. Shaw, to New York’s Supreme Court. In mid-December, the court ordered the street commissioners to lay out the extension as mandated, leaving Mayor Strong to complain that the project was nothing but a scheme “got up by men who wanted to increase the value of their property.” That was certainly true, but he also railed that if executed as planned, the extension of Riverside Drive would be “the most abominable thing the city ever went into, and . . . a lasting disgrace.” History proved him wrong

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on that count. Whatever the mayor’s feelings or pronouncements, the board of aldermen had no choice. On Christmas Eve 1897 (the date the Times erroneously attributed to the assault on the state capital), one week before the City of Greater New York came into being, the exiting commissioners approved the mandated extension, each registering his disapproval as he voted. The Grinnells and their allies had won a major campaign, but the war was far from over.17 The entire time the Grinnells had been battling to ensure their stake in Riverside Drive, they had been following progress on the proposed rapid transit system. New Yorkers had been talking about an underground railroad ever since the London system opened in 1863, but technology, topography, politics, and above all, competition from the city’s network of omnibuses, street railroads, elevated trains, and cable roads had quashed every effort before it gained traction. Momentum for public transit that not only moved large numbers of people but moved them quickly had been building throughout the 1880s, particularly in Washington Heights, where property owners had anticipated a population boom since the end of the Civil War. Stepwise advances in transportation—improved street surfaces, the elevated railroad, the Amsterdam cable line, and the 155th Street viaduct—had opened the area to waves of new residents, but as the last decade of the century approached, the “boom” had yet to occur.18 Although the Els shortened travel time to the lower end of the island, they were usually crowded and always late. After Jay Gould used “legal muscle, political bribery, and financial chicanery” to consolidate the Metropolitan and New York lines into the Manhattan Railway Company in 1881, service deteriorated. It didn’t improve after his death, when his son, George, and Russell Sage took over. If George Bird Grinnell’s experiences on the Amsterdam Avenue cable cars were any indication, customer service on street transit wasn’t much better. In April 1891, he complained to the superintendent of the line that on his daily travels on the cable cars, he frequently ran into “exceedingly careless and negligent” conductors. “We are commonly carried from ten to one hundred feet beyond the corner and set down in the middle of the block,” he wrote, “and as the streets up there are poorly paved, we are obliged to wade through the mud in bad weather, whereas, if we set down on the corner, we could walk on the cross walk.” The conductors, he thought, were “too sociable in their natures” and spent “much of their time gossiping with passengers who stand on the rear platform.” On the late-night cars, they slept. Service improved for a while, but nine months later, he complained again. “I regret to state that they [the conductors] have again fallen off. . . . And that it is now quite a common

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matter for them to decline to stop their cars on the crossings, and when a passenger remonstrates with them for their carelessness in carrying him by, they are sometimes impertinent and saucy.”19 In 1888, exiting mayor Abram S. Hewitt delivered a farewell address to the board of alderman that envisioned “high-speed, high-capacity transport” as a means of achieving New York City’s imperial destiny. He based his seven-point subway plan on the premise that rapid transit would open remote areas of the city, particularly the West Side, Harlem, Washington Heights, and the Annexed District, to housing for the city’s middle-class professionals. The alternative was losing a valuable part of the tax-paying population to Brooklyn and New Jersey. Less than six weeks later, the Great Blizzard of ’88 shut down all transit and brought the city to a halt, underscoring the need for mass transit that could run in any kind of weather.20 Three years to the day after Hewitt’s address, Governor David B. Hill signed the Rapid Transit Bill of 1891 into law, creating a new Board of Rapid Transit, popularly known as the Steinway Commission, after its first president, William Steinway of the piano manufacturing family. The Steinway Commission proposed electric-powered trains that would run under Broadway from South Ferry to 59th Street and then under the Boulevard past Audubon Park, through Washington Heights, and into Riverdale. A second line up Madison Avenue would cross into the Annexed District at the Central (Macomb’s Dam) Bridge. A four-track system with two tracks for local traffic and two servicing express traffic would shorten travel time from the northernmost parts of the city and open them to increased real estate development—northern Manhattan’s ever-expected, ever-elusive prize. The Steinway Commission’s plan relied on private financing, and when no serious bidders materialized, it appeared to have failed at its one job. Real estate investors and speculators, particularly those in Harlem and Washington Heights, pushed the commission to consider an elevated railroad as an alternative. When William Steinway wondered out loud what property owners along the Boulevard would think of the substitution, the Herald sent out a battalion of reporters to find out, knocking on doors between 108th and 170th streets. Nearly 19,000 people were in favor, 3,500 were against, and only 355 said “an underground or nothing.” Significantly, both Columbia College and the Trinity Corporation objected. The park’s property owners were unanimously in favor. “I would gladly consent to any form of rapid transit no matter whether it was elevated, surface or underground,” said Constance Oscanyan. Emma Kerner “wouldn’t oppose an elevated road,” and her husband, Charles, believed “it would materially increase the value

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of all property along the street,” though like many others, he would prefer that it ran in front of “some other fellow’s property.” Intercession’s vestry and John Dalley approved, as did Sarah Harris, who had “conferred with other property owners in Washington Heights” and found they agreed that at present people had no encouragement “to buy and settle in that part of the island, for they can reach homes in New Jersey and Long Island in much shorter time from down town.” William Wheelock, now nearing seventy, told the canvassers that property owners in the neighborhood were “bitterly disappointed that a road was not built in the Boulevard long ago. It is the most suitable, in fact, the only practicable route.” The Grinnells were not available for comment, but the canvasser noted that it was “understood that they [would] interpose no objection.”21 Even though an elevated railroad would not solve speed, crowding, or weather issues, the Steinway Commission began negotiating with the Manhattan Railway Company to build a new elevated line. Neither Gould nor Sage felt any particular compulsion to expand their operation, but negotiating with the Steinway Commission would stall further talk of a competing subway, so they began discussions in the spring of 1893. They had made little headway when that year’s panic threw the country into a depression that halted any immediate consideration of private financing for a rapid transit system. The Chamber of Commerce then finally awoke to the problem and, in 1894, pushed an act through the state legislature that created a new Rapid Transit Commission. The law also mandated a referendum so that the public, which would share in paying for the system, could have a voice in the decision. The city’s residents voted overwhelmingly in favor, 132,647 to 42,916.22 The new Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners (RTC) revised the Steinway plan and began the approval process. The mayor and board of aldermen gave their full support, but the majority of property owners along the route and the state courts did not. Owners on the lower end of the line, who were worried that an underground railroad would damage or devalue their property, outnumbered those at the upper end, who were positive that the lack of rapid transit would devalue theirs. The Supreme Court thought the $30 million price tag was ridiculously low and worried that inflated costs for the project would raise the city’s debt and damage its credit rating. Believing the underground railway was dead, the commissioners renewed negotiations with the Manhattan Railway Company, which so horrified the elderly William Steinway, he joined the RTC in developing a simpler route. This one would begin at City Hall, travel north to Grand Central Station, cross 42nd Street to Longacre (Times) Square, and then

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turn up Broadway and the Boulevard to 96th Street. There, one branch would travel north through Harlem and Washington Heights into Riverdale, and the other would continue along Lennox Avenue into the Bronx. The new plan didn’t service Wall Street or the Ladies Mile shopping area, but Steinway argued that later expansion would rectify the omission; the first order of business was establishing a subway. By the spring of 1898, the RTC had all the necessary approvals and was ready to proceed with bidding. A subway route under Broadway to the top of the island had been the backbone of rapid transit dreams even before the Steinway Commission’s 1891 proposal, but after the RTC delivered contracts to corporation counsel John Whalen—contracts that would not be valid without his signature—the citizens of Washington Heights began to fret. The RTC, with support from the new comptroller Bird Sim Coler, had announced a proposal for a tunnel to Brooklyn and its existing transit system. Fearing that the tunnel’s cost would shorten the Upper West Side route and rob Washington Heights of rapid transit, Whalen rejected any amendments to the scheme New York City’s voters had approved before consolidation. Although his reasoning rang true, Whalen was not a dispassionate observer. He had grown up near Carmansville, owned a house on 155th Street, and intended to develop adjacent property with a hotel. He was also fiercely loyal to his neighbors, who were up in arms, though not sufficiently to satisfy George Bird Grinnell. “I feel a little anxious lest the prospects for rapid transit, in which we are all so deeply interested, be jeopardized by the apparent apathy of the residents of the upper part of the Island,” he wrote to his Carmansville neighbor, publisher E. B. Treat, inquiring whether the Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association could take some action. “I am very much afraid that if this opportunity is allowed to pass, many more years may go by without Washington Heights gaining the relief that it has so long needed.”23 The taxpayers’ association did become involved and advocated for an immediate contract and for tunnel excavations to begin simultaneously uptown and downtown. So did the newly formed “Committee on Public Opinion and Rapid Transit Agitation.” On the evening of January 9, 1900, “residents of Washington Heights turned out in full force” at the YMCA headquarters (the old Athenaeum building) to hear John Whalen and Newell Martin reinforce those two points. The next day, more than a dozen speakers addressed the RTC about the urgency for uptown rapid transit; Newell represented the Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association, and 158th Street homeowner Walter Stabler spoke for the West End Association.

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Three days later, Newell headed a northern Manhattan delegation that called on Mayor Robert Anderson Van Wyck and urged him to “hasten the construction of the entire rapid transit system before anything is done looking toward the building of a tunnel to Brooklyn.”24 “The people of the whole northern part of the city are alarmed at the resolution relating to the South Brooklyn tunnel which Controller Coler has sent to the Rapid Transit Commission,” Newell Martin told the mayor. “The contract for the rapid transit system will likely be awarded on Tuesday, and if, after that, the question of an East River tunnel is taken up, the result will be that we will not get the relief which we need so much, and which we have been promised so often.” The mayor assured the delegation that Coler was not trying to deprive northern Manhattan of rapid transit, and Coler himself claimed that the misunderstanding arose because Whalen had maneuvered a political attack on him. Whalen wasn’t convinced by Coler’s righteous indignation or by his promises. So, the unsigned contracts sat on his desk for eighteen months, while he voiced concern about the city’s debt and complying with the labor law of 1899. Holding his signature as ransom, he refused to sign until the RTC agreed that subway construction would begin at the intersection of Broadway (the Boulevard’s new name as of February 1899) and 156th Street—Audubon Park’s front gate. Work would radiate north and south from that point simultaneously.25 At the end of September 1899, he finally signed the contracts. Construction would begin simultaneously at 156th Street and in lower Manhattan and would proceed north from both points. As a bonus, actual tunnel excavations would begin at a Washington Heights ground-breaking ceremony a few weeks after the ceremonial groundbreaking at City Hall. The only contracts he would execute before the Washington Heights ceremony went to Lawrence B. McCabe, a Baltimore contractor who would oversee subway construction north of 133rd Street. When a Tribune reporter asked the supervising contractor, John B. McDonald (who coincidentally was Whalen’s cousin), whether the delay in work downtown was because of a problem with bonding subcontractors, he didn’t bother to dissemble, but bluntly stated that “the construction company had purposely delayed the beginning of work on the lower sections in order that the first start might be upon the northern section of the route.”26

16

Partition Suit

Although the Grinnells were united in their fight for public improvements, their individual views about their property—whether they saw it primarily as a home or an unrealized investment—varied greatly. Like Victor Audubon decades earlier, George Bird bore the responsibility of interest payments, stock transfers, leasing properties, collecting rents, allocating dividends, and anything else that kept the family afloat. He and Newell Martin worked for a living, while Morton, Helen, and William spent money as if they were to the manor born. The harsh truth was that the Grinnells were no longer rich—if they ever had been. They had become what New York City commentator E. Idell Zeisloft described as the “Well-to-Do Uncomfortable,” prominent families who kept up appearances after their wealth shrank, but only with difficulty. Ironically, while George Bird cautioned his siblings about frugality, his club memberships, yearly travels, and the family’s staff of servants seemed out of scale with his income as owner and publisher of Forest and Stream. Helen never grasped even basic finance, so her elder brother spent decades remonstrating with her about her spending habits. Eventually dividing her time between a home in Tucson and winters with a childhood friend in France, she lived off dwindling capital and likely depended on her children’s financial support and her friends’ goodwill.1 Once Morton quit his medical job with the police department to care for Natalie, he never worked again. Barely fifteen months after she died in July 1895, the third Grinnell family death in as many years, he married San

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Francisco socialite Jennie Catherwood, nearly twenty years his junior. William traveled west to be his brother’s best man, but the staid George Bird stayed home and was no doubt glad the ceremony took place on the other side of the continent—and not just because of gossip about his brother’s quick rebound and child bride. First, Morton forgot to get a marriage license, and when he did, the military band performing for the ceremony returned to its barracks because the commanding officer and Morton’s soon-to-be mother-in-law had quarreled. Eventually, the band returned, the wedding took place, and the local newspapers sniggered at the proceedings. That winter, Morton and his bride sailed down the Nile and, in the spring, traveled to Paris. Back in California, they set up residence at the Hotel del Coronado across the bay from San Diego. There, Morton followed his literary muse and wrote An Eclipse of Memory—a roman a clef about a newly married couple sailing down the Nile that featured both of his wives. Periodically, he wrote his elder brother asking for money.2 In June 1898, George Bird suggested that Morton should get a job as a military surgeon in the Spanish-American War. “This is your trade,” he wrote, “a thing you are fitted for. Such a position after the war is over would help you immensely in stepping back into the ranks of the profession where you belong, and always have belonged, and which we all know you never should have left.” Dismissing any idea that Morton could earn a living as a writer—by then George Bird had published a half dozen books and knew the challenges—he firmly admonished his brother, “You have been a gentleman of elegant leisure now for a good many years, and it would be hard for you to turn to and work, but you have your health and a trade, and I don’t see how you can escape the responsibility of trying to earn a living.”3 Morton apparently did see how and was still at the Coronado the following February when George Bird loaned him another $200. “I am sorry to learn that you are broke,” he wrote and blocked any further pecuniary requests by explaining he only had ready cash because he had sold lots from their father’s estate to John Lilliendahl. Eventually, Morton and Jennie returned to the East Coast and split their time between a 67th Street townhouse and Beaverbrook, where Morton played gentleman farmer and sometime writer, still very much dependent on whatever he could wheedle out of his brother.4 William had no more interest in practicing architecture than Morton had in practicing medicine. His spurt of creativity in the 1880s represented the bulk of his output. (The Office for Metropolitan History’s exhaustive building permit database does not attribute a single building to him after 1900.) His sociability proved helpful to George Bird in agitating for the

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subway and the Riverside Drive extension, but he was restless to focus his intellect and artistic nature on travel, collecting art, and such pursuits as membership in the Huguenot Society, a few terms as vestryman at Intercession, and cofounding the Society of Mayflower Descendants. George Bird’s letters in the late 1890s make no reference to any disputes with William at the Hemlocks, where both lived, but he did drop a hint of dissatisfaction in the winter of 1898. Writing to Morton that he had rented the old Smythe house on a short-term lease and for less than he wanted, he explained that he had “deferred to Billy’s urgency,” a suggestion that William’s wants or needs might require liquidating some family assets. William would soon escalate his demands.5 The Smythe house tenants were the Sisters of the Academy of the Visitation, Villa de Sales, a cloistered order of nuns that observed strict separation from the world while running a female academy. Living secluded lives of contemplation must have been challenging in the park. How George Bird and the Sisters found each other is not clear, but perhaps the Jones family was the intermediary; Caroline’s sister-in-law was a nun at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Harlem. Another possibility was Stephen Farrelly, who leased the Clapp house when the Joneses moved in October 1896. Farrelly was a noted benefactor to Catholic causes, and Sister Mary Farrelly, a member of the convent, was probably a relation.

Audubon Park Viewed from the Northwest, with the Boulevard Lafayette in Foreground, Arnold Schramm House (Left), Francis Schnugg Row Houses (Center), Miller-Soulard Houses (Right), and the Hemlocks (Right Background), February 1899 (Courtesy of Scott T. Robinson)

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On March 23, 1899, Harold Bunker, managing clerk for the law firm of Charles Robinson Smith, served court summonses on all the members of the Grinnell family, save one. He found George Bird at the Broadway offices of Forest and Stream, Newell in his law offices on Nassau Street, Morton and Jennie at their leased brownstone on 67th Street, and Laura and Helen in Audubon Park. Bunker also served the two sisters with summonses for their children, from fifteen-year-old Laura Page down to sixyear-old Janet Martin. The adults no doubt expected Bunker’s arrival and already knew that William was suing the rest of the family to effect a partition of their father’s estate. If a partition couldn’t be made “without great prejudice to the owners”—that is, harming their financial interests—a court-appointed auctioneer would sell the land and divide the proceeds equally among the five of them.6 The partition suit only involved George Grinnell’s estate; the Hemlocks and its lots had belonged to Helen Grinnell, and both Laura and Helen Page owned their houses. The seven parcels in the suit were a mixed bag. Several still carried covenants against noxious businesses and tenement houses dating back to the Audubons; five carried mortgages: the Clapp house, the Smythe house, and the combined Parcels One, Two, and Three. Parcel One, the “Grinnell gardens,” lay on the northern side of 158th Street; Two was a small triangle on the eastern side of the Boulevard Lafayette; and Three—the “Grinnell pasturage,” which the Sun reported was “the most attractive plot to be sold”—included nearly thirty-two lots between 157th and 158th streets straddling the proposed Riverside Drive. Parcel Four was a strip of 156th Street running through the park, and Parcel Seven was a small gore in 157th Street that the city had somehow “forgotten” when it opened the street. Reminiscent of the Audubons’s cash flow problems, the Grinnells collected $4,000 a year in rents from the Clapp and Smythe houses, but owed $8,000 in interest payments; beyond that were upkeep, insurance, real estate taxes, and $3,363.84 in disputed assessments, plus interest, for the Riverside Drive extension through the Grinnell pasturage.7 Just as the partition suit came to court in early May, George Bird left town. Edward H. Harriman had organized an expedition to Alaska, and his invitation was the perfect excuse for him to be absent, though nothing about the proceedings really seemed acrimonious. Throughout the lawsuit and for more than a year afterward, William lived at the Hemlocks among his siblings. In principal, his lawyer, Louis Dean Speir, and his expert witnesses agreed with Newell Martin, who represented the rest of the Grinnells and Martin’s experts: dividing the parcels equitably among the five

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heirs was impossible, so the only solution was to sell them and split the proceeds. Newell Martin was his own star witness. He expostulated why the property should not be divided so fervently, the court-appointed referee Henry de Forest Baldwin might have been forgiven for thinking he had written the plaintiff’s complaint himself. All agreed that the worst scenario would be dividing the parcels into regular building lots. “When from time to time the talk and the planning about a rapid transit road under Broadway seem to show signs of coming to something more than talk,” Newell testified, “then in this neighborhood west of Broadway there is some inquiry for lots at retail measuring 20 or 25 feet each. But until such a railroad actually comes, a person owning any land which can be put to some use in its present condition is much better off by using it in that way [for a villa] than by cutting it up into lots.” Further, until the city built Riverside Drive, no one would know how to grade 156th and 157th streets. “If streets were made now,” Newell said, “they would have to be opened from Broadway downwards directly to the railroad at a ruinous grade, such as now exists in 155th and 158th Street. That would be butchering the whole property.” So not only would the Riverside Drive extension provide the Grinnells a prestigious address, it would repair defects in their property’s topography, at the city’s expense.8 In June, Judge Henry Beekman ordered Baldwin to auction the property. The Sun advertised the sale for July twenty-sixth, but as with the Audubon auctions, the date came and went, and nothing happened. Baldwin rescheduled once, and then again. Eugene Jerome was probably watching with interest because, down the hill from the Hemlocks, he had his mother’s house on the market. That summer, he sold it, while the Adams and Miller families traded the old Hall house again like a token in a real estate version of hot potato. Real estate speculators Michael and Daniel Mahoney bought the Jerome house and, like William Kramer, never lived there, nor did they visit often. Years later, George Bird wrote that he “never knew, or, indeed, saw, anybody belonging to either family.” That was to the Grinnells’s benefit, however, because absentee owners were far less likely to notice changes like Riverside Drive’s path in time to prevent them.9 In October, Richard Harnett finally auctioned George Grinnell’s estate, “from one of the handsomest book-maps ever published.” None of the newspaper coverage suggested that any Grinnell attended; they probably stayed away to avoid anxiety and reporters’ questions. The auction was quick and decisive. A newly formed real estate corporation, the Lansing Investment Company, bought all seven parcels at satisfactory, if not exceptionally high, prices. The company was a mystery, though. When a Times

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reporter asked its attorney Louis Dean Speir about the investors, he received a “no comment,” and for good reason. The Lansing Investment Company comprised all the Grinnell heirs, minus William. Morton was president, George Bird was vice president, and Speir, who had represented William in the partition suit, was secretary. William received his payout— just under $50,000—and the other four heirs still owned their father’s legacy. In December, the Lansing Company registered its deeds and assumed new mortgages totaling $100,000, the equivalent of two of the five auction payouts.10 Seven months later, before dawn on Monday morning, May fourteenth, workmen began assembling near Broadway and 156th Street. By ten o’clock nearly two hundred Irishmen, Italians, Australians, South Africans, and African Americans were sitting and lying along the roadway opposite Audubon Park, unskilled laborers and experienced miners, all seeking work building the subway. Shortly after sunrise, near Amsterdam Avenue, John Whalen awoke to loud hammering on the side of his house. Grabbing his old navy revolver, he rushed outside to find his neighbors decorating his front porch with flags and bunting. When they finished, they continued through the neighborhood until it “bloomed into waving color.” At the Hemlocks, George Bird’s staff prepared for an evening reception, and next door, Newell Martin and former police inspector Thomas McAvoy, cochairs of a “Committee of Arrangements,” reviewed plans for the day’s ceremony. Six weeks after an official subway groundbreaking ceremony in front of City Hall, Washington Heights was preparing for its own groundbreaking and the official start of subway excavations.11 As morning wore into an unseasonably hot afternoon, northern Manhattanites arrived from Fort George, Inwood, Marble Hill, Dyckman’s Meadows, and Spuyten Duyvil, their horse-drawn vehicles contrasting starkly with the electrical miracle they were coming to inaugurate. Just before four o’clock, the police boat Patrol arrived at the 155th Street pier, where the Hebrew Orphan Asylum band, a platoon of policemen, and several hundred people awaited Corporation Counsel Whalen and a boatload of dignitaries. A rapid-fire gun mounted in the Patrol’s bow fired a salute, and from Broadway, the Louis Wendel Battery responded with a salute of seventeen guns. While the band serenaded Whalen with “Hail to the Chief,” Mayor Van Wyck, subway financier August Belmont, and two columns of city commissioners marched—or as the Herald ungenerously reported, “toiled”— up the steep incline to Broadway. There, the band and seven hundred schoolchildren marched in formation and performed the “Star Spangled Banner.”12

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Newell Martin was the master of ceremonies and introduced a series of speakers, who praised rapid transit, Washington Heights, and a grand future. Whalen reminded the crowd of the years they had awaited rapid transit and thanked the RTC for honoring Washington Heights by “beginning the actual work of tunnel construction in their neighborhood.” Last to speak was James J. Coogan, now Manhattan’s borough president, who congratulated the city’s Democratic administration and Tammany Hall for rapid transit and reminded the crowd that except for “the untiring efforts of our Corporation Counsel, who would not sign the contract unless the work for this section was placed therein, we would not to-day be witnesses to the greatest boom Washington Heights has yet received.”13 As the crowd cheered and the band played “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the dignitaries climbed down from the grandstand and assembled in the middle of Broadway. There, Lawrence B. McCabe, chief contractor for this section of the tunnel, handed Whalen a pick, and he struck the first blow for rapid transit with a vigor that caused “perspiration at every pore.” Whalen dug a hole about three inches deep, filling a Tiffany silver loving cup that a group of grateful neighbors had presented him a few nights earlier, and then a dozen workmen began digging a trench across Broadway to the width of the tunnel. Once Whalen and the dignitaries returned to the grandstand, the cordon of police stepped aside, and souvenir hunters rushed forward to gather pebbles, stones, and even dirt as soon as the workmen unearthed it. The ceremony concluded, the crowd dispersed, and a hundred guests walked down the hill for a reception at the Hemlocks.14 That evening, somewhat upstaged by the day’s events, the Washington Heights Free Circulating Library opened its new headquarters on 156th Street at Amsterdam Avenue. Begun in 1868 with two hundred books, the library now owned 17,000 volumes. J. Hood Wright and his sister, Miss E. J. Wright, had given seed money that encouraged community subscribers to fund the new building.15 The next morning, while New Yorkers read accounts of the preceding afternoon’s festivities in the daily papers, contractor McCabe walked to the shallow trench at 156th Street, where thirty of the men continued excavations begun the previous afternoon. South of 157th Street, they would use cut-and-cover construction, the safer, cheaper method; they would dig a trench, construct the tunnel’s floor, walls, and ceiling, recover it, and rebuild the street. Beginning at 158th Street, next to the Church of the Intercession, cut-and-cover gave way to blasting and tunneling, necessary so the tracks could maintain a steady grade as the elevation rose and the tunnel ran deeper underground. Far more dangerous because of explosions

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Subway Excavations on the Boulevard at 157th Street with the Church of the Intercession at Left, June 1900 (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

and collapses, it was the only way to burrow through Manhattan schist. Audubon Park’s bucolic calm ended that year. Blasting shook houses, rattled windows, and disrupted household routines by day, and the miners who had descended on the neighborhood turned it into a saloon district by night. Around the clock, dust invaded every corner and crevice. A month after the groundbreaking, Charles Englehardt worked his way around Broadway’s deepening pit to count the local population for the 1900 Federal Census. Even before the subway’s opening disrupted old ways of life, the park was witnessing significant changes. The number of houses in its footprint had jumped by the twelve that Leo and Lilliendahl built on 158th Street in anticipation of rapid transit, but they only accounted for a portion of the population jump from 139 in 1880 to 220 in 1900. Mother Superior Mary Dillon and the twenty-nine Visitation Sisters living in the Smythe house, absentee owners dividing their houses into “floors,” and property owners converting unused stables to rental homes—all these increased the park’s population density. In the Leo-Lilliendahl row, nine owners lived in their houses, but in the old Audubon Park, only George

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Subway Excavations on the Boulevard at 157th Street with the Church of the Intercession at Left, October 1900 (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

Bird Grinnell owned the house he occupied. Even Newell Martin was renting. In a time-honored New York tradition, he had let his house to Adin Wright and leased the Kerner house for his family, pocketing the difference. Wright managed New York City’s branch of the Everett Piano Company, and that census year brought the young Russian pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch to the United States for a promotional tour of the company’s instruments.16 Patrick Tynan and his wife, Sadie, were still living in Frank Stone’s house with their eight children, son-in-law, Sadie’s mother, and two female boarders. On one side of them, broker Kenneth Fleming, a relative of the Stones, was leasing the old Audubon homestead, and on the other, subway contractor Lawrence McCabe and his wife, Mary, were in the old Jerome house with their six children. Most of the homeowners on 158th Street kept one, sometimes two servants, but in the park’s villas, a full staff was rare, and many of the families had no servants at all. George Bird retained two cooks and three female servants; the Farrellys kept four female servants;

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and the Martins retained four house maids, a coachman, and John Theodore Lutz’s son, John, as their gardener. He and the coachman both paid rent for their quarters. Although the park was changing quickly, its housing formats were decades behind the rest of the city. At a time when thousands of city households were moving into apartments, Audubon Park had just recently earned its first-row houses, and dividing houses into floors was only now “catching on.”17 A few months after Englehardt completed the census, Newell’s seventythree-year-old father, William Martin, a Presbyterian missionary to China since before his son was born, arrived in the park, a refugee from the Boxer Rebellion. A few months later, Eliza Audubon broke up housekeeping after running her school at 152nd Street for two decades, and with her younger sister Annie, took a flat at the recently opened Stella Apartments near the corner of Broadway and 155th Street. With their grandfather’s monument in one direction and their former home in Audubon Park in the other, they were once again on ground their family had once owned; the building sat on the lot where Lucy Audubon’s spring once flowed down the hill into Minnie’s Land.18 The most astonishing event that summer was fifty-three-year- old George Bird Grinnell’s marriage to Elizabeth Williams, a widow half his age. After their August wedding, she moved into the Hemlocks, which by then was a shrine to Native American culture. “Its dusky, wide, mysterious rooms are such as a child would remember with shuddering delight,” George Bird’s friend Hamlin Garland wrote in his diary the previous year. “Savage weapons are on the walls, wolf and bear skins on the floor, and in the corner bookshelves stand volumes filled with pictures of red men and animals.”19 Although the house had always accommodated a large family and staff, by the time Elizabeth arrived, Helen and her children were spending most of their time at Beaverbrook, and William was gone. Sometime between June 1900, when Englehardt counted him among the Hemlocks’s inhabitants, and the following May, when he listed his address as 36th Street, William had taken his possessions and left the Hemlocks, never to return. Why he left isn’t clear, but his parting was likely unpleasant. George Bird never mentioned William by name again, despite years of voluminous correspondence about every aspect of Grinnell family life, with frequent mentions of far-flung friends and relatives. His sole reference was a curt response to his nephew Donald Page after William died of blood poisoning in June 1920; “I had not thought it necessary to write you about the death of my brother.”20

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“Real estate agents’ signs abound on property near where the station will be,” wrote the Times in 1901, reporting on the subway’s progress at Broadway and 156th Street. Masonry work was complete where excavations had begun a year earlier, and workmen were progressing south toward the cemetery. No matter; George Bird wasn’t ready to sell. He told real estate agents Isaac Kuhn and Romaine Brown that he would consider offers and then refused $40,000 for a parcel because he didn’t “feel inclined to sell it for anywhere near the price mentioned.” Arnold Schramm thought otherwise and had already sold his yellow-brick house only eight years after moving into it. In fact, George Bird was resigned to never getting full value for the park. “My father has owned property in the upper part of the island, which has now come down to his children, for considerably over forty years,” he wrote to a friend in Oklahoma, “and I have not the slightest doubt that if the money he put into it had been invested at simple interest for those forty years, it would have amounted now to more than the real estate will bring.”21 The summer of 1903, Stephen Farrelly’s family left the Clapp house, and the Sisters of the Visitation prepared to leave the Smythe house as soon as their new convent was ready in Riverdale. George Bird saw little chance of renting either property while roadwork was underway through the park, so the rents on those houses, inadequate as they were, plummeted to nothing. Brokers were eager to buy, but he only promised them “careful consideration” and then carped at their low offers. “Lots much inferior to this, lying on 155th St., fronting on Trinity Cemetery between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave., recently sold for $11,000 each,” he wrote to Carmansville real estate agents DuBois and Taylor. “With this information you will probably be able to advise me whether your client cares to buy, and if so, about the figure he thinks of offering, and about how much he thinks of spending on his building.”22 Riverside Drive opened as far as 135th Street in the spring of 1903, and plans were underway for the last section, which would extend through Audubon Park. Then, borough president Jacob A. Cantor balked. The price of the viaduct around Trinity Cemetery and a retaining wall to support the Drive through the park gave him pause. As an alternative, he ordered city engineers to devise plans for turning the Drive up the steep hill at 152nd Street, possibly cutting across the cemetery rather than around it, and then following Broadway a few blocks to reach the Boulevard Lafayette at 156th Street. He seemed oblivious to the irony of running a pleasure drive along a city street, blocked from the river views that gave it its name.23

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Irked that the city had already condemned and assessed their land but hadn’t paid a penny of the $2,234,000 it owed the property owners all along the route, the indefatigable Grinnells went to court again. “This public improvement was ordered in 1897 by an act of the Legislature,” argued their lawyer W. B. Hopping, “which act specified in detail the exact course to be followed by the drive extension.” Once again, the court ruled in the Grinnells’s favor. In mid-December, absent other options, President Cantor broke ground for the final leg of the extension. “The lines of the driveway do not exactly accord with my views,” he conceded, “but the statute authorizing its construction was mandatory in terms, and no discretion was allowed me in determining the route.”24 Any sighs of relief were premature.

12

Panic

The Viennese Stock Exchange had thrown Europe into a depression when it crashed in May 1873, and America had been experiencing warning signs: Black Friday 1869, when James Fisk and Jay Gould failed in their attempt to corner the gold market; property loss in the 1871 Great Chicago Fire; an outbreak of equine influenza that brought America to a standstill in 1872; and the demonetization of silver. Most damning for the American economy, though, was speculation in the symbiotic twins, railroads and railroad securities. At the forefront were Cornelius Vanderbilt, his son-inlaw Horace Clark, and their broker George Grinnell. T. J. Stiles, in The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, makes a strong case that Clark often acted without his father-in-law’s knowledge and that Vanderbilt was not only innocent of any suspect dealings but also outraged when he discovered the extent of Clark’s speculation. By then, however, Clark was safely out of his reach; he had dropped dead of a heart attack in June 1873. Lacking his cash support, the Grinnells were left high and dry the following September, when the market crashed. During the two days following Jay Cooke’s collapse, twenty-three companies suspended operations, and panicked citizens began running banks. Late Saturday afternoon, the New York Stock Exchange’s governing committee suspended all trading for ten days, hoping the market would stabilize when trading commenced again. Each of those ten days, the daily papers carried long lists of failed companies. Conspicuously absent was “Vanderbilt’s broker” George

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Bird Grinnell & Company, even though it traded almost exclusively in railroad stocks.1 Four days after the stock market’s colossal failure and amidst great uncertainty in the city, nearly a thousand people gathered on the park’s northeastern corner to dedicate Intercession’s new edifice. The Reverend Stephen H. Tyng of St. George’s Church preached the dedicatory sermon, and Postlethwaite assisted in the service. As vestrymen and parish leaders, George Grinnell and Isaac Martin were certainly sitting in their prominent

The Church of the Intercession, Postcard View circa 1905 (Author’s collection)

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husband’s helpmate and, in her later years, a benefactress to those in need. He undoubtedly raised a few eyebrows when he described her lack of “that petty pride which sometimes stains a great name.” Stoddard must have been pleased with his sermon. The published excerpts from it the next week, and he published it in its entirety in the , a religious weekly newspaper that his father-in-law, the Reverend Doctor Samuel Irenaeus Prime, owned. Prime had employed Stoddard as a member of his editorial staff in 1859 and promoted him to associate editor in 1869. When Stoddard became proprietor in 1873, he tendered his resignation to the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church, but the congregation asked him to remain, with reduced duties and salary. Twenty years later, he was still capitalizing on his acquaintance with Lucy Audubon. His tenacity and inventive prose made him a major voice in giving her a mythology that rivaled her husband’s.10 Postlethwaite returned to his congregation in the fall, but not for long. In December, he left Intercession, citing theological differences, but as the soon reported, the real cause was “the financial embarrassment of the church.” Postlethwaite’s letter to the vestry, read into the minutes, is even clearer. “Under no circumstances will I, or can I consent to be a party for the continuance of church services in a parish when there is no provision made for debts constantly contracting. . . . My own salary has scarcely been paid when it was due, since I entered this parish and it all being needed for my expenses the constant embarrassment which comes from monthly bills to pay, when no monthly salary is received, is such that none of you could ask me to put up with.” Completely frustrated with the church’s affairs, William Harrison, a member the Carmansville faction, resigned from the vestry. Others would follow. (Postlethwaite’s concept of his importance at Intercession would evolve. In 1881, when he accepted the position of chaplain and professor of history and ethics at West Point, a article reported that he had accepted the call to Intercession “when the parish erected a magnificent large stone church for him.”)11 The vestry minutes do not clarify why George Grinnell’s debt took precedence over others, but the vestrymen clearly went out of their way to reimburse and assuage him. They signed their notes over to him, promised him any compensation the church might receive for the opening and widening of Eleventh Avenue, and forgave his $10,000 subscription “on account of the indebtedness of the church to him.” But by the end of 1874, George was no longer attending church or vestry meetings. Still smarting from the bankruptcy proceedings, he leased the Hemlocks to William Van Voorhis and his wife, Carrie (Jesse Benedict’s daughter), and moved his family to

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through scarlet fever and his adventurous childhood only to have her “laughter loving” child die from a freak accident before a game he was not even intended to play. If George’s despondency after his 1861 bankruptcy was any indication, one of the reasons he moved his family to the Milford farm was a return of his melancholia. Now, his second son, “a thoroughly good fellow and much liked in his class,” a young man who might have demonstrated the interest in business his elder brother had lacked, was dead. George Bird was traveling in the West and wouldn’t learn of his brother’s death until his old Churchill roommate, Paul Ferguson, met him in St. Paul and broke the news. He immediately left for home and joined his family in Milford. In the new year, George Bird returned to his studies in New Haven, Morton went to New York to clerk for Joseph Williams, and the remainder of the family traveled to California for a change of scenery.15 While they were there, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed George’s brother William as United States consul at Etienne, France, the beginning of a diplomatic career that would eventually keep him and his family in Europe. That was a good reason for the Grinnells to take their daughters, now of marriageable age, on the grand tour, so in the spring George applied for their passports. A few months later, Morton obtained his passport and escorted his mother and sisters in his father’s place. Perhaps George remained behind to settle his dispute with Intercession. In April 1877, he filed another suit against the church and refused the vestry’s request to delay legal proceedings. Isaac Martin, still George’s lawyer as well as a member of the vestry, suggested that they give him a seven-year mortgage on the church’s lands and building” with interest at “7% semi-annually.” In exchange, George wouldn’t foreclose or collect interest for three years. The vestry consented but still had to come to an agreement with the Haggerty estate so they could continue holding services in the church.16 The Presbyterians were faring far better. By 1876, they had secured the church’s debt, and the Sunday School had “nineteen classes, embracing more than two hundred scholars, a library of over one thousand volumes, and all the appointments of a first-class Sabbath-school.” Officers of the Deaf and Dumb Institution, the Juvenile Asylum, and the Colored Orphan Asylum had all been members, and “some of the deaf-mutes [had] been received as members of the church, and the children of the Asylums often [formed] a portion of the congregation.” Reaching into the community, the Presbyterians also sponsored a Wednesday evening lecture series.17 When the Grinnells returned to the Hemlocks in the spring of 1879, they found that much had changed in their absence. Wellington and Cornelia Clapp’s daughter Nellie, Georgie’s playmate on his first visit to the park

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Louise Fraker, into the Smythe house, which he leased from George Grinnell after the William Grinnells moved to France.20 The built landscape had also evolved while the Grinnells were away from the park. Along 155th Street, a handsome stone and iron fence surrounded Trinity Cemetery and complemented the Gothic bridge. From the park’s front gate, a graded and macadamized Boulevard stretched northward past Intercession and southerly to a grand circle at 59th Street, where it connected with Broadway. The biggest change was Georgianna’s house, remodeled and enlarged for Charles Francis (Frank) Stone, including an attic studio for his sister Mary Louisa Stone, an illustrator for children’s books. For the first time, no Audubons lived in Audubon Park.21 Edward Talman’s executor, his son, George, a stockbroker who lived on 37th Street, had never shown the close attachment to the park his parents did. With no claim to the house, Georgianna began looking for a new home within a month after Edward’s death. The best option was a large house at the corner of 152nd Street and the Boulevard that belonged to Richard Carman’s grandson Richard Carman Sage, an expatriate living in London. His lawyer, Jacob Lockman, had hired realtor J. Romaine Browne to manage the house. It sat in a large yard one block south of the cemetery, so

Detail of Fence Surrounding Trinity Cemetery, 1908 (Author’s collection)

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opened service to 155th Street. Work on Gilbert’s railroad had stalled in the immediate aftermath of the panic but gained momentum after the state legislature passed the 1875 Husted Act, also known as the Rapid Transit Act, which allowed county supervisors and city mayors to appoint commissioners to determine the most effective routes and mode of mass transportation. In the spring of 1876, with a New York City Board of Rapid Transit Commissioners in place, construction began on elevated tracks at Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street. Gilbert had realized that his idea for pneumatic propulsion wouldn’t work over the length of many blocks and had turned to steam-powered engines.23 The Record and Guide predicted that extending the elevated road north of 59th Street “into the heart of the section distinctively termed the West Side, [would] afford facilities of access such as this quarter of the city has never before known.” Despite that, the periodical was dismissive about development on the Boulevard.24 This magnificent monument of the era of fraud seems likely to become a standing menace and refute to corrupt officials and daring speculators, besides an expensive plague and constant distraction to property owners. The dreams and expectations of its originators have, so far, utterly failed of any adequate realization: and, as if to dispel them entirely, the first substantial improvements of the Boulevard consist of stores and common tenements [flat buildings], which have been erected within the past year at the corner of Sixtyseventh street. . . . Doubtless, imposing specimens of the apartment system will be here projected; but, in every case, we venture to assert, the first floor will be ultimately appropriated for business purposes.25 In 1878, real estate at the northern end of the Boulevard was still suffering the panic’s effects. That summer, Richard Carman’s heirs put the Riverside Hotel at 152nd Street on the market—“a handsome and wellappointed brick building, containing one hundred and twenty-five rooms and every accessory of a first-class hotel, with the Hudson River Railroad station in front.” Five years earlier, they had valued it at $85,000. Now, the highest bid was $22,000. “These prices establish ruinous rates for those who bought during flush times,” the Times wrote. It then predicted that many years would pass “before the acres and acres of building lots which fill up the space between Fifty-ninth and One Hundred and Fiftieth streets, Eight Avenue and North River are taken up and built on, and till this area is covered with bricks and mortar we can hardly look for rows of

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A few days after the celebration, Audubon Park’s death throes continued when real estate broker–developer Adolph Lewisohn, “the Jewish Gatsby,” filed plans for a two-story brick-and-stone office building on the northwestern corner of Broadway and 157th Street, one block south of the Church of the Intercession and in direct view of the three Grinnell houses. The building would replace the discreet structure the McCabe brothers had used as their headquarters during subway construction. Designed by architect Franklin M. Small and civil engineer Charles H. Schumann, the complex would include offices and stores and would embody the least savory characteristics of the New York “taxpayer”: squat, utilitarian, and short on visual interest. The Knights of Columbus took a five-year lease on the upper floor, naming it Corrigan Hall. For the next few decades they and the Washington Heights Taxpayers Association would meet there regularly.1 Lewisohn’s taxpayers changed the landscape figuratively as well as visually. For decades, covenants, tacit agreement among property owners, and tradition had kept commerce at bay—over on Amsterdam Avenue in Carmansville, a safe distance from the residential park. Although a place of business, the McCabes’s office was architecturally similar to the nearby houses and blended into the existing landscape; neither it nor the utilitarian shed the Grinnells leased to the Rapid Transit Commission as temporary storage were “trade.” Now, Lewisohn’s shops had brought commerce into the park.

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Before the Grinnells could consider a legal maneuver to hinder him, he sued them, claiming that their storage shed and chain-link fence blocked his building’s light, air, and access. Newell Martin’s law firm sent Edward Whitney into the courtroom to plead the Grinnells’s case. And he lost. Undaunted, the Grinnells pressed onward and spent the next two years pursuing their case upward through the judicial system until Judge J. Davis determined that, while the shed undoubtedly obstructed Lewisohn’s light, air, and access, he had no legal claim to an easement, so it could stay. A few months later, the Grinnells ended the dispute by selling Lewisohn the land, the shed, and the fence, along with a larger triangle at the northwestern end of the same block—Parcel Two from the partition suit—possibly their objective all along. With that purchase, Lewisohn owned the entire triangle that the Boulevard Lafayette had severed from Audubon Park a decade earlier. The Record and Guide reported that he would “improve the entire plot with a large apartment house,” but he didn’t. Instead, he built additional taxpayers, filling the block with a “temporary” commercial strip that remains, with few structural changes, more than a century later.2 In July, even greater disruption loomed on 158th Street when architect Joseph Cocker filed plans for two five-story, twenty-seven-family flat buildings that builders Kuhn and Lawson would erect adjacent to the Church of the Intercession’s western wall. “The Lafayette” would face Audubon Park, and the “Fort Washington” would front on Fort Washington Road (now Fort Washington Avenue). Cocker registered the two Renaissance-style buildings as “tenements,” but as Elizabeth Collins Cromley writes in Alone Together, a history of New York’s apartment houses, nomenclature for multifamily dwellings in the second half of the nineteenth century was vague and, despite the Department of Buildings’ attempts to create categories accurately describing the structures it permitted, not standardized. Classifications grew no clearer after the Tenement House Act of 1901 (New Law), which repealed 1885 restrictions on residential building heights. “Flat,” “apartment,” and “tenement” all appear in the Office for Metropolitan History’s building-permit database, but those terms have no particular distinguishing features relating to building location, size, number of units, or construction materials.3 Although the term “French flat” had fallen out of use before the turn of the century—and does not appear in the database—the format remained viable, particularly in neighborhoods like lower Washington Heights, where a transition from single-family houses to multifamily dwellings was underway. With understated façades, minimal public spaces, and simple apartment layouts, Cocker’s twin walk-ups bore distinctive features of the

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French-flat form and represented the kind of building that was already dominating northern Manhattan’s numbered streets. Even before Kuhn and Loeb began building, rows of flat buildings had lined both sides of 159th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, leaving the lots fronting the two avenues free for the wider and taller buildings the New Law permitted. Spurred on by Cocker’s plans, Intercession’s vestrymen pondered an apartment building for their vacant land. A select committee working with John Leo proposed a five-story, fifteen-unit apartment house on Fort Washington Avenue adjacent to the church’s parish house and in a similar architectural style. The committee calculated that the building would cost less than $40,000, and they could lease the apartments for about $6,000 yearly. In seven years, the building would have paid for itself, and the church would have a steady income, though not nearly enough to offset its mounting debt. Before the vestry could act on the committee’s proposal, it needed permission from the diocese’s standing committee to mortgage the vacant land, a necessary step if they were to pay for the new building. The standing committee denied permission. Undoubtedly, it saw the scheme’s weakness, but it had a more delicate decision at hand: Trinity Church’s renewed desire to establish a chapel inside the grounds of Trinity Cemetery, which was part of Intercession’s parish territory. If Intercession’s finances collapsed and it closed its doors, the diocese could grant Trinity permission to build the church it had planned in the 1840s when it first opened the cemetery. Ironically, by the time the committee refused permission, a fault in the foundation of Cocker’s buildings endangered Intercession’s western wall. Deprived of its own apartment building, the congregation had to contend with damage from the two tenements that would soon block light and air from its western windows.4 The Lafayette blended unobtrusively between Arnold Schramm’s yellow-brick mansion and Intercession’s red-brick church, barely disrupting the streetscape. John Dalley’s Mansard roof and wrap-around porches across the street had far more visual interest, even though inside, the house was now divided into floors and let to three families. A narrow moat separated the Lafayette’s façade from the sidewalk and allowed light to penetrate sub-grade windows. Ionic columns supporting a molded cornice and architrave decorated the stooped entrance a few steps above street level. Aimed at the lower end of the Comfortable classes, the five or six apartments on each floor ranged from three to six rooms with a bath. But what set the Lafayette apart from its neighbors was not its proportions, apartment sizes, or ornamentation. Rather its distinction was a population

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density greater than any Audubon Park had witnessed since Minnie’s Land emerged from a wooded hillside six decades earlier. Although the Lafayette’s footprint was approximately the size of an Audubon Park villa, its twenty-seven families were more than double the number that had lived in the park at any one time, until the last few years.5 As an architectural form, the Lafayette and Fort Washington looked back to the nineteenth century and targeted an established client base. Before they were complete, a building rising on the eastern side of Broadway—facing Audubon Park’s entrance—would point forward to the mature Beaux-Arts apartment house, testing whether luxury on a modest scale would entice middle-class tenants to move north of 155th Street. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the top of Zeisloft’s social pyramid had filled luxury apartment buildings and residential hotels such as the Navarro, Osborne, Dakota, and Ansonia, while the middle of the pyramid followed suit and flocked to the simpler French flats. What developers in northern Manhattan didn’t yet know was how much “luxury” they must offer to entice Zeisloft’s burgeoning middle strata uptown. The question was no longer whether the Comfortable classes preferred old-fashioned vertical row-house living to an apartment’s horizontal format. Convenience had answered that question, even if divisions between social, sleeping, and service spaces were more porous in apartments. For developers, economics was the key. The lots that generated sales from five of John and Isabelle Leo’s twenty-foot-wide houses could accommodate an apartment building holding twenty-five to thirty families in five six-to-eight-room apartments per floor producing rents of $840 to $1,080 per family, per year. So that’s what architects Schwartz, Gross, & Marcus designed for Henry Bulman: a brick-and-stone tenement named the Audubon Park Apartments, announced in a bold “APA” on the cartouche above the entrance. Simon I. Schwartz and Arthur Gross had met while they were studying at the Hebrew Technical Institute. They had only been in business together two years when they began Bulman’s project, but they already had a dozen apartment buildings under their belts, most in collaboration with Bertram M. Marcus. In the next four decades, Schwartz & Gross (minus Marcus) would design scores of apartment buildings, the majority in Harlem and Washington Heights. Drawing inspiration from upscale apartment houses farther south on the island, they adapted designs and amenities to fit the budgets of northern Manhattan’s speculative builders, scaling rooms and layouts to maximize space, light, and ventilation, but always with an eye toward packing as many tenants into a building’s footprint as possible.6

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Exceeding the Record and Guide’s initial estimate of $175,000, the Audubon Park carried a $200,000 price tag and cost more than twice as much as the Lafayette and Fort Washington combined. But it reflected that cost difference in every element of its design. Cocker’s Lafayette presented a yellow-brick face to Audubon Park, barely broken by its stooped entrance and limestone accents. Schwartz, Gross, & Marcus’s Beaux-Arts design, a variation on the Braender at the corner of Central Park West and 102nd Street, featured a limestone and brick façade divided into seven bays (sections). In the center, a pillared archway drew the public into an entry court. On either side of the archway, a recessed fire escape further divided the two flanking sections into thirds. Decorative ironwork masking the fire escapes—a feature Schwartz and Gross originated and used often—created the appearance of a balcony on each floor, while terra cotta trim and an ornate cornice broke the monotony of the solid brick upper stories. The Audubon Park Apartments did not approach the Braender in either size or elegance. Its entry court was narrow to the point of claustrophobic, and the public reception area was cramped, with perfunctory decorations falling short of extravagance. But extravagance was not Bulman’s goal. His building represented affordable luxury for the middle class. A uniformed doorman admitted residents and guests while directing tradesmen to the rear entrance on 156th Street and firmly turning away anyone he deemed unsuitable. A manned elevator directly across from the front door—in a building as small as the Audubon Park, the doorman may have doubled as the operator—signaled that this was not a walk-up, though directly adjacent to it a flight of stairs rising to the second floor offered impatient tenants an alternative to waiting for the lift. A white-tiled floor stretched in both directions with a decorative border dividing it into three sections, each marked by a red, tan, and green tile medallion. Left and right, at the far sides of the lobby, two marble steps led to a semi-private alcove that served as a common entry to the first-floor apartments, three on either side. Apartments in the Audubon Park were larger and more elaborate than those in the Lafayette and Fort Washington and featured “electric and gas lighting fixtures, steam heat, porcelain baths, best plumbing, and other modern improvements.” Parlors and dining rooms were generally ten or eleven feet by seventeen, and the bedrooms ranged from small to medium, though each had a sizable closet. Among the other selling points were a “long distance telephone in each apartment” (meaning outside the building), mail chutes, and kitchen dumbwaiters that sent trash and laundry to the basement and brought tradesmen’s deliveries up. The building lacked a service elevator, so move-ins and large deliveries came through the front

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door and up the stairs. Six apartments on each floor—four large facing Broadway and two small facing the interior—ranged from four to seven rooms. The large apartments had servants’ rooms and washrooms equipped with a toilet and sink, but the small ones, in a pattern that would repeat itself throughout the neighborhood, had no servant accommodations. Few apartments had more than two family bedrooms, and many—even with a suite of living-room, dining room, and library—had only one, suggesting that Bulman was targeting couples: young beginning their families, older with no children living at home, or childless of any age.7 The largest and best-placed apartment line was a “classic seven” on the corner of Broadway and 156th Street, articulated in the “long hall” design. “Long haul” was equally appropriate, as that is what faced guests between the front door and the living room and library facing Broadway: a journey past two bedrooms, a bath, maid’s room, kitchen, and dining room. Schwartz, Gross, & Marcus were adapting the row houses model to their floor plan, placing the social rooms at the front of the building to maximize light and air and give the lady of the house visual communication with the street so that she could keep an eye out for callers or pass the time monitoring the comings and goings in the neighborhood.8 Bulman’s managing agents Frederick Southack and Alwyn Ball Jr. capitalized on the time-tested selling points in Washington Heights and took full advantage of the building’s proximity to Audubon Park, informing prospects that fresh air and panoramic views in “Manhattan’s only Section of Natural Beauty” would add “the Charm of Country to the City Home,” all at a cost of $660 to $1,200 a year, a monthly average of $14 per room. Over the next few years, the Apartment Houses of the Metropolis (1908) and the World’s New York Apartment House Album (1910) echoed those selling points in other buildings around Audubon Park, noting the “unobstructed view of the Hudson River and surrounding country” and the convenience of a nearby subway station and the “Amsterdam avenue surface cars.”9 Advertised rents at the Audubon Park Apartments remained steady in 1906, but at the end of Manhattan’s 1907 rental season, with newer buildings competing for tenants a few blocks up Broadway, a five-room apartment rented for $660 and a six-room unit for $840, roughly $11 per room. When necessary, Bulman’s agents adjusted rents to keep the building fully occupied—and not solely for the income. A fully occupied building that yielded a steady revenue attracted buyers, which was the primary purpose of a speculative apartment house. Bulman found a buyer after three renting seasons and invested the proceeds in building the Alfredo at Broadway and 162nd Street, again buying property from Morgenthau and hiring

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Schwartz, Gross, & Marcus to design another six-story apartment house with an archway dividing a center court from the street. This time, however, the architects added several feet to the interior by placing the fire escapes on the building’s façade.10 Very little information remains about the four-story brick-and-stone Hospital for Incurables that rose beside the Audubon Park Apartments. The Sisters of the Annunciation, an Episcopal order founded in 1893, had begun their work in a building on 94th Street but quickly outgrew it and moved to 152nd Street—directly next door to William Kramer—where they could accommodate twenty girls with terminal illnesses. By 1905, they had also outgrown that building and continued their move uptown to the corner of 155th Street and Broadway. While apartment-house developers maximized light and ventilation to comply with the New Law’s requirements, squeezing the maximum number of units and rooms into a building’s footprint was their primary goal, so the outer walls extended to the edge of the sidewalk and property lines, with insets and interior courts just large enough to comply with building codes. The Annunciation Sisters’ primary concern was ensuring their patients were comfortable and had light and fresh air, so architects Glasser and Ebert set the building back from property lines on all sides. At the sidewalk, a wrought iron fence separated the open yard from the street but let in light, air, and river views. An understated stairway facing Broadway led to a small stoop above an English basement. While the building’s purpose and institutional character were a distinct departure from the old Hawley house that had sat on that corner since the end of the Civil War, its height, simplicity, and design were less intrusive than the Audubon Park Apartments on its northern side, similar to the Stella on the east, and inconspicuous compared to the grand, new Presbyterian church beyond. The only suggestions of the hospital’s religious affiliation were the Gothic arches over the windows and doors and a simple cross above the lintel.11 As one development in the neighborhood rapidly followed another through 1904 and into 1905, pressure mounted on George Bird to convert land into cash. With no additional income available from leases, the Grinnells were as land poor and mortgaged as the Audubons had been a half century earlier, though neither George Bird’s correspondence nor the Audubon Park reminiscences he wrote over the next two decades give any evidence that he marked the parallels between his family’s situation and the Audubons’s. Neither did his personal experience soften his assessment of the Audubon sons’ business skills, despite their facing the same problems he did: heavy mortgages, mounting maintenance expenses, an expanded

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Audubon Park Apartments and Hospital for Incurables, circa 1910 (Thaddeus Wilkerson / Museum of the City of New York. X2011.34.1271)

family depending on income from a dwindling supply of land, and family members with expensive habits that required a steady flow of cash. Like the Audubon brothers, George Bird had diversified his family’s assets—in his case into various stocks and bonds and shoring up his father’s investments in the Bosworth Machine Company and other ventures in Milford—but the bulk of the family’s wealth still lay in the Audubon Park property’s potential value. It wasn’t paying. In December 1904, when George Bird had refused to lease the empty Clapp house to his friend Hamlin Garland, he wrote:12 . . . we have sacrificed old tenants who were paying high rents, and we cannot afford to embarrass or endanger [our] plans in any way. We have felt obliged to decline a number of offers for some of our vacant houses, and the two or three tenants we still have are costing us much more than we can ask anyone to pay.13 The following summer, Garland inquired again and received another rejection. George Bird replied that the family had a house available on 157th Street (most likely a speculative row the Grinnells had built east of Broadway or were leasing and subletting) for $1,000 to $2,000 per annum, but it was without permanent water, gas, or sewer mains. “All the present

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connections are absolutely temporary, and we have declined to talk about renting these four houses, because we don’t know at all what is going to happen with regard to the construction.” Tenants lived in three of the four houses in that row, so George Bird could have leased one to Garland but was perhaps reluctant to rent his friend substandard accommodations. The larger issue was the family’s uncertain future in Audubon Park. “We all of us feel that we are mere temporary sojourners on the property,” George Bird wrote to Garland. “There is a possibility that it may be sold in a lump at any time, in which case the tenants would have to move out on thirty days’ notice, unless they could make arrangements with the purchaser.”14 Despite Riverside Drive’s construction claiming the old Burgoyne house, which sat squarely in its path, the enumerator for the New York State Census in June 1905 counted twenty-six separate family units in Audubon Park, more than double its traditional dozen. Most of the newcomers were working-class families crowded into the houses along the river, though on the other side of the park Lena Vanner had leased one part of the Kerner house to tailor Lewis Hollander and his wife, Annie, and the other to candy-store operator Ruth Winfield. Both the Hollanders and Winfield increased the number of family units in the park with boarders. Patrick Tynan, whose glory as a would-be Irish terrorist had dimmed significantly, was working at the custom house and leasing the old Audubon homestead from the Kramers for twenty-five dollars a month. Living with him were his wife, son, four daughters, two nieces, and servant Lena Vidella, as well as three sub-tenants: jewelry messenger Frank Stiver (Steiner), along with his wife and daughter; Mrs. Alice Wells and her two adult children; and George Rogers, a watchman who was perhaps working for Huntington as a guard over the museum construction.15 With the subway complete, Lawrence B. McCabe moved his family to a house on the east side of Broadway, and the Mahoney brothers divided the old Jerome house into floors. Frank Stone and Emma Adams soon followed their lead. The eclectic group filling the Stone house included three families of Italian stone-cutters working on Huntington’s museum, a brass worker, a laundry operator, and the Italian “music conductor” Joseph Bruno with his wife, Vincenze. The Mahoneys rented to fishdealer Edward Keenan, who had ready access to the river at the foot of his yard. His household included his wife, son, and daughter, along with four fishermen boarders. Next door, engineer-inventor Joseph ClaudMantle, electrician Samuel Agnew, liquor salesman Warren Lutz, and bookkeeper Ernest Rosberg filled the Adams house with their four interrelated families.16

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Excepting the Tynans, who had long kept a housekeeper, the women living in the houses along the river fended for themselves without the benefit of servants. In contrast, the old park households included more servants than family members. The five Martins in the Clapp house—Newell, Laura, and their three children—depended on a coachman, a gardener, and four female servants; Marion Post and her two sons retained a coachman and three female servants; and George Bird and Elizabeth Grinnell kept three female servants—sharing a gardener with the Martins. Even the households on 158th Street had one or two servants each, all they needed since modern conveniences had eliminated the requirements for a full staff.17 Riverside Drive’s construction had thrown those 158th Street families into limbo. Professionally and socially, they resembled the households populating apartment buildings on Broadway, but physically, Riverside Drive’s retaining wall had isolated them into association with the working-class families along the river. They must have felt more than a little peeved that the Grinnells had struck a deal that left them on the wrong side of the wall, but for the time being, most of them took consolation in their back gardens. The exception was engineer Reginald Pelham Bolton, who began taking measures to keep any remaining space open, preferably as parkland surrounding the three Audubon houses. Unfortunately, he had arrived on the scene too late to join the opposition before construction began. At the very moment he and his neighbors were buying their houses, the Grinnells were pushing Chapter 665 through the state legislature, ensuring a mandated path for Riverside Drive’s extension. So with the original route a fait accompli, Bolton lobbied for an alternate Riverside Drive that would be safer and, at the same time, enhance 158th Street, a cul-de-sac ending at the wharfs on the river.18 In July, Helen Page and her children returned from their year in Switzerland to find Audubon Park transformed. The inhospitable conditions more than likely sent them to the house they shared with the Martins at Beaverbrook. George and Elizabeth soldiered on. He wrote to his friend John White that they “spent most of the time sitting on the grass, trying to keep cool and avoid gaslight.” Excavations for Riverside Drive then disrupted their gas lines, so whenever they wandered around the house at night, they resorted to candles. Ironically, while one city agency was tearing up the land around the Hemlocks and disrupting gas service, another was sending repeated notices about inspecting the gas and water lines to the out-of-commission stable. George Bird could barely contain his irritation in replying to the head of the Bureau of Water.19

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Within the year this stable has been separated from the house by the contractors building the Riverside Drive; gas and water have both been cut off and the pipes torn up by these contractors; the stable has been abandoned and is partly torn down. The Riverside Drive, from 40 to 50 feet above the level of the ground on which the stable stands, runs over where the gas and water pipes used to pass. If your inspector, whenever he happens to be in the neighborhood of 157th St. & Broadway, or 12th Ave., will call at my house and ask for John Fitz Williams, he will show the inspector the stable and its condition.20 That month, while Helen and her children escaped to the country and George Bird battled with the gas company and pondered the family’s future, one of the last members of Audubon Park’s old guard died. Eightyone-year-old William Wheelock was at his summer home in the Hamptons when he took his last breath. A laudatory New York Times obituary recounted his mercantile and banking successes as well as his decades-long philanthropic affiliations with the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church and Union Theological Seminary. His funeral, on Saturday, July 8, was the last held in the church before the congregation moved to its new building. Fittingly, the organist played the pipe organ Wheelock had donated four decades earlier, and Charles Stoddard, who had led the congregation at the time Wheelock was head of the presbytery, presided at the funeral.21 The summer of 1905 was a turning point for George Bird. Even as he ordered coal for the winter, investigated a “hot water heating apparatus” for the conservatory, and solicited bids for “painting and kerosening” the kitchen, laundry, pantry, and maid’s sitting room, he was handing off duties at Forest and Stream and quietly buying land adjacent to Beaverbrook Farm that he would develop into a country seat for himself and Elizabeth. The family’s strategy for maximizing the value of their Audubon Park property was succeeding. The subway was open, workmen were constructing Riverside Drive through the park, and new buildings were rising on its borders, museums to the south, apartment buildings to the north and east. George Bird was willing to sell, but also willing to wait for a buyer who would take all the land in one large block. So far, that person hadn’t materialized.22 George Bird had grown weary of financing siblings who still thought the family property was their cash cow. “I have had on my shoulders for some years the load of carrying along a lot of people who are too lazy or too inefficient to earn their own living,” he wrote to his friend Jack Monroe several months later. George Bird bore his sister Helen’s inability to manage money

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The Hemlocks Interior, Various Rooms, circa 1893 (Private collection, Schuyler M. Meyer Family)

patiently and, for the most part, with brotherly kindness. Her husband had died young and left her little, so she depended on the income George Bird could provide her from her trust fund and rents from her Audubon Park house. Apparently, she thought the sum was much larger than it was. After years of remonstrating, George Bird summed up her spending habits quite neatly: “I do not mean to say that you are extravagant,” he wrote in 1920, “because I do not believe that you are, but apparently you contract bills without considering how they are to be paid.”23

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Workmen atop the Hispanic Society Building While It Was under Construction, with the Remnants of Charles Kerner’s Stable at Left and Wellington Clapp’s East Piazza at Right, circa 1905 (Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York)

George Bird had far less patience with his jovial younger brother Morton, who had abandoned his career as a medical examiner to become a gentleman farmer with artistic pursuits on the side—the exact life John Woodhouse Audubon had dreamed about a half century earlier. And then, at the beginning of December 1905, Morton died suddenly at the age of fifty-two. Jennie was abroad and only learned the news when George came to meet her homebound steamer when it arrived in New York’s harbor a few weeks later. Ironically, as George Bird wrote to Jennie’s brother, Clinton Catherwood, Morton’s death was the result of a cold he caught while seeing Jennie off on her journey at the end of October. From this he measurably recovered, but it left his heart very weak, and a little later he began to lose strength and to go down hill very fast. About December 2nd he had a bad turn and from that day he lost ground constantly until last Saturday, the 9th, when he seemed very much stronger, perfectly clear in mind, and on the whole better; that day he went downstairs and walked around with me, talking, laughing and joking. At 9 o’clock at night he went to bed, and when I

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left him he said that he felt quite exhausted and did not know when he had been so tired. He slept until 3 o’clock, when he awoke and within an hour died peacefully and without suffering.24 On December thirteenth, a special train left Grand Central Station carrying mourners to Beaverbrook Farm for the funeral. On the way back to Manhattan, the train stopped at Woodlawn Cemetery, where Morton was laid in the family plot with his parents and adored older brother, Frank. Two months later, while George Bird settled his brother’s estate, Jennie set sail for Japan.25

19

Rapid Transit, Rapid Transformation

The city was sitting at Audubon Park’s front gate in 1908, and George Bird could stall no longer. The family’s property was in high demand, he was suffering personal financial problems, and as the Panic of 1907 had reminded him, prices could as easily go down as up. Already, at least one apartment building sat on every block of Broadway between 135th Street and Trinity Cemetery. At 158th Street, the Knowlton Court apartment houses had just opened, and at 159th, the Washington Heights apartments had been in operation since 1906. Continuing northward, buildings like Chrystal Court, Windsor Court, and the Alexander Hamilton dotted both sides of Broadway, and developers were building five- and six-story apartment houses on side streets as quickly as they could snap up lots. Trapped amidst these “improvements” sat Audubon Park—or the remnants of it. Riverside Drive’s retaining wall had banished its western flank, and Archer Huntington’s institutional buildings were propagating across the southern portion.1 At the beginning of 1906, after Huntington became president of the American Numismatic and Archaeological Society, he had donated land and $25,000 to erect a permanent home for its collection at 155th Street. Charles Huntington’s design for the building complemented the Hispanic Society’s. Both would face north across a plaza to a noble entrance on 156th Street. Before workmen could begin the plaza, however, the Smythe house must come down. “It is pitiful to look out of the windows and see woodwork and bricks and plaster flying out of the windows,” George Bird wrote

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The Hispanic Society Building in Audubon Park with Incomplete Riverside Drive in Foreground, 1905 (Thaddeus Wilkerson / Museum of the City of New York. F2011.33.45)

to his cousin Nettie Cheston in March 1907. “However, in a few days, that will all be over with, and we shall scarcely remember that another of the old landmarks is gone.” Huntington had nominated George Bird to life membership in the Numismatic Society, perhaps as apology for the additional construction noise and disruption. George Bird accepted gladly. Blasting into Manhattan schist, hammering, and chiseling were a small price to pay for monumental structures that “tended to greatly enhance” the Grinnells’s property values.2 The Numismatic Society opened at the end of the year, and the Hispanic Society followed in January 1908, “without fuss or fanfare.” The Hispanic Society building had been ready for a year, but Huntington delayed its opening while he arranged and rearranged the “boxes and bales of manuscripts, paintings, coins and archaeological objects” to suit his taste. “It takes a long time to catalogue the more than 40,000 volumes of Spanish and Portuguese,” he told the Sun, “and I do not want any one to come here and ask for a volume that we are not prepared to give him.” Adjacent to the two Beaux-Arts buildings, the Kerner house still sat on Broadway, its Mansard roof looking like a hat several years out of season and its wide verandas a countrified version of the adjacent balustraded plaza. It wouldn’t be there much longer. At the beginning of 1907, Arabella Huntington bought the

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The Hispanic Society and Numismatic Society, Postcard View, circa 1908 (Author’s collection)

Broadway frontage from Lena Vanner for $100, along with $85,000 in mortgages, and transferred it to her son, without the mortgages, giving Archer nearly two-thirds of the city block between 155th and 156th streets.3 George Bird was finally ready to sell his Broadway frontage but, in March 1907, refused an offer to exchange it for a rent-generating apartment building on 135th Street. Three months later, he borrowed money to make an interest payment on that same parcel’s $55,000 mortgage and then took Elizabeth to Europe after her doctor recommended an ocean voyage for her health. They returned to the Hemlocks in time to learn that real estate brokers were buying the old Knapp house. With the Grinnells’s finances still shaky in the summer of 1907, Newell Martin arranged a mortgage on the Hemlocks. Matters grew worse in October when the Knickerbocker Trust Company’s failed attempts at stock manipulation ignited the Panic of 1907. George Bird’s cousin Charles T. Barney was president of the Knickerbocker and, in disgrace, killed himself a month later. The Grinnells didn’t directly lose any money, but Barney’s involvement in the Panic and his suicide pushed George Bird closer to extricating his family from Audubon Park.4 He continued borrowing in 1908 but refused an offer for the cow pasture. “The land in question is not for sale,” he replied to an offer. Piecemeal sales no longer interested him. Something much bigger was in the works. On November 22, 1908, the Tribune reported that an “Audubon Syndicate” had paid the Grinnells $1.5 million for the cow pasture and all their land

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between 156th and 157th streets, as well as the Riverside Drive frontage at 155th Street and George Bird’s parcel east of Broadway. “Within a stone’s throw of the Subway station at 157th Street and Broadway the lots are ranked to-day as among the most desirable of the remaining vacant properties on the Heights,” wrote the Times, “and will probably be resold for immediate improvements with apartment houses.” That prediction was accurate. Within a year, the syndicate—Henry and Hyman Sonn, Adolph M. Bendheim, and Max Marx—would dismantle the Audubon Park estate George Grinnell had spent two decades assembling.5 With Christmas approaching, George Bird spent his days deciding what would come next. “The old place where you have slept so many nights at Audubon Park has been sold,” he wrote Jack Monroe at the beginning of December, “and we are very likely to be turned out into the street after a while. What we shall do, I do not at present know.” His end-of-year greetings to close friends mingled self-pity, resignation, and relief. “It is not very agreeable to think of moving out of the old house and setting forth to hunt up six rooms and a bath in which to spend my declining years,” he wrote to Ned Dana. “It was inevitable that we should go, but I have always had a sneaking hope that I should die before that time came.” To Lute North, he confided, “The Jews have got it and shortly the place will be, I suppose, covered with apartment houses.” And to Jack Nicholson, who had money problems of his own, he wrote, “The twisting and turning and endeavoring to make both ends meet has lasted for both of us for many years now. I hope that it is near the end.”6 When the syndicate registered the deeds in February 1909, Max Marx told George Bird that he and Elizabeth could rent the Hemlocks on a month-to-month basis but would have only ten days’ notice after he found a buyer. The Martins had already moved to a townhouse on East 38th Street in Murray Hill, a block north of the new library J. P. Morgan had commissioned from McKim, Mead, & White. Helen and her five children went with them, as did six servants. George Bird toyed with the idea of renting something north of the park that was “roomy, with some ground around it, and in fair repair,” if the price was moderate, but in March, he agreed to buy 238 East 15th Street, a townhouse on the southern side of Stuyvesant Square. It wasn’t the Hemlocks, but the greensward with houses on its perimeter bore a faint kinship with Audubon Park.7 At the end of May, George Bird wrote his niece Sylvia Page that most of the small things were “packed in boxes and barrels, ready to go off at any time.” He was taking “a little bit of the old house” with him, a couple of the mantel pieces and mirrors. The Fleischmann Brothers were already raising

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twin buildings on the Broadway frontage at 156th Street, where the Grinnells had once played tennis; around the corner, James O’Brien was building two apartment houses; and across Broadway, Gross and Herbener’s Robert Fulton Court, a six-story apartment house designed by Thomas P. Neville and George A. Bagge, was rising on George Bird’s old parcel. Four weeks later, the Riviera Realty Company bought the Hemlocks, and the ten-day countdown began. On June 9, 1909, George Bird discontinued gas and telephone service and left his home of a half century for the last time. The cook, Frieda Meyer, and two house maids went to 15th Street with the Grinnells, but John Fitzwilliams, who had worked for the family for twenty years, stayed behind in a new job with the Hispanic Society.8 The move was “like pulling up an old tree by the roots and trying to plant it somewhere else,” George Bird wrote, but he took some comfort knowing that the neighborhood was “filling up with an exceedingly good sort of people.” Two days later, a builder “put the plow in the ground” and began chopping down trees and wrecking the Hemlocks. Laura’s and Helen’s houses had survived until then, but they went too. George Bird decided that the only way to cope with his loss was to accept and, as much as possible, ignore it. “I had lived in that house for more than fifty years,” he wrote to his former neighbor, Lemuel Hayward, in December, “and to give it all up and move away seemed to me a good deal like having one’s legs and arms twisted off one’s body; but since it obviously had to be done, I thought of it as little as possible, and now we are comfortably situated in the new place.”9 Robert Fulton Court was “open for inspection” in the fall of 1909, offering suites of four to seven rooms with “every modern convenience and good sized closets.” The Fleischmann Brothers had finished and sold “Audubon Hall” on the corner of 157th Street, but kept its twin “Hispania Hall” for several years while they increased its rent rolls. They had been busy in 1909, constructing another four apartment buildings on Amsterdam Avenue and six on Audubon Avenue, all in collaboration with George Fred Pelham. A second-generation architect, Pelham specialized in “apartment houses built in the neo-Renaissance, neo-Gothic, and neo-Federal styles.” Between 1909 and 1911, he filed one hundred twenty-seven plans with the Department of Buildings, most in a six-story format in groups of two and three, though some reached ten stories and a few were utilitarian stables or taxpayers like the ones he designed for Adolph Lewisohn at the corner of Broadway and 158th Street. Among Pelham’s filings was a series of six-story apartment buildings that the Grinnells had contemplated for their Riverside frontage, oddly after they had sold the property, and similar buildings for Max Marx on the Hemlocks lots. None of them went to bid.10

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The architects who designed the first apartment buildings to cover Audubon Park were not from prestigious firms like McKim, Mead, and White or Carrere & Hastings. Rather, as Andrew S. Dolkart describes in his history of Morningside Heights, “They were practitioners who, if they had any formal architectural training at all, had been educated in less prestigious offices or in technical schools.” Unwelcome in the “higher echelons of the architectural profession because of their ethnic background and ‘inferior’ training, they entered the field at the least prestigious end,

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designing speculative apartment houses.” Yet, these prolific designers “created the architectural character and texture of many of New York’s neighborhoods,” including the one rapidly covering the old Audubon Park.11 Hispania Hall, its name an homage to the institution across 156th Street, had a total of forty-seven apartments ranging from four to nine rooms with “extra toilets and washstands for servants, and an abundance of closet room.” Audubon Hall, with similar amenities, sat on a slightly smaller lot and had forty-one apartments, including a two-room suite without a kitchen off the main entrance that was perhaps intended for a superintendent. Restrictive covenants in the syndicate’s deeds prevented exterior fire escapes from projecting over the street, so Pelham recessed them as Schwartz & Gross had done on the Audubon Park Apartments several years earlier. The covenants also restricted storefronts to façades facing Broadway or Audubon Place, so Pelham incorporated an apartment-sized commercial space into the outside corner of each of the two buildings.12 Amenities in the two new buildings set a neighborhood standard that catered to what Andrew Alpern later termed “middle-class tenants with upper-class pretensions” (upper-class aspirations might be more accurate). Uniformed attendants and elegant lobbies decorated with tiled floors, giltframed mirrors, and marble columns were prominent marketing features— shared amenities that echoed the liveried staff and grand foyers the rich enjoyed in their Fifth-Avenue mansions. Building staff operated the elevators around the clock, a hall boy ran errands, mail chutes on every floor eliminated the need for travel to the lobby, and each apartment had a longdistance telephone “with a central operator in the building.” The apartments featured enameled woodwork in the bedrooms; tiled bathrooms with porcelain sinks, tubs, and “syphon jet flushometer toilets”; butler’s pantries and maid’s rooms; mahogany-paneled libraries with parquet floors; dining rooms with beamed ceilings and oak-paneling “capped with a Dutch shelf”; wall safes and burglar alarms; and a combination of electric and gas fixtures for those who still preferred the ambiance of gaslight. Promises of “salubrious air” and “the delightful environments of a most beautiful country” reflected the same points Lydia Watkins had used in 1785 when she advertised her farmland: “The healthiness of the situation, with the beautiful prospect it commands, renders it an inviting purchase to a gentleman.13 No display ads for the two buildings appeared in the local papers that winter, but the 1909 Supplement to Apartment Houses of the Metropolis, a wish book that real estate brokers used to show prospective tenants their many options, highlighted both buildings, so by the time the Federal Census taker came around in April, twenty-three families were already living

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Audubon Hall Floorplan from Supplement to Apartment Houses of the Metropolis, 1909 (New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-d9b5-a3d9-e040 -e00a18064a99)

at Hispania Hall and eighteen at Audubon Hall. Demographically, the households resembled those living on 158th Street: core families plus adult siblings, in-laws, parents, grandchildren, and servants. Three-quarters of the units had maid’s rooms, and just under half of the forty-one new families kept live-in servants. Pelham had carefully separated the kitchen and

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maid’s quarters from the rest of the apartment—the entry to the maid’s room was usually from the kitchen—so the two lodgers in Hispania Hall would have enjoyed some privacy in the maid’s quarters, though they lacked the separate entrances later neighborhood buildings would offer. The first residents’ occupations covered a wide range of professions: brokers, bank clerks, a druggist, an architect, and salesmen for office supplies, real estate, jewelry, and insurance. One standout was Rose Chapman in Hispania Hall, a reform lecturer. She and her husband, William, president of an electrical company, sublet space to reform-worker Amy Ramsey.14 In the weeks and months after the Grinnells left the Hemlocks, builders bought all the Audubon Park parcels from the syndicate, and apartment houses quickly rose where Italianate villas had once sheltered among forest trees and curvilinear drives. By renting season 1910, James O’Brien and Sarah Harris had their buildings ready for tenants. O’Brien had exchanged two six-story apartment buildings on Claremont Avenue for eight lots on 156th Street and hired Frank Scammon Nute (who had designed the Claremont buildings) and his partner Edwin H. Denby to create designs for his new property. The six-story Goya and Velasquez offered twenty-nine apartments each in units of four to eight rooms with one bathroom in the smaller units and two in the larger. While most of the Audubon Park builders were speculators who quickly sold their apartment houses and began new projects, O’Brien, and his estate after him, held the Goya and Velasquez for the next three decades, often advertising their apartments simultaneously.15 Sarah Harris also turned to familiar architects for the six-story Hortense Arms, which rose where Helen Page’s house sat for a quarter-century. She hired Neville and Bagge, who had designed the row house where she lived with her husband, Louis (a real estate developer), and their son, Albert, on 86th Street. On September 11, 1910, the height of the fall renting season, only five unleased suites remained in her new apartment house with its distinctive Palladian-style façade. Wainscoting and beamed ceilings in the dining rooms, “magnificent crystal chandeliers” in the parlors, a telephone in each apartment, milk lockers, vacuum cleaners, and steam clothes dryers recommended them to discerning renters. By 1915, the Harris family had also moved into the building. Thomas P. Neville and George A. Bagge were prolific apartment house designers with “hundreds of speculative residential buildings for the middle class along the route of the IRT subway.” The Office for Metropolitan History database lists four hundred separate filings for them between 1901 and 1917, many for groupings of two to five apartment houses. Besides the

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Robert Fulton Court and Columbus, which they had designed for the eastern side of Broadway between 156th and 157th streets, they also drew plans for the Sutherland, which would replace Arnold Schramm’s yellowbrick house on the corner of 158th Street and Riverside Drive. The partners were not, however, speculative builders, so the eight-story Cortez at the western end of 156th Street was an anomaly. Bagge himself owned the property.16 The Cortez was narrower than its neighbors (a sixty-five-foot frontage rather than one-hundred plus), but distinguished itself by having only two apartments running front to back on each floor, an eight-room suite with two baths on one side or nine rooms with three on the other. Splitting what was once the Hemlocks’s east lawn with the Cortez and facing 157th Street, the Kannawah was also ready for tenants in 1910. Kuhn & Lawson, who had built the Lafayette and Fort Washington flat buildings five years earlier, once again collaborated with Joseph Cocker, though this time on a six-story, U-shaped building curving around a deep entry court. Although the apartment house was visually more elaborate than the French-flat buildings, the three- to-five-room apartments were small for the neighborhood average. Even so, as soon as the Kannawah was completed, Kuhn and Lawson sold it for $260,000.17 As new tenants moved into the buildings on 156th and 157th streets in 1910’s renting season, they could ponder Audubon Park’s paradox from their west-facing windows. In the foreground, apartment buildings were rising along Riverside Drive. Beyond, peering over the top of Riverside Drive’s retaining wall, was the Mansard roof Jesse Benedict had imposed on the Audubon homestead. Some residents could also see John’s and Victor’s houses, the trees surrounding them, and the families who lived in them, the “bit of country” the display ads were fond of mentioning. Returning their gaze, the families living below the retaining wall looked up to see the neighborhood’s future, reaching into the sky above them. The section of Riverside Drive between 145th and 158th streets finally opened in February 1911, three years after the Grinnells had sold their inheritance and six months before tenants moved into the Riviera, Grinnell, and Rhinecleff Court. Property owners objecting to assessments for the $1.5 million improvement and legal wrangling over a section of 151st Street that the Times compared to “a settlement outside the gate of some mediaeval town” had been the holdups. “We shall get as much benefit from the extension of the Drive as from the Speedway,” complained Christian Trinks, president of the Washington Heights Progressive Association, “and we get as much from that as from the Panama Canal.” Until 1911, residents

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The Audubon Homestead Against Riverside Drive’s Retaining Wall with the Vauxhall Above, from the Mentor, 1920 (Author’s collection)

in the Audubon Park neighborhood had used Riverside Drive as a vehiclefree promenade. With no reliance on automobiles, they were a pedestrian community, walking up the numbered streets to Broadway when they needed to commute or shop.18 The Riviera, Grinnell, and Rhinecleff Court, laden with amenities, featured prominently in 1911’s apartment literature. All appeared in The World’s New York Apartment House Album, another wish book real estate agents used in renting apartments, as well as in newspaper articles and display ads in the summer and fall rental season. The park had been a mere shadow of itself when the Grinnells sold their property at the end of 1908, but as its last remnants disappeared in the wake of rapid transit, the daily papers took notice of “Audubon Park’s Rapid Transformation.” Reporters tripped over each other finding encomiums to rephrase the old saws about panoramic views, healthy elevations, and the “touch of country in the city.”19 The Record and Guide marveled that “fifteen million dollars [was] being invested in apartment houses in that interesting center once known as ‘Audubon Park.’” The Times compared “old-time rural scenes” with the apartment houses now covering the “picturesque and healthful highlands

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Promenade on Riverside Drive at 153rd Street a Few Weeks Before Its Opening, 1911 (Author’s collection)

of the north.” The Herald noted that because builders could only erect apartment houses on Riverside Drive’s eastern side, the supply of apartments would always be limited, and rents would always be “at a premium.” It focused on the triangular Grinnell, sitting where that family had once pastured its cows, with frontages on Riverside Drive, Audubon Place, and 157th Street—and a subway entrance a half-block away. Architects Schwartz & Gross had designed the building with ten apartments on each floor ranging from five rooms and one bath to nine rooms with three baths, including three duplex apartments on the lower two floors. Like the neighboring Riviera and Rhinecleff Court, all rooms had an “outside window,” in the Grinnells’s case, facing a street or the triangular interior courtyard. Architects designing apartment houses for square corner lots and two street façades usually placed the smaller suites “in the rear of the house,” but at the Grinnell, all suites—small or large—shared the same exposures.20 Articulating spaces within an apartment, combining the social, sleeping, and service areas into a unified whole, was a continual challenge for architects. An early objection to apartment living was the proximity of social (or reception) and sleeping spaces; delegated to separate floors in vertical row houses, they were uncomfortably close, physically and visually, in horizontal apartments. Adding to the problem was fitting in as many units—and renters—as possible while maximizing light, ventilation, and views. A common solution, one that Schwartz & Gross had used at their 1905 Audubon Park Apartments, was an entry foyer on the inside of the building, with a

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long hall leading past the sleeping and service areas to the reception area— in that case, the parlor and dining room—facing the street. No doubt, middle class sensibilities required that a guest passed numerous closed doors, leaving the hallway dark except for artificial lighting. Neville & Bagge solved the problem at the Cortez with only two apartments per floor, so the reception space flowed in one direction from the apartment’s entrance and the sleeping and service spaces from the other. William L. Rouse and Lafayette A. Goldstone took a hybrid approach at the Riviera, which was one of their first joint filings with the Department of Buildings. Prolific apartment house designers, both together and separately, their collaboration lasted two decades and produced more than one hundred forty apartment houses in New York City. Covering the entire Riverside Drive frontage between 156th and 157th streets and stretching one hundred feet up 157th Street and one hundred eighty-five feet up 156th Street, the Riviera was the largest apartment building in Washington Heights, and at thirteen stories, the tallest in the Audubon Park neighborhood. Although Rouse & Goldstone achieved an admirable articulation of space, with the bedrooms farthest from the front door in most suites and in the majority, facing a street for maximum ventilation and cool breezes, most of their apartment layouts also had the service area adjacent to the front door; anyone entering passed it before reaching the rest of the apartment. They did minimize this effect with only one door into the service area or sometimes a separate door to the public hallway, but they still strung the apartment along long halls in most of the suites.21 Schwartz & Gross had matured since they designed the Audubon Park Apartments with its narrow entry court and apartments articulated along a hall. They designed Rhinecleff Court as an irregular H, with a much wider and airier entry court and a similar courtyard at the rear. Although the southern side of the building still had awkward treks from the front door to the parlor, the A-suite and E-suite on the building’s northern side both featured the parlor, dining room, and library ensuite, grouped on a foyer. In both apartment lines, the bedrooms faced the Drive and the service rooms were on the entry court. The kitchens in those two suites had their own exterior doors, so that servants had access from the public hallway without passing through the apartment’s foyer. Schwartz & Gross achieved even greater success with their Grinnell layouts, where the triangular footprint presented both a unique problem and a unique solution. Building their design around a central courtyard, they created ten apartment layouts in which the sleeping space was always farthest from the front door and the service space secluded behind a figurative green baize door, often with a separate entrance from the public

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Rhinecleff Court Floorplan from The World’s Loose Leaf Album of Apartment Houses, 1910 (New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-d7c0-a3d9-e040 -e00a18064a99)

hall. In every line, the foyer combined with the parlor, dining room, and, when present, library to create a unified social space. Both the A-suite and the J-suite featured a triangular bedroom with seven windows. In response to the double-height entry that interrupted apartment suites on two floors, Schwartz & Gross created three duplex apartments from the “leftover” spaces, all with the entry foyer, dining room, and service areas on the first floor and the other social and sleeping spaces articulated at

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The Grinnell Floorplan from The World’s Loose Leaf Album of Apartment Houses, 1910 (New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-d7bf-a3d9-e040-e00a 18064a99)

opposite ends of the second floor. Early advertisements suggested these apartments were suitable for a doctor, who might use the first-floor dining room for a patient examining room and the adjacent butler’s pantry for washing up. Huntington had not sat idle while apartment houses sprouted around his museums. In 1909, he deeded land on the corner of Broadway and 156th Street to the American Geographical Society and commissioned his cousin to design their new headquarters where Charles Kerner’s house had long been a presence. The next year, the Church of Our Lady of Esperanza opened, the only building in the complex oriented to the street instead of to the courtyard. Huntington had envisioned a church for the cultural plaza as early as 1906, when he offered land and half of the construction cost to the Archbishop of New York City; in return, he would choose the architect (his cousin), and the archdiocese would raise the other half of the funding. Huntington, in a combination of arrogance and innocence, believed that “no educated Spaniard” would come to the city without visiting his museum, so having “a church of their faith at the museum’s door” would make them feel welcome.22

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Church of Our Lady of Esperanza, Original Façade, circa 1924 (Wurts Bros. / Museum of the City of New York. X2010.7.2.1190)

Maria de Barril, the wife of the Spanish consul-general in New York, took an interest in the project and helped raise funds with benefits such as a concert at the Waldorf featuring Metropolitan Opera soprano Emma Eames and her husband, baritone Emilio de Gogorza, performing with the Victor Herbert Orchestra. She also helped organize a parish from the different groups of Spanish-speaking people in New York City. By the time Cardinal John Farley blessed the church in July 1912, its cost had risen to $100,000, and Huntington had given more than twice his initial pledge. King Alfonso of Spain presented a silver-gilt sanctuary lamp, borne by cherubs, the artist Joaquín Sorolla donated a painting, and many nonCatholic New Yorkers supported the effort, including Mrs. Frederick Vanderbilt and J. Pierpont Morgan.23 When New York State ran its census “on the fives” in 1915, all the new apartment buildings in the neighborhood were fully tenanted except the Vauxhall, which had recently opened and as yet had only twenty-five

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families. Strathcona Construction Company had bought the parcel from Adolph Bendheim in 1913 and hired George and Edward Blum to design an eleven-story apartment house that included four- to seven-room suites with one or two bathrooms, three in the largest apartments. The Arts and Crafts façade, with its faience tiles, decorative brickwork, and ornamental balconies, was a contrast to the neighboring Rhinecleff Court, but not an anomaly to the streetscape. Because the architects filling the Audubon Park footprint all used Beaux-Arts ideals in their designs and were working simultaneously, they had a unique opportunity to build a cohesive streetscape comprising buildings with similar proportions, heights, and materials, featuring elaborate cornices, window surrounds, keystones, and pinnacles. All the buildings followed a tripartite format based on the Greco-Roman column: a shaft of brick stories rising from a stone base, often rusticated, with a cornice or decorative roofline serving as the capital. The Record and Guide praised the neighborhood as “one of the most inviting centers on Washington Heights.” Even the architecturally uninitiated could have felt the stylistic harmony resulting from individual building design blended with streetscape planning.24 Enhancing the whole was Trinity Cemetery, its forest trees providing a backdrop for the suddenly emerged cityscape. Sitting in the midst of it was the third building to house the Church of the Intercession’s congregation. Milo Gates had spent his first two years as Intercession’s rector building the congregation and negotiating with the Trinity Corporation, which was determined to build the chapel in the cemetery grounds envisioned in James Renwick’s 1843 plans. In June 1907, Intercession’s vestry, acknowledging that it needed more space for its growing congregation but had too many debts to build a new church, deeded all of its property to the Trinity Corporation, which would assume its debts, oversee its governance, and build a new church edifice in the cemetery. As a satellite of Trinity, the Chapel of the Intercession would have a new church building and Trinity would finally have its funeral chapel in the cemetery.25 On Thursday, October 24, 1912, while three thousand spectators lined Broadway, trumpeters and a vested choir led a liturgical procession from the old church building on 158th Street to a platform erected inside Trinity Cemetery at the corner of Broadway and 155th Street. Trinity’s rector, William T. Manning, conducted a cornerstone laying service, with vicar Milo Gates, no longer carrying the title of rector, assisting. Among the honored guests were Eliza Audubon, Dr. and Mrs. Louis Rodenstein, and Pell Foster, who had witnessed the 1873 cornerstone laying. Gates would collaborate closely with Bertram G. Goodhue of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson on

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the design and execution of the Gothic church with its vicarage, parish hall, and cloister, an unusual addition for a New York City church. The completed “chapel” was larger and grander than its parent church. As soon as the congregation moved to its new building in May 1915, Adolph Lewisohn bought and demolished Rembrandt Lockwood’s 1873 structure, replacing it with another row of taxpayers.26

20

When the Bloom Faded

By 1915, the Audubon Park name had fallen out of common usage among the new residents in the neighborhood, who were far more likely to identify their homes as “the Grinnell” or “the Riviera” or perhaps “Seven-eightyeight Riverside” or “Six-oh-one 156th Street.” The same was true of Carmansville. With each new apartment building in the old village’s footprint, the name receded further from memory. “Time was when Yorkville almost rivaled Harlem in importance,” wrote the Herald in 1910, “and when Carmansville, Bloomingdale, Chelsea, Manhattanville, and other places had distinct individualities of their own and a large degree of local pride. They are now all swallowed up in New York, but their memory and their names ought to be preserved.”1 Such was population growth in the seven years after George Bird and Elizabeth Grinnell left Audubon Park that the 1915 New York State enumerator found 654 people living at the Riviera, the building that had replaced the Hemlocks. Ninety-two families lived next door in the Grinnells’s eighty-one apartments, suggesting a sharing model that expanded in the early 1930s when families joined resources to survive the Great Depression. At the Grinnell, as in the other nine apartment buildings in the neighborhood, many first-generation Americans were family heads, mostly German and Austrian, though with a sprinkling of English, Russian, and French. Also representative of neighborhood demographics, the sixtytwo servants living at the Grinnell represented a wide range of nationalities: German, English, Irish, Norwegian, Austrian, and Bermudan; ten of them

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were among the building’s first black residents. Occupations throughout the ten neighborhood apartment buildings ranged from sales and importing to bankers and brokers to doctors and lawyers. Most of the adult women listed their occupations as “housework” or “no occupation,” though a few were stenographers, teachers, or social workers.2 Exceptions to the common occupations at the Grinnell included icecream journal editor Thomas Cutler, Rear Admiral Amway Arnold, composer and piano manufacturer Ben Janssen, and theatrical agent Harry Gillespie. Gillespie’s wife, Christie McDonald, an operetta diva, had originated the lead role in Victor Herbert’s “Sweethearts.” At the Goya, Henry Mills Alden was editor of Harper’s magazine and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Art dealer Maurice de Brozik, publisher of automobile journals Howard Spohn, and actor Herbert Delmore lived at the Riviera. So did Walter Stabler, who had forsaken vertical living on 158th Street—selling Number 648 to Fanny Dyke—for horizontal apartment living. German-born artist Lambert Guenther, who produced drawings of theatrical productions for the Tribune, lived at Hispania Hall, as did costumer Gertrude Engel and her daughter Iphigenia, “Iffy,” an actress who twenty years later became Gloria Swanson’s private secretary. “A mysterious, dramatically masculine-looking woman with short-cropped blond hair,” she would escort a “handful of inventors” out of Fascist Europe in the late 1930s to work for Swanson’s technology company, Multiprises, Inc.3 Many renters living on 156th and 157th streets worked in the clothing industry. Of the thirteen family heads at the Cortez, eight worked in the garment industry, as did several adult sons. Earlier immigrant populations had also worked as garment workers, but these men were buyers, sellers, and manufacturers of woolens, cloaks, men’s suits, lace and linens, and, in one instance, silk petticoats. Their wives usually remained at home, and, in contrast to earlier immigrant generations, their children went to school rather than to work in sweatshops. Little had changed on 158th Street between the 1910 Federal Census and the 1915 New York State Census except that Louise Chaddom in Number 644 and Josephine Hein in Number 634 were running boardinghouses. Among Chaddom’s lodgers was actor Bennett Kilpack, later famous for the long-running “Tracer of Lost Persons” radio show.4 Although the newly planted London plane trees in the oval park at the foot of 156th Street were a meager substitute for Audubon Park’s stately oaks, elms, and hemlocks, the small greenspace would, in time, become a treasured feature of the neighborhood. A 1910 architectural rendering for 788 Riverside Drive showed a sculpted fountain in the octagonal basin at

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Riverside Drive at 155th Street, Showing the Oval Park and Fountain with the Audubon Homestead’s Mansard Roof Visible, Dated 1925, but Possibly Earlier (New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dd-52c1-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)

its southern end. In 1913, model Audrey Munson told a reporter for the New York Sun that she had posed for the semi-nude mermaid in Allen George Newman’s statue “Music of the Water,” which would be installed there. If it ever existed on the site—photographic evidence is contradictory—it was only briefly.5 The neighborhood’s apartment dwellers may have forsaken the Audubon Park name, but it was not entirely extinct. The homeowners on 158th Street used the name as a byword for improvements that would raise their property values, while the Bechelli, Stella, McGrath, and McCulloch families living in the old Audubon houses used it as an address—the only one they had, since no city streets ran through their isolated neighborhood. In 1915, Audubon Park had shrunk to five houses. Agnes Miller still lived in the old Post house with her daughter, Celice, a housekeeper, and a gardener; Italian construction laborers and their families lived in the houses John and Victor Audubon had built for their families; and the large McGrath family rented the Audubon homestead from William Kramer’s heirs. In size and family relationships, the twenty-three members of the McGrath household resembled the 1840s Audubons. Heading the family

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was sixty-five-year-old Patrick McGrath, a blasting foreman; he and his sixty-year-old wife, Margaret, had both emigrated from Ireland when they were teenagers. Five of their adult children lived in the house with them: James, a brakeman on the New York Central Railroad, and his wife, Rose, with their seven children; Daniel, a policeman; William, a tinsmith and roofer, with his wife, Catherine, and her brother; and Helen, her husband, Charles McCulloch, and their three children. Completing the household was another granddaughter, Margaret Boger. In 1927, James McGrath earned national fame when a Time magazine reporter wrote about his discovery of bird paintings beneath “the dirty old wall paper” in his kitchen on the first floor of the homestead, the room that Audubon had used as a studio and in which he died. McGrath had left the birds on the walls for years, but eventually “tired of them” and painted over the drawings with “a can of good lead paint.” As he remarked to the reporter, “Those birds have flown away for good, I guess.”6 Preservationists had begun raising concerns about the Audubon homestead’s future as soon as Riverside Drive construction began. Most vocal among them was 158th Street’s Reginald Pelham Bolton, an amateur archeologist and historian as well as a member of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society (ASHPS), New York State’s first preservation lobby. He was also an active member of the Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association and had a financial incentive to ensure that land adjacent to his 158th Street home remained as appealing and valuable as possible. One obstacle was Riverside Drive. City planners had realized from the start that its path across the park was illogical, and many proposed a new viaduct up the river, west of the Audubon homestead, to fix it. The inherent problem with a second viaduct was that it would trap the house between two roadways. Addressing Riverside Drive’s route and preserving the house did not seem compatible.7 Looking for a solution, in 1905 Bolton drew plans for a new Audubon Park, a public parkland incorporating the homestead, John’s house, and the Knapp house in a woodland setting that included an aviary, an “Audubon aquatic bird lake,” and walking paths—with a reconfigured Riverside Drive passing to the east. Bolton took his idea to ASHPS but gained little traction there. Next, he tried the Taxpayers’ Association, which adopted the plan as one of its priorities, along with removing overhead wires on Broadway, installing escalators at the 168th and 181st Street subway stations, and instituting “third rail” express subway service from 96th to 137th Street. While Bolton focused on the historical and aesthetic reasons for the new Audubon Park, his 158th Street neighbor Benjamin Blauvelt, secretary

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of the Taxpayers’ Association, emphasized the economic feasibility of converting the land to a park; the safety benefit of creating a plaza at Riverside Drive and 158th Street; the societal benefit of adding parkland where none existed; and the fiscal benefit of increased tax revenues once Bolton’s Audubon Park raised neighboring property values.8 Borough president John Ahearn gave Bolton hope when he commissioned plans for creating new parkland west of Riverside Drive as far north as Fort Washington Park. A viaduct would carry a new Riverside Drive along the eastern side of the railroad tracks from 155th Street to Spuyten Duyvil Creek and across a proposed Hudson Memorial Bridge to Riverdale in the Bronx. Expecting that Ahearn’s plan would bear fruit, Bolton organized his neighbors into a cooperative venture to create a community garden on the parcel stretching behind their houses on 158th Street, a first phase of his new Audubon Park. The Twellane Company, as the four shareholders called themselves, bought the parcel from Martha and August Cordes for $7,500, divided it with wire fences, and then “each owner set to work to cultivate the allotted space to best advantage.” That plan faltered because “tastes differed very widely and the general results was an appearance of confusion,” so when one of the members sold his house and another died, Bolton bought all of the shares and took control of the project.9 In July 1908, while the Grinnells were still living at the Hemlocks, Bolton published an illustrated article in the Record and Guide that supported Ahearn’s plan. Excoriating Riverside Drive’s “curious route” and its retaining wall, which had “very greatly injured the once charming residential properties immediately below,” he laid blame squarely on “certain property owner’s interests” and, leaving no doubt whom he meant, named the Riverside Extension Association’s lawyer, John C. Shaw, as the route’s author. Apparently reconciled to a viaduct, Bolton focused on the “handsome stone archway” that would cross 158th Street. Ahearn’s plan died after the Panic of 1907 reduced the city’s revenues and the Board of Estimate and Apportionment filed suit to prevent him from soliciting bids. The havoc the Grinnells had created by manipulating Riverside Drive’s path was becoming clearer by the day.10 In 1913, New York City parks commissioner Charles Stover presented Bolton with a quandary. Stover—a mostly forgotten public servant, who “spent his time and money providing playgrounds, gardens, housing, and other services for poor immigrant children and their families”—proposed moving the Audubon homestead to Fort Washington Park, where it could be a nature center, headquarters for the Audubon Society, or a combination. While the plan would preserve the house, it would remove a key element of Bolton’s Audubon Park scheme. When the National Association of

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Reginald Pelham Bolton’s Plan for a Reimagined Audubon Park, 1905 (New York Public Library Manuscripts Division)

Audubon Societies declined to help with funding—much as it would have liked to preserve Audubon’s home, its mission was saving birds—Stover’s plan faltered. As the situation grew more dire, the New-York Historical Society, foreseeing the demise of the Audubon homestead, commissioned a plaque to commemorate it.11

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Commissioner Stover’s interest may have been the catalyst for Manhattan borough president George McAneny to revisit the viaduct scheme. Finding the 1907 plan neither “adequate nor economical,” he asked Arnold W. Brunner and Frederic Law Olmsted Jr. to submit a “simpler and less expensive” plan. In June 1913, they delivered a three-phase proposal with the first part focused on Riverside Drive between 155th and 158th streets. Acknowledging that moving Riverside Drive as far east as possible— Bolton’s preference—was the cheapest method because it relied on an existing embankment, Brunner and Olmsted then categorically dismissed that idea because it wouldn’t significantly improve the overall curve or allow for improving 158th Street’s grade. The Taxpayers’ Association argued that the street was unimportant for vehicular traffic, though welltraveled by pedestrians going to the docks where ferries took them to the Palisades Park across the river. The Dock Department disagreed; no other street connected Broadway with the river for a mile to the south or two and a half miles to the north.12 Bolton faced another obstacle when garages and sheds began popping up around the Audubon houses, so many that a sign identified the area as Garage Village. The Grinnells had built a brick garage to replace their stable, but taxes and upkeep on it and a lot at the corner of 158th Street had so eaten into their capital—George Bird calculated that he had personally lost more than $27,000—they sold both parcels to City Real Estate in 1919. That company quickly resold the stable lots to North River Buildings Corporation and the corner piece to Bentley Holding Corporation. North River’s president, Mose Goodman, hired George Fred Pelham to design a six-story apartment building with forty-eight suites ranging from three to five rooms. He named the building the Cragmoor Dwellings and liked it so much he moved in himself. Its Arts and Crafts façade was far simpler than the Beaux-Arts designs across Riverside Drive, but Pelham echoed their tripartite format with a limestone sill course to divide the first floor from the brick stories above and a bell-shaped parapet providing a capital. A basement more than thirty feet deep raised the building’s entry to street level. The Cragmoor claimed pride of place as the first apartment house on the western side of Riverside Drive between 72nd and 158th streets. It also obliterated river views for many Grinnell and Riviera residents—just as their buildings had blocked them for apartment dwellers on 157th Street and theirs, in turn, had blocked them for the Audubon Park Apartments.13 Alarmed at the possibility of additional buildings lining the western side of Riverside Drive, the Washington Heights Taxpayers’ published a new plan in 1920, likely from Bolton’s pen. Dismissing most of the proposed

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(Author’s collection)

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“Garage Village” on the Northwestern Side of Riverside Drive at Approximately 157th Street, circa 1918 (Author’s collection)

remediations, the Taxpayers’ Association endorsed George C. Wheeler’s idea for a tunnel beneath Huntington’s museums that would route traffic away from the sharp turn at 158th Street. Drivers missed that corner so frequently, any new “traffic sign in the centre of the platform [was] invariably run down and broken after a few days.” Phrasing the problem in community terms, the Taxpayers’ Association feared the Cragmoor would lower property values and reduce tax revenues for the entire neighborhood. More to the point, they favored a viaduct of sufficient height that one part of 158th Street could pass beneath it and another rise to its level. The Board of Estimate debated a year before rejecting the Brunner and Olmsted plan in June 1921. Six months later a newly elected borough president revived the idea.14 Julius Miller, whose legacy would be the West Side Elevated Highway from 72nd Street to the top of the island, thought bigger than a viaduct at 155th Street. He wanted to open northern Manhattan’s river front for real estate development, increase the city’s housing stock, and provide access to a proposed bridge spanning the Hudson between 178th Street and Fort Lee, New Jersey. His expansive vision convinced the Board of Estimate to adopt the 155th Street viaduct in the spring of 1923. Construction began three years later. The western Riverside Drive was ready for traffic at the end of 1928. “The new structure is monumental in design,” reported the Times a few

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Riverside Drive West Construction, Looking South from 160th Street, Showing the Wheelock Mansion (left) in the Near-ground and the Audubon Houses and Cantilevered Viaduct Carrying Riverside Drive Past Trinity Cemetery in the Distance (left), 1927 (Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives)

days before the November dedication ceremony. “A series of arches extends for a quarter mile along the riverfront, supporting the main roadway, which is surmounted on either side by carved granite balustrades, on which are mounted ornamental lamp fixtures.” Unlike some earlier proposals, most of the arches were solid rather than open, creating a cavernous space for garages and storage beneath the roadway. Ominously, the Times noted that the wall facing the Audubon house was left plain, because the deep foundations of apartment houses would “ultimately screen the concrete walls on this side of the viaduct.” On November 27, with the George Washington Bridge’s eastern tower as a backdrop, Borough president Miller, Mayor James (Jimmy) Walker, and other city officials gathered at Riverside Drive and 155th Street, where Miss Civic Pride of Washington Heights, fourteenyear-old Louise Marra, cut the ribbon allowing a line of cars to drive up the new Riverside Drive West.15

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The Audubon Houses Submerged Between Riverside Drive and Riverside Drive West, Wheelock Mansion at 158th Street, and George Washington Bridge Under Construction, 1928 (Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives)

A new Riverside Drive was not Bolton’s only headache in 1922. That same year, a brick façade rose above the retaining wall at the corner of Riverside Drive and 158th Street. What first appeared to be a large villa was in fact two houses that Fred W. Moore and Frank L. Landsiedel had designed for Nathan Berler and Charles Levy. Levy had filed the plans with the Department of Buildings in June 1920, even though Berler didn’t buy the land until May 1921. An Austrian immigrant and clothing store operator, Berler may have delayed because he first formed Nasarolu, the realty and construction company that financed the houses. Berler, his wife, Sadie, and their children, Robert and Lucille, all contributed letters to the acronym. The façade fronting Riverside Drive was perfectly symmetrical, with three center windows split between the two houses. On either end was a solarium topped with a balcony attached to the master bedroom. A green-tiled roof added a Mediterranean flavor.16 Two years later, the Times reported that Berler saw a “demand and a good market” for houses like his. He had moved into 809—Levy took 811—and he was planning to build several more houses on property he

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owned in Inwood. Although Berler promoted the houses as a novelty, other than placing the kitchen on the first floor, he had built reimagined row houses with social, sleeping, and service areas articulated vertically rather than horizontally. Anyone looking for an earlier example could walk around the corner to where the Soulard-Miller houses had stood for nearly seventyfive years. They wouldn’t stand much longer, though. In December 1923, the Times announced that Mose Goodman was developing that plot with an apartment house.17 The developer was actually Nathan Berler, now president of the Enesbe Realty Corporation. Putting aside his earlier idea of double houses, he commissioned George Fred Pelham to design a six-story apartment house for the parcel, his fourth in the Audubon Park footprint. Tapestry brick, roughly textured and subtly variegated; a green-tile roof; and the arched entry and windows all complemented the two adjacent houses. The building’s fifty-two units included modern conveniences such as radio service, moth-proof cedar closets, and kitchens with breakfast alcoves. It also had a

807 Riverside Drive and a Portion of 809 Riverside, circa 1925 (Wurts Bros. / Museum of the City of New York. X2010.7.2.17035)

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ballroom “with 1,200 square feet of dancing floor,” decorated in Louis XVI style. The spring the building opened, the Berlers inaugurated the ballroom with “a vocal and instrumental concert followed by a formal dinner and dance.”18 Then in 1926, Harris Ratner, president of the Dark Hill Construction Company, continued filling Riverside Drive’s western edge when he built a six-story Arts and Crafts apartment building west of the Cragmoor. Architect Sidney H. Kitzler grouped ninety apartments of three to six rooms around a large, landscaped entry courtyard, separated from the street by an iron fence and elaborate gateway. Fully utilizing the space below the Drive’s retaining wall, the building sat atop a large garage. With Ratner’s new apartment building at the edge of their property, Frank Stone’s heirs signed over Victor’s former home to the Brandt Brothers Building Corporation in 1927. Albert E. Schaefer of Schaefer & Rutkins designed two buildings for the space, one facing east to the old Riverside Drive and the other west to the new. The Brandts submitted the designs to the Department of Buildings in 1928, but delayed construction, perhaps because of borough president Miller’s continued interest in preserving the Audubon homestead. He saw the property as a link between the Riverside and Fort Washington parks. The Women’s League for the Protection of Riverside Park agreed and, on the seventy-eighth commemoration of Audubon’s death in January 1929, called for “the preservation of the old homestead in a setting harmonizing with other landscaped spaces along the Hudson River.”19 New York City’s commissioner of parks Walter R. Herrick inspected the property and rejected it as parkland. “This depression, forty feet or more below surrounding levels, is not a valley or ravine,” he said in a public meeting. “It is a hole, and it would not lend itself readily to development for park purposes.” If the city wanted to spend the $3 million it would cost to purchase and develop the property, it could better spend it on sites it already owned. Grasping at straws, Bolton claimed the site could be “one of the most beautiful sunken gardens in the world.” When that argument failed, he raised the specter of “garages, gas tanks and other unsightly commercial enterprises” invading the area. That argument failed, too. The Brandt Brothers had already filed plans for apartment houses, and the other landowner, Charles Adams, said he intended doing the same. A few days later, agreeing that the expense did not justify the outcome, the Board of Estimate soundly rejected the Audubon Park project.20 With any possibility of preserving the house in its original location dead, Bolton finally focused on moving it to the land the city had promised at

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161st Street. In October 1931, the Times reported that the Audubon house would be saved from demolition and preserved as a museum, if the Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association could raise $25,000 to move it up Riverside Drive. The house would need extensive renovation, though. Clapboards were loose, it hadn’t been painted in years, and the foundation was crumbling. Mid-month, the Taxpayers’ Association received $500 from the NewYork Historical Society. With a November 24 deadline looming and the committee far from its goal, George DuPont Pratt, president of the American Forestry Association and former New York State conservation commissioner, pledged $1,000 if the committee could raise $6,000 on its own. A few days later, Bolton announced that workmen were lifting the house to the top of the viaduct and rolling it to its new home. His announcement was premature. Until the deal closed at the end of the month, the Kramer estate’s trustee, Chase National Bank, controlled the property. Annoyed by Bolton’s grandstanding, the construction company’s president Henry Brandt threatened to withdraw the agreement his son Emanuel had made with the Taxpayers’ Association. Then, the new borough president, Samuel Levy, intervened and brought the Brandts, the Taxpayers’ Association, the National Association of Audubon Societies, and the American Museum of Natural History together to attempt a deal.21 Exactly what happened in those negotiations is not clear, but afterward, Bolton was sidelined. He told the press that the Brandts had asked for a new $50,000 guarantee that the Taxpayers’ Association could move the house by December 10, and they had not raised nearly that amount. Audubon’s home would be demolished, and he couldn’t do anything to prevent it. The Taxpayers’ Association would refund the several thousand dollars they had collected and disband the special committee dedicated to saving the house. At the end of the month, the Times printed an obituary for the Audubon homestead.22 Today even the last remnant of Audubon Park, as it was, is about to give way before the regime of masonry and asphalt. In place of the robins and the catbirds, the veeries and the vireos, that once chattered and caroled the thickets, the bleat of the pneumatic drill and the whine of the riveting hammer will fill the air. Instead of the rugged pines that formerly towered close to the river, machine-turned steel girders will shoot skyward in even more perfect perpendiculars, and eventually a monolith of brick and stone, mortar and concrete, will cover the spot where the author of “The Birds of America” passed

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his days close to nature in comparative peace after an earlier life of heart-breaking struggle.23 On December 1, the Brandt Brothers obtained title to the property. The Kramer family had owned it for forty-four years, much longer than Lucy Audubon’s twenty-three years or the Benedict family’s quarter-century, and ironically, not a single member of the family had ever lived there. Emanuel Brandt told the press that workmen would begin dismantling the house. Bolton had lost his decades-long battle, or so he thought. Five days later, Bronx ornithologist Harold Decker announced that the Audubon house would be “saved for posterity after having been abandoned to the wreckers.” In what appears to have been an end run around Bolton, Decker had struck a deal with the borough president, superintendent of buildings, and Park Commissioner Herrick, and made himself the hero of the day. The wreckers had dismantled Jesse Benedict’s Mansard roof, bay windows, and front porch, but that didn’t matter, since Decker’s plan was to remove them when restoring the house to its original state. By December 9, the entire house was on its new site at 161st Street and ready for rebuilding and renovation.24 At the beginning of January 1932, the Times announced that Decker had incorporated “Audubon Home, Inc.” to raise $25,000 for rebuilding the Audubon homestead, “restored in every detail.” The board of directors was heavily weighted to professional ornithologists and American Museum of Natural History associates. Ornithologist Frank R. Oastler, Intercession’s vicar, Milo Gates, James L. Clark, an accomplished animal sculptor, taxidermist, and big game hunter, and Decker were the executive committee working with directors James P. Chapin, Harmsted S. Chubb, George H. Sherwood, George F. Kunz, and Samuel Verplanck Hoffman—but not Bolton. Decker began a national campaign targeting “Audubon Societies, Bird Clubs, Nature Groups, and interested individuals,” offering $2 Associate, $5 Annual, and $100 life memberships. Over the next months, additional details and requests for donations appeared in the Auk, a regular publication by the American Ornithological Union (Society today), and Bird-Lore, the official magazine of the National Association of Audubon Societies. In both, Decker emphasized his role in saving the house. By February, he reported that “the foundation of original brick and stone [was] well advanced, following strictly original lines.” When rebuilt to its original specifications, enhanced with Audubon furniture and memorabilia, the “fire-, damp- and burglar-proof” museum and educational center would promote “knowledge of Audubon and conservation.”25

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After an initial splash of publicity, Decker’s project disappeared from the press, and, eventually, the house disappeared from the landscape, leaving no trace. The most likely cause was lack of funding. As the Great Depression deepened in 1932, Audubon Society members around the country, who might otherwise have been the project’s biggest supporters with $2 subscriptions, had far greater worries than saving Audubon’s home. Although Decker wrote in his appeals that the restoration would “help a considerable group of workmen in these days of unemployment,” it was several years too early to be a Works Progress Administration project. Eventually, the dismantled house probably succumbed to vandals, souvenir seekers, and the elements, or perhaps some of it found its way into Hooverville shanties. The site became a public playground.26 The Brandt Brothers’s new building, 765 Riverside Drive, opened in November 1932. Schaefer and his associate, Harry B. Rutkins, had designed the six-story building’s façade to fit into the original Riverside Drive’s curving path, with a crenellated roof line and extended piers giving it the appearance of a fortress guarding the entrance to Riverside Drive West. More than 1,600 tons of “steel piles running forty-five feet below the curb level and then forty feet into the ground to bedrock” supported the building, which had space underneath for a double-decker garage. A Times article, noting that the only new apartment house to open on Riverside Drive that fall had “usurped” a city landmark’s home, reported that its 233 apartments, ranging from three to five rooms, were renting quickly. A classified ad in the same edition, buried among scores of others for apartment rentals, promoted the building’s “unusual dining alcoves, cross ventilation, stall shower, recessed radiation, [and] beautiful layouts.”27 Among the garages and sheds that covered the northwest corner of the Audubon Park footprint, John Woodhouse Audubon’s house still sat, barely noticed, out of the path of immediate apartment house construction. With no neighborhood activism to save it, the owners would unceremoniously demolish it a few years later to clear space for several more rows of garages.

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Postscript

By the time 765 Riverside Drive opened its doors to tenants in November 1932, “Audubon Park” had long since passed from common usage as the name for the neighborhood stretching around it. With the visual reminder of Audubon’s home gone, the Audubon Park name would lie dormant for the next seven decades, an occasional footnote to Audubon biographies, New York City histories, and the occasional newspaper article. What did linger was a vague awareness of the neighborhood’s Audubon connection, which resonated through the following years, in no small part because the name that once sold subscriptions to the Birds of America now hawked batteries, wine, kitchen appliances, and tobacco; the name graced a pharmacy, a garage, a theater, a hand laundry, and a telephone exchange servicing northern Manhattan. More fittingly, it was inscribed on Audubon Avenue and the Audubon monument.1 A subtler reminder of early days was an urban footprint as distinct and visually separate from surrounding Washington Heights as suburban Audubon Park had once been from Carmansville. The new apartment houses along Riverside Drive’s northwestern side robbed many earlier tenants of their river views, but they also enfolded the neighborhood into an inwardlooking enclave that focused on the Drive, its broad and winding expanse disrupting any sense of Manhattan’s grid that the numbered streets attempted to impose. In coming decades, residents often remarked on the peculiarity of two Riverside Drives running between 155th and 162nd

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streets. Although the connection between that oddity and nineteenthcentury Audubon Park had long since dimmed, even first-time visitors sensed the echo of that suburban enclave’s footprint. Here, old natural boundaries conspired with new street patterns and street walls to define a sense of place rooted in that earlier neighborhood. West of the viaduct, beyond the railroad tracks that lay some forty feet below, the Hudson River was an ancient border flowing back in time to the centuries when the Lenape people inhabited Manahatta. On the neighborhood’s southern side, along the steep, little trafficked 155th Street—a favorite play spot for local children in warm months and a fine sled run in winter—Huntington’s museum complex (named Audubon Terrace soon after the Second World War) and 780 Riverside Drive presented a solid street wall to passing traffic. On the opposite side, Trinity Cemetery’s crypts and stone memorials set into its wooded, rocky terrain provided a centuries-old boundary, part natural, part manmade. Broadway, which had separated Carmansville’s grid-oriented, working-class citizenry from Audubon Park’s genteel suburbanites, even when Eleventh Avenue was nothing more than two parallel lines on a map, continued to isolate communities on its opposite sides. As Robert W. Snyder wrote in Crossing Broadway, his definitive history of Washington Heights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, “Depending on the era, Broadway has been a boundary between white and black, Irish and Jewish, affluent and poor, Dominican-born and American-born.”2 Once complete, Riverside Drive West sent traffic straight up and down the viaduct, bypassing the neighborhood between 155th and 158th streets and creating the ambience of a cul de sac focused on the landscaped oval park in the center of the Drive. From its earliest days, “the oval” was the site for neighborhood gatherings on Armistice Day, July Fourth, and, in the late 1930s, “Cuba Week.” Although the neighborhood radiating from Riverside Drive nurtured a community rooted in a strong sense of place, it was not immune to events beyond its narrow borders. Residents braved the Great Depression, World War II, the postwar 1950s, white flight in the 1960s and ’70s, and the downward spiral of urban unrest that afflicted most cities in the United States during the last decades of the twentieth century. As the neighborhood diversified beyond its Eurocentric population over the decades, waves of newcomers came with their rich traditions, German and middle-European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in the late 1930s, then Cubans and Puerto Ricans, and, when building owners finally began racial integration in the 1960s, African Americans and Dominicans. By the end of the twentieth century, the community reflected the “gorgeous mosaic of

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156th Street Between Broadway and Riverside Drive as Construction Began on the Hispanic Society’s North Building, July 1926 (Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, New York)

race and religious faith, of national origin and sexual orientation” that Mayor David Dinkins, one of its native sons, celebrated in his 1990 Inaugural Address.3 Like people in any neighborhood, some passed through quickly and others put down deep roots that would span generations. Among the latter was Geraldine Loretto Moore, who arrived at the Grinnell in 1937, when she was seventeen, and was living in the same apartment there when she died in 2004, a few months before her eighty-fifth birthday. Moore’s grandmother, Elizabeth Griffin, had moved into the Grinnell in the 1930s with three of her eleven children. When she died in July 1937, Geraldine and her mother filled the vacancy she left in the apartment. In those days, the staff still put up awnings in early May and took them down in September. Uniformed, white-gloved attendants supplied round-the-clock elevator service, with one car exclusively for tenants and the other for deliveries and servants, and dumbwaiters took soiled clothing to the basement laundry and returned clean clothes to their owners. Each lobby had a porters’ station with intrabuilding switchboards, and when the postman delivered mail

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The Hispanic Society’s North Building Under Construction; It Replaced the 156th Street Entrance, October 1926 (Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, New York)

(twice a day), the porters sorted and delivered it to each apartment, in a basket if tenants provided one.4 The New York legislature abolished its state census in 1931, so 1925 was the last year for an enumeration “on the fives,” but major shifts in household size and composition between the 1930 and 1940 Federal censuses confirm that the number of people living in any one apartment had increased along with the number of borders, lodgers, unrelated families, and multiple generations living in one unit. The only demographic category that fell was the number of live-in servants, a change that freed the former maid’s room for a family member or lodger. On 158th Street, ten of the twelve houses were owner-occupied in 1930, with six of them including lodgers, boarders, or roomers. By 1940, only six were owner-occupied, and the number of lodgers, boarders, and roomers had jumped from twentyeight to fifty-one. The enumerator categorized five of the buildings as rooming houses and recorded no live-in servants.5 One column of the 1940 Federal Census noted where each person had been living in 1935 and recorded an individual’s previous city, state, and

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country when applicable. These responses provide an indication of the number of German Jews who immigrated to Washington Heights after Kristallnacht in 1938. Stephen M. Lowenstein calculated in Frankfurt on the Hudson that “some 157,000 refugees (just under half of them German Jews) arrived in the United States [in those years] compared to a total of only about thirty-thousand refugees in the five preceding years of Nazi rule.” Their presence in the buildings adjacent to Broadway and 158th Street was so prevalent in the late 1930s and early ’40s, the area earned the title “the Fourth Reich.”6 More than five hundred individuals immigrating from German-speaking countries after 1935 lived in the blocks bound by Broadway, Amsterdam Avenue, and 155th and 158th streets, and even larger numbers lived north of 159th Street along Fort Washington Avenue and on the cross streets stretching between Broadway and Riverside Drive. But very few people fitting that demographic lived in the enclave between 155th and 158th streets, west of Broadway, the old Audubon Park footprint. The large apartments were readily adaptable for extended or unrelated families, but they were also more expensive than apartments to the east and north. Several dozen newly arrived Lehmanns, Levys, Rosenthals, Lipschutzes, and Goldschmidts from Frankfurt, Cologne, Berlin, and Vienna lived in the neighborhood’s older buildings, but excepting two German and Austrian lodgers at 799, all of the European tenants in the newer apartment buildings had arrived before 1935. The lack of new tenants listing Germany, Austria, or other mid-European countries as their origin of birth at 780 Riverside Drive may have been because the syndicate of residents who had bought the building in 1920 restricted it to “discriminating tenants,” established code signaling a building was closed to Jews.7 Another noticeable change in the neighborhood reflected a citywide trend toward smaller apartments with “modern” amenities. Looking for a competitive edge, owners began subdividing large apartments and modernizing them with newly designed, refitted kitchens and bathrooms as well as reorganized layouts that eliminated long halls in favor of an off-thefoyer room articulation. The largest-scale remodeling took place at the Riviera, where some long-established residents had vacated their apartments because they needed to curtail expenses and the new buildings across the Drive “obstructed the view of the Hudson River which had hitherto been a good renting feature.” In response, managing agent Wood, Dolson redesigned two of the Riviera’s five wings for the owner Met Life, converting fifty-two seven-to-nine-room suites into ninety-two suites ranging from two to six rooms. Even the largest apartments in the new configuration had

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fewer rooms than previous units, but as the Times noted, improved rent rolls demonstrated how an owner could “transform obsolete $115 per month quarters into rentable facilities” with a relatively small outlay. Going forward, those two wings produced 80 percent as much revenue as the remainder of the building, even though they contained only 40 percent of the space.8 Within a year, the Brooklyn Savings Bank, which owned 788 Riverside Drive, and the 780 Syndicate altered some floors in their buildings, generating an assortment of large and small units. None of the owners or their agents registered any concern about architectural integrity, historical preservation, or retaining features that had been selling points when the BeauxArts apartment houses were new. Tastes had changed, and the owners reorganized floor plans, painted fine paneling, replaced cabinetry, and discarded old plumbing fixtures to attract new tenants. At the Grinnell, however, apartments remained undivided. Rentals there remained strong through the depressed 1930s and into the early 1940s when Marcelino Manuel da Graça (the evangelist Sweet Daddy Grace) bought it as trustee for the Church of the House of Prayer for All People. Decades later, people still remembered the chauffeur-driven limousine that heralded his arrival at the building, the liveried footman who placed a footstool at the sidewalk’s edge, and Daddy Grace himself, resplendently dressed, locks coiffed, and fingernails painted in his signature red, white, and blue, stepping down from his car and pausing to survey the neighborhood (and let the neighborhood return the favor) before entering his building. No doubt, Grinnell residents assumed that Daddy Grace would integrate their building, which he renamed “the Grace.” But despite being born in the Cape Verde Islands—by American reckoning, African— Grace allowed no blacks at the Grace, with one exception: actress, author, playwright Alice Childress. She and her daughter moved into the Grinnell in 1952 and would be the only persons of color living there until the early 1960s, when the first Dominican family arrived after Daddy Grace’s death.9 Integration, however, was not Grace’s goal with the Grinnell or with the El Dorado on Central Park West, another distinguished property in his portfolio. Rather, as his biographer Marie W. Dallam explained, his highprofile real estate holdings were an investment, a means for publicity, a hobby, and perhaps most importantly, “a point of pride for House of Prayer members nationwide,” who could say they were “part of a church that owned glamorous buildings.”10 A few months before Grace bought the Grinnell, the Federal Office of Price Administration had instituted rent controls to protect wartime workers from price gouging, a revival of earlier policies that would prove

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permanent, with some modifications over the decades. Initially, low inflation offset price caps, and modernizations such as automated elevators and lobby mailboxes reduced staffing needs, so landlords continued realizing enough profits to provide adequate maintenance and building services. When Peggy Gill Oakes and her family moved to 780 Riverside Drive in 1946, a doorman still operated the elevator and manned the building switchboard, but the postman delivered mail to individual mailboxes in the lobby, and the dumbwaiters had been converted into kitchen closets. By the early 1950s, when self-service elevators and a modernized telephone system eliminated the need for a doorman, the building’s name had long since fallen from use. “While I was living there I had no idea that it was called Vauxhall,” Peggy later wrote. “Should I have known, I would’ve had stationery embossed. It sounds so grand!”11 Decades later, Peggy Oakes recalled a neighborhood where girls rollerskated and boys played stickball and marbles. Single-proprietor shops lined Broadway. The grocer at the corner of 157th Street would total the bill by hand on a paper bag and send a deliveryman with the food “in a large wooden cart.” Mr. Dugan the dry cleaner would greet people by name, and, even though everyone dropped their clothes on one large pile, he always knew “whose clothes were whose.” The corner drugstore had a lending library, a “crotchety woman” ran the soda fountain, a Viennese bakery sold unique confections, and at the fish store “you could retrieve your fish swimming in a large tank.”12 On May 21, 1958, Peggy Gill’s father arrived home and “breathlessly announced that he had just seen Marilyn Monroe.” She had come uptown with her husband, Arthur Miller, for his induction into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Young Charles Neal Finley, who lived near Broadway, saw her too.13 My friend Bobby Rivera and I were playing ball on 155th street, Audubon Terrace. Suddenly, Bobby shouted out, “Hey, there’s Marilyn Monroe!” Miller and Monroe stood on the northwest corner of 155th street, awaiting a cab. While they waited, a man walked up to her with pen and paper, and she gave him an autograph. Bobby and I stood a few feet away from her, speechless! There were no reporters or bodyguards . . . just Miller and Monroe. It was a warm day, and she had a summer dress on, but there was no subway grate breeze to elevate that skirt as it did in “The Seven Year Itch.”14 In the 1950s, suburban life was already summoning urbanites like Benedict and Mary Attanasio, who had operated “Garage Village” for several decades and lived a few blocks north of it. Their son, Richard, played

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baseball in the park by the river and rode his bicycle around the neighborhood, but from an early age, he also helped his parents run the garages. His job was to “pump gas, change oil, sell anti-freeze and if possible rent [units] on a monthly basis.” On Sundays, he served as an altar boy at the Church of Our Lady on 156th Street. The Attanasios moved to New Jersey in 1951, preceding the demographic shift in northern Manhattan that racial integration and white flight would accelerate in coming years. Lacking the financial incentive to remain in place that working-class homeowners had when neighborhoods integrated in many cities across the country, renters in northern Manhattan instead moved into other neighborhoods, usually farther north and west on the island, or to the suburbs.15 Remembering that era in an oral history discussion that the Riverside Oval Association (ROA) produced at the Grinnell in 2008, Richard James told of his boyhood experience crossing Broadway to visit 800 Riverside Drive, where he hoped to enlist a young man to become “the lone white Boy Scout” in his troop. Richard’s family had moved to Washington Heights in 1945 from Buffalo, where both of his parents had “worked in a war production plant in Niagara Falls.” They lived in a five-story walk-up on 164th Street a few blocks north of the Grinnell and east of Broadway. Although Richard attended integrated schools throughout the primary and secondary grades, the “group of boys and girls that [he] grew up with didn’t have white friends that [they] visited with on Riverside Drive,” and when the end of the school day came at George Washington High School “the Jewish students went west, the Irish students went north, and the Black students went south.” His main experience crossing Broadway was delivering groceries for the A&P where he worked on Saturdays “from eight in the morning until the store closed at eight that night,” so coming to the Grinnell as a visitor was a daunting experience. “I came into the building and went up to the apartment, and I was just blown away,” he recalled. “I was going up to induce this guy to join our troop?”16 More than a decade later, when Elizabeth (Betsy) Currier came uptown with her husband and daughter to escape their cramped apartment in the East Village, she welcomed the racial diversity at 788 Riverside Drive. She also welcomed the $225 a month rent and the weekly view of the Palisades Park fireworks. Within a year of moving to the building, the Curriers took a lease on a larger apartment for only $175 a month (a rent regulation anomaly based on how many times an apartment changed hands). A halfcentury later and still in that second apartment, Betsy remembers when “everyone knew everyone” and “word-of-mouth recommendations” drew a host of creative people to the neighborhood.17

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Gwen Gilyard, who also lived at 788 Riverside Drive in the 1960s, had a different viewpoint. When she first moved there, her roommate advised her to be careful when she passed the Grinnell because “those white people just stare at you all the time from there.” Gwen assumed her friend was exaggerating but followed her advice. “When I would pass [there] going to the store I would go on the back [157th Street], or I would just walk a little fast. Because to be perfectly frank with you, people who were standing around, didn’t look friendly. The building looked very exclusive from the outside.”18 As Gwen would later learn, her first impression of the Grinnell was not entirely accurate. Around the time she made her observation, two residents there were helping form the Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association (RENA), which brought together tenant advocates across lower Washington Heights from predominately white Riverside Drive to Edgecombe Avenue, which was predominantly black and Latino. Their focus was tenants’ rights and equal housing opportunities. The City Planning Commission had moved in that same direction in 1961, when it established a Mitchell-Lama co-op where Garage Village had once engulfed John Audubon’s house. As conceived, the sixteen-story River Terrace Apartments would provide racially integrated, middle-income housing intended to influence the surrounding community.19 Another change in the 1960s wasn’t as hopeful. A new rent-stabilization measure capped potential revenue on old buildings in the neighborhood just as their fifty-year-old electrical systems, plumbing, and boilers began failing. When taxes and inflation increased in the following years, properties failed to generate enough income to pay expenses—a curse that had plagued both the Audubons and the Grinnells—and many owners responded with delayed maintenance, repairs, and upgrades, skimped on heat and hot water, and often left utility and tax bills unpaid. Eventually, some just walked away. Between 1974 and 1984 landlords abandoned 300,000 New York City units, including the eighty-three at the Grinnell.20 Even well-meaning landlords gave up. In 1974, writer John Foreman bought 602 157th Street for $190,000, enticed by the building’s architecture, its evocative “Hortense Arms” name, and a rent roll that “seemed huge in relation to the price of the building.” After just one year, he sold it “for a spectacular dollar loss.” In addition to rising costs, he found that his tenants were ingrained with the idea that they were in combat with the building owner. “Whenever the plaster cracked or one of the children broke a window,” they routinely called “the Buildings Department instead of the superintendent,” so minor repairs always included a fine and “overwhelming paperwork.”21

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A different kind of landlord came into focus after the murder of candystore owner Morris Goldstein. More than one hundred neighbors led by RENA and David Dinkins, a River Terrace resident (and future mayor), marched on the 30th Precinct Station in protest. Their goal was maintaining an integrated community and preventing “what was once a pleasant middle-class neighborhood from degenerating.” Hindering those efforts were landlords “trying to drive out white tenants because they could get more money from Negroes by ‘breaking down’ apartment houses”—that is, subdividing apartments to create more units, while charging black tenants a premium to live in the neighborhood. The practice was already entrenched in Harlem, where “African Americans paid high rents for second-rate housing because landlords could jack up their rents (and scrimp on maintenance), secure in the knowledge that black tenants had few alternatives.”22 William Nourse, a third-generation resident at 780 Riverside Drive, later recalled the box ball, sledding, and picnics, but also the years of neighborhood decline. By the late ’60s, the neighborhood became the target for both property and personal crime. Tires, then later, automobiles, were stolen on a regular basis (my family lost two cars, never to be seen again). Muggings became frequent and brazen. Especially in the winter, people were attacked coming home from the subway, in lobbies, and in elevators. A survey of the 96 apartments at 780 RSD found that 82 of them had suffered personal injury or loss. Groups of tenants organized and volunteered to act as lobby guards in the evenings. What was happening back then was a reflection of what was happening to New York City itself. The city degenerated from “Fun City” to risky and fun-less. But what seemed like the worst of times eventually generated its own virtue. Residents in the neighboring buildings on the Oval became closer and friendlier, maybe just out of the sheer necessity and the need for mutual protection. And from that came the organizations and neighborhood activities that are alive and well today.23 A different narrative was playing out around the corner in the twelve rowhouses John Leo had built on 158th Street in the 1890s. There, African American families were demonstrating that through home ownership, cooperation, and vigilance, they could improve a block as it integrated racially. During the Second World War, absentee owners there had continued the earlier trend of renting to multiple families and single-room

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occupants. By the 1940s, the once tranquil street dead-ending on the docks had become an entry ramp to the Henry Hudson Parkway, one of Robert Moses’s projects for moving vehicles quickly in and out of the city with little regard for the impact on neighborhoods. Besides severely disrupting 158th Street, the Henry Hudson Parkway consumed Riverside Drive north of 181st Street, except for a three-block stretch at the northern end of Fort Tryon Park. Although some black people rented floors and rooms on 158th Street, not until 1954, when Joseph and Lavonne Scruggs bought number 626, the eastern-most house in the row, did an African American family own and occupy a home on the block. More than a decade later, in 1967, Joseph Arthur Bailey moved his family into number 630, converting it from a boardinghouse back to a single-family home. The next year, Sherman Carter did the same with number 632. Decades later, Bailey’s daughter, Josette, remembered the long friendship and deep mutual respect between the two men. Both my dad and Sherman Carter went to Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, the first college founded for the freed negro by the Methodists. My dad was there with Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall. Mr. Carter was slightly younger. All were active in the Lincoln Alumni Association, and all the wives were active in the Lincolnettes. It was quite a mark of achievement, and everyone was very proud and loyal.24 Josette also remembered that her father and Sherman Carter maintained their properties carefully and reported any crime or suspicious activity to the police, encouraging their neighbors to do the same. “Both my dad and Mr. Carter were Southerners. My dad from Louisiana, and Mr. Carter from Virginia. Property ownership was, and is, very important to southern Blacks.”25 New York City property records reveal that in those days of redlining— government-sanctioned discrimination in lending that lasted for decades— African American families were able to buy homes on the block because the previous owners financed their mortgages. Kendrew (Kenneth) Bushelle, a naturalized American citizen from Barbados who owned an apartment building on West 154th Street, sold number 632 to Carter a few months after he had bought it in foreclosure. Bushelle then held Carter’s fifteen-year, 6.5 percent mortgage. The recorded paperwork for the Baileys suggests that they had a “rent-to-own” contract with Rita and Robert McClaren, who sold them number 630. They moved into their home in

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1967, but the McClarens did not transfer the property to them until 1974, seven years later. The deed lists the sales price as “Ten Dollars and other valuable considerations,” the latter likely being seven years of monthly payments. (During those same years, the Baileys were collecting mortgage payments from the new owner of their previous home on Weeks Avenue in the Bronx.) Absentee owners Blanche Forys and Edward J. Beck also financed Ruth Johnson’s purchase of number 634 in 1973, at 6 percent rather than that year’s national average of more than 7 percent. The next year, though, Marshall and Loretta Keeling secured a mortgage from Chemical Bank when they bought number 638.26 The Keelings moved their family into their new home, where Reginald and Ethelind Bolton had lived for decades, but Ruth Johnson continued renting around the corner at the Grinnell, where she lived with her daughter, Robin. As the Audubons had done more than a century earlier, she let her house for a steady revenue stream. Even so, the Johnsons were friends with the African American families on West 158th Street, joined them in social events, and were active members in the block association. In 1980, Sherman Carter followed Ruth Johnson’s lead and leveraged his investment in number 632 into buying number 636, which he divided into apartments. Although Johnson and Carter did not occupy their rental houses, they still could exert control on the block by carefully screening their tenants. By 1980, excepting one house still in the hands of an absentee landlord, African American families owned the eastern end of the block. In 1986, they had an opportunity to extend their ownership and control one house farther, when the city threatened to foreclose on number 640 for delinquent taxes, unpaid utilities, and building code violations. Joining forces and finances, the Carters and Ruth Johnson bought that house by assuming a $97,000 mortgage the owner had taken to forestall the city’s foreclosure, a price almost five times higher than any of the African American families on the block had paid for their homes. The terms in the new deed dictated that the Carters and Johnson must effect all repairs and obtain a new Certificate of Occupancy within two years, and either occupy the house or live within one block of it for three years—confirming the house’s state of disrepair as well as the city’s attempts to prevent speculators from buying into the block. Absentee landlords already owned the four houses west of 640, though, and continued dividing them until most were completely single-roomoccupancy rentals, a stark contrast to the well-maintained houses at the eastern end of the block. As the millennium and the row’s hundredth birthday approached, slum landlords let those four houses fall into complete

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disrepair and then abandoned them to vagrants. Eventually fires gutted both 646 and 648, which sat as charred shells until the second decade of the twenty-first century, when a heated real estate market stimulated renewed interest in the block and developers renovated both houses.27 In 1979, New York Times reporter Anna Quindlen contrasted the newly designated Audubon Terrace Historic District—encompassing all the buildings on Huntington’s institutional plaza—with its surroundings: “The neighborhood . . . is like a lot of other neighborhoods in New York City. Everyone talks about how it has changed, and is still changing. Everyone has a mugging story. Once the language of its streets was Yiddish; now it is Spanish. Lots of the people must concern themselves with jobs, crime and staying alive, and thus often forgo culture.” They also forewent history. With the neighborhood’s connection to John James Audubon a distant memory, many residents assumed the Audubon garage, drugstore, and dozen other businesses derived their names from the avenue, “not the ornithologist whose pleasant home stood on the banks of the Hudson River near the museum complex that [bore] his name.”28 A few years later, Quindlen joined the annual holiday party at 780 Riverside Drive, a symbol of determination in the midst of “a neighborhood that has decayed.” An evening with the residents inspired her to write, “What 780 Riverside Drive has that a lot of other buildings in the city do not have is a sense of neighborhood. After all, in a lot of other parts of this country and the world, 90 homes would be considered a small town. And, in some ways, that is what the building became the other night.”29 Neighbors might create their own sense of community, but they couldn’t prevent landlords from neglecting or abandoning their buildings. That’s what happened at the Grinnell. Struggling to fill vacant apartments, rental agents exercised less oversight, with varying results: a group of nuns leased one apartment while a neighboring group of women established a bordello. One Grinnell resident ran a day-care center while another was indicted for selling “massive amounts of heroin and cocaine.” Despite these horrific conditions, a core group of dedicated people remained at the Grinnell and took charge of their collective destiny, forming a Grinnell Tenants Association and enlisting newcomers in an ongoing effort to “save the Grinnell.”30 In the late ’70s, Grinnell residents—a multiracial group that included Richard James and Gwen Gilyard, who had moved into apartments there despite their earlier experiences and reservations—joined the city’s Tenants Interim Lease (TIL) program and assumed management of the building and its finances. Although the Grinnell was “a predominantly white

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community” when Richard James and his wife and young son moved there in 1972, he remembers it as having “a reputation as a kind of cultural rendezvous for Black artists and expatriates.” A list of tenants at the time of co-oping suggests that in the early ’70s, the building integrated further. By 1976, “when the City of New York placed the building ‘in rem’ because of the owner’s failure to pay back taxes, [it] had deteriorated to such an extent that it really became a matter of physical survival—life and death—for [tenants] who barely knew each other to arrive at a basic understanding as to what to do given the horrible living conditions.” Richard, who would be elected as the co-op’s first board president, remembers “racial tensions in the building as we moved to acquire ownership, but the racial conflict was centered around the idea of power and control rather than racial integration.” In 1982, the tenants bought the Grinnell from the city for $250,000 in back taxes and utilities. But they still had work to do, both in the building and in the community.31 The neighborhood’s nadir came in the late 1980s when the Dominican Jheri Curl gang set up camp in 614 157th Street, flaunting their drug dealing, terrorizing the community with sporadic gunfire, and eventually murdering a building resident who had assisted the police with information. Their arrests in October 1991 ended a “$5.2 million-a-year drug operation” and signaled a turning point. Within a few years, a reviving economy brought a new wave of residents. As longtime community activist Maria Luna told the Times in 1998, “Crime is down, parks and buildings are being renovated and this is probably one of the few places in Manhattan where you can rent a four-room apartment for less than $1,000.” Buyers came, too. In the three years before the millennium, more than a quarter of the Grinnell’s eighty-three units changed hands as original purchasers found buyers willing to gamble on spacious apartments in a beautiful building with a unique sense of place.32 The trend continued across the millennium with “price-numbed refugees” investing in Washington Heights, which they would not have considered a few years earlier. The lure, just as it had been when the Audubons came to Minnie’s Land, was affordable space. In 2004, the New York Post proclaimed that northern Manhattan had “Risen from the Depths,” attributing its falling crime rates to a combination of anti-narcotics programs, first-generation immigrants going to college and moving up the economic ladder, and an influx of new residents. Walter Delgado, president of the Audubon Partnership for Economic Development, dated the change to the city creating the Thirty-Third Precinct in 1994. That’s when he noticed that “banks stopped abandoning the area, chain stores started to show an

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interest in the neighborhood, and longtime residents began to feel comfortable investing their money in the area.”33 When the Audubons began carving Minnie’s Land out of a rocky, wooded hillside in 1841, they hardly expected they would set in motion the evolution that led to a twentieth-century cityscape. Their need was for adapting an affordable, conveniently located piece of property into a home. And so it was at the millennium when new individuals and families arrived in the neighborhood looking for affordable housing in an unrelentingly expensive city. Enthusiastic about their new homes, they joined co-op and condo boards and committees, volunteered for neighborhood cleanups, participated as members on Community Board 12, and attended precinct meetings to voice concerns and advocate for improvements. With less time required for combating crime, urban blight, and negligent landlords, residents old and new could focus, instead, on continuing the work a few faithful stewards had shouldered during the troubled years: pedestrian safety, clean streets, business development, and nurturing the community’s landscaped spaces. An interest in the neighborhood’s architecture and history sparked enthusiasm for reviving the long dormant Audubon Park name, and in the summer of 2009, when the oldest apartment buildings in the neighborhood were approaching their centennials and Audubon Park’s urbanization had been complete for more than eighty years, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) created an Audubon Park Historic District that included most of the residential buildings sitting on the old Audubon Park footprint. The name that had lain dormant for nearly a century once again identified the residential neighborhood that had evolved from Audubon’s last home. Realtors quickly seized on the moniker as a selling point for existing apartments as well as for the new condo conversions on the western side of Riverside Drive. By 2015, when 775 Riverside Drive became the “John James” condos, number 765 was the only rental apartment building remaining on that side of the Drive. The tide of urban renewal rarely raises all boats. As the first decade of the twenty-first century turned into the second, the disruptive forces that had uprooted the Audubons when rural Minnie’s Land evolved into suburban Audubon Park, and the Grinnells, when that suburb evolved into an urban cityscape, threatened many of Washington Heights’ longtime residents. Displacement was underway in 2015, when Robert Snyder wrote that gentrification threatened to “price out the people who sustained the neighborhood through its most difficult years.” Many of the displaced were African American and Latino renters who had moved into neighborhood buildings when whites fled to the suburbs.34

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“Gentrification picked up steam around 2011–12,” said lifelong Washington Heights resident and upper Manhattan blogger Led Black for a 2018 article about gentrification in the Cooperator, a periodical geared specifically to issues affecting co-ops and condos. That same year, the New York Post reported that more millennials—often the harbingers of gentrification—lived in Washington Heights than any other neighborhood in the city: “50,103 residents age 20 to 34, comprising 10 percent of the area’s population.” Priced out of Williamsburg and Bushwick, they had migrated to northern Manhattan looking for cheaper housing, a trend prompted, in no small part, by the enormous popularity and success of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s musical In the Heights. As the socioeconomic mix began to shift, some common gentrification markers began appearing: bike lanes, dog runs, and a spate of trendy and expensive eating places, particularly in the vicinity of New York–Presbyterian Hospital. Most telling was the number of small, family-operated businesses that closed along Broadway north of 155th Street, some giving way to chain

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stores and bank branches, though in many cases, landlords allowed storefronts to remain vacant, waiting for higher-paying tenants.35 As had been the case since Audubon Park emerged in the early 1850s, the new Audubon Park neighborhood did not precisely mirror the socioeconomic trends on the streets and blocks around it. Grinnell residents Jeanie and Dave Dubnau, who spent decades taking the pulse of housing in lower Washington Heights, saw this firsthand. When they moved to the neighborhood in the mid-1960s from an apartment on Riverside Drive at 108th Street—like many before and after them, looking for more space at an affordable price—they were already involved in antiwar activities and quickly joined a local group aligned with the coffeehouse movement. That led to their first steps advocating for affordable and fair housing. Like their neighbors Mark and Barbara Gordon, they volunteered as “testers,” who would apply for an apartment after a landlord or rental agent had rejected people of color. If the tester successfully obtained a lease, the landlord was required to rent the apartment to the people of color who had first applied.36 In their early years working with RENA, the Dubnaus mostly saw problems related to repairs, building maintenance, or inadequate heat and hot water. As gentrification accelerated in Washington Heights after the millennium, however, they witnessed increasing instances of landlords attempting to force people from rent-regulated apartments, often illegally. Once again, Broadway was a divide, with gentrification seeming to take a greater toll on its eastern side than in the Audubon Park neighborhood. One reason was that fewer buildings in the blocks east of Broadway had converted to condos and co-ops, so landlords had more opportunities for converting regulated units to market-rate apartments. Those conversions could destabilize a building’s population because the newer tenants were often young professionals who had little in common with the families already living in the buildings. Even though multiple studies show that millennials “harbor less racial or ethnic animosity than their older counterparts,” they are often transient and less likely to join tenant associations or participate in building events. In contrast, the multiracial wave of new residents that had begun arriving in the Audubon Park neighborhood in the late 1990s and early 2000s had mostly represented an older demographic that included married couples with children, gay couples, single people (both straight and gay), and retirees looking to downsize and decrease—or at least stabilize—their housing expenditures.37 Another difference was that despite increased crime, landlord neglect, and economic decline in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the enclave on the western side of Broadway had stabilized as a middle-income

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neighborhood. Even in its most difficult years, African Americans, Latinos, and whites had joined forces to preserve their homes and neighborhood. That was the compelling force that pushed residents to march to the neighborhood precinct following the murder of candy-store owner Morris Goldstein in 1967; to protest, successfully, against the Department of Transportation’s attempt to reconfigure Riverside Drive for faster traffic north of 155th Street in the early 1970s; to form the ROA later in the decade; and to support Grinnell tenants as they labored through the TIL program and bought their building from the city in the early 1980s. When the Grinnell did convert to a co-op as part of New York City’s HDFC program, tenants who might otherwise have been displaced were instead afforded an opportunity to buy an apartment and build equity through homeownership. The same was true later at the Goya on 156th Street. Over time, cooperators who sold their apartments—particularly original purchasers at the Grinnell where the resale formula did not place a cap on prices—reaped windfall profits they would not have had as renters, even in rent-regulated apartments. In other neighborhood buildings, conversions to co-ops and condos were not as affordable as they were at the Grinnell and Goya, but neither were they forced conversions, so many rentstabilized tenants remained for years after the conversion process began. One of the most poignant metaphors for gentrification was a remark that Harlem historian, preservationist, and activist Michael Henry Adams overheard a black teen make to his friends when they learned that proposed housing on 125th Street in the center of Harlem would be too expensive for the people already living in the neighborhood. “You see,” the young fellow said. “I told you they didn’t plant those trees for us.” Audubon Park’s longestablished residents proved more pragmatic. When the ROA cochair Vivian Ducat arranged for tree-pit enclosures on 157th Street, the block’s residents—many of whom were black and Latino tenants living in rentstablized apartments and susceptible to gentrification’s displacement— quickly took ownership and planted the tree pits with a variety of flowers and shrubs.38 While some long-time residents in the Audubon Park neighborhood complained on the neighborhood chat-board, NextDoor, that the “new people” weren’t friendly or were trying to “change things too fast,” many others supported the historic districting initiative, participated in “It’s My Park Day” and other ROA activities, and added their voices to the protest when Amtrak installed a digital billboard on land adjacent to the railroad tracks at the foot of 155th Street. New people in the neighborhood were as likely to enjoy the Clement Clarke Moore Ceremony in Trinity Cemetery, a Christmas tradition Intercession’s Milo Gates began in 1911, as they were

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Neighbors Protesting the Department of Transportation’s Plans to Reconfigure Riverside Drive for Faster Traffic North of 155th Street, circa 1974 (Photo by Martin Berman. Courtesy of Diane, Irene, and Julie Berman)

the summer jazz concerts the Community League of the Heights (CLOTH) presented in Payan Park.39 Historic districting ensured that the new Audubon Park would remain a human-scale neighborhood devoid of high-rise towers but did not secure its periphery. As Adolph Lewisohn’s two-story taxpayers on Broadway passed

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their hundredth birthdays, they were a prime target for unrestricted growth, as were the 158th Street row houses and the still unbuilt space where Reginald Pelham Bolton once created a community garden. Although they were the oldest extant buildings in the historic Audubon Park footprint, the LPC had omitted the twelve houses from the designation, citing a difference in topology between them and the apartment houses that predominated in the historic district. As a coalition of neighbors pointed out when advocating for an expansion of the historic district, that narrow interpretation ignored the centuries-long relationship between the two areas and their similar steps toward urbanization. More importantly, the lack of historic district status left both the undesignated and designated buildings vulnerable to a “pencil tower”—a slender, tall building format that resulted from a “heady confluence of engineering prowess, zoning loopholes and an unparalleled concentration of personal wealth” in twenty-first-century cities. Ironically, the 1890s covenants that August Cordes and John Leo signed on their 158th Street lots proved useful in forestalling uncontrolled growth, but the street’s champions were painfully aware that Reginald Bolton had lived in the center of the block while he attempted—and failed—to save the Audubon homestead. Winning an early battle did not ensure winning the war.40 As the second decade of the twenty-first century comes to an end, Audubon Park’s stewards are actively preserving their neighborhood’s legacy for future generations. Active congregations worship at churches the Audubons and their neighbors established in the mid-nineteenth century, but like many churches across the nation, struggle to maintain old buildings needing extensive renovations and repairs. Seeking creative solutions and reflecting northern Manhattan’s diversity, the North Presbyterians share their space with the Ghanaian Mawuhle congregation, and the Episcopalians at Intercession host English- and Spanish-language services. Both congregations generate extra income by renting their buildings for films and other events, such as the Crypt Sessions, a series of musical performances in the columbarium beneath the Church of the Intercession.41 St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church has followed a different path, perhaps because it was an established congregation in 1947, when it purchased the church edifice the Washington Heights Methodists had built on Amsterdam Avenue in 1869. A few years after it bought the church, St. Luke’s purchased the 30th Precinct Police Station, which it converted into an administrative building. As the congregation approaches its seventy-fifth year on Amsterdam Avenue, its website lists five clergymen, several dozen ministries, and twelve hundred members.42

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The Audubon Park Historic District with the Grinnell in the Foreground, 2010 (Author’s collection)

In the streets in the Audubon Park neighborhood, Spanish and English predominate among an array of languages; a diverse group of neighbors shows up for “It’s My Park” day events; an upscale coffee shop and Caffè Bene sit side-by-side on Edward M. Morgan Place, each with its dedicated patrons; and family-run, ethnic-oriented restaurants share Broadway with chain grocery stores, a Subway sandwich franchise, and Boxers, a gay bar. The Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association dissolved decades ago, but neighbors continue its work through political clubs or ad hoc groups advocating for specific initiatives. One neighborhood group, Audubon 157, tends Ilka Tanya Payan Park, where the Audubons once caged Quadruped specimens and, later, the Grinnells had a vegetable garden. Another, the ROA, continues its decadeslong activities—nurturing the oval island where the Burgoynes once lived in a house converted from a stable, recording neighborhood history with calendars of historic images, and honoring Audubon annually with a community-wide birthday party. The Audubon Park Alliance sponsors walking tours and hosts a website and programs celebrating neighborhood

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The Riverside Oval Park, circa 2012 (Author’s collection)

Audubon Park Neighbors Working in the Riverside Oval on It’s My Park Day, 2019 (Courtesy of Vivian Ducat, Photographer)

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Audubon Park Neighbors Gathered in the Riverside Oval to Celebrate John James Audubon’s Birthday, 2019 (Courtesy of Vivian Ducat, Photographer)

Audubon Mural on Broadway at 155th Street: Swallow-tailed Kite Containing Images of Other Endangered Birds, Created by Lunar New Year, Painted 2015 (Mike Fernandez/Audubon)

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history and culture; and throughout the community, Audubon’s birds fly once more in the Audubon Mural Project, a collaboration between the National Audubon Society and Gitler & ______ Gallery that focuses attention on the many species of climate-threatened birds.43 Architectural landmarking has frozen the Audubon Park Historic District’s streetscape into an urban footprint that retains reminders of its suburban and rural past, but the community living within that footprint remains as fluid as it has been throughout its long history. Of the many threads running through Audubon Park’s story—the affordability of living beyond the city center, the appeal and benefits of light, air, and elevation, mass transportation’s importance for population growth, the deadening effect of economic downturns on public improvements and services, the importance of community institutions and organizations in effecting change—perhaps the most enduring is the neighborhood’s continuous ability to replenish itself with new residents who embrace the evolution the Audubons set in motion nearly two hundred years ago.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Two decades of researching and writing have brought me in contact with many dedicated researchers, librarians, and archivists, who have shared their expertise and knowledge, and with many extremely generous people who have shared their ancestors’ stories and photographs. Each one has played an important role in telling Audubon Park’s story, and for that I am sincerely grateful. First and foremost, I thank my late parents, Frank and Katherine Spady, for the many weekends they piled their five children into an old station wagon for daytrips to Virginia’s many historical sites, for their love of local history, and for the storytelling skills they passed forward and shared around the dinner table, on long summer evenings on the porch, and during those many opportunities for conversation that arise in everyday life. Their influence is reflected in every page of this book. I am very grateful to the team at Fordham, who guided me through every step of production, particularly Fredric Nachbaur, Will Cerbone, Eric Newman, and Aldene Fredenburg. My sincere thanks also to the many librarians, archivists, curators, and assistants who answered my questions, responded to my emails, and helped me find the sources I needed to expand my knowledge of Audubon Park: Sabine Meyer at the National Audubon Society; Elliott Avi Gitler of the Audubon Mural Project; Patricia L. Keats at the California Ephemera Project; Jennifer McCormick at the Charleston Museum; Christine Schmid Engels at the Cincinnati Museum Center; Mary Jo Fairchild, Addlestone

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Library, College of Charleston; Wayne Kempton at the Episcopal Diocese of New York; Constance Mayer and Robert Scott Young at the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology; Alexander Campos, Noemí Espinosa, Patrick Lenaghan, and Margaret Connors McQuade at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library; Nancy Powell at the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove; Jennifer Spence of Kentucky State Parks; Hector Rivera of the Manhattan Borough President’s Map Room; Claudia Jew at the Mariners’ Museum; Lauren Robinson at the Museum of the City of New York; Ken Cobb at the New York City Municipal Archives; Jill Reichenbach and Erin Weinman at the New-York Historical Society; Charina Castillo, Thomas Lannon, Tom Lisanti, Tal Nadan, and Laura Ruttum at the New York Public Library; Janet Linde at the New York Stock Exchange; Carey Stumm and Desiree Alden-Gonzalez at the New York City Transit Museum; Margaret Dykens at the San Diego Natural History Museum; Kathy Lafferty at the Spencer Research Library; Anne Petrimoulx at Trinity Church; and the helpful staff at the New York City Register. I am particularly grateful to Roberta J. M. Olson, Curator of Drawings at the New-York Historical Society, for sharing her deep knowledge of the Audubons and for her continual enthusiasm and support for my research. My thanks also to those many individuals who shared images and information about their forebears: Martha Alexanderson (Seth Hawley), Tom Lanagan (the McGrath and McCulloch families), Paul Locher Jr. (Stephen Farrelly), Cary Stone-Greenstein (Charles Francis Stone and Minnie Stone Martin), Kathy Collins (John and Annie Miller Lutz), and Maureen Guitard (Reginald P. Bolton). My special thanks to Jeffrey L. Ward for creating the beautiful maps in this book and to Alison Meyer and the members of the Schuyler M. Meyer Family for giving me access to their photo albums and allowing me to use images their ancestor Janet Martin captured with her camera as Audubon Park was disappearing beneath streets, sidewalks, and towering apartment buildings. My thanks to Richard Attanasio, Josette Bailey, Wayne Benjamin, Elizabeth (Betsy) Currier, Vivian Ducat and Ray Segal, Charles Neal Finley, the late Gwen Gilyard, Doris Holloway, Richard James, Robin Johnson, the late Jaundine Moore, William (Bill) Norse, Peggy Gill Oakes, and the late Harris Present, who shared their Audubon Park stories, memories, research, and photos. My special thanks to Jon Esman for leading the Audubon Park Historic District effort and, in the process of his research, unearthing important pieces of this story. Thank you to my fellow writers and researchers who generously shared their knowledge and sources: Gail Addiss, Fred Baumgarten, Daniel

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Patterson, Bob Isaac, John Reiger, Joelle Million, Margaret Oppenheimer, Barry Popik, Daniel Ralston, Eric K. Washington, Richard Vaughan, Suzanne Wray, Dr. Robert Nelson, and Dale Winling, and the wonderful group who participated for several years in Minnie’s List, a chat group devoted to the Audubon family after John James: Bert Filemyr, Sarah Boehme, Claire Colthorpe, Jenniffer Hudson Connors, Susan Davis, Alan Gehret, Joe Hamrick, Leslie Kostrich, Ken Nugent, Nancy Powell, and Ted Bakewell Weiler. I am sincerely grateful to Michael Henry Adams, Richelle Elberg, Joe Hamrick, Leslie Kostrich, Peter Logan, and Daniel Patterson for reading my manuscript and offering invaluable suggestions for improvement. One of the great joys of writing this book was meeting John Taliaferro, who began and completed his critically acclaimed biography of George Bird Grinnell while I was in the last leg of my Audubon Park journey. Without his transcriptions of Grinnell’s voluminous correspondence, this book would still be several years away from publication. John’s mentoring, encouragement, and exchange of ideas took me over the finish line. Lastly, but most importantly, I thank my partner, Scott Robinson, for his encouragement, suggestions, prodding, and forbearance in listening to twenty years of Audubon Park trivia.

NOTES

The following lists explain the abbreviations used in the endnotes. Individuals

CHA GBG HBA JB JJA JJA II JWA LBA MEA MEBA MRBA MM MMB MRA VGA WGB WMG

Caroline Hall Audubon George Bird Grinnell Harriet (Hattie) Bachman Audubon The Reverend John Bachman John James Audubon John James Audubon II (JWA and CHA’s eldest son) John Woodhouse Audubon Lucy Bakewell Audubon Mary Eliza Audubon (VGA’s eldest daughter with his second wife, Geogianna Mallory Audubon, known as Eliza) Mary Eliza Bachman Audubon (VGA’s first wife) Maria Rebecca Bachman Audubon (JWA’s first wife) Maria Martin Maria Martin Bachman (Maria Martin after marrying JB) Maria R. Audubon (JWA and CHA’s daughter) Victor Gifford Audubon William Gifford Bakewell William Milne Grinnell

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Periodicals

LOC Newspapers NYT NYDT NYH R&G SUN WaPo

Library of Congress Newspapers New York Times New York Daily Tribune New York Herald Real Estate Record and Builder’s Guide New York Sun Washington Post Sources

APS ASHPS AudMusKY CharlestonMus CincinnatiMus Ellis Archives, UKan FrankJour GBGMem HelenJour EdHarrisPapers-AL HoughtonAud HawleyMem HSA, Grinnell ISR IVM JShuler

American Philosophical Society The American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society John James Audubon State Park, Henderson, KY Charleston Museum Audubon Papers, Cincinnati Museum Ralph Ellis Archives, University of Kansas Helen Lansing Grinnell, Diary for Frank Grinnell George Bird Grinnell “Memoirs,” typescript, 1915 Helen Lansing Grinnell, Diary for Helen Jessup Grinnell Excerpts from the papers of Edward Harris II, Alabama Department of Archives and History John James Audubon Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University Audubon Park Memories, Seth Canfield Hawley, Unpublished Manuscript Huntington-Grinnell Correspondence, Hispanic Society of America Library Church of the Intercession Sacramental Register Church of the Intercession Vestry Minutes Jay Shuler Collection, Marlene & Nathan Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston, http://archives.library.cofc.edu/ inventories/mss0066.html

NOTES

MinnieStoneMem

NYCR N-YHS Audubon Folder N-YHS Sage Folder

NYPL Audubon Folder NYPL Burgess

NYPL-CityDir OMHD PrincetonU StarkMus TylerFam

UKLib YaleAud

YaleGrin

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Minnie Stone Martin. “My Dear Grandchildren.” Unpublished Memoir. Private Collection, 1965 New York City Register Audubon Family Correspondence, New-York Historical Society Records of De Witt, Lockman, & De Witt (law firm), Richard Carman Sage folder, New-York Historical Society Audubon Family Correspondence, New York Public Library Burgess Family, Lucy Green Bakewell Audubon, William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, Fanny Burgess Bottin, Anna Burgess, Charles Henry Burgess, Edward Burgess, et al. Burgess Family Papers, n.d., New York Public Library, http://archives.nypl.org/mss/431 City Directories, New York Public Library (online) Office of Metropolitan History Database John James Audubon Collection, Princeton University Stark Museum of Art, Library and Archive, Orange, TX Morris Tyler Family Collection of John James Audubon. General Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Audubon family papers, ca. 1805–1938, University of Kentucky John James Audubon Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University George Bird Grinnell Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University

Introduction: Humanizing the Landscape Epigraph: George Bird Grinnell, Audubon Park: The History of the Site of the Hispanic Society of America and Neighbouring Institutions (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1927), 1.

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1. NYCR, Audubon to Nagel, Jul. 5, 1852, L606, 620; NYCR, Audubon to Harris, Jun. 25, 1853, L641, 390. 2. LBA, Audubon, 436–437; 1850, 1860, and 1910 FedCensus. 3. NYCR, Bowery Life Insurance to Audubon, Oct. 1, 1841, L420, 206; NYCR, Audubon to Clapp, Sep. 6, 1852, L612, 264; https://streeteasy.com/sale/1248707; Nancy Jackson, “Drawn by the Prices, Betting on the Neighborhood,” NYT, Nov. 14, 2004.

1. Triumph and Tribulation on White Street 1. JJA to VGA, May 6, 1842, APS. 2. See Ron Tyler, Audubon’s Great National Work: The Royal Octavo Edition of the Birds of America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), and Bill Steiner, Audubon Art Prints: A Collector’s Guide to Every Edition (Columbia, S.C: University of South Carolina Press, 2003). 3. JJA to LBA, Aug. 1, 1838, PrincetonU. 4. JJA to LBA, Aug. 1, 1838, PrincetonU; LBA to Euphemia Gifford, Sep. 29, 1838, PrincetonU. 5. VGA to Mary Davis, Jul. 29, 1839, CharlestonMus. 6. JJA to S. G. Morton, Sep. 9, 1839, APS; Shirley Streshinsky, Audubon: Life and Art in the American Wilderness (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 318. 7. JB to JJA, Sep. 13, 1839, CharlestonMus. 8. Elizabeth C. Cromley, Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 11; JJA to JB, Feb. 15, 1840, Howard Corning, Letters of John James Audubon: 1826–1840 (1930; repr. New York: Kraus Reprint, 1969), 2:232; 1840 FedCensus. 9. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 632; Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, ed. Patricia Ingham, reissue ed. (London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 101. 10. JJA and LBA to VGA, Nov. 24, 1839, Corning, Letters of John James Audubon, 2:224–225. 11. LBA to Burgess, undated, NYPL. See also May H. Gray, “Harriet B. Audubon: A Personal Appreciation,” AudMusKy, 1. 12. Alice Ford, John James Audubon: A Biography by Alice Ford (New York: Abbeville,1988), 290. 13. VGA to JJA, Sep. 19, 1840, YaleAud. 14. Burgess Diary, Dec. 19, 1840, NYPL Burgess. 15. Burgess Diary, Dec. 29, 1840, and Jan. 2, 1841, NYPL Burgess. 16. Burgess Diary, Jan. 2, 1841, and Jan. 22, 1841, NYPL Burgess. 17. JJA Will, Apr. 19, 1840, NYC Surrogate’s Court. 18. LBA to VGA and MEBA, Mar.10, 1841, UKLib. 19. JJA to VGA, Mar. 5, 1840, and Jan. 9, 1841, APS; NYCR, Barbier to Lord, Apr. 29, 1839, L396, 255. 20. JJA to VGA, Mar. 7, 1840, APS. 21. LBA to VGA, Mar. 23, 1841, UKLib. 22. Mary Eliza Audubon, “Audubon’s Life and Work,” NYT, Apr. 30,1905. 23. JJA to VGA, Apr. 28, 1833, Auk 33 (1833): 119–130. See also JJA, Ornithological Biography (Philadelphia: E. L. Cary and A. Hart, 1832); George Bird Grinnell, Audubon

NOTES TO PAGES 17–31

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Park: The History of the Site of the Hispanic Society of America and Neighbouring Institutions (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1927), 7, See also HBA to GBG, Apr. 19, 1915, YaleGrinn; LBA, The Life of John James Audubon the Naturalist (New York: Putnam, 1869), 436. 24. “Marriages, New York American, Oct. 5, 1841; NYCR, Bowery Life Insurance to Audubon, Oct. 1, 1842, L420, 206. 25. John James Audubon, John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings, ed. Christopher Imscher (New York: Library of America [Literary Classics of the United States], 1999), 789, 786; Streshinsky, Audubon, 79. 26. John James Audubon, Audubon, 789. 27. LBA, Audubon, 416; Rufus Rockwell Wilson, New York Old & New, Street, and Landmarks, 3rd ed. (J. B. Lippencott, 1909), 2:327. 28. See Streshinsky, Audubon, 3–19, and Francis Hobart Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time, 2nd ed. (New York and London: D. AppletonCentury, 1938), 1:39–51. 29. Herrick, Audubon, 1:65. 30. John James Audubon, Audubon, 765. On the Audubons and slavery, see Streshinsky, Audubon, 82, and Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York: Knopf, 2004), 115, 139–142. 31. See NYCR, Dunkin to Connor, Aug. 12, 1835, L342, 64. 32. LBA, Audubon, 437; “On Washington Heights,” R&G, Sep. 6, 1890, 300. 33. HBA to Florence Brandeis, Nov. 1931, N-YHS; See also HBA to Alice Jaynes Tyler, Interview, Apr. 13–15, 1932, AudMusKy. 34. JJA to VGA, Mar. 25 and Apr. 1, 1842, APS. 35. JJA to VGA, Apr. 1, 1842, APS.

2. The Land before It Was Minnie’s 1. See Reginald Pelham Bolton, Washington Heights Manhattan: Its Eventful Past (New York: Dyckman Institute, 1924), 5. 2. Matthew Spady and Jackie Thaw, The Grinnell at 100 (New York: Grinnell Centennial Planning Team, 2011), 22. 3. E. M. Ruttenber, History of the Indian Tribes, Internet Archive, 108, https:// archive.org/details/ruttenberindians00ruttrich/page/n12/mode/2up. 4. Rev. William Hall, “Minor Topics: Major-General John Maunsell, B.A.,” Magazine for American History 12 (December 1884): 563. 5. See Bradhurst, My Forefathers: Their History from Records & Traditions (London: De La More Press, 1910; reprint Andesite Press, 2014), 50, 105; Charles Felton Pidgin, Theodosia, the First Gentlewoman of Her Time: The Story of Her Life, and a History of Persons and Events Connected Therewith (Boston: C. M. Clark, 1907),116, https://archive .org/details/theodosiafirstge00pidg/page/n8; Bolton, Washington Heights, 160. 6. Bradhurst, My Forefathers, 102, 107. 7. Hermitage website, retrieved February 8, 2012; John E. Stillwell, The History of Captain Richard Stillwell, Son of Lieutenant Nicholas Stillwell, and His Descendants (New York: [s.n.], 1930), 65. 8. George Washington, George Washington: Writings, ed. John H. Rhodehamel (New York: Library of America, 1997), 440. 9. Bradhurst, My Forefathers, 40.

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NOTES TO PAGES 31–42

10. “To be Sold,” Independent Journal, June 1, 1785. 11. NYCR, Watkins to Maunsel, Apr. 19, 1793, L49, 35; Bradhurst, My Forefathers, 50. 12. “Died,” NYH, Jun. 1, 1811. 13. Paul E. Cohen and Robert T. Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps: 1527–1995 (New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 94. 14. “Remarks of the Commissioners,” March 22, 1811. 15. “Died,” NYH, Jun. 1, 1811; Lydia Watkins Will, Mar. 30, 1807. 16. Lydia Watkins Will, Mar. 30, 1807. The Federal Censuses of 1800 and 1810 listed six slaves, all accounted for in Hannon and Jane’s family, so Robin may have been counted in the “All other free persons” column. 17. Rocellus S. Guernsey, New York City and Vicinity during the War of 1812–15: Being a Military, Civic and Financial Local History of That Period, with . . . Anecdotes Thereof, Etc (New York: C. L. Woodward, 1889–95), 2:156, 226, https://catalog.hathitrust .org/Record/006255524. 18. Elizabeth Maunsell Will; “Died,” Evening Post (New York City), Nov. 3, 1816; NYCR, Beekman/Dunkin/Watkins, Oct. 28, 1816, L118, 254. Elizabeth Maunsell omitted John Watkins Jr. from her will just as her sister had done. 19. See Brian Altonen, “John W. Watkins, Esq.—Land Use and Health in Watkins Glen,” Brian Altonen, MPH, MS (blog), February 3, 2012, https://brianaltonenmph.com/6 -history-of-medicine-and-pharmacy/hudson-valley-medical-history/1795-1815-biographies/ john-w-watkins-natural-products-land-use-and-health/; 1810, 1820, 1830, 1840 FedCensus; NYCR, Dunkin to Conner, Aug. 12, 1835, L342, 64. 20. Board of Aldermen 1837, vol. III, 93. 21. Board of Aldermen 1837, vol. III, 78. 22. NYCR, Conner to Carman, Jul. 13, 1836, L356, 511. 23. NYCR, Carman to Conner, Aug. 10, 1837, L377, 386; NYCR, De Peyster (Referee) to New York Bowery Fire Insurance, Jul. 29, 1839, L401, 79; NYCR, Carman to Trinity, Sep. 1, 1842, L428, 576.

3. Arcadia Found . . . 1. George William Curtis et al., Homes of American Authors: Comprising Anecdotical, Personal, and Descriptive Sketches, by Various Writers (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853), 6; HBA to GBG, Sep. 30, 1915, YaleGrinn. 2. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 624. 3. Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York: Knopf, 2004), 417; HBA to Alice Jaynes Tyler, Interview, Apr. 13–15, 1932, UKLib; VGA to JJA, Aug. 25, 1842, TylerFam; VGA to JJA, Jul. 22, 1843, TylerFam; JJA to LBA, Jul. 24, 1842, APS; MRA, in JWA, Audubon’s Western Journal: 1849–1850; Being the Ms. Record of a Trip from New York to Texas, and an Overland Journey through Mexico and Arizona to the Gold Fields of California, with a biographical memoir by his daughter Maria R. Audubon, Introduction, notes, and index by Frank Heywood Hooder (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), 28, https://archive.org/details/audubonswesternj00audufo/page/n7. 4. Maria Rebecca Audubon, “Reminiscences of Audubon,” Scribner’s Monthly (July 1876), 333; HBA to Alice Jaynes Tyler, Interview, Apr. 13–15, 1932, UKLib; VGA to JJA, May 14, 1844, TylerFam. 5. See HBA to Alice Jaynes Tyler, Interview, Apr. 13–15, 1932, UKLib.

NOTES TO PAGES 42–48

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6. NYPL–CityDir, 1841–42: Audubon’s name appears on the “Too late for inclusion page”; VGA to JJA, Aug. 24, 1842, Mar. 29, 1843, May 7, 1844, Aug. 25, 1842, Jul. 30, 1844, TylerFam. 7. VGA to JJA, Aug. 24, 1842, TylerFam; VGA to WGB, Sep. 9, 1837, Cincinnati. 8. LBA to JJA, Jul. 2, 1842, YaleAud; VGA to JJA, Oct. 3, 1842, TylerFam; VGA to JJA, Jul. 22, 1832, TylerFam; VGA to JJA, Aug. 7, 1844, TylerFam; HBA, Minnie’s Land Notes, Nov. 1931, N-YHS Audubon Folder. 9. LBA to WGB, May 25, 1845, CincinnatiMus. 10. MM to VGA, Jun. 2, 1842, CharlestonMus; Vanderburgh had also provided longdistance treatment for Victor’s wife, Eliza, when she was in Cuba attempting to cure her tuberculosis; MM to VGA, Jun. 2, 1842. 11. JJA to LBA, Jul. 24, 1842, APS. 12. JJA to LBA, Aug. 24, 1842, APS; MM to JB, Oct. 5, 1842, CharlestonMus; VGA to JJA, Aug. 25, 1842, TylerFam; Paul E. Cohen and Robert T. Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps: 1527–1995 (New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 118. 13. Curtis et al., Homes of American Authors, 4. 14. Curtis et al., Homes of American Authors, 6. 15. JJA to DWA, Oct. 5, 1836, UKLib; Autographed visiting card, AudMusKY; VGA to JJA, May 3, 1844; TylerFam; VGA to LBA, June 11, 1844; TylerFam. 16. Burgess Diary, Dec. 26, 1842, NYPL Burgess. Whether Audubon was at Minnie’s Land on Christmas Day, 1842, is not clear. Lucy wrote to him in Massachusetts on Christmas Eve that everyone was “sitting around the table, some reading, some writing, with the wind blowing from the West and the thermometer at 22, and we hope you are as warm and comfortable as we are”; LBA to JJA, Dec. 24, 1842, TylerFam; LBA, The Life of John James Audubon, the Naturalist (New York: Putnam, 1869), 436; Jacob Pentz, “The Audubons,” Shooting and Fishing, May 11, 1893, 50–51. 17. See “Married,” New York American, Feb. 27, 1843; “Married,” New York Evening Post, Feb. 27,1843; VGA to JJA; Mar. 18, 1843, TylerFam; VGA to JJA, Apr. 20, 1843, TylerFam. What Catholic church in Harlem Victor is referencing is not clear. The New York City Directories in 1843 and 1844 do not list any Roman Catholic churches in the vicinity of Harlem; the Church of St. Joseph of the Holy Family, recognized as the oldest Catholic church north of 44th Street, was not founded until 1859. The Academy of the Sacred Heart, which had a chapel, did not move to Manhattanville until 1847. 18. VGA to JJA, Apr. 20, 1843, TylerFam; VGA to JJA, Mar. 29, 1843, Apr. 20, 1843, TylerFam; LBA to JJA, Jul. 2, 1843, YaleAud; VGA to JJA, Jul. 15, 1843, TylerFam. 19. LBA to JJA, Jul. 2, 1843, YaleAud. 20. LBA to JJA, Aug. 27, 1843, YaleAud; HBA to Alice Jaynes Tyler, Interview, Apr. 13–15, 1932, UKLib. 21. Samuel Watkins Will. 22. VGA to JJA, Apr. 20, 1843, TylerFam; NYCR, Watkins to VGA, Sept. 2, 1843, L437, 603; NYCR, Watkins to Morgan, Mar. 29, 1844, L444, 424; NYCR, Morgan to Harris, Dec. 2, 1850, L557, 414; NYCR, Watkins to Carman, Oct. 24, 1833, L438, 330. 23. MRA, JWA, Audubon’s Western Journal: 1849–1850; Being the Ms. Record of a Trip from New York to Texas, and an Overland Journey through Mexico and Arizona to the Gold Fields of California, with a biographical memoir by his daughter Maria R. Audubon, Introduction, notes and index by Frank Heywood Hooder (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), 2:175–176ff, https://archive.org/details/audubonswesternj00audufo/page/n7;

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JJA to JB, JJA, Audubon: Writings and Drawings, ed. Christopher Imscher (New York: Library of America [Literary Classics of the United States], 1999), 856. The portrait is now at the American Museum of Natural History. 24. JB to JJA, Mar. 14, 1844, CharlestonMus; MRA, JWA, Audubon’s Western Journal, 74; Ron Tyler, Audubon’s Great National Work: The Royal Octavo Edition of the Birds of America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 155. 25. VGA to JJA, May 3, 1844, LBA to JJA, May 3, 1844, VGA to JJA, May 7, VGA to JJA, May 14, 1844, TylerFam; LBA to JJA, Aug. 12, 1844, YaleAud; VGA to JJA, Jul. 30, Aug. 7, Aug 12, 1844, TylerFam; VGA to JJA, May 14, 1844, TylerFam. 26. VGA to JJA, Jul. 30, Aug. 7, Aug. 12, 1844, TylerFam; LBA to JJA, May 3, 1844, TylerFam. 27. VGA to JJA, May 14, 1844, TylerFam; LBA to JJA, Jul. 15, 1844, YaleAud; VGA to JJA, Jul. 15, Aug. 7, 1844, TylerFam; VGA to JJA, Jul. 30, 1844 TylerFam; VGA to JJA, Jun. 11, 1844, TylerFam; VGA to LBA, Jun. 11, 1844, TylerFam; VGA to JJA, Jul. 30, 1844, TylerFam. 28. Charles A. Stoddard, “A Noble Woman’s Life: A Memorial Sermon,” Jun. 28, 1874, UKLib. 29. “Summer Arrangement: Bloomingdale, Manhattanville, and Fort Washington Stages,” NYH, May 17, 1845; JJA to JB, Mar. 8, 1845, HoughtonAud; VGA to JB, Mar. 31, 1845, HoughtonAud; Dillingham to Rev. Chapman, May 1, 1845, CincinnatiMus; Lucy to WGB, May 25, 1845, CincinnatiMus; JJA to JB, Mar. 30, 1845, HoughtonAud; JWA to Thomas Lincoln, Mar. 11, 1845, JShuler. 30. JB to JJA, Aug. 1, 1845, CharlestonMus; JB to JJA, Aug. 1, 1845, CharlestonMus; Herrick reports that John Harden wrapped the plates in tissue paper, boxed them, and put them in the cave, and that “whenever John Audubon wanted a plate, John Hardin (sic) would go to the ‘Cave’ and get it for him”; see Francis Hobart Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time, 2nd ed. (New York and London: D. AppletonCentury, 1938), 2:295. Harden didn’t begin working for John and Victor until after 1852, so he could not have initially wrapped and stored the plates but could have looked after them after 1852. 31. JB to JJA, Aug. 1, 1845, CharlestonMus; JB to JaneB, Oct. 26, 1845, CharlestonMus; Bachman, John Bachman, 205–206; LBA, Audubon, 435. 32. Lucy and Victor to WGB, Jan. 26,1846, CincinnatiMus; MRA, Western Journal, 29; Clements alternately appears as Clement and Clemens. 33. LBA and VGA to WGB, Jan. 26, 1846, CincinnatiMus; JJA to Baird, Dec. 25, 1845, quoted in William Healy Dall, Spencer Fullerton Baird: A Biography, 129, https://www .google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved =2ahUKEwiMtYfYmujoAhVEl3IEHZ1_BgAQFjACegQIBhAB&url=https%3A%2F%2 Ftraining.fws.gov%2Fhistory%2FConservationHeroes%2Fbaird.readings.pdf&usg=AOv Vaw0m3aAtO8a5N07JBuPJs36T; LBA and VGA to WGB, Jan. 26, 1846, CincinnatiMus. 34. JJA to JB, Mar. 12, 1846, HoughtonAud; MRA, Western Journal, 29–30. 35. JB to VGA, Nov. 29, 1845, CincinnatiMus; VGA to JB, Mar. 13, 1846, HoughtonAud; See also JJA to Baird, Feb. 2, 1846, quoted in Dall, Baird, 131–132; JJA to JB, May 1,1846, HoughtonAud; Anne Matthews to Alicia Bakewell, Jun. 27, 1846, CincinnatiMus. 36. See James D. Reid, The Telegraph in America and Morse Memorial (New York: John Polhemus [1884?], 120, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005765561; Carleton Mabee, American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. B. Morse, rev. ed. (Fleischmanns, N.Y.:

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Purple Mountain, 2000), 291n413; All National Academicians (1825–Present), https:// www.nationalacademy.org/all-national-academicians, accessed August 27, 2018; HBA to Alice Jaynes Tyler, Interview, Apr. 13–15, 1932, UKLib. 37. JB to VGA, Jun. 14, 1846, JB to Harriet and Julia Bachman, Jul. 16, 1846, JB to VGA July 18, 1846, JB to VGA, Oct. 23, 1846, JHB to VGA, Dec. 27, 1846, JB to VGA, June 19, 1847, CharlestonMus.

4. . . . and Too Quickly Lost 1. NYCR, Audubon to City of New York, Dec. 8, 1847, L498, 310. 2. VGA to WGB, Dec. 10, 1847, CincinnatiMus. 3. See IVM, 1, and D. D. Draper, George B. Draper, and Miln P. Dayton, Esq., “History of St. Andrew’s Church (Harlem), compiled by George Draper and Miln Dayton (1889),” transcribed by Wayne Kempton, archivist and historiographer of the Diocese of New York (2013), 20, http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/misc/draper_harlem1889.html. 4. IVM, Dec. 22, 1847, 2. 5. LBA and VGA to Dillingham, Jul. 13, 1847, LBA to Dillingham, Sep. 1, 1847, VGA to Dillingham, Aug. 1, 1847, CincinnatiMus. Information about Lucy Audubon’s pew rental comes from the original deed, formerly in the collection of John James Audubon State Park, Henderson, Ky. 6. JB to JJA, Dec. 24, 1839, CharlestonMus. 7. LBA and VGA to WGB, Nov. 1 and 2, 1846, CincinnatiMus. 8. See WGB to LBA, 1847, VGA to Martha Dillingham, Jun. 18, 1847, LBA to Dillingham, Sep. 1, 1847, CincinnatiMus; ISR, 73. 9. JB to MM, May 11, 1848, CharlestonMus. 10. MM to Lynch and Jane Bachman, Oct. 7, 1848, VGA to MM, Jan. 29, 1849, CharlestonMus. 11. MRA, JJA, Audubon’s Western Journal: 1849–1850; Being the Ms. Record of a Trip from New York to Texas, and an Overland Journey through Mexico and Arizona to the Gold Fields of California, with a biographical memoir by his daughter Maria R. Audubon, Introduction, notes, and index by Frank Heywood Hooder (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), 31, https://archive.org/details/audubonswesternj00audufo/page/n7. 12. VGA to MM, Jan. 28, 1849, JShuler; See JWA, Illustrated Notes of an Expedition through Mexico and California (New York: J. W. Audubon, 1852), 1–2, https://archive.org/ details/GR_111/page/n6/mode/2up; MRA, JJA, Western Journal, 30–31, 41; JB to VGA, Dec. 18, 1848, LBA and VGA to Dillingham, Nov. 15, 1848, CincinnatiMus. Jack Tone’s father, Richard Tone, a property owner in northern Manhattan, had provided the favorable survey report for James Conner’s rural cemetery scheme. 13. Sanford “Sandy” Wilbur, On the Trail, http://www.condortales.com/onthetrail/ colonel-webbs- california.html; Jeanne Skinner Van Nostrand and J. H. Bachman, “Audubon’s Ill-Fated Western Journey: Recalled by the Diary of J. H. Bachman,” California Historical Society Quarterly 21, no. 4 (December 1, 1942): 289–310 https://doi.org/10.2307/25161021. 14. JWA, Illustrated Notes, 81, 189, 194. 15. JWA, Illustrated Notes, 205. 16. Hershel Parker, Melville: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1:735.

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17. Augustus Maunsell Bradhurst, My Forefathers: Their History from Records & Traditions (1910; repr. Andesite Press, 2015), 260. 18. J. C. Robertson, “Progress of Marine Engineering in America: The Minnesota Iron and Brass Foundry,” Mechanics’ Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal, and Gazette (vol. 15) (London: M. Salmon, 1850), 377–378, https://archive.org/details/ mechanicsmagazi24unkngoog; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 660; NYPL- CityDir 1849/50. 19. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 659; NYCR, VGA and GMA to LBA, Sept. 30, 1850, L555, 135. 20. McPeters(?) to De Peyster, Feb. 24, 1863, N-YHS Audubon Folder. 21. VGA to JWA, Dec. 6, 1850, TylerFam. 22. Francis Hobart Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time, 2nd ed. (New York and London: D. Appleton- Century, 1938), 2:299. 23. VGA to JWA, Dec. 5, 1850, TylerFam. 24. VGA to JWA, Dec. 16 and 19, 1850, TylerFam; Downer was living in Minnie’s Land at the time of the 1850 Federal Census, so he probably leased the coachman’s house before moving into the house in the chicken yard. 25. VGA to JWA, Sept. 5, Nov. 28, Dec. 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 4, 16, 18, 19, 1850, TylerFam; VGA to LBA, Nov. 28, 1850, TylerFam. 26. “New York Botanical and Zoological Garden,” Daily Crescent (New Orleans), Aug. 23, 1850; VGA to JWA, Dec. 7, 14, 1850, TylerFam. 27. VGA to JWA, Dec. 16, 1850, TylerFam. 28. The Audubons produced the Quadrupeds in three volumes that appeared in 1845, 1846, and 1848; hoping to emulate “the little work’s” success, they immediately began producing Octavo volumes in 1849, 1851, and 1854. 29. VGA to JWA, Dec. 14, 1850, TylerFam; Alice Ford, John James Audubon: A Biography by Alice Ford (New York: Abbeville,1988), 422.

5. Audubon Park Begins to Bloom 1. LBA, Audubon, 442; Catherine Trevor to WGB, Feb. 2, 1851, CincinnatiMus; “John J. Audubon,” NYDT, Jan. 28, 1851. 2. “Weather Report,” NYDT, Jan. 28, 1851; “The Burial of Audubon,” NYDT, Jan. 30, 1851; Audubon was sixty-five years old. The receipt for the Audubon plot in Trinity Cemetery, which is in the Morris Tyler Family Collection of John James Audubon, at Yale, lists the plot number as 1069; it contained 336 square feet. 3. See Bill Steiner, Audubon Art Prints: A Collector’s Guide to Every Edition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 148–158. The Audubons produced the Quadrupeds in three volumes, appearing in 1845, 1846, and 1848, and then, hoping to emulate the success of “the little work,” immediately began producing Octavo volumes in 1849, 1851, and 1854. 4. NYCR, Audubon to Harris, Mar. 12, 1851, L567, 178 (see also VGA to JWA, Dec. 5, 1850, TylerFam); NYCR, Harris to Audubon, Mar. 12, 1851, L567, 179; Lucy paid Victor and Georgianna approximately $700 per acre and sold the parcel to Harris for about $1,900 an acre.

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5. See Joelle Million, “New York History Review Articles: Samuel Blackwell: Sugar Refiner and Abolitionist,” New York History Review Articles (blog), June 14, 2017, http://newyorkhistoryreviewarticles.blogspot.com/2017/06/samuel-blackwell-sugar-refiner -and.html. 6. NYCR, Kingsland to Harris, Nov. 5, 1849, L530,105; “Sale,” NYDT, Dec. 25, 1850; NYCR, Harris to King, Mar. 1, 1851, L568, Page 77; NYCR, Morgan to Harris, Dec. 11, 1850, L557, 414. 7. “Present to Jennie Lind,” NYDT, Apr 12, 1851. 8. Harriet Bachman to JB, Aug. 8, 1827, CharlestonMus. For examples of the Bachmans euphemizing slavery by calling their slaves “servants,” see JB to VGA, Oct. 27, 1840, CharlestonMus, JB to JJA, Feb. 5, 1846, CharlestonMus, MM to MEBA, Apr. 24, 1840. 9. MM to MEBA, Apr. 24, 1840, CharlestonMus. 10. MM to stepdaughters, Jun. 18, 1851, CharlestonMus. For Bachman’s views of freesoilers, see JB to VGA, Mar. 9, 1857, CharlestonMus; for Bachman’s views on the south, slavery, and the war, see JB to J. A. Brown, Feb. 13, 1861, CharlestonMus. For a detailed biography of Maria Martin’s life, see Debra J. Lindsay, Maria Martin’s World: Art and Science, Faith and Family in Audubon’s America (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2018). One example hinting at Lucy Audubon’s views of African Americans appears in a letter she wrote to Valeria Burgess shortly after arriving in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1869, referring to it as “a place of bustle slovenliness & the coloured Race which abound”; LBA to Valeria Burgess, Oct. 12, 1869, NYPL Burgess. 11. VGA to JWA, Apr. 30, 1851, VGA to LBA, May 6, 1851, VGA to JWA, Apr. 30, 1851, VGA to JWE, May 9, 1851, TylerFam. 12. VGA to JWA, Jan. 5, 1851, Jan. 6, 1851, May 10(?), 1851, TylerFam. 13. VGA to JWA, May 10(?), 1851, TylerFam; See also VGA to JWA, May 14, 16, 18, 1851, TylerFam. 14. VGA to JWA, Jul. 1, 1851, TylerFam; VGA to JWA, May 22, 1851, TylerFam; JB to VGA, Sept. 11, 1851, CharlestonMus; “Sales by Auction,” NYH, Oct. 11, 1851; IVM, Sept. 22, 1851. 15. NYCR, Harris to Johnson, Oct. 27, 1851, L583, 556; Harris to Edward Archer, Oct. 27, 1851, L583, 559; Harris to Smith, Oct. 29, 1851, L584, 520; Harris to Hutchins, Nov. 25, 1851, L589, 349; Harris to Curry, Nov. 25, 1851, L589, 384; Harris to Curry, Nov. 26, 1851, L585, 628; Harris to Curry, Nov. 25, 1851, L589, 366. 16. See NYPL- CityDir 1853/54. (In addition to his floral business at 130th Street, Maythorn published a gardening magazine, The American Gardeners’ Chronicle); NYCR, Maythorn to Harris, Mar. 1, 1853, L626, 519; NYCR, Carman to Watson, May 10, 1851, L578, 59; Carman to Griffen, Sept. 19, 1851, L587, 111; Carman to Carnley, Jul. 7, 1851, L417, 466, Mar. 19, 1850, L535, 352, Apr. 1, 1852, L600, 366. 17. NYCR, Morgan to Mills (November 15, 1850), L550, 561; NYPL- CityDir 1849/50 through 1859/60; NYCR, Mills to Mayor, Dec. 8, 1851, L592, 15; Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971, NARA Microfilm Publication, M841, 145 rolls. Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group Number 28, Washington, D.C.: National Archives, accessed May 15, 2018. 18. NYCR, Audubon to Harris, Nov. 12, 1851, L589, 303; Audubon to Harris, Dec. 8, 1851, L592, 36; Audubon to Harris, Nov. 5, 1851, L584, 558; Audubon to Harris, Nov. 7, 1851, L584, 558.

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19. NYCR, LBA to VGA, Dec. 20, 1851, L581, 540; LBA to JWA, Dec. 16, 1851, L588, 320; LBA to JWA, Feb. 7, 1852, L590, 575; NYCR, LBA to JWA, Dec. 16, 1851, L588, 320; LBA to JWA, Feb. 2, 1852, L590, 575; LBA to VGA, Dec. 20, 1851, L581, 540. 20. VGA and LBA to WGB, Feb. 2, 1852, CincinnatiMus. Lucy Audubon’s brother, William Bakewell, married twice. His second wife, Maria Dillingham, had both a mother and a sister named Martha. Lucy’s correspondent was more likely William’s sister-in-law, who never married, than his mother-in-law. 21. LBA to Martha Dillingham, Feb. 23, 1852, CincinnatiMus. 22. VGA to JWA, May 14, 18, 1851, TylerFam. 23. VGA to JWA, Jan 10, Jan. 13, Feb. 27, Mar. 6, 1852, TylerFam; VGA and LBA to WGB, Feb. 2, 1852, CincinnatiMus; VGA to JWA, Jan. 1, 3, Feb. 28, March 6(?), 1852, TylerFam. 24. VGA to JWA, Mar. 9, 1851, TylerFam. 25. The sale to Gildemeister is missing from the City Register, but he and his wife list “155th near Eleventh Avenue” as their address in City Directories from 1852 to 1854; see NYPL- CityDir 1852/53 and 1853/54. The property’s coordinates appear in the deed when they sold the property back to John in 1856; see NYCR, Gildemeister to Audubon, Apr. 30, 1856, L700, 608. See also VGA to JWA, Jan. 6, 11, 1852, TylerFam. In 2007, Christie’s sold a first edition of this rare work autographed to William Cullen Bryant for $120,000; NYCR, Audubon to Nagel, Jul. 9, 1852, L609, 519. 26. NYCR, Talman to Audubon, Sep. 28, 1852, L614, 239. 27. NYCR, Audubon to Clapp, Sep. 9, 1852, L612, 264. 28. VGA to MMB, Oct. 13, 1852, CharlestonMus; “Real Estate for Sale,” NYDT, Sep. 18, 1860. 29. LBA, The Life of John James Audubon, the Naturalist (New York: Putnam, 1869), 437; see NYCR, Audubon to Jerome, May 4, 1864, L906, 213. 30. LBA to VGA, Mar. 6, 1853, TylerFam; NYCR, Audubon to Harris, Jun. 25, 1853, L641, 390; LBA to VGA, Apr. 10, 1853, TylerFam. The description of the Smythe house is based in part on one of scores of studies for the 1860 Blackwell Map in the New York City and Manhattan Borough President’s Office. 31. NYCR, Audubon to Smythe, May 7, 1853, L634, 252; LBA to VGA, Mar. 6, 1853, Apr. 10, 1853, TylerFam. 32. See IVM, Apr. 19, 1852, 19–20; Oct. 9, 1852, 22–23, Mar. 28, 1853, 27, Apr. 7, 1854, 39. 33. NYCR, McBride to Monroe, Nov. 21, 1842, L433, 59; Monroe to The New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, May 13, 1853, L636, 246; See also Rev J. F. Richmond, NY and Its Institutions, 1609–1873: The Bright Side of New York; A Library of Information . . . (New York: E. B. Threat, 1872), 281–286.

6. Fruit Basket Turnover 1. JJA, Audubon: Writings and Drawings, ed. Christopher Imscher (New York: Library of America [Literary Classics of the United States]), 437; “Obituaries,” NYT, May 20, 1854; LBA to VGA (?? 1856), TylerFam; LBA to Burgess, Jan. 4, 1856, NYPL Burgess. 2. LBA to VGA, Mar 6, 1853, TylerFam; GBGMem, 18–19. 3. George Bird Grinnell, “Recollections of Audubon Park, AUK (Jul.–Aug. 1920): 373. 4. LBA to VGA, Mar. 1853, TylerFam. See ISR, Burials, 1852 and 1853. “I hearby certify that I buried Jane The daughter of J. W. Audubon & Caroline his wife on the 23rd of April in Trinity Cemetery, W. H. H. Stewart.”

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5. LBA to VGA, Apr. 10, 1853, TylerFam. Conklin (no first name available) didn’t stay long enough to register his address in the City Directory. Reginald Pelham Bolton and George Bird Grinnell both believed the house was originally the Audubons’s stable; see George Bird Grinnell, “Audubon Park”; ASHPS, Eighteenth Annual Report, 1913, 461; Taxpayers1920, 5; 1860 FedCensus; 1855 NYCensus; and “Obituary” NYT, Sept. 17, 1881. Johnson & Higgins remained an independent company until 1997, when Marsh & McLennan acquired it. Among its most famous insurance policies was one for the Titanic. 6. See LBA to VGA, undated, TylerFam; “Another Conflagration! Five Buildings Burned on Spruce Street,” NYT, Mar. 6, 1854; “Court of Common Pleas,” NYT, May 28, 1855. 7. NYCR, Nagel to Hayward, Apr. 4, 1854, L662, 105; GBGMem, 10; “News from Classes,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, vol. XXIII, 1914–1915, 483. 8. “Houses to Let,” NYT, Oct. 20, 1857. 9. LBA to VGA, undated and undated no. 2, TylerFam; LBA to MariaB, Feb. 25, 1855, CincinnatiMus; VGA to JWA, Feb. 21, 1855, TylerFam. 10. “The Animals Don’t Draw,” NYT, Aug. 7, 1855. 11. LBA to VGA, Jul. 6, 1856, TylerFam; LBA to VGA, Apr. 10, 1853, TylerFam; LBA to MariaB, Feb. 25, 1855, CincinnatiMus; “Thirty-third Congress . . . First Session,” NYT, Feb. 3, 1854. 12. 1855 NYCensus. New York State’s second constitution (1821) required a statewide census in 1825 and others regularly every ten years afterward. The process continued through 1925, though with some interruptions in 1885 and 1895. In 1931, the state abolished its census “on the fives.” A fire at the New York State Library destroyed records from many years, so enumerations for Audubon Park are incomplete. 13. 1855 NYCensus; James Trager, The New York Chronology: The Ultimate Compendium of Events, People, and Anecdotes from the Dutch to the Present (New York: Collins Reference, 2003), 99; NYCR, Harris to Harris, Jun. 30, 1855, L683, 554. The description of the “Dutch House” is based one of scores of studies for the 1860 Blackwell Map in the New York City and Manhattan Borough president’s office. 14. 1855 NYCensus; “Sanford Co’s. Celebrated Ethiopian Opera,” NYT, Aug. 7, 1856; “M’lle Auberts Boarding and Day School,” NYT, September 3, 1855; LBA to VGA (undated), TylerFam; “Instruction,” Apr. 4, 1858, NYDT. 15. See also “Moral and Religious: Church and Missionary Intelligence,” NYT, Jun. 28, 1853; “Dedication,” NYT, June 28, 1854; Charles Augustus Stoddard, Washington Heights Presbyterian Church, New York, An Historical Review of the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church: 155th Street and 10th Ave., New York City (New York: N.Y. Institution for the Deaf & Dumb, 1877), 6; NYCR Harris to Washington Heights Congregational Society, Sep. 15, 1855, L699, 62. 16. Although the Audubons published the Birds in discrete octavo editions, they continuously published the octavo editions of the Quadrupeds throughout the 1850s. 17. LBA to VGA (undated, after 1855), TylerFam; Isidore Singer et al., International Insurance Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Theory and Practice of All Branches of Insurance Throughout the World and from the Earliest Times to the Present Day . . . (New York and London: American Encyclopedic Library Association, 1910), 527; Alexander Munkittrick’s son Richard Lansdale Munkittrick had great success as a conductor and musical comedy composer, using the pseudonym Howard Talbot; GBGMem, 10. 18. Burgess Diary, Feb. 14, 1843, NYPL Burgess; LBA to VGA, Jul. 6, 1856 and LBA to VGA, 1856, TylerFam. 19. LBA to Burgess, Jan. 4, 1856, NYPL Burgess.

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20. See also GBGMem, 13; John Hall Wheelock and George Garrett, The Last Romantic: A Poet among Publishers: The Oral Autobiography of John Hall Wheelock, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 3–4; see also “William A. Wheelock Death,” NYT Jul. 7, 1905; Henry Hall, America’s Successful Men of Affairs: An Encyclopedia of Contemporaneous Biography (New York: New York Tribune, 1895), http://archive.org/details/ americassuccessf01hallrich, 724–726. 21. NYCR, Gildemeister to Audubon, Apr. 30, 1856, L700, 608; Benjamin Cooper Wright, Banking in California 1849–1910 (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker, 1910), 104–105; Alonzo Phelps, Contemporary Biography of California’s Representative Men: With Contributions from Distinguished Scholars and Scientists (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1881), 196–197, https://archive.org/details/contemporarybiog2188phel. 22. NYCR, Wallis (Referee) to Hayward, Jun. 28, 1856, L716, 85; Wright (Referee) to Hubbard, Jul. 1, 1856, L717, 43. 23. “Could Not Kill Himself,” NYH, Nov. 12, 1856. 24. Paul Jenkins, The Conservative Rebel (1982), 42, https://www.goodreads.com/work/ best_book/68195684-the-conservative-rebel-a-social-history-of-greenfield-massachusetts; GBGMem, 1. 25. GBGMem, 11.

7. Audubon Park’s New Power Brokers 1 “Sales at Auction,” NYH, Dec. 22, 1856. For Harris in court, see “Interesting Developments: How Fire Insurance Companies Are Organized,” NYT, Dec. 20, 1856; “Bank Notices,” NYT, Mar. 14, 1854; “Insurance,” NYT, Apr. 20, 1855; “The Courts,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 23, 1856; see also Case Containing Exceptions, Orchard vs. Binniger and Britton, 1868. 2. NYCR, Willet (Sheriff) to Williams, Aug. 7, 1856, L717, 141; Edwards to Blanco, Mar. 25, 1857, L729, 146; Willet (Sheriff) to Gandy, Jul. 3, 1857, L733, 345; Willet (Sheriff) to Suarez, Jul. 3, 1857, L733 344; Merrihew (Referee) to Smalley, Jul. 28, 1857, L741, 131; among others; NYCR, Suarez to Convert, Mar. 26, 1868, L1053, 75; Suarez to Burke, Mar. 26, 1868, L1053, 76. 3. NYCR, Northam (Referee) to Knapp, Mar. 21, 1857, L726, 386. 4. WGB to Alicia [care of Dr. John Trevor], Jul. 10, 1832, CincinnatiMus; VGA to JWA, Jan. 5, 6, 1851, TylerFam; VGA to LBA, Jan. 8, 1851, TylerFam; LBA to Burgess, Jan. 4, 1856, NYPL Burgess. 5. Jacob Pentz, “The Audubons,” Shooting and Fishing, May 11, 1893; Herrick to Howland, May 9, 1915, Private Collection; see Robert W. Shufeldt (Robert Wilson), On a Case of Female Impotency (Washington, D.C., 1896), 10, http://archive.org/details/10121 5152.nlm.nih.gov. When Florence Audubon divorced Robert Shufeldt, he attempted to blackmail her with a scurrilous pamphlet that intimated that Victor had “died a drunkard, and was while living a man of passion.” Although Florence Audubon’s allies dismissed the pamphlet, elements of it were based in fact. Interestingly, Shufeldt’s uncle was the Rev. Abercrombie, Intercession’s first rector, and when Florence was born, he and his parents were living in Carmansville. 6. JB to VGA, Jan. 30, Mar. 2, Mar. 9, 1857, CharlestonMus; “Sales by Auction, “NYDT, May 14, 1857.

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7. “Country Board—On the Hudson,” NYH, May 12, 1857; “Cottages to Let,” NYT, Aug. 5, 17, 1856; see also “Valuable Up-Town Property,” May 14, 1857, NYDT; “Country Board,” NYT, May 8, 1858; also FrankJour, March 15, 1861. 8. G. Danielson Carroll, Carroll’s New York City Directory to the Hotels of Note, Places of Amusement, Public Buildings . . . Etc. (New York: Carroll, 1859), 131, http:// archive.org/details/carrollsnewyorkc00carr. 9. “The Financial Troubles: Bank Suspensions in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Elsewhere,” NYT, Sep. 28, 1857. 10. “Houses to Let and Furniture for Sale,” NYT, Oct. 20, 1857; see also “Houses to Let for Six Months,” NYT, Oct. 20, 1857. 11. “Robert A. Haggerty, Auctioneer,” NYT, June 10, 1858. 12. Hershel Parker, Melville: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 2:336. 13. “Hard Times in the City,” NYT, Oct. 7, 8, 9, 10, 1857. 14. “Houses, Rooms, etc. to Let,” NYH, Sep. 22, 1858; NYCR, East River Bank to Knapp, Oct. 25, 1858, L764, 232; “Houses and Lots for Sale,” NYT Mar. 26, 1858; Weed to Harrison, Oct. 9, 1858, L761, 629. 15. “The New City Government,” NYH, Jan. 5, 1858; “City Government 1858,” NYT, Jan. 5, 1858; Francis Hobart Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time, 2nd ed. (New York and London: D. Appleton- Century, 1938), 2:299; “Curious Movement Up Town,” NYH, Feb.19, 1858; see also “Another Job in Street Grading and Street Opening,” NYH, Mar. 26, 1858; “The Scheme to Desecrate the North End of Manhattan island,” NYH, Mar. 30, 1858; “The Street Opening Job on the Northern End of Manhattan Island,” NYH, Mar. 30, 1858. 16. “The Scheme to Desecrate the Neighborhood of Fort Washington,” NYH, Apr. 3,1858. 17. “Audubon’s Original Work of the Birds of America,” NYDT, Feb. 2, 1859; Joel Oppenheimer, The Birds of America: The Bien Chromolithographic Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 61. For a discussion of Bien’s art training in Germany, see Oppenheimer, Birds of America, 47–50, and Ann Lee Morgan, “The American Audubons: Julius Bien’s Lithographed Edition,” Print Quarterly 4, no. 4 (December 1987), 362–379. For other discussions of the Bien Edition, see Oppenheimer, Birds of America, 44–68, and Bill Steiner, Audubon Art Prints: A Collector’s Guide to Every Edition (Columbia, S.C: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 70–79. John Woodhouse Audubon’s contract with Julius Bien resides at the Stark Museum of Art, in Orange, Texas; a copy appears in Oppenheimer, Birds of America, 51. 18. JB to VBA, Jan. 30, 1857, CharlestonMus; LBA to Maria Bakewell, Aug. 28,1859, CincinnatiMus; LBA to Maria Bakewell, Aug. 28, 1859, CincinnatiMus. Given that Lulu’s first child arrived seven months after the wedding, she and Delancey may have married earlier than planned, which would have explained Hattie’s absence at the ceremony. Maria Bakewell was William G. Bakewell’s second wife. 19. “Untitled,” Daily Exchange (Baltimore), Jan. 1, 1859; “Advertisement,” Historical Magazine, Apr. 4, 1859, 133; see Oppenheimer, Birds of America, 57–62. 20. FrankJour, Mar. 30, May 4, Oct. 21, 1859. 21. FrankJour, Jan. 2, Mar. 12, 1859; HelenJour, Mar. 12, 1859; HelenJour, Feb. 11, 1859 (see also FrankJour Feb. 11, May 28, 1859); FrankJour, Oct. 1, 1859; FrankJour, Feb. 20, 1859 (references to church attendance and religious observance in the Frank and

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Helen Journals are too numerous to list); FrankJour, Apr. 17, 1859 (see also FrankJour, Mar. 20, 1859); FrankJour, Feb. 27, 1859. 22. Charles Augustus Stoddard, Washington Heights Presbyterian Church: 155th Street and 10th Ave., New York City (New York: N.Y. Institution for the Deaf & Dumb, 1877), 8–9; “Religious Services Tomorrow,” NYT, Oct. 6, 1860. 23. IVM, May 5, 1857, 53 (see also Jul. 20, 1857, 55, Aug. 4, 1857, 56, Sept. 7, 1857, 57, Jan. 4, 1858, 59); IVM, Apr. 13, 1857, 51; IVM, Aug. 3, 1857, 56. 24. GBGMem, 19; FrankJour, Feb. 14, 1859; FrankJour, Apr. 1, 1859. 25. FrankJour, Jul. 4, 1859. 26. FrankJour, Mar. 8, 1859; FrankJour, Mar. 29, 1859; FrankJour, May 27, 1859; FrankJour, Sep. 21, 1859; FrankJour, Mar. 16, 1860. 27. FrankJour, Jun. 28, 1859; FrankJour, Feb. 19, Mar. 16, 1859. 28. FrankJour, Jul. 21, 1859. 29. FrankJour, May 18, 1859. 30. GBGMem, 19–20; GBGMem, 15; FrankJour, Oct. 6, 1959. 31. GBGMem, 19. 32. HelenJour, Jul. 16, 1859. 33. HelenJour, Jun. 18, 1859; FrankJour, Jun. 21, 1859; FrankJour, May 14, 1859; FrankJour, Feb. 22, 24, Mar. 10, 24, Apr. 5 (see also HelenJour, Mar. 10, 1859); HelenJour, May 31, 1859. 34. NYCR, Audubon to Miner, Jul. 12, 1859, L793, 97. 35. LBA to Maria Bakewell, Aug. 28, 1859, CincinnatiMus. Lucy Audubon’s investment interest was not new; see LBA to VGA, Jun. 15, 1828, YaleAud, quoted in Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York: Knopf, 2004), 311. 36. LBA to Maria Bakewell, Aug. 28, 1859, CincinnatiMus.

8. The Hemlocks 1. HelenJour, Oct. 16, 1859; FrankJour, Sept. 11, 1859 (see also FrankJour, Oct. 16, 1859); “Country Residences to Let,” NYT, Mar. 9, 1859; GBGMem, 13. 2. FrankJour, Nov. 5, 1859; JWA to JaneB, Dec. 6, 1859, CharlestonMus. 3. FrankJour, Jan. 26, 1860; HelenJour, Jan. 21, 1860. 4. GBGMem, 12, and HelenJour, Apr. 17, 1860 (see also FrankJour, Mar. 8, 1860); 1860 FedCensus; GBGMem, 10; “For Sale—At Audubon Park,” NYT, Mar. 22, 1860; “Real Estate for Sale,” NYDT, Mar. 22, 1860; NYCR, Hayward to Smythe, Apr. 11, 1860, L811, 140 (see also Mortgages Hayward to Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York June, 1856, L513, 355). 5. FrankJour, Apr. 1, Jun. 1, 1860; GBGMem, 1; FrankJour, Jul. 19, Aug. 22, 1861. 6. FrankJour, Feb. 8, 1861; GBGMem, 27; GBGMem, 28. 7. “To the Legislature of the State of New-York,” NYH, Mar. 16, 1860. 8. Green, Communication to the Commissioners (1866), 70. 9. 1860 FedCensus. 10. “Death of Victor G Audubon,” Commercial Advertiser, Aug.18, 1860 (see also “Died,” NYT, Aug.18, 1860; “Obituary” NYH, Aug. 19, 1860; “News Items,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 20, 1860); “Obituary,” Crayon 7 (Sept. 1860): 269–270; MMB to Kate, Nov. 12, 1860, CharlestonMus. 11. VGA Will, Oct. 9, 1854; LBA to Ed Harris, Apr. 14, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL; MMB to Kate Bachman, Nov. 12, 1860, CharlestonMus; “Real Estate for Sale,” NYDT,

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Sept.18, 20, 1860; (McPeters?) to Frederic De Peyster, Feb. 24, 1863, N-YHS Audubon Folder; NYCR, Mortgages Oct. 26, 1860, L641, 60 (see also LBA to EdHarris, Apr. 14, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL); NYCR, “Audubon to Clapp,” Jan. 26, 1861, L832, 290, 293, 297, 298. Helen Grinnell’s brother-in-law Frank Griswold does not appear to have been involved with the mortgage or directly related to the wards. 12. FrankJour, Oct. 15, 1860. 13. HelenJour, Dec. 26, 1860. 14. “Advertisement,” Commercial Advertiser, Jan. 2, 1861; FrankJour, Feb. 8, Mar. 15, May 18, 1861. 15. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 336. 16. FrankJour, May 18, 1861; “Dissolution—The Firm of George B. Grinnell,” Commercial Advertiser, July. 20, 1861; Helen’s journal entries offer conflicting, somewhat vague accounts of what was happening. She wrote that George Grinnell had left Morton, Grinnell & Co. to form a company with his cousin Jonathan Bird, but also that the cause of all their problems was the collapse of Morton, Grinnell & Co. In Helen’s Journal, she was even more explicit: “The firm of Morton, Grinnell & Co. failed about a month ago, and thus has arisen our trouble.” One conclusion is that Grinnell still held a stake in his former business and thus absorbed part of its debts. See FrankJour, Jul. 11, 1861 and HelenJour, Jun. 10, 1861. 17. FrankJour, May 18, 1861; HelenJour, Sep. 26, 1861. 18. MEA to J. Herbert Johnston, Mar. 12, 1896, StarkMus, accessed Apr. 16, 2018; Francis Hobart Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time, 2nd ed. (New York and London: D. Appleton- Century, 1938), 2:297. see also McPeters? to Frederic De Peyster, Feb. 24, 1863 N-YHS Audubon Folder; LBA to Burgess, Dec. 12, 1862 and Apr. 28, 1863, NYPL Burgess. 19. “Country, Residence,” NYT, Mar. 30, 1861; NYCR, Audubon to Lockwood, Apr. 29, 1861, L823, 623; NYCR, Audubon to Lockwood, May 4, 1861, L841, 117. 20. FrankJour, Jul. 11, 1861; FrankJour, Jul. 19, 1861; FrankJour, Jul. 11, 1861; see “Country Board,” NYH Oct. 16, 1861, and LBA to Burgess, Undated, NYPL Burgess; McPeters? to Frederic De Peyster, Feb. 24, 1863, N-YHS Audubon Folder. 21. FrankJour, Dec. 1, 1861; see also FrankJour, Sept. 3, 1863. Lansing would be wounded at Bayou Terche, Louisiana, in Apr. 1863 and discharged the following November; FrankJour, Nov. 11, 1861; Jacob Pentz, “The Audubons,” Shooting and Fishing, May 11, 1893; JWA to WGB, Sep. 20, 1861, CincinnatiMus. Until Victor and John were twenty-one and seventeen, respectively, they lived entirely in states that would join the Confederacy, excepting an eight-month stay in Cincinnati. 22. JWA to WGB, Sep. 20, 1861, CincinnatiMus; see also Joel Oppenheimer, The Birds of America: The Bien Chromolithography Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 53–54, in which the author suggests that Lockwood had already parted ways with John in 1861 and was completing the Bien edition on his own; LBA to Burgess, Jun. 26, 1862, NYPL Burgess; the set now resides at the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas; see JWA to John T. Johnston, Nov. 5, 1861, StarkMus, April 18, 2018; MEA to J. Herbert Johnston, Mar. 12, 1896, StarkMus, Accessed April 16, 2018. 23. MRA, JWA, Audubon’s Western Journal: 1849–1850; Being the Ms. Record of a Trip from New York to Texas, and an Overland Journey through Mexico and Arizona to the Gold Fields of California, with a biographical memoir by his daughter Maria R. Audubon, Introduction, notes, and index by Frank Heywood Hooder (Cleveland: Arthur

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H. Clark, 1906), 37–38, https://archive.org/details/audubonswesternj00audufo/page/n7. See also LBA to Burgess, Feb. 25, 1862, NYPL Burgess. Exactly one week later, Lulu’s father-in-law, Abraham Williams, followed her father to the grave. See FrankJour, Mar. 3, 1862. 24. LBA to WGB, Jul. 23, 1862, CincinnatiMus. Maria Rebecca Audubon also described delirium in her account. “By morning delirium set in, and for two days and nights he wandered in spirit over the many lands where once in health and strength the happy boy, the joyous youth, the earnest man had traveled in body”; MRA, JWA, Western Journal, 37–38.

9. Three Widows, Three Households 1. LBA to EdHarris, Apr. 14, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL; LBA to Burgess, Feb. 25, 28(?), Mar. 27, 1862, NYPL Burgess; LBA to George Burgess, Feb. 25, 1862, NYPL Burgess; LBA to EdHarris, Apr. 14, 1862, and LBA to Mrs. EdHarris, Jun. 6, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL; LBA to Edward Harris, Aug. 29, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL (see also LBA to WGB, Aug. 19, 1862, CincinnatiMus). 2. LBA to Burgess, Jun. 26, 1862, NYPL Burgess; LBA to WGB, Aug. 19, 1862, CincinnatiMus; LBA to Burgess, Nov. 14, 1862, Burgess; LBA to Burgess, undated, probably 1862, NYPL Burgess; see LBA to WGB, Aug. 19, 1862, CincinnatiMus, and LBA to Edward Harris, Aug. 29, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL; LBA to GHMoore, Dec. 8, 1862, and LBA to DePeyster, Apr. 6, 1863, N-YHS Audubon Folder (see also LBA to Burgess, Nov. 25, 1862, NYPL Burgess; LBA to EdHarris, Apr. 28, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL). 3. Burgess to EdwardHarris, Apr. 26, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL; John’s son Jack Audubon, eldest of the Audubon grandsons, was five months short of his seventeenth birthday when his father died and three months away from it when Burgess wrote this letter; see LBA to Burgess, Apr. 28, 1862, NYPL Burgess, regarding dispute about uncolored Havell plates. 4. LBA to EdHarris, Apr. 14, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL; Burgess to Harris, Apr. 26, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL; Burgess to EdwardHarris, Apr. 26, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL. Burgess is not specific about which house Caroline was taking. The Burgoyne house, the only Audubon house available, was not “at the top of the hill,” and several months later, Lucy wrote to Burgess about taking that house herself. It would not be available until the following May when the Burgoynes’s lease was up. See LBA to Burgess, Nov. 25, 1862, and Dec. 3, 1862, NYPL Burgess; Burgess to Martin V. Smith, Apr. 25, 1862, NYPL Burgess. See also CHA to Burgess, Mar. 23, 1862?, NYPL Burgess, regarding William Wheelock trying to lease the house for Mr. Coe at $700 a year if Caroline would first put “gas through the house, shining (?) and painting rooms papered and fixed & dumb waiter put in, all necessary repairs done and the place put in order.” 5. LBA to Burgess, undated, but probably Fall 1862, NYPL Burgess; LBA to EdHarris, Apr. 14, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL; LBA to Burgess, Apr. 28, 1862, NYPL Burgess; LBA to EdHarris, Apr. 14, 1862, and LBA to MrsEdHarris, Oct. 7, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL; LBA to Burgess, Mar. 27, 1862, and Nov. 4, 1862, NYPL Burgess; LBA to George Burgess, Oct. 12, 1861, NYPL Burgess (a note on the envelope for the letter reads 1861, but the letter’s content and reference to Mrs. Harlan suggests it was 1862); LBA to Valeria Burgess, Sep. 10, 1863, NYPL Burgess.

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6. “William A. Wheelock Death,” NYT, July 7, 1905; LBA to George Burgess, Jun. 26, 1862, NYPL Burgess; FrankJour, Apr. 1, 1862; FrankJour, May 17, 1862; see also HelenJour, May 22, 1862, and GBGMem, 15. 7. LBA to MrsEdHarris, Oct.16, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL. See also McPeters? to Frederic De Peyster, Feb. 24, 1863, N-YHS Audubon Folder. 8. NYCR, Audubon to Wheelock, Nov. 11, 1862, L857, 890 (see also LBA to WGB, Aug. 19, 1862, CincinnatiMus, and LBA to MrsEdHarris, Oct. 7, 1862, EdHarrisPapers-AL); NYCR, LBA to Excelsior Fire Insurance Company, Dec. 19, 1853, L453 of Mortgages, 590; see LBA to MrsEdHarris, Oct. 16, 1862, and Jan. 8, 1863, EdHarrisPapers-AL; LBA to Burgess, Dec. 3, 1862, NYPL Burgess; LBA to Burgess, Oct. 12, 1862?, and November 4, 1862, NYPL Burgess; LBA to Mrs. EdHarris, Jun. 14, 1863, EdHarrisPapers-AL; Ann Gordon to LBA, Feb. 7, 1862, CincinnatiMus; LBA to WGB and wife, Nov. 26, 1862, CincinnatiMus; LBA to Burgess, Nov. 25, 1862, NYPL Burgess. 9. LBA to Mrs. EdHarris, Jan. 8, 1863, EdHarrisPapers-AL; 1862 FedIncomeTax. 10. “William Foster, Jr. Dead,” NYT, Feb. 22, 1907. 11. FrankJour, Jan. 26, 1863. 12. GBGMem, 27. 13. “Croton Water Meeting in Carmansville,” NYT, Mar. 6, 1863; “From the State Capitol,” NYT, Mar. 1, 1863; “Croton Water Works,” NYT, Dec. 23, 1869. 14. LBA to Burgess, undated, but probably Mar. 1863, NYPL Burgess; LBA to DePeyster, May 9, 1863, N-YHS Audubon Folder; “Sales of Real Estate,” NYH, Jun. 13, 1863, and “Sales of Real Estate,” NYH, Aug. 6, 1863. 15. See Special Schedule—Surviving Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines, and Widows, etc., S.D. 3, E. d. 38, Borough of Vineland, N.J., 7. 16. GBGMem, 15; HelenJour, Jul. 23, 1863. 17. HelenJour, Jul. 23, 1863; see also FrankJour, Jul. 25, 1863. 18. For a full history of the Colored Orphan Asylum, see Seraile, Angels of Mercy. 19. See Henry Clews, “The Ups and Downs of Wall Street,” Chambers’ Journal, Jun. 10, 1905, 433–437; “The Southern Michigan R. R.: A Great Law Suit,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 2, 1863; “A Glimpse at the New York Stock Exchange,” Pacific Advertiser (Honolulu), Jan. 28, 1864; “The Southern Michigan R. R.: A Great Law Suit,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 2, 1863. 20. See “Commercial Matters,” NYDT, Jun. 1, 1863; “Copartnerships,” NYH, Jun. 1, 1863; LBA to Burgess, undated, probably Jan. 1865, NYPL Burgess; “Died,” NYT, Dec. 31, 1864. 21. LBA to Charles C. Adams, Jan.27, 1864, NYPL Audubon Folder (originals in Science Library, Society of Natural History, Balboa Park, San Diego, Calif., General Anthony Wayne Vogdes Collection); LBA to Frederic De Peyster, Nov. 23, 1863, N-YHS Audubon Folder; LBA to Burgess, Dec.16, 1863, and Mar. 9, 1864, NYPL Burgess; NYCR, Merrihew (Referee) to Jerome, May 4, 1864, L906, 213; LBA to Burgess, Mar. 9, 1864, NYPL Burgess; NYCR, Audubon to Wheelock, Feb. 19, 1864, L891, 470; “Supreme Court Sale of Audubon Park Property,” NYT, Mar. 10, 1864. 22. Thomas B. Paton, ed., Banking Law Journal 12 (Jan.–Dec. 1895): 612, https:// books.google.com/books?id=-uRCAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA612&lpg=PA612&dq=wheelock +AND+smythe+AND+%22banking+law+journal%22&source=bl&ots=fNMOGeQDWt &sig=ACfU3U2DNI4sn7ZyYy0FJ_9Uo0Mkl1RQbQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiH2 YiKsvjoAhXohOAKHayABRMQ6AEwCnoECAsQAQ#v=onepage&q=wheelock%20

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AND%20smythe%20AND%20%22banking%20law%20journal%22&f=false>>; FrankJour, Sep. 3, Nov. 25, and Dec. 17, 1863; LBA to Valeria Burgess, Sep. 10, 1863, NYPL Burgess; HelenJour, Jun. 12, 1864. 23. “Our Public Schools: Indignation Meeting of the Citizens in Reference to Appointment of Principal of Grammar School No. 46 at Washington Heights,” NYT, Mar. 13, 1864; “Board of Education,” NYDT, Jun. 3, 1864. 24. LBA to Burgess, Mar.15, 1864, NYPL Burgess; LBA to Burgess, Spring 1864, NYPL Burgess; NYCR, Audubon to Benedict, May 28, 1864, L914, 176; see also “Griswold to Audubon,” May 28, 1864, L914, 174. 25. NYCR, Harrison to McMullen, Apr. 13, 1864, L888, 665; NYCR, Ex. of Victor Audubon to Helen Grinnell, Apr. 8, 1865, L924, 679; Ingraham (Referee) to Grinnell, Apr. 8, 1864, L924, 685. George didn’t register his deed until the following April, possibly because Georgianna had ongoing litigation with Lucy Audubon or other creditors; see LBA to Burgess, Sep. 25, 1864, NYPL Burgess; See also FrankJour, Dec. 8, 1864. “I do not know if I mentioned that your Father has purchased this place: given to me”; HelenJour, Sep. 2, 1864, and FrankJour, Oct. 5 and Dec. 12, 1864. 26. NYCR, Smythe to Kirtland, Feb. 16, 1865, L926, 266; NYCR, Kirtland to Kerner, Mar. 7, 1865, L926, 282; NYCR, Miner to Kerner, Jun. 13, 1865, L941, 134. The Miners’s lots and house still carried three mortgages they had assumed when they bought the house: one from John for delinquent taxes for $1,565.66, one from Lucy for $1,000 she had borrowed from Theophilus Sill, and one for the mortgage Wilhelmina Gildemeister held on the property; NYCR, Harris to Kerner and Kirtland, Dec. 4, 1865, L946, 673. See also Wheelock to Kirtland and Kerner, Feb. 5, 1866, L943, 696. 27. For Jesse Benedict and the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church, see Charles Augustus Stoddard, Washington Heights Presbyterian Church, New York, An Historical Review of the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church: 155th Street and 10th Ave., New York City (New York: N.Y. Institution for the Deaf & Dumb, 1877), 13. 28. NYCR, Harrison to McMullen, Apr. 13, 1864, L888, 665; Richard Edwards, ed., Merchants and Manufacturers (New York: Historical Publishing, 1884), 282. 29. CHA to Burgess, Nov. 3, 1864, NYPL Burgess (the New Haven 1861 City Directory lists this as the home of James Hall and James Hall Jr.); LBA to Burgess, Sep. 25, 1864, NYPL Burgess; LBA to Burgess, Oct. 11, 1864, NYPL Burgess. For more on Lucy’s finances, see LBA to Burgess, Oct. 9, 1864, LBA to Burgess and Valeria Burgess, undated, probably Jan. 1865, NYPL Burgess. 30. “Audubon Station,” New York Observer and Chronicle, Dec. 15, 1864. According to realtor Romaine Browne, his employer Richard Carman was “very wrath” about the name change and ordered him to evict all his tenants who had supported it. “He had seen the petition with their names on it and he copied them”; see “J. Romaine Brown at 89 an Optimist on New York Realty,” R&G, Oct. 14, 1922, 490.

10. Reconstructing the Park 1. FrankJour, Apr. 2, 1865; IVM, May 15, 1865; HelenJour, Apr. 16, 1865. 2. HelenJour, Apr. 19, 1865; HelenJour, Apr. 24, 1865; HelenJour, Apr. 24, 1865 (see also GBGMem, 32–33); HelenJour, Apr. 25, 1865; IVM, May 15, 1865. 3. “The Washington Heights Commission and the Kingsbridge Railroad,” NYH, Mar. 15, 1864 (see also “City Improvements—The Region Around the Park, Washington Heights, &c.,” NYH, May 30, 1864); Andrew H. Green, Communication to the Commissioners of the

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Central Park (New York: Wm. C. Bryant, 1865), 1:52; “East and West Side Associations,” R&G, May 9, 1868, 1. 4. Green, Communication to the Commissioners of the Central Park (New York: Wm. C. Bryant, 1866), 20. 5. Green, Communication to the Commissioners (1865), 52–53; “City Improvements— The Region Around the Park, Washington Heights, &c.,” NYH, May 30, 1864 (see also “The Park, as Compared with European Pleasure Grounds—The Great Improvement Contemplated,” NYH, Aug. 7, 1864); Green, Communication to the Commissioners (1866), 20. 6. Green, Communication to the Commissioners (1866), 20. 7. “Meeting of the West Side Association: Projected City Improvements,” NYT, May 28, 1868; “Rapid Transportation of Passengers,” NYT, Nov. 22, 1866 (see also “General City News,” NYT, Oct. 4, 1866). 8. NYCR, Gandy to Wheelock, Jun. 13, 1865, L941, 94; NYCR, Knapp to Wheelock, Nov. 8, 1865 L951, 114; NYCR, Lewis to Wheelock, Oct. 20, 1869, L1124, 187; NYCR, Kelly to Hill, Feb. 6, 1862, L952, 107; Harris to Hill, Oct. 20, 1865, L941, 475; Hill to Foster, Oct. 20, 1865, L941, 476; 1865 Federal IncomeTax Schedule, 1865. 9. HelenJour, Jul. 4, 1865; HelenJour, Jan. 4, 1866; HelenJour, Feb. 3, 1866; ISR, Jan. 6, 1866. 10. HelenJour, Sep. 20, 1866; HelenJour, Sep. 2, 1866; “Important Business Changes,” R&G, Sep. 1, 1872, 3. (The end date for the partnership was September 1, 1872. Despite the announced name change, the city directory listing remained Clapp & Grinnell until Clapp retired from the company in 1869); GBGMem, 31–32. 11. “The Collectorship,” NYT, May 11, 1866; Gayle, Robert L. Gayle, A Herman Melville Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 419. 12. NYCR, Kirtland to Clapp, Oct. 17, 1867, L1027, 321. 13. HelenJour, Apr. 9 and Apr. 18, 1867; HelenJour, Jul. 4, 1867. 14. HelenJour, Oct. 1, 1867; see also HelenJour, Nov. 12, 1867; HelenJour, Dec. 26, 1867. 15. “Organ Exhibition,” NYT, Jan. 30, 1868; Charles Augustus Stoddard, Washington Heights Presbyterian Church, New York, An Historical Review of the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church: 155th Street and 10th Ave., New York City (New York: N.Y. Institution for the Deaf & Dumb, 1877), 11; “Religious Intelligence,” NYH, Feb. 23, 1868. 16. NYCR, Kerner to Kirtland, Feb. 13, 1868, L1038, 400, Kirtland to Hawley, Feb. 24, 1868, L1038, 673; and NYCR, Hawley to Hawley, Feb. 24, 1868, L1038, 675. 17. “Local Intelligence: The Metropolitan Police, Their Services During the Riot Week,” NYT, Aug. 1, 1863; HawleyMem, 16; “Police Clerk Seth C. Hawley Dead,” SUN, Nov. 11, 1884; “Change in the Police Department—Difficulty of Securing a New Chief Clerk,” NYT Mar. 27, 1870. 18. HawleyMem, 34. 19. HawleyMem, 18; HawleyMem, 22; HawleyMem, 21; HawleyMem, 34; HawleyMem, 35; HawleyMem, 36. 20. “Personal and Literary,” NYT, Sep. 28, 1868; NYCR, Audubon to Talman, Oct. 31, 1868, L1070, 532; NYCR, Audubon to Grinnell, Jun. 20, 1868, L1059, 478 (see also John James Audubon II to Burgess, Feb. 14, 1868, NYPL Burgess). 21. HelenJour, Sep. 12, 1868. 22. NYCR, Kelly (Sheriff) to Blanco, Nov. 13, 1868, L1081, 141; Blanco to Harris, Nov. 13, 1868, L1081, 146; Kelly (Sheriff) to Harris, Nov. 13, 1868, L1081, 151; Harris to

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NOTES TO PAGES 142–152

Knapp, Nov. 13, 1868, L1081, 156; Harris to Grinnell, Nov. 13, 1868, L1081, 158; NYCR, Knapp to Grinnell, Jul. 2, 1868, L1026, 457; Knapp to Soulard, Jul. 30, 1868, L1068, 273; NYCR, Knapp to Miller, Jul. 30, 1868, L1068, 275; NYCR, Knapp to Willis, Mar. 15, 1869, L1084, 692; Willis to Squires, Mar. 19, 1869, L1087, 474; Squires to Grinnell, Jun. 5, 1869, L1113, 337 (and Mortgage L884, 613, dated March 15, 1869).

11. A Gilded Lily 1. “West Point,” NYH, Aug. 9, 1869; IVM, Jan. 7, 1870, 148. Excepting the Grinnell stable, no named architect is associated with any of the buildings in or near Audubon Park. Audubon family correspondence and house plans in the collection at Yale (see “House plans, drawn by JWA, 1851,” https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/archival _objects/283335) suggest that John Woodhouse Audubon drew the plans for the Italianate villas that originally covered Audubon Park and supervised their building, assisted almost from the start by John Harden. Harden and other builders supervised later additions and modifications. 2. GBGMem, 16; “A New Station House,” NYH, Nov. 9, 1872; Herrick to Howland, May 9, 1915, private collection. 3. “The Mansard Mania,” NYT, Nov. 12, 1872. 4. “Living in Flats: Advantages of the System for New-Yorkers,” NYT, Jul. 18, 1869. 5. NYCR, Beamish (Referee) to Grinnell, Sep. 23, 1870, L1156, 196; NYCR, Wheelock to Stockwell, Sep.15, 1870, L1161, 143. The Stockwell brothers also had a sister in the city, Lavinia, who married Clarence Day. Several decades later, her son Clarence Day Jr. would use Audubon Park as a plot element in his book God and My Father, part of the trilogy adapted into the stage—and screenplays—for Life with Father and have his mother claim that it would be a safe place for his father’s baptism, since they knew no one there. A search of the Intercession’s sacramental register confirms that the tale is apocryphal. 6. NYCR, McMullen to Grinnell, Oct. 7, 1871, L1200, 137; NYCR, West to Grinnell, Dec. 18, 1871, L1201, 208; West to Foster, Dec.18, 1871, L1201, 210; West to Wheelock, Oct. 17, 1871, L1197, 156; West to Martin, Oct. 17, 1871, L1197, 159; Milford County Registrar, Peck to Grinnell, May 2, 1871, L42, 717; Beard to Grinnell, Sept. 18, 1871, L43, 194; Tomlinson to Grinnell, Jun. 16, 1871, L43, 84; Ford to Grinnell, Mar. 7, 1872, L43, 52; Baldwin to Grinnell, Dec. 14, 1872, L43, 87; Campfield to Grinnell, Mar. 9, 1872, L43, 221; Smith to Grinnell, Mar. 11, 1872, L43, 222; Hubbell to Grinnell, May 1, 1872, L43, 233; Smith to Grinnell, July 15, 1872, L43, 258; Baldwin to Grinnell Jan.1, 1873, L43, 714; Baldwin to Grinnell, Dec. 19, 1874, L44, 307. 7. “Died,” NYT, Apr. 15, 1872; Benedict Will. 8. “Religious Intelligence,” NYH, Nov. 14, 1869; “Washington Heights Methodist Episcopal Church,” NYH, Nov. 15, 1869. See also David W. Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 222. 9. “Croton Water Works,” NYT, Dec. 23, 1869. 10. “The Boulevard,” NYH, Apr. 27, 1870. 11. HawleyMem, 10; “Empty Graves in Trinity Cemetery,” NYT, Apr. 4, 1911. 12. “Trinity Improvements,” NYT, Jun. 15, 1871. 13. “A New Church,” NYT, Jun. 13, 1872. 14. “Madame Jumel’s Will,” NYH, Feb. 8, 1866; “The Contest About the Alleged Will of the Late Widow of Aaron Burr,” NYT, Feb. 8, 1866; IVM, Nov. 9, 1866, 108; IVM, Mar. 8, 1867, 109.

NOTES TO PAGES 152–161

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15. “Died,” NY Evening Express, Jul. 13, 1867; IVM, Apr. 1, 1868, 116 and following. 16. IVM, Apr. 8, 1869, 127; IVM, Sep. 29, 1869, 132; IVM, Apr. 14, 1870, 138. See also IVM, Dec. 12, 1870, 147. 17. IVM, Apr. 18, 1870, 140; IVM, Jan. 7, 1871, 149; IVM, Feb. 6, Mar. 27, Apr. 10, Apr. 13, Apr. 22, 1871, 152–157. 18. IVM, Aug. 15, Sep. 20, Oct. 9, Nov. 2, Dec. 2, 1871, Feb. 1, Feb. 10, Mar. 26, Apr. 1, May 28, 1872, 158–173. See also NYCR, Martin to Rector Church Wardens and Vestrymen of the Church of the Intercession in the County and City of New York, Apr. 13, 1872, L1210, 208; “Laying the Corner Stone of a New Church, NYH, Jun. 13, 1872; see also “New-York and Suburban News,” NYT, Apr. 19, 1872. 19. IVM, Jul. 9, 1872, 175; IVM, Sep. 3, 1873, 176; IVM, Oct. 11, 1872, 177. See also IVM, Nov. 11, 1872, 178. 20. James Blaine Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit, 1864–1917 (1918; repr. New York: Law Printing Co., 2019), 105–110, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/0970671.0001 .001?rgn=main;view=toc; “Along the Hudson,” Atlantic Monthly, Jul. 1868, 2. 21. Rev J. F. Richmond, NY Institutions, 1609–1873: The Bright Side of New York; A Library of Information . . . (New York: E. B. Threat, 1872), 113. 22. Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (New York: Monacelli, 1999), 741. 23. See “In 1861,” NYDT, Mar. 12, 1873; “New York News,” Helena Weekly Herald, Mar. 20, 1873; “Telegraph News,” Las Vegas Gazette, Mar. 15, 1873; see “The Panic: Excitement in Wall Street,” NYT, Sept. 19, 1873; “Copartnership Notices,” NYT, Sept. 3, 1873, and “Copartnership Notices,” World, Sept. 6, 1873. See also GBGMem, 50. 24. Sarah N. Cleghorn, Threescore: The Autobiography of Sarah N. Cleghorn, with an Introduction by Robert Frost (New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, 1936), 42; see also “Marriages and Deaths,” NYH, Nov. 7, 1873. 25. LBA to Valeria Burgess, undated, probably 1865 or 1866, NYPL Burgess; Thomas Bakewell to WGB, Aug. 27, 1868 CincinnatiMus; LBA to Maria Bakewell, Nov. 18, 1868, CincinnatiMus; LBA to Grandchildren, Oct. 7, 1869, AudMusKy; LBA to Valeria Burgess, Sept. 14, 1871, NYPL Burgess. 26. HBA to Susan Towles, Feb. 17, 1930, AudMusKy; LBA to Teddy Burgess, Aug. 4, 1871, Burgess; LBA to Valeria Burgess, Jul. 4, 1872, NYPL Burgess (see also LBA to Burgess, Jun. 23, 1872, NYPL Burgess); LBA to Valeria Burgess, Jul. 4, 1872, NYPL Burgess; LBA to Fanny Burgess, Apr. 2, 1873, NYPL Burgess (see also LBA to Burgess, Jun. 23, 1872, NYPL Burgess). 27. LBA to Valeria Burgess, Oct. 20, 1873, and LBA to Fanny Burgess, Sep. 9, 1873, NYPL Burgess; LBA to Valeria Burgess, Jul. 1, 1873, NYPL Burgess; LBA to Fanny Burgess, Sep. 9, 1873, NYPL Burgess; Lucy Audubon Codicil; George Bird Grinnell, “Recollections of Audubon Park,” AUK (1920): 379. 28. “The Panic: Excitement in Wall Street,” NYT, Sep. 19, 1873.

12. Panic 1. See T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009); “More Failures Yesterday,” NYT, Sep. 20, 1863; “The Panic in Wall Street,” NYT, Sep. 21, 1873. 2. “A New Up-Town Church,” NYDT, Sep. 22, 1873. 3. “Financial Affairs,” NYT, Oct. 3, 1873. See also “Local Miscellany: George Bird Grinnell & Co.,” NYT, Oct. 12, 1873; “The Late Panic in Wall Street: The Alleged

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Bankruptcy of George B. Grinnell & Co.,” NYH, Oct. 12, 1873 (numerous other newspapers mentioned the events); “Financial Affairs,” NYT, Oct. 3, 1873; “Death of George Bird (sic) Grinnell,” NYDT, Dec. 20, 1891; “Minutes of the Committee on Admissions,” NYSE Archive. See also File Cards for Geo. B. Grinnell (Card 1) and Geo. B. Grinnell (Card 2); GBGMem, 62. 4. Stiles, First Tycoon, 539. 5. “The Obituary Record,” NYT, Sep. 28, 1894; see also “George Bird Grinnell & Co.,” NYT, Nov. 25, 1873. 6. “Financial and Commercial,” World, Dec. 15, 1873. 7. NYCR, Audubon to Talman, Oct. 18, 1873, L1271, 72. 8. IVM, Jan. 31, 1874, 181, Mar. 16, 1874, 183, and following; “Sales at Auction,” NYH, Apr. 8, 1873; IVM, May 2, 1874, 186; Charles Augustus Stoddard, Washington Heights Presbyterian Church, New York: An Historical Review of the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church; 155th Street and 10th Ave., New York City (New York: N.Y. Institution for the Deaf & Dumb, 1877), 12. See also NYCR, Washington Heights Presbyterian Church to Stoddard, Apr. 7, 1869, L1095, 538; Washington Heights Presbyterian Church to Stoddard (confirmation deed), Nov. 19, 1874, L1036, 309; Stoddard to Stoddard, Mar. 24, 1865, L1317, 317; NYCR, Supreme Court Decree or Order Cancelling Deed, Jan. 26, 1869, L1094, 79; Wood to Stoddard, Jan. 7, 1869, L1084, 282; IVM, May 2, 1874, 186. 9. “Funeral of Mrs. Audubon,” NYDT, Jun. 24, 1874. 10. “The Late Mme. Audubon,” NYT, Jun. 29, 1874; Stoddard, Washington Heights Presbyterian, 12. Stoddard also published his sermon in pamphlet form. 11. “Ministerial and Church Movements: Episcopalian,” NYH, Nov. 8, 1874; IVM, Oct. 20, Oct. 27, Nov. 11, Dec. 2, 1874, 191–195; “The New Chaplain at West Point,” NYT, Dec. 25, 1881. 12. IVM, Dec. 2, 1874, 195; Milford City Records, Baldwin to Grinnell, Dec. 19, 1874, L44, 307. 13. IVM, Jan. 7, 1875, Mar. 17, 1875, 198–199; IVM, May 3, 1875, 202. 14. See “The Danger of Hard Elastic Balls,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sep. 14, 1875. 15. “Died: Grinnell,” NYDT, Sep. 13, 1875; “Marriages and Deaths,” NYT, Sep. 6, 1875; ISR, 2:220–221; “Bridgeport,” Hartford Daily Courant, Oct. 23, 1875; “Death of Young Grinnell,” Hartford Daily Courant, Sep. 13, 1875; “Francis (sic) Lansing Grinnell,” NYDT, Sep. 13, 1875; GBGMem, 74. 16. IVM, Apr. 26, 1877, 223; IVM, May 3, 1877, 225. 17. Stoddard, Washington Heights Presbyterian, 14. 18. “The Hermit’s Letter,” Lutland Daily Globe, May 2, 1876; ISR, 2:222–223, and “Obituary: Talman,” NYT, Jan. 15, 1878. According to the plot card in the Trinity Corporation archives, Edward’s leg was buried in Oct. 1876, two years before the rest of his body; the likely cause is that it was amputated, and in an era when belief in bodily resurrection was strong, the body and limb should be buried close to each other; ISR, 2:224–225. 19. “A Commission House Suspends,” NYT, Sept. 1, 1883; “City and Suburban News,” NYT, Sep. 11, 1880. 20. “Buildings Projects: New York City,” R&G, Jul. 17, 1880, 663. 21. “The Upper Part of New York,” Daily Graphic, Jun. 28, 1875. 22. J. Romaine Browne to Jacob Lockman, Feb. 11, 1878, N-YHS Sage Folder; “Instruction,” Washington Heights Gazette, Sep. 1 and 16, 1895; GMA to J. Lockman,

NOTES TO PAGES 170–179

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May 4, May 11, May 29, June 29, 1878, N-YHS Sage Folder; MEA to J. Lockman, Jul. 22, 1878, N-YHS Sage Folder; GMA to J. Lockman, Dec. 13, 1878, N-YHS Sage Folder. 23. “City Real Estate for Sale,” NYT, Nov. 9, 1879. 24. “Capabilities of the West Side,” R&G, Jan. 12, 1878. 25. “Capabilities of the West Side,” R&G, Jan. 12, 1878. 26. “Unimproved Real Estate,” NYT June 2, 1878. 27. “Rapid Transit,” NYH, Aug. 18, 1878; “Chicago Markets,” Wall Street Daily News, May 24, 1880.

13. Halcyon Days 1. “How the City Is Building Up,” SUN, Jan. 9, 1880; “Luxury in Flat Houses,” SUN, Oct. 21, 1883. 2. “The Population of New York,” SUN, Jul. 8, 1883; “Hints About Life in Flats,” NYDT, Dec. 2, 1883; “Not Justified by the Facts,” SUN, May 3, 1883; see also “Building a Mighty City,” SUN, July 23, 1883. 3. “A Waiting Population,” NYT, May 6, 1883; “More Bridges Wanted Up Town,” NYT, Dec. 2, 1881. 4. “Railroad Interests,” NYDT, Jan. 19, 1884. See also “Another Elevated Road Wanted,” NYT, Mar. 2, 1882; “Rapid Transit Suggestions,” NYT, Jan. 16, 1884; “Railroad Interests,” NYT, Jan. 19, 1884; “Rapid Transit Measures,” NYT, Jan. 30, 1884; and “Selecting Rapid Transit Routes,” NYT, Feb. 7, 1884. 5. 1880 FedCensus. 6. 1880 FedCensus. The 1880 Census marked the first time an enumerator included “West” with numbered streets around Audubon Park— e.g., West 158th Street. Unless otherwise indicated, the reader should assume all numbered streets in the text are “West.” 7. MinnieStoneMem, 1; Minnie Stone Martin to Lillian Stone, undated, unpublished letter in private collection; see NYCR, “Talman to Stone,” Feb. 10, 1880, L1532, 42; “Charles Francis Stone,” NYT, Apr. 29, 1910; “Married,” NYT, Nov. 19, 1867; “New Unitarian Society,” NYT, Mar. 30, 1886; “Light Bulb Balked Edison for Months,” NYT, Oct. 18, 1931. 8. Minnie Stone Martin to Lillian Stone, undated, unpublished letter in private collection. 9. See IVM, Jul. 6, July 13, August 11, Oct. 6, Nov. 1, Nov. 11, 1880, 255–261; IVM, Feb. 27, 1882, 272. 10. “Three Fashionable Weddings,” NYT, Nov. 1, 1882; see also ISR, 2:198, and “A Bath Boy Wed,” Bath Independent, Nov. 4, 1882. 11. “Obituary Notes,” NYT, Sept. 17, 1881; ISR, 230–231; “Ex- Collector Smythe,” NYH, May 15, 1884. 12. See “Police Clerk Seth C. Hawley Dead,” SUN, Nov. 11, 1884; “Died,” NYT, Nov. 12, 1884; “Respect for Seth C. Hawley,” NYDT, Nov. 12, 1884; “Chief Clerk Hawley’s Funeral,” NYT, Nov. 13, 1884; “Arrangements for S. C. Hawley’s Funeral,” NYDT, Nov. 13, 1884; “Funeral of Seth C. Hawley,” NYDT, Nov. 14, 1884; “Funeral of Seth C. Hawley,” NYT, Nov. 14, 1884; “Some Men About Town,” NYDT, Nov. 16, 1884. 13. See NYCR, Clapp to Meyer, Nov. 25, 1884, L1808, 464; Meyer to Grinnell, Nov. 28, 1884, L1851, 58; “Conveyances,” R&G, Nov. 19, 1884, 1206; “Conveyances,” R&G, Dec. 6, 1231; “Died,” NYH, Feb. 21, 1885; “Died” NYT, Mar. 25, 1893. 14. “Shepherd F. Knapp Dying,” NYT, Dec. 24, 1886; “Shepherd F. Knapp,” NYDT, Dec. 26, 1886; “Death of Shepherd F. Knapp, Jr,” NYT, Oct. 28, 1882; “Shepherd F.

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Knapp’s Burial,” NYT, Dec. 29, 1886. See also “Deaths,” SUN, Dec. 26, 1886; “Shepherd F. Knapp Dead,” NYT, Dec. 26, 1886. Shepherd F. Knapp’s cousin, of the same name, married Jesse Benedict’s daughter Emma and was the assistant pastor of Brick Presbyterian Church from 1901 to 1908. 15. See NYCR, Dupignac (Referee) to Miller, Nov. 20, 1883, L1763, 142, 145, 150; “Four, Capital $700, Now Have Millions,” NYT, Aug. 16, 1910; “By Separate Paths Four Brothers Win Millions,” NYT, Aug. 21, 1910; NYCR, Miller to Miller, Apr. 19, 1884, L1791, 259 and following; Miller to Adams, Jul. 3, 1885, L1893, 235; Miller to Miller, Nov. 14, 1887, L2089, 404, 407, and 411. 16. Minnie Stone Martin to Lillian Stone, undated, unpublished letter in private collection. 17. “Streets That Cannot Be Used,” NYDT, Apr. 4, 1885. See also “Objecting to Cable Roads,” NYT, Feb. 10, 1885; “Streets That Can’t Be Used: Their Condition a Source of Disease and Driving Away the Residents,” NYT, Apr. 4, 1885; “Streets That Are Torn Up,” NYT, May 8, 1885. 18. “The Carmansville Boat-House,” NYT, Sept. 2, 1881. 19. “Mr. De Camp’s Resignation,” NYT, Mar. 16, 1885. 20. “Financial Points,” R&G, Nov. 21, 1885, 1280; “New-York City,” NYDT, Feb. 2, 1888 (see also “City and Suburban News,” NYT, Feb. 2, 1888); see NYCR, Martin to Grinnell, Aug. 13, 1884, L1831, 69; Martin to Grinnell, Mar. 5, 1885, L1834, 452; “Out Among the Builders,” R&G, Sep. 27, 1884, 975; “Furnished Houses to Let,” NYDT, Apr. 27, 1885. 21. “Building North of One Hundred and Thirty-Fifth Street, West Side,” R&G, Jan. 16, 1886, 67. See NYCR, Schepp to the Washington Heights Athenaeum Society, Sep. 30, 1886, L1990, 410; “Cain to the Washington Heights Athenaeum Society,” Dec. 1, 1885, L1923, 8; “Settling the West Side,” NYT, Sep. 11, 1886. 22. “City and Suburban News,” NYT, Feb. 15, 1886; “Washington Heights Athenaeum,” NYH, Feb. 16, 1886; “Washington Heights Athenaeum,” NYT, Feb. 16, 1886. 23. “Mr. Fuller’s Hopes,” NYT, Aug. 25, 1886; see also “For Manhattan Hospital,” NYT, Oct. 20, 1887; “Washington Heights Athenaeum,” NYT, Oct. 3, 1888.

14. Waning Days of Summer 1. “A Day of Many Weddings,” NYT, Apr. 28, 1886; Yale Obit Record 1906, 596–597; “Want to Be Police Surgeons,” NYT, Jul. 6, 1886; GBGMem, 16; see Elizabeth Collins Cromley, Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments (London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 109–110. 2. See “Buildings Projected,” R&G, Oct. 23, 1886, 1316; NYCR, Grinnell to Martin, Oct. 22, 1886, L1982, 432, and Grinnell to Page, Oct. 22, 1886, L1982, 434; “Buildings Projected,” R&G, Oct. 23, 1886, 1316; NYCR, Grinnell to Grinnell, Dec. 30, 1886, L1993, 494, and Grinnell to Grinnell, Dec. 30, 1886, L1993, 490; “Audubon Park,” R&G, Sept. 17, 1887, 1174. 3. “Out of Town,” R&G,” Mar. 17, 1886, 390; NYCR, Grinnell to Grinnell, Jan. 3, 1887, L2018, 348; see also GBG to WMG, June 21, 1890, and GBG to Kernochan (?), Aug. 16, 1886, YaleGrinn. William did venture beyond the Queen Anne style in 1889, a Memorial Tower and Bridge for Milford, Connecticut, but not for the Excelsior Power Company building on Gold Street, sometimes attributed to him. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report for that building attributes it to architect and engineer William C. Gunnell.

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4. “Protecting the Birds,” NYT, May 18, 1886; see also GBG to GEGordon, Nov. 13, 1886, YaleGrinn. 5. For a history of Grinnell’s first Audubon Society, see John Taliaferro, Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West (New York: Liveright, 2019), and Carolyn Merchant, Spare the Birds!: George Bird Grinnell and the First Audubon Society (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016); GBG to C. Hart Merriam (December 20, 1887), YaleGrinn. 6. “Nicaragua Their Choice,” NYT, Aug. 16, 1887. See also “A Monument to Audubon,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences,” Aug. 15, 1887, 163–64, and GBG to J. A. Allen, Dec. 16, 1887, YaleGrinn; “A Monument to Audubon,” NYT, Nov. 30, 1885, and “The Proposed Monument to Audubon,” Forest and Stream, Oct. 27, 1887, 1. 7. “New York’s First Cable Road,” New York Evangelist, Sep. 30, 1886; “Apartments in London and in New York,” SUN, Sept. 24, 1886; “Luxury for Bachelors,” NYDT, Jan. 16, 1887. 8. “Is There a Job in It?,” NYH, March 20, 1887. 9. “Electric Light for Harlem,” NYT, March 31, 1887; “Testimony Gas and Electric Light,” 309–310. 10. “Tunneling the Harlem,” NYT, Oct. 30, 1887; “More Railroads Wanted,” NYT, Nov. 1, 1887; “They Want a Viaduct,” NYT, Jul. 21, 1888; “A Municipal Need,” NYT, Jul. 15, 1888. 11. “A New York Crematory,” R&G, Aug. 4, 1888, 564; Nick Ravo, “Residents Say Sewage Is Not the Only Smell,” NYT, Aug. 18, 1991; E. R. Ships, “Will Diversity Subvert Vision in a New York City District?” NYT, Aug. 15, 1991. 12. Washington Heights Plan,” NYT, Jan. 13, 1889. See also “The Hamilton Elms,” NYT, Jan. 3, 1889. 13. William B. Philips, ed., Washington Heights in the Past, in the Present, in the Future (New York: Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association, 1889), 4. 14. “The Big West Side of Town,” SUN, Mar. 23, 1889. 15. “Lack of School Facilities,” NYT, Sept. 29, 1889; “Designed to Hold 4,000 Pupils,” NYT, Dec. 24, 1889; “The New Viaduct,” NYT, May 7, 1890; “Saloons Enough Already,” NYT, Jun. 8, 1890; and “Determined Opposition from Washington Heights Citizens,” NYT, Jun. 11, 1890. 16. “A Street Built in Mid-Air,” NYT, Dec. 21, 1890; “Watching for Investments,” NYT, Jul. 6 1890; “On Washington Heights,” R&G, Sept. 6, 1890, 300; see Jay Shockley and Elisa Urbanelli, Macomb’s Dam Bridge [Originally Central Bridge] and 155th Street Viaduct Designation Report (New York: Landmarks Preservation Commission, January 14, 1992), http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/1629.pdf. 17. “John F. B. Smith, Auctioner,” NYDT, Apr. 18, 1888; NYCR, Benedict to Kramer, May 17, 1888, L2141, 244; “General New York News,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug.16, 1891. 18. “Freight Trains Collide,” NYT, Oct. 1, 1891; “Into a Trainload of Hogs,” SUN, Oct. 1, 1891. 19. NYCR, Soulard to Weber, May 8, 1889, L2221, 326; Weber to Koch, Aug. 15, 1890, L2340, 197; HawleyMem, 34; “A Call for Dr. Barney,” NYT, Aug. 19, 1886; NYCR, Hawley (Barney) to Solomon, Apr. 25, 1889, L2220, 157; Hawley (Barney) to McCormick, Aug. 16, 1888, L2164, 98; FindaGrave: Dr. Charles Spencer Barney, https://www.findagrave.com/ memorial/48328218 (accessed May 5, 2019). The information at FindaGrave is taken from Barney obituary, Otsego Farmer, May 29, 1914.

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20. NYCR, Solomon to Oscanyan, Apr. 23, 1890, L2314, 196. 21. MinnieStoneMem; “In the World of Fashion,” SUN, February 16, 1894. 22. See “Death of George Bird (sic) Grinnell,” NYDT, Dec. 20, 1891; “George Bird Grinnell,” Hartford (Conn.) Courant, Dec. 22, 1891; “Gotham Brevities,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 20, 1891; “Obituary,” Utica Morning Herald, Dec. 21, 1891; “George B. Grinnell,” NYT, Dec. 20, 1891; “George B. Grinnell” Obituary, Forest and Stream, Dec. 24, 1891, page 1; Obituary, “George B. Grinnell,” NYT, Dec. 20, 1891; ISR, 2:312. 23. See “Mr. Grinnell’s Untimely Death,” NYH, May 25, 1884; “Fired by His Own Hand,” SUN, May 25, 1884; “Thos. P. Grinnell Death,” NYT, May 25, 1884; “Death of Mr. Grinnell,” NYT, May 25, 1884. 24. GBG to ESDana, Jan. 12, 1892, Yale. For the next two years, George Bird would frequently cite his mother’s health in refusing invitations and curtailing his travel schedule. See GBG to Joseph Kipp, Dec. 26, 1891; GBG to TR, Mar. 15, 1892; GBG to Everett Hayden, Mar. 22, 1892; GBG to H. W. Henshaw, Mar. 24, 1892; GBG to ESDana, Mar. 30, 1892; GBG to Harry S. Sargent, Apr. 16, 1892; GBG to John R. Nicholson, Jun. 25, 1892; GBG to Luther North, Sept. 7, 1892; GBG to Henry B. Metcalf, Oct. 15 1892, YaleGrinn; GBG to Dr. E. S. Dana, Oct. 17, 1892; GBG to Rev. John M. Wolcott, Oct. 19, 1892; GBG to H. A. Dodge, Oct. 27, 1892; GBG to George Gould, Nov. 9, 1892; GBG to George H. Gould, Nov. 30, 1892; GBG to John A. Ross, Dec. 22, 1892, YaleGrinn; GBG to Luther North, December 9, 1892, YaleGrinn. 25. GBG to Rev. John M. Wolcott, Apr. 16, 1892, YaleGrinn; GBG to Rev. John M. Wolcott, Jul. 20, 1892, YaleGrinn. 26. “Miss Caroline Jones Married to the Viscount Benoit d’Azy of France,” Ohama Bee, Jul. 29, 1894; see also “Viscount Weds a Chicago Girl,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jul. 28, 1894; “Social and Personal,” WaPo, July 26, 1894; “Miss Jones Now Vicountess D’Azy,” NYT, Jul. 29, 1894. 27. GBG to Messrs. Winans & May, May 18, 1894, YaleGrinn; GBG to John Haines Jr., Jul. 22, 1896, YaleGrinn. 28. GBG to D. McLellan, Sept. 23, 1892, YaleGrinn. 29. Minnie Stone Martin, hand-drawn map, circa 1965, private collection; NYCR, Knapp to Cordes, Jan. 30, 1893, L4, 15. 30. “Clarendon Hotel to Lease,” NYT, Apr. 8, 1893; “Death List of the Day,” NYT, Jun. 22, 1904. 31. “Audubon Monument Ceremonies,” Forest and Stream, Apr. 27, 1893, 360; “In Memory of Audubon,” SUN, Apr. 27, 1893; “Audubon Monument Unveiled,” NYT, Apr. 27, 1893; GBG to Morris Tyler, May [unreadable], 1888, YaleGrinn; “The Audubon Monument,” NYT, Jan. 4, 1889. See also “Forgetful Ornithologists,” Evening Post, Nov. 14, 1889, and “Birds of this Country” NYT, Nov. 15, 1889; “Deed Lot No. A. A.,” Feb. 10, 1888, AudMusKY. 32. For a history of the monument, see Roberta J. M. Olson and Matthew Spady, “In Quest of Audubon,” New York History 96, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 101–21; “For the Audubon Monument,” NYT, May 10, 1891; “In Audubon’s Memory,” NYT, Oct. 30, 1892. 33. See “Mayor Gilroy’s Speedway,” NYT, Jan. 21, 1893. For an illustrated history of the Harlem Speedway’s construction, see the Ultimate History Project Staff, “Built for Speed,” http://ultimatehistoryproject.com/harlem-river-speedway.html, accessed May 5, 2019.

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34. “Obituary” NYT, Sept. 26, 1893; GBG to Messrs. Winans & May, May 18, 1894, YaleGrinn. 35. “The Obituary Record,” NYT, Sept. 28, 1894; “Gen. E. P. Scammon Dying,” SUN, Oct. 28, 1894; “Flashes from the Wires,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 8, 1894. 36. “Died” NYT, Aug. 24, 1894; GBG to R. N. Wilson, Jul. 19, 1894, YaleGrinn.

15. Exit Strategy 1. “The Upper West Side,” R&G, Jun. 5, 1897, 965. 2. “The Board of Estimate,” NYT, Jul. 16, 1873; “Property Owners Object,” NYT, Dec. 4, 1890; see “The Boulevard Lafayette in the City of New York,” Scientific American, Jan. 26, 1895, cover and 58. 3. “Drives in Upper New-York: Interesting Sights and Beautiful Views Revealed,” NYT, Sep. 22, 1895; GBG to Rice, Feb. 17, 1896, YaleGrinn. 4. “Drives in Upper New-York: Interesting Sights and Beautiful Views Revealed,” NYT, Sep. 22, 1895; see William H. Ukers, All About Coffee (New York: Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, 1922), 477; NYCR, Wheelock to Schramm, May 21, 1894, L4, 430; West to Schramm, Aug. 15, 1894, L5, 93; Schramm to Schramm, Dec. 19, 1894, L5, 245; West to Schramm, Jan. 21, 1895, L5, 321–322. 5. “Building News: Dwellings,” R&G, May 30, 1896, 929; see “The Armory Board,” NYT, Aug. 12, 1892; “Contractors and Builders Unite,” NYT, Sep. 25, 1894. 6. NYCR, Cordes to Leo, Jun. 11, 1896, L7, 304; Leo and Cordes Restriction Agreement, June 11, 1896, L7, 302; Cordes and Leo Modification Agreement, Jul. 21, 1896, L7, 395. 7. Grinnell and Leo, Aug. 7, 1896, L7, 414. 8. The Building Department, NYT, Jan. 15, 1897; NYCR, Leo to Cordes, Jan. 22, 1897, L8, 380; NYCR, Leo to Cordes, Jun. 11, 1897, L7, 304; Leo to Shipman, Apr. 28, 1897, L8, 490; Leo to Bolton, Sep. 23, 1897, L10, 233; Leo to Baer, Jun. 15, 1897, L9, 233; Leo to Creamer, Sep. 27, 1897, L9, 277; Leo to Werckshagen, Sep. 20, 1897, L9, 271; Leo to Dulon, Apr. 2, 1898, L11, 134; Leo to Stabler, Jun. 25, 1897, L9, 245; NYCR, Lilliendahl to Wagner, Jun. 2, 1898, L12, 199; Lilliendahl to Martin, Jul. 6, 1898, L13, 19; Lilliendahl to Lilliendahl, May 12, 1898, L12, 79; Lilliendahl to Blauvelt, Jul. 6, 1898, L13, 18; NYCR, Gillie to Schnugg Jan. 4, 1897, L8, 301; “Buildings Projected,” R&G, Jul. 23, 1898, 137. Entzer had a very short career as an architect and took to drink after being disappointed in love. See “Farewell Message on a Cuff,” NYT, Aug. 6, 1901; see also NYCR, Grinnell to Lilliendahl, Dec. 6, 1897, L10, 371; Germania Life Insurance Company to Cordes, Dec. 8, 1897, L10, 385; Cordes to Lilliendahl, Dec. 8, 1897, L10, 386; Lilliendahl Cordes Agreement, Dec. 8, 1897, L10, 388. Lilliendahl signed a Restriction Agreement with John Koch, who owned the western side of the house Miller and Soulard had built in the 1860s. That house was on the lot adjacent to Lilliendahl’s to the east. See City Register: Koch Lilliendahl Agreement, Jan. 17, 1897, L10, 436; Leo and Lilliendahl collaborated on at least one other building venture and were associates at the Bower Decorating and Painting Company, where both were directors. 9. See “Hints for Home Seekers,” World, Mar. 3, 1898. 10. “The Dynamic Conspiracy,” Graphic, Sep. 19, 1896, 359; see also “The Big Bomb Fizzle,” World, Oct. 18, 1896; “Tynan a Free Man,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 17, 1896; “Tyanan’s Appeal for Intervention,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep. 17, 1896. Tynan’s son James William had a successful stage and film career using the name Brandon Tynan.

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11. “I have known William to be honest, industrious and faithful, and believe that if the position is given to him he will do the city good service. He never uses liquor in any form”; GBG to Haven, Feb. 28, 1895, Yale; GBG to Charles H. Shaw, Apr. 30, 1898, Yale. 12. “Riverside Drive Extension,” NYT, Apr. 8, 1897. 13. See “Riverside Drive Plans,” NYDT, Feb. 6, 1897; “To Improve Riverside Drive,” NYT, Jan. 15, 1897; “Riverside Drive Association,” NYDT, Jan. 15, 1897. Jerome, Arizona, owes its name to Eugene Jerome, who invested in mining operations there in the 1880s, reportedly on condition that the town be named for his family. 14. “To Extend Riverside Drive,” NYDT, “Jan. 25, 1897; “Editorial,” NYT, Jan. 10, 1897; “New Driveway Planned,” NYT, Jan. 30, 1897; “The Riverside Drive Extension,” NYT, Jan. 29, 1897; “Article,” NYDT, Feb. 12, 1897; “Riverside Drive Extension,” NYT, Feb. 8 1897. 15. See “New York Legislature,” NYT, Apr. 6, 1897; “New Bills in the Senate,” NYT, Mar. 9, 1897; “Gov. Black Signing Bills,” NYT, May 23, 1897; “New York’s Long Fight for the New Riverside Drive,” NYT, Jul. 10, 1904. 16. “The Riverside Drive Extension,” R&G, Jun. 5, 1897, 964; “Riverside Drive Viaduct,” NYT, Nov. 18, 1897; “Riverside Drive Extension,” NYDT, Dec. 5, 1897; “Riverside Drive Plans,” NYDT, Nov. 18, 1897. For more of Martin’s involvement, see “Riverside Drive Extension,” NYDT, Dec. 5, 1897. 17. “Riverside Drive Viaduct,” NYT, Nov. 18, 1897. See also “The Extension of Riverside Drive,” NYDT, Nov. 6, 1897; “Riverside Drive Extension,” NYT, Nov. 11, 1897; “Riverside Drive Plans Passed,” NYT, Dec. 25, 1897. 18. “Dreams of Rapid Transit,” NYT, Aug. 6, 1890. 19. Clifton Hood, 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 60; GBG to Superintendent of Cable Car Line, Apr. 14, 1891, YaleGrinn; GBG to Superintendent Cable Car Line, Dec. 18, 1891, YaleGrinn. 20. Hood, 722 Miles, 25. 21. “Boulevard Owners Polled by the Herald,” NYH, Apr. 7, 1893. 22. Hood, 722 Miles, 66. 23. “Whalen Opposed to Tunnels,” NYDT, Jan. 7, 1900; GBG to Treat, Apr. 10, 1899, YaleGrinn. 24. “Coler and Rapid Transit,” NYT, Jan. 13, 1900; see “To Start Work on Tunnel,” NYT, May 13, 1900; “Washington Heights Residents Meet,” NYT, Jan. 10, 1900; “Rapid Transit Meeting,” NYT, Jan. 10, 1900. 25. “Coler and Rapid Transit,” NYT, Jan. 13, 1900; See “Loving Cup for Mr. Whalen,” NYT, May 10, 1900. 26. “Real Tunnel Work Now,” NYDT, May 14, 1900.

16. Partition Suit 1. E. Idell Zeisloft, The New Metropolis: Memorable Events of Three Centuries, 1600– 1900; From the Island of Mana-Hat-Ta to Greater New York at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (repr. Forgotten Books, 2017) (CDRom), 242; see GBG to Helen Grinnell Page, Jul. 12, 1904; GBG to Helen Grinnell Page, Sep. 9, 1915, YaleGrinn. 2. See “Feud Develops at Wedding,” Leavenworth Times, Oct. 9, 1896; “Wedding Bells at the Presidio,” San Francisco Call, Oct. 6, 1896; “Married at the Presidio,”

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Evening Times, Oct. 5, 1896; “Dr. And Mrs. Morton Grinnell,” San Francisco Call, Feb. 21, 1897. 3. GBG to Morton Grinnell, Jun. 15, 1898, YaleGrinn. 4. GBG to Morton Grinnell, Feb. 4, 1899, YaleGrinn. 5. See http://www.metrohistory.com/; see GBG to Morton Grinnell, Mar. 12, 1898, Yale. 6. Grinnell v. Martin, Grinnell Partition Suit, 33–36. 7. “Real Estate News,” SUN, Jul. 4, 1899. 8. Grinnell v. Martin, Grinnell Partition Suit, 16–17. 9. GBG to Helen Grinnell Page, Jul. 24, 1923, Yale; see “Real Estate News,” SUN, Jul. 4, 1899; NYCR, Jerome to Mahoney, Jul. 25, 1899, L12, 261; NYCR, Adams to Miller, Jun. 2, 1899, L13, 187; Miller to Adams, Jun. 19, 1901. 10. “The Realty Market,” R&G, Oct. 21, 1899, 589; “In the Real Estate Field,” NYT, Oct. 19, 1899. See also “Real Estate at Auction,” World, Oct. 10, 1899; “One $400,000 Sale,” World, Oct. 19, 1899; NYCR, Grinnell to Lansing, Dec. 8, 1899, L13, 345, 348, 350, 352, 354, and Grinnell to Lansing, Dec. 13, 1899, L14, 269 and 270; “Recorded Mortgages,” NYT, Dec. 15, 1899. 11. “Work on the Tunnel Underway at Last,” Evening World, May 14, 1900; see “Tunnel Is Really Begun: And Washington Heights Does Honor to the Event,” SUN, May 15, 1900; “To Begin the Subway,” NYDT, May 13, 1900. 12. “Tunnel Begun on Washington Heights,” NYH, May 15, 1900; see “Tunnel Begun on Washington Heights,” NYH, May 15, 1900; “Whalen Begins Tunnel,” NYDT, May 15, 1900. 13. “Tunnel Begun on Washington Heights,” NYH, May 15, 1900; see “Tunnel Is Really Begun,” SUN, May 15, 1900; “Ground Broken for the Big Tunnel.” NYT, May 15, 1900. 14. “Whalen Begins Tunnel: Corporation Counsel Does First Real Work on the Excavation,” NYDT, May 15, 1900. 15. See “Heights Free Library Opened,” SUN, May 15, 1900. 16. See 1900 FedCensus; fire and water damage destroyed most of the 1890 Federal Census, and the Audubon Park records for New York City’s Police Census of 1890 are missing. Even so, piecing together the residents in 1890 from correspondence and city directories strongly suggests it had not changed significantly from 1880; GBG to Newell Martin, Mar. 11, 1901, YaleGrinn; David Allen, “Adin Wright, Piano Man and Family,” http://daveswrightstuff.blogspot.com/, accessed Dec. 28, 2019. 17. For a full discussion of row houses in New York City, see Charles Lockwood et al., Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House (New York: Rizzoli, 2019). 18. “Rescue of the Legations,” NYDT, Oct. 24, 1900. See also “Rev. Dr. Martin in Peking,” NYT, Jul. 10, 1900; GBG to Rev. R. Terry, Mar. 11, 1904, YaleGrinn. See NYPLCityDir, 1900/01, 1901/02, 1902/03. 19. Hamlin Garland, Companions on the Trail: A Literary Chronicle, 104–105, https:// www.goodreads.com/work/ best_book/4582295-companions-on-the-trail-a-literary-chronicle. 20. GBG to Donald Page, Jul. 28, 1920, YaleGrinn; See also “Grinnell-Williams,” NYT, Aug. 22, 1902. 21. “Progress on the Rapid Transit Tunnel,” NYT, Jun. 16, 1901; GBG to Messrs. J. Romaine Brown & Co., Dec. 17, 1900; GBG to Mr. I. Kuhn, Oct. 26, 1900, YaleGrinn;

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GBG to David Steward, Feb. 25, 1901, YaleGrinn; GBG to Major Stouch, Feb. 11, 1903, YaleGrinn; “In the Real Estate Field,” NYT, Jun. 18, 1902. 22. GBG to Messrs. Hall J. How & Co., Sep. 23, 1903, YaleGrinn; GBG to Du Bois & Taylor, Nov. 17, 1903, YaleGrinn. See GBG to Newell Martin, Aug. 5, 1903, YaleGrinn; “Monastery of the Sisters of the Visitation at Riverdale, N.Y.,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Nov. 15, 1903. 23. “President Cantor Criticized in Court,” NYT, Mar. 10, 1903; “Riverside Drive Extension Started,” NYT, Dec. 13, 1903; see “To Cut Through the Cemetery,” NYT, Sep. 21, 1902. 24. “Along the Hudson,” NYDT, Dec. 14, 1902; “Plans Ready for New Driveway,” NYT, Dec. 14, 1902.

17. Clinging to the Past . . . 1. “In the Real Estate Field,” NYT, Oct. 23, 1904. 2. “In the Real Estate Field,” NYT, Oct. 23, 1904; “The First Day of May,” R&G, May 7, 1904, 1044. 3. E. Idell Zeisloft, New Metropolis: Memorable Events of Three Centuries, 1600– 1900; From the Island of Mana-Hat-Ta to Greater New York at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (repr. Forgotten Books, 2017), 242 (CDRom). 4. “A Mile and a Half of Progress,” R&G, Sep. 12, 1908, 505. 5. “A Mile and a Half of Progress,” R&G, Sep. 12, 1908, 505; “Thirty Blocks of Broadway,” NYT, Apr. 26, 1908. 6. “Century- Old Trees Cut Down,” NYT, May 3, 1904. 7. “Century- Old Trees Cut Down,” NYT, May 3, 1904; GBG to Board of Health of the Health Department, Apr. 16, 1904, YaleGrinn; GBG to N. M. Burtis, May 27, 1904, YaleGrinn; GBG to Frank Crosby (Presby?), May 20, 1904, and May 27, 1904, YaleGrinn. 8. GBG to Newell Martin, Jul. 30, 1904, YaleGrinn; GBG to John Molloy, Jun. 27, 1904, YaleGrinn; GBG to Mrs. W. G. L. B. Allen, Apr. 25, 1904, YaleGrinn; see also GBG to Hamlin Garland, Dec. 15, 1904, YaleGrinn. Between 1902 and 1905, the large lot fronting Broadway between 155th and 156th streets changed hands five times, eventually becoming part of Archer Huntington’s museum complex property. Charles Kerner had owned the property for the second half of the nineteenth century and most likely refused offers from George Blake Grinnell, who would have wanted to acquire it to complete his Audubon Park holdings. The Grinnells may have gained control of the parcel through Miss Lena Vanner, who was an employee in Newell Martin’s law firm and whose representation would have helped them buy lower and sell higher than they could as the owner of the adjacent property. See NYCR, Kerner to Bendheim, Oct. 4, 1902, L17, 290; Bendheim to Lytton, Jan. 6, 1903, L17, 163; Lytton to Block, May 17, 1905, L25, 415; Bloch to Vanner, May 17, 1905, L35, 430; Vanner to Huntington, Jan. 21, 1907, L30, 452; and Vanner to Huntington, Feb. 19, 1904, L31, 36; GBG to Miss L. F. Vanner, c/o Martin, Fraser & Speir, Aug. 13, 1909, and GBG to Charles T. Barney, Jan. 30, 1906, YaleGrinn. 9. NYCR, Lansing Investment Company to Huntington, Jul. 30, 1904, L31, 114; GBG to Jack Nicholson, Dec. 5, 1905, YaleGrinn; see GBG to Messrs. Smith & Martin, Jun. 22, 1900, YaleGrinn; GBG to R. N. Wilson, May 22, 1906, YaleGrinn. 10. Beatrice Irene Gilman Proske, Archer Milton Huntington (New York: Printed by Order of the Trustees, the Hispanic Society of America, 1963), 2.

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11. NYCR, Huntington to Trustees, Jul. 30, 1904, L21, 121; Huntington wrote detailed instructions into the deed governing how and when the trustees would hold meetings and what staff members they could hire: a librarian, assistant librarian, and janitor, as well as “Stenographers, and Typewriters as may be needful.” See NYCR, Huntington to Trustees, Jul. 30, 1904, L21, 121. 12. Archer Huntington to Morton Grinnell, Feb. 23, 1901, HSA, Grinnell; Archer Huntington to Morton Grinnell, Nov. 15, 1902, HSA, Grinnell; GBG to Luther North, Jul. 18, 1902, YaleGrinn. 13. Huntington replaced the Reverend J. Lord Sutton, a retired Presbyterian minister in his sixties, who had leased Helen’s house for most of the 1890s. In 1902, a year after he married his brother’s widow, his elder son, believing he was going insane, rented a hotel room and killed himself. Soon after, Sutton and his wife moved from the park, leaving the house free for the Huntingtons. See “Minister Weds Sister-in-Law,” WaPo, Jul. 1, 1901; “Shot Himself in a Hotel,” NYT, Apr. 22, 1902. 14. GBG to Helen Grinnell Page, Jul. 12, 1904, YaleGrinn. 15. GBG to Edward S. (Ned) Dana, Jul. 28, 1904, YaleGrinn. 16. GBG to Ned Dana, Nov. 5, 1904, YaleGrinn. 17. City of New York: Law Department Annual Report, Dec. 1905 (New York: Martin B. Brown, 1906), 835, 841–842. 18. “Northern Subway Limit Twelve Blocks Further,” NYT, Oct. 30, 1904; see also “Ticket Choppers Overflow after Football Crowd Is Handled,” NYDT, Oct. 30, 1904; “Subway Not Limbered Yet,” SUN, Oct. 30, 1904; “Subway Alarm System Tested Three Times,” NYT, Dec. 5, 1904; GBG to Ned Dana, Dec. 9, 1904; GBG to John Pitcher, Dec. 27, 1904, YaleGrinn; see also GBG to Jack Monroe, Nov. 22, 1904, and GBG to John Pitcher, Feb. 2, 1905, YaleGrinn; “A.M. Huntington’s Gift,” NYT, Nov. 20, 1904; “Another Subway Station,” NYT, Dec. 4, 1904. 19. Morton Grinnell to Archer M. Huntington, Jan. 15, 1905, HSA, Grinnell. 20. Archer M. Huntington to Morton Grinnell, Feb. 1, 1905, HSA, Grinnell; see Archer M. Huntington to GBG, Mar. 23, 1905, HSA, Grinnell; NYCR, Lansing to Huntington, Oct. 23, 1905, L26, 394. 21. GBG to Miss Emily Cook, Feb. 20, 1905, YaleGrinn; GBG to Frank Le[unreadable], Feb. 23, 1905, YaleGrinn; See GBG to Charles T. Barney, Mar. 3, 1905, YaleGrinn. 22. NYCR, Busman to Annunciation, Mar. 30, 1905, L24, 25; “Building Loan Contracts,” R&G, May 13, 1905, 1054. See also “Conveyances,” R&G, May 6, 1905, 1017; “Status of New Buildings North of 125th Street,” R&G, May 20, 1905, 1113. 23. “Audubon’s Birthday,” Forest and Stream, Apr. 15, 1905, 1. The planning committee scheduled the celebration for the birthdate the naturalist cited most often and that was carved on the monument in Trinity Cemetery; consequently, the celebration took place on the wrong day, in the wrong month, and during the wrong year. See also “Called to Church of Intercession,” NYDT, Oct. 27, 1903; “Called to New York,” NYT, Oct. 27, 1903; IVM, Aug. 6, 215, Sept. 10, 218, Oct. 6, 225, Oct. 22, 226, Nov. 11, 227, Nov. 29, 1903, 228. 24. “Audubon Park Sold,” R&G, Mar. 4, 1905, 465; see also “Audubon Park Not Sold,” NYDT, Mar. 1, 1905; “Audubon’s Birthday,” Forest and Stream, Apr. 15, 1905, 1.

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18. . . . and Facing the Future 1. NYCR, Gutwillig to Lewisohn, Mar. 17, 1903, L19, 187; also “Conveyances,” R&G, Mar. 14, 1903, 496–497; OMHD, DOB #727, 1905; see also “Projected Buildings,” R&G, Jun. 17, 1905, 1360; “Leases: Manhattan,” R&G, Dec. 2, 1905, 881; see also NYCR, Lewisohn to Corrigan Council, Dec. 1, 1905, L24, 487. For information about the Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association’s early activities, see “Wants Express Trains,” NYT, Sep. 19, 1906; “Object to Proposed Armory Site,” NYT, Mar. 14, 1907; “Protests from the Heights: Taxpayers Demand to Know Why Public Service Board Doesn’t Act,” NYT, Mar. 5, 1909; “To Tackle Subway Station Problem,” NYT, Mar. 10, 1909; “Denounce Ft. George as Immoral Resort,” NYT, Feb. 26, 1910; and “Flay the Interboro and Subway Service,” NYT, Nov. 26, 1910. 2. “Large Plottage Sold on Washington Heights,” R&G, Dec. 28, 1907, 1054–1055; see also NYCR, Lansing Corporation to Lewisohn, Jan. 24, 1908, L33, 338. 3. “Apartments, Flats and Tenements,” R&G, Jul. 8, 1905, 65; “Projected Buildings,” R&G, Aug. 5, 1905, 276; see Cromley, Alone Together, 5–8 ; “The Howe Buildings Bill,” NYT, Apr. 9, 1885. 4. IVM, May 2, 247, and May 26, 1905, 249; IVM, Sep. 26, 1905, 252–253. 5. 1900 FedCensus; Jennifer L. Most and Mary Beth Betts, Audubon Park Designation Report (New York: Landmarks Preservation Commission, May 12, 2009), 83, http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2335.pdf; “Display Advertisement,” NYT, Sept. 7, 1913; “Display Advertisement,” NYDT, Sep. 7, 1913; “Display Advertisement,” SUN, Aug. 23, 1914, Apartment House Guide, 2. 6. OMHD, DOB #753, 1905; “Of Interest to the Building Trades,” R&G, Jan. 17, 1903, 104. Bulman simultaneously collaborated with Schwartz, Gross, and Marcus on the Rivercrest at the corner of Fort Washington Avenue and 160th Street, which strongly resembles the Audubon Park Apartments. He would build eight more apartment houses between 1905 and 1911, several with Schwartz and Gross and all of them north of 155th Street. See “Projected Buildings,” R&G, Dec. 23, 1905, 1034. 7. “High Class Apartments for Washington Heights,” R&G, Apr. 1, 1905, 685; G. C. Hesselgren, Apartment Houses of the Metropolis (New York: G. C. Hesselgren, 1908), https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/ apartment-houses-of-the-metropolis#/?tab=about. 8. Christopher Gray, “The Ungainly Duckling That Alighted Along the Park,” NYT, Sep. 3, 2006. 9. Display ad, NYT, May 28, 1905; Hesselgren, World’s Apt. Houses, 155b. 10. Display ad, NYT, Aug. 27, 1906, and Sep. 22, 1907. 11. “House of the Annunciation: Report Showing the Work of the Charity Last Year,” NYT, Mar. 14, 1898; see also “Innovations in Ritual,” NYT, Feb. 16, 1896; NYCR, Oscanyan to Schlesinger, Feb. 15, 1904, L20, 245; Schlesinger to Kohn, Feb. 15, 1904, L20, 251; Schlesinger to Corn, Mar. 4, 1905, L24, 270; Corn to Bulman, Mar. 4, 1905, L21, 433; Bulman to Sisters of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mar. 30, 1905, L24, 245; See also OMHD, DOB #417, 1905. 12. See GBG to Henry A. Oakley, Mar. 23, 1892, YaleGrinn; GBG to Morton Grinnell, Mar. 1, 1897, YaleGrinn; GBG to Morton Grinnell, Feb. 4, 1899, YaleGrinn; GBG to Messrs. Smith & Martin, Jan. 22, 1901, YaleGrinn; GBG to Newell Martin, Aug. 28, 1902, YaleGrinn.

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13. GBG to Hamlin Garland, Dec. 19, 1904, YaleGrinn. 14. GBG to Hamlin Garland, Jun. 19, 1905, YaleGrinn. See also GBG to Jack Nicholson, Dec. 5, 1905, YaleGrinn. Although Grinnell mentions these four houses in other correspondence, information about them is limited. Row houses on 157th Street east of Broadway do appear on maps in the early years of the twentieth century, but land records do not indicate the Grinnells owned the property where they stood. The likeliest scenario is that they were leasing them from the owner(s) and subletting them. 15. 1905 NYCensus. 16. 1905 NYCensus. 17. 1905 NYCensus. 18. 1905 NYCensus. 19. GBG to John J. White Jr., Jul. 21, 1905, YaleGrinn. 20. GBG to J. W. Savage, Bureau of Water Register, Jul. 28, 1905, YaleGrinn. 21. See “William A Wheelock Dead,” NYT, Jul. 7, 1905, and Charles A. Stoddard, “Tribute to William Wheelock: Student, Financier, Philanthropist, Friend, Christian,” New York Observer, Jul. 13, 1905. 22. GBG to Messrs. S. Jacobs & Son, Brooklyn, Jun. 12, 1905, YaleGrinn; GBG to J. H. Stoothoff, Oct. 19, 1905, YaleGrinn; see GBG to M. D. Williamson, Oct. 30, 1905, YaleGrinn; GBG to Jack Nicholson, Dec. 5, 1905, YaleGrinn. 23. GBG to Jack Monroe, Nov. 28, 1906, YaleGrinn; GBG to Helen Page, Jul. 14, 1920, YaleGrinn. 24. GBG to Clinton Catherwood, Dec. 21, 1905, YaleGrinn. 25. “Died,” NYT, Dec. 12, 1905; see also GBG to Arthur Lincoln, Dec. 12, 1905, and GBG to Col. N. G. Osborn, Dec. 21, 1905, YaleGrinn.

19. Rapid Transit, Rapid Transformation 1. See David W. Dunlap, On Broadway (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 292–293. 2. GBG to Mrs. Galloway Cheston, Mar. 15, 1907, YaleGrinn; GBG to R. N. Wilson, May 22, 1906, YaleGrinn; See NYCR, Huntington to American Numismatic and Archaeological Society, Jan. 26, 1906, L27, 291; GBG to Bauman W. Belden, Jan. 25, 1906, YaleGrinn. 3. “Another Fine Museum Added to City’s List,” NYT, Jan. 19, 1908; “New Spanish Church,” SUN, Apr. 7, 1907; see NYCR, Vanner to Huntington, Jan. 21, 1907, L30, 452; Vanner to Huntington, Feb. 29, 1907, L31, 36; Huntington to Huntington, Mar. 18, 1907, L32, 29. See also GBG to Charles T. Barney, Jan. 30, 1906, YaleGrinn. 4. See GBG to Messrs. Adolph Offenberg & Son, Mar. 9, 1907, YaleGrinn; GBG to Newell Martin, Jun. 6, 1907, YaleGrinn; GBG to John White, Mar. 28, 1907; GBG to Wm. [Morton] Grinnell, May 29, 1907; GBG to Newell Martin, Jun. 6, 1907; GBG to Newell Martin, Jun. 12, 1907, YaleGrinn; NYCR, Knapp to Rosenthal and Berinstein, Jun. 10, 1907, L33, 111; GBG to Newell Martin, Jul. 10, 1907, YaleGrinn; GBG to Luther North, Nov. 4[?], 1907, and GBG to Jack Monroe, Dec. 12, 1907, YaleGrinn. 5. GBG to [unreadable], Mar. 31, 1908, YaleGrinn; “Audubon Park Sold,” NYT, Nov. 22, 1908. See GBG to Newell Martin, Jul. 13 and 21, 1908, YaleGrinn; “Audubon Park’s End,” NYDT, Nov. 22, 1908; “In the Real Estate Field,” NYT, Nov. 22, 1908; “A $450,000 Bronx Deal, Property Well Located, Part of the Audubon Park Tract Also Resold to Builders,” NYDT, Nov. 24, 1908.

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6. GBG to Jack Monroe, Dec. 3, 1908, YaleGrinn; GBG to Ned Dana, Dec. 30, 1908, YaleGrinn. See also GBG to George Gould, Dec. 31, 1908, YaleGrinn; GBG to Luther North, Dec. 23, 1908, YaleGrinn; GBG to Jack Nicholson, Jan. 22, 1909, YaleGrinn. 7. GBG to Messrs Chas. Griffith Moses, Dec. 9, 1908, YaleGrinn; see NYCR, Lansing Company to Turney, Feb. 24, 1909, L35, 87; Turney to Huntington, Feb. 24, 1909, L35, 75; Turnery to Fleishman Brothers Co., Feb. 24, 1909, L35, 82; Turney to Sound Realty, Mar. 4, 1909, L35, 129; 1910 FedCensus. 8. GBG to Sylvia Page, May 27[?], 1909, YaleGrinn; see NYCR, Sound Realty to O’Brien, May 4, 1909, L34, 241. Transaction on the east side of Broadway, Grinnell to Lansing Company, Feb. 24, 1909, L35, 57; Lansing Company to Turney, Feb. 24, 1909, L35, 87; Turney to Gross & Herbener, Feb. 24, 1909, L35, 74; NYCR, Sound Realty to Riviera Realty, Jun. 3, 1909, L34, 321; GBG to Consolidated Gas Co., Jun. 9, 1909, YaleGrinn; GBG to John Fitzwilliams, Jul. 22, 1909, and Nov. 23, 1909, YaleGrinn. 9. GBG to George Bent, Feb. [?], 1909, YaleGrinn; see also GBG to Newell Martin, Feb. 5 and 6(?), 1909, YaleGrinn; GBG to Charles Hallock, Feb. 9 and 11, 1909, YaleGrinn; GBG to Newell Martin, Feb. 9, 1909, YaleGrinn; GBG to Agnes Laut, Feb. 18, 1909, YaleGrinn; GBG to Lemuel Hayward, Dec. 9, 1909, YaleGrinn. See GBG to De Cost Smith, Jun. 11, 1909, YaleGrinn; “Audubon Park’s Rapid Transformation,” NYT, Oct. 10, 1909. 10. Display Ad, SUN, Oct. 24, 1909; Jennifer L. Most and Mary Beth Betts, Audubon Park Designation Report (New York: Landmarks Preservation Commission, May 12, 2009), http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2335.pdf; see OMHD; “The Real Estate Field,” NYT, Dec. 23, 1909; “In the Real Estate Field,” NYT, Nov. 23, 1909; NYCR Fleischmann Brothers to Silberstein, Dec. 22, 1909, L35, 464; Fleischmann Brothers to Higgins, Dec. 31, 1909, L36, 410; Higgins to Marshall, Dec. 31, 1909, L36, 409. George Fred Pelham’s son George Fred Pelham Jr. joined his firm in 1910 and among many other buildings, designed Castle Village twenty blocks north of the Audubon Park neighborhood. 11. Andrew S. Dolkart, Morningside Heights Morningside Heights: A History of Its Architecture and Development, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 295. 12. G. C. Hesselgren, Apt Houses of the Metropolis (New York: G. C. Hesselgren, 1908), 32–33, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/ apartment-houses-of-the-metropolis#/?tab=about. 13. Andrew Alpern, New York’s Fabulous Luxury Apartments: With Original Floor Plans from the Dakota, River House, Olympic Tower and Other Great Buildings, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1987), 70; “Advertisement,” Independent Journal, Jun. 1, 1785. 14. 1910 FedCensus. 15. See NYCR, Sound Realty to Moersch and Wille, Jun. 18, 1909, L34, 353; Sound Realty to Centre Realty, Jun. 28, 1909, L35, 298; Sound Realty to Bagge, Sept. 2, 1909, L35, 352; Sound Realty to Sonn, Sept. 24, 1909, L36, 267; “In the Real Estate Field,” NYT, Apr. 11, 1909. 16. Display Ad, NYH, September 11, 1910; Most and Betts, Audubon Park Designation Report, 94. 17. See Display Ad, NYDT, September 18, 1910; NYCR, Kuhn-Lawson to Casabianca, Jan. 11, 1911, L39, 296; “The Real Estate Field,” NYT, Dec. 29, 1910.

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18. “Why Riverside Extension Is Held Up,” NYT, Sep. 26, 1909; “Want City to Pay for Drive Extension,” NYT, May 21, 1908; see “Riverside Drive Extension,” NYT, Feb. 12, 1911. 19. “Audubon Park’s Rapid Transformation,” NYT, Oct. 10, 1909. 20. “Audubon Park Movement,” R&G, Mar. 26, 1910, 641; “Towering Apartment Houses Have Effaced Audubon Park,” NYT, Mar. 26, 1911; “Along the Drive and Atop the Heights in Pinehurst,” NYH, Jun. 4, 1911. 21. See OMHD and Most and Betts, Audubon Park Designation Report, 97–98. 22. See NYCR, Huntington to American Geographical Society, Jul. 2, 1909, L35, 319; NYCR, Coronado Land Company to Huntington, Mar. 7, 1910, L38, 46. Huntington had apparently agreed to buy the lots in 1905 or 1906, contingent upon the diocese raising its part of the building cost, but didn’t close the sale until four years later; “New Spanish Church,” SUN, Apr. 7, 1907. 23. “Cardinal Blesses New Spanish Church,” NYT, Jul. 22, 1912. In 1924, Lawrence G. White of McKim, Mead & White redesigned the façade of Our Lady to allow an expansion of the sanctuary. By then the Museum of the American Indian and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters had joined the other institutions on the plaza. Charles Huntington had died in 1919 after designing the Museum of the American Indian, so William Mitchell Kendall, a member of the academy as well as the firm of McKim, Mead & White, designed the building to harmonize with Huntington’s designs. Cass Gilbert of the same firm designed the Hispanic Society’s north building, which opened in 1930, giving the museum much needed storage space but permanently erasing the vista Huntington had created from the north entrance facing the museums. 24. “Another Large Apartment House,” R&G, Jan. 10, 1914; see also NYCR, Sound Realty to Benheim, Oct. 4, 1909, L36, 283; Bendheim to Strathcona Construction, Dec. 18, 1913, L45, 383; Most and Betts, Audubon Park Designation Report, 28. 25. See IVM, Jun. 16, 1907, 285–288. 26. See “Lay Stone of $600,000 Church,” SUN, Oct. 25, 1912; American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, “18th Annual Report of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society to the Legislature of the State of New York” (1913): 465–466, https:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89072985278&view=1up&seq=5; “Mr. Lewisohn Buys Old Church,” R&G, Nov. 27, 1915, 904.

20. When the Bloom Faded 1. “New York Neighborhood Names,” NYDT, Dec. 30, 1910. See also “Preserving Good Old Names,” NYDT, Jan. 21, 1902. 2. See Matthew Spady and Jackie Thaw, The Grinnell at 100 (New York: Grinnell Centennial Planning Team, 2011), 40. 3. Stephen Michael Shearer, Gloria Swanson: The Ultimate Star (New York: St. Martin’s), 284. 4. 1915 NYCensus. 5. “All New York Bows to the Real Miss Manhattan,” Sun, Jun. 8, 1913; see also “American Sculpture of To-day,” NYH, Jul. 12, 1908. Audrey Munson’s life, the majority of which she spent in an asylum, is operatic in scope. Her likeness survives on many statues in New York City, including the Strauss memorial at Broadway and 106th Street, the Maine Memorial at the southeast entrance to Central Park, the Fireman’s Memorial on Riverside Drive, and “Civic Fame” atop the Municipal Building. For additional images of

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the oval park with and without the fountain, see the Audubon Park website: http://www .audubonparkny.com/AudubonParkFountainRiversideDriveand156thStreetLarge.html. 6. “Art: Palimpsest,” Time, Jul. 11, 1927. See also “Find Audubon Bird Paintings on Wall,” Shiner (Texas) Gazette, Aug. 11, 1927, among many others. 7. See “Political Job Ruins a Drive,” World, Aug. 15, 1904. 8. See “Wants Express Trains,” NYT, Sept. 29, 1906; “Blauvelt Tells Why City Needs Audubon Park,” Evening Telegram, Jul. 14, 1906. See also “For Audubon Park,” Evening Telegram, Jul. 12, 1906. 9. Reginald Pelham Bolton, The Bolton Garden at West 156th Street, unpublished, undated manuscript, New-York Historical Society, Collection 20, Box 45, Folder: Bolton Garden, 2; see “Riverside Drive Carried to Completion,” Evening Telegram, Mar. 18, 1907; NYCR, Cordes to Twellane Company, Dec. 27, 1907, L31, 315; Twellane Company to Cordes (Agreement), Dec. 28, 1907, L32, 250. 10. Reginald Pelham Bolton, “Riverside Drive Extension,” R&G, Jul. 4, 1908, 38; see “New York’s Great Driveway by the Hudson,” NYT, Mar. 14, 1909. 11. Ariella Rosen, “A Whisperer in an Age of Shouting,” NYT, Aug. 25, 2017; see also “Washington Heights Plan,” SUN, Jun. 29, 1912; see “Riverside Drive Plots at Auction,” NYT, May 18, 1913; ASHPS, “Eighteenth Annual Report, 1913, of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, to the Legislature of the State of New York,” Appendix C, 463, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36969902-eighteenth-annual-report-1913-of -the-american-scenic-and-historic-pres; “Defends Audubon Society,” NYT, Feb. 27, 1913. 12. Arnold W. Brunner and Frederic Law Olmsted, Proposed Change of Map for Riverside Drive Extension: Report and Plans Submitted to Hon. George McAneny, President of the Borough of Manhattan (New York: M. B. Brown, 1913), 5; see also Riverside Drive and Audubon Park: A Statement by Washington Heights Taxpayers Association (pamphlet) (New York, 1920), 6. 13. See GBG to L. D. Speir, Mar. 21, 1919, YaleGrinn; see also GBG to Laura Grinnell Martin, Nov. 14, 1917, YaleGrinn; GBG to Frank Page, Nov. 14, 1917, YaleGrinn; GBG to Louis Dean Speir, Nov. 19, 1917, YaleGrinn; GBG to Frank Page, May 9, 1918, YaleGrinn; GBG to Helen Grinnell Page, Apr. 8, 1919, YaleGrinn; NYCR, City Real Estate Co. to North River Buildings Corporation, Jun. 10, 1919, L3090, 97; Jennifer L. Most and Mary Beth Betts, Audubon Park Designation Report (New York: Landmarks Preservation Commission, May 12, 2009), 57, http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2335.pdf; 1925 NYCensus; Display Ad, NYT, Aug. 26, 1923. 14. Riverside Drive and Audubon Park, 2, 3. The Sun printed the plan in its entirety: “Completion of Riverside Drive Vital Need of the City,” SUN, Dec. 7, 1919; “West Riverside Drive Plan Fails,” NYT, Jun. 11, 1921; “Wants to Improve Riverside Drive,” NYT, Feb. 26, 1922. 15. “Riverside Drive’s New Viaduct, to Be Opened Next Week,” NYT, Nov. 19, 1928; see “City Plan to Improve Riverside Drive,” NYT, Mar. 5, 1922; “House Audubon Lived in Fast Falling into Ruins,” NYT, Apr. 22, 1923; “New Drive Viaduct Opened to Traffic,” NYT, Nov. 28, 1928. 16. See “Plans Filed for New Construction in All Boroughs of New York City,” R&G, Jun. 5, 1920, 759, and OMHD; NYCR, City Real Estate Co to Bentley Holding Corp, Jun. 15, 1919, L3173, 32; Bentley Holding Corp to Nasarolu Inc, May 19, 1921, L3224, 298. 17. “Unique Two-Family Dwelling,” NYT, Feb. 12, 1922; see Heights Landmark Sold,” NYT, Dec. 9, 1923.

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18. “Despite Prediction of a Decided Slump,” NYT, Feb. 17, 1924; “Ballroom for Tenants Built by Landlord,” NYT, May 3, 1925; see NYCR, Weir to Enesbe, Feb. 1, 1924, L281, 161; “High- Class Apartment Just Completed at 807 Riverside Drive for Tenants,” NYT, Dec. 21, 1924. 19. Diana Rice, “Audubon’s Home Sought As Park,” NYT, Jan. 27, 1929; see OMHD; NYCR, Heirs to Park Hill Construction, Sept. 21, 1925, L3444, 278; Park Hill Construction to Drive Building Corp, Jun. 7, 1926, L3547, 452; NYCR, Stone Heirs to 775 Riverside, Feb. 25, 1927, L3586, 221. 20. “Herrick Opposes Audubon Park Plan,” NYT, Nov. 8, 1929; see “Division Arises in Estimate Board,” NYT, Nov. 15, 1929. 21. See “Drive to Save Audubon Mansion,” NYT, Oct. 16, 1931; “Audubon Fund Gets $500,” NYT, Oct. 18, 1931; “Makes Gift to Help Save Audubon House,” NYT, Nov. 6, 1931; “Begin Work of Moving Audubon Home Today,” NYT, Nov. 11, 1931; “Audubon House Not Moved,” NYT, Nov. 12, 1931; “Audubon Plan Imperiled,” NYT, Nov. 14, 1931; “Will Give Audubon House,” NYT, Nov. 15, 1913; “Confer on Audubon Home Today,” NYT, Nov. 17, 1931. 22. “Wreckers Take Over the Audubon House,” NYT, Dec. 2, 1931. 23. Arthur Warner, “The City Engulfs the Home of Audubon,” NYT, Nov. 29, 1931. 24. “Home of Audubon Saved to Posterity,” NYT, Dec. 6, 1931; see “Gets Audubon Property,” NYT, Dec. 1, 1931; “Manhattan Mortgages,” NYT, Dec. 2, 1931; “Rebuilding Audubon House,” NYT, Dec. 9, 1931. 25. “Organize to Preserve Audubon Homestead,” NYT, Jan. 17, 1932; see also “Audubon House Still Needs $25,000,” NYT, December 8, 1931; Decker to Mr. Ellis, Feb. 10, 1932, Ellis Archives, UKan; Decker to Member of the A.O.U., undated, Ellis Archives, UKan; see also “Notes and News,” Auk 49, no. 2 (Apr. 1932); Harold K. Decker, “Saving the Audubon Home,” Bird-Lore, Feb. 1932, 100–102. 26. Decker to Member of the A.O.U., undated, Ellis Archives, UKan. 27. Classified Apartment Ad, NYT, Nov. 20, 1932; see “New Apartment Houses Occupy Sites of Old Landmarks,” NYT, Nov. 20, 1932.

Postscript 1. See “Audubon Remains the Perfect Bird Man,” NYT, April 28, 1935; “Miss C. A. Dike Hostess,” NYT, Sep. 6, 1943; “Topics of the Times: Holding the Fort,” NYT, Nov. 5, 1949; “Mass This Morning by Padre, 89, Will Start His 66th Year as Priest,” NYT, Mar. 5, 1952; 1940 New York Telephone Directory, New York Public Library website: http://directme .nypl.org/directory/manhattan; “Divide Audubon’s Exchange,” NYT, Mar. 5, 1916; “Fire in Phone Exchange,” NYT, Sep.16, 1921. 2. Robert W. Snyder, Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015), 6. 3. “Anniversary Week for Cubans Ends,” NYT, May 23, 1938; “Mayor Dinkins: A Pledge to All the People; Text of Dinkins Speech: ‘We Are All Foot Soldiers on the March to Freedom,” NYT, Jan. 2, 1990. 4. “Miss Moore’s Memories,” Typewritten Notes, Oct. 1998, Author’s Collection. 5. 1930, 1940 FedCensuses. 6. Steven M. Lowenstein, Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933–1983, Its Structure and Culture, repr. ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 47.

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7. See “Tenant Syndicates Buying Apartments,” NYT, Apr. 9, 1920; 1940 FedCensus; “The Vauxhall Apartments,” Undated promotional literature, circa 1938. 8. “Resourceful Modernization,” Buildings and Building Management, Apr. 1939, 40; “Suites Remodeled for Tenant Needs,” NYT, Aug 17, 1941; see “Apartment House Sales: Leland Will Be Altered into Small Suite, NYT, May 29, 1920; “13-Story Cooperative for West 58th Street; $2,100,000 Building in Small Suites to Replace One of the ‘Spanish Flats,’” NYT, Dec. 9, 1926; “Altering Big Apartment: Small Suites being Installed in Sutton Place Area,” NYT, Sep. 28, 1940; iCard for 625 West 157th Street, http://www1.nyc .gov/site/hpd/index.page (either the inspector did not include the basement apartment in his count or the owner left one of the original apartments intact); Jennifer L.Most and Mary Beth Betts, Audubon Park Designation Report (New York: Landmarks Preservation Commission, May 12, 2009), 78, http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2335.pdf; iCard for 625 West 157th Street, http://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/index.page. 9. See “Final Rush Fills Many Apartments,” NYT, Sep. 30, 1934; “Houses Fully Rented,” NYT, Jul. 24, 1938; “Display Ad,” NYT, Sep. 7, 1930; NYCR, Arndt to Riverwood Realty, Dec. 14, 1933, L3863, 441; “Manhattan Auctions,” NYT, Dec. 1, 1943; “Manhattan Transfers,” NYT, Aug. 2, 1944. 10. Marie W. Dallam, Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 133. 11. Peggy Gill Oakes to Matthew Spady, email, Aug. 23, 2017. For a discussion of New York State’s first experiments with rent regulation, see Robert M. Fogelson, The Great Rent Wars: New York, 1917–1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 12. Peggy Gill Oakes to Matthew Spady, email, Aug. 23, 2017. 13. Peggy Gill Oakes to Matthew Spady, email, Aug. 23, 2017. 14. Charle Finley to Matthew Spady, email, Aug. 25, 2017. 15. See Snyder, Crossing Broadway, 48; Richard Attanasio to Matthew Spady, email, Nov. 11–14, 2013. 16. Matthew Spady and Jackie Thaw, The Grinnell at 100 (New York: Grinnell Centennial Planning Team, 2011), 55; Richard James to Matthew Spady, email, Dec. 28, 2019. 17. Elizabeth Currier to Matthew Spady, Interview, Aug. 9, 2017. 18. Spady and Thaw, Grinnell at 100, 56. 19. “City Speeds Riverside Drive Plan for a Mid-Income Cooperative,” NYT, Dec. 1, 1961; see Glenn Fowler, “Co- Op Tax Benefits: Some New Tenant- Owners Believed Unaware of Permitted Deductions,” NYT, Apr. 8, 1962; “Ignorance Cited on Housing Rules: Families Deny Themselves Moderately Prices Suites Although They Qualify,” NYT, Jun. 17, 1962; “City Speeds Riverside Drive Plan for a Mid-Income Cooperative,” NYT, Jan. 12, 1961; Edmond J. Bernett, “Riverside Drive to Get 2 Co-ops,” NYT, Jan. 28, 1962. 20. Scott Beyer, “How Ironic: America’s Rent- Controlled Cities Are Its Least Affordable,” Forbes, Apr. 24, 2015. 21. John Foreman, “To Me the Building Was Lovely, So I Bought It,” NYT, Dec. 13, 1981. 22. Murray Scumach, “Neighbors March on Station House,” NYT, Nov. 20, 1967; Snyder, Crossing Broadway, 23. 23. William P. Nourse, “Riverside Drive and the ’60s,” unpublished memories for 780 Riverside Drive’s Centennial Celebration. 24. Email, Josette Bailey to Matthew Spady, July 12, 2017. 25. Email, Josette Bailey to Matthew Spady, December 5, 2019.

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26. See Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, https://dsl.richmond.edu/ panorama/redlining/#loc=5/39.1/-94.58&text=intro, and Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). For national mortgage rates, see http://www.fedprimerate.com/mortgage_rates.htm. 27. See https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/acris.page: McClaren to McClaren, Aug. 24, 1967, Rec. 241, 216; McClaren to Baily, Feb. 19, 1974, Reel 305, 1980; Bushelle to Carter, Sep. 20, 1968, Reel 118, 1948; Carter to Bushelle (Mortgage), Sep. 20, 1968, Reel 118, 1950; Forys and Beck to Johnson, Dec. 7, 1970, Reel 268, 1146; Johnson to Forys and Beck (Mortgage), Feb. 1, 1973, Reel 263, 1148; Fisher to Carter, Jan. 28, 1980, Reel 513, 1278; Carter to Fisher (Mortgage), Jan. 28, 1980, Reel 513, 1280; Keeling to Chemical Bank (Mortgage), Mar. 1, 1974, Reel 306, 1878; Silvera to Keeling, Mar. 1, 1974, Reel 306, 1864; Daiko to Carter and Johnson, Jan. 10, 1986, Reel 1107, 382; Scrugg to Javon Realty Corp., Mar. 25, 1992, Reel 1858, 2201. 28. Anna Quindlen, “Residents of Audubon Terrace Area, ‘a Unique Entity,’ Accept Landmark Designation as Block’s Due,” NYT, Jan. 16, 1979. 29. Anna Quindlen, “About New York,” NYT, Dec. 18, 1982. 30. Spady and Thaw, Grinnell at 100, 44. 31. Richard James to Matthew Spady, email, Dec. 28, 2019. 32. Ronald Sullivan, “Violent Drug Gang Smashed,” NYT, Oct. 24, 1991; Maggie Garb, “If You’re Thinking of Living In Washington Heights; New Hopes in a Patchwork Neighborhood,” NYT, Dec. 27, 1998; see David R. Francis, “What Reduced Crime in New York City,” The National Bureau of Economic Research, http://www.nber.org/digest/ jan03/w9061.html, accessed August 28, 2017. 33. Abigail Rayner, “Why Harlem’s Rose Is Set to Bloom Again,” Financial Times, Feb. 3, 2001; see also Clara S. Träger, “Washington Heights Hitting Its Peak,” Crains, Jul. 21, 2003; Nancy Beth Jackson, “If You’re Thinking of Living In: Audubon Terrace; An Uptown Pocket With Historic Roots.” NYT, Apr. 11, 2004; Patrick Gallahue, “Reaching the New Heights—Upper Manhattan Has Risen from the Depths,” New York Post, Jul. 28, 2004. 34. Snyder, Crossing Broadway, 9. 35. A. J. Sidransky, “The Changing Faces of Washington Heights,” Cooperator, Jun. 28, 2018, online version: https://cooperator.com/article/washington-heights-changing-faces/full; Melkorka Licea, “Washington Heights Is the New Williamsburg,” New York Post, Jun. 23, 2018, online edition: https://nypost.com/2018/06/23/washington-heights-is-the-new-williams burg/; Benjamin Fearnow, “Seven U.S. Cities Make Up Half of Country’s Gentrification, Washington D.C. and New York Lead Displacement,” Newsweek, Mar. 25, 2019, online edition: https://www.newsweek.com/gentrification-race-cities-hispanic-black-neighborhoods -capitalism-jobs-1374064; Carolina Pichardo, “More Empty Storefronts Plague Uptown Than Other Parts of City, Report Says,” DNAinfo, Jun. 14, 2017, https://www.dnainfo.com/ new-york/20170614/washington-heights/broadway-vacant-buildings-gale-brewer/. 36. Interview with Jeanie and David Dubnau, Nov. 7, 2019; Mark Gordon, “Our Stories: The Struggle to Save the Grinnell,” The Grinnell at 100 website: http://www.the grinnellat100.com/TheGrinnellat100MarkGordonsMemories.html. 37. Fearnow, “Seven U.S. Cities Make Up Half of Country’s Gentrification.” 38. Michael Henry Adams, “The End of Black Harlem,” NYT, May 27, 2016, https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-black-harlem.html. 39. See also Brendan Krisel, “Amtrak Angers Uptown after Blocking Views, Spraying Chemicals,” Patch, Mar. 21, 2019, online: https://patch.com/new-york/washington-heights -inwood/uptown-residents-rip-amtrak-treatment-neighborhood; Krisel, “Uptown Pols

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Want Amtrak Billboard Torn Down,” Patch, Apr. 23, 2109, online: https://patch.com/new -york/washington-heights-inwood/uptown-pols-want-amtrak-billboard-torn-down; Gregg McQueen, “Stop Sign: Amtrak Billboard Panned,” Manhattan Times, Oct. 9, 2019, online: https://www.manhattantimesnews.com/stop-signpantalla-polemica/. 40. Oliver Wainwright, “Super-Tall, Super-Skinny, Super-Expensive: The ‘Pencil Towers’ of New York’s Super-Rich,” Guardian, Feb. 5, 2019, online version, https://www .theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/05/super-tall-super-skinny-super-expensive-the-pencil -towers-of-new-yorks-super-rich. For more on efforts to expand the Audubon Park Historic District, see James Barron, “Grace Notes: Rowhouse Residents Want Historic District Expanded,” NYT, Jun. 18, 2017. 41. See “North Presbyterian Church,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ North_Presbyterian_Church_(Manhattan); “The Crypt Sessions,” Death of Classical, https://www.deathofclassical.com/cryptsessions; Justin Davidson, “I Went to a Concert with a Basement Full of Dead People and Loved It,” Vulture, Jun. 1, 2017, https://www .vulture.com/2017/06/i-went-to-a-concert-with-dead-people-and-loved-it.html; “2014 Political Clubs,” Gotham Gazette, https://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/career/ 5049-2014-political-clubs. 42. “Cemeteries and Crematoria at Fort Lee,” CYBO; see https://www.stlukeame harlem.org/; http://www.intercessionnyc.org/. 43. See “Audubon 157,” Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/audubon157; “Riverside Oval Association,” Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/RiversideOval/; Aududon Park Perspectives, https://audubonparkperspectives.org/; “Where Birds Meet Art—After Dark,” National Audubon Society, https://www.audubon.org/amp.

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Van Nostrand, Jeanne Skinner, and J. H. Bachman, “Audubon’s Ill-Fated Western Journey: Recalled by the Diary of J. H. Bachman.” California Historical Society Quarterly 21, no. 4 (December 1, 1942): 289–310. https://doi.org/10.2307/25161021. Walker, James Blaine. Fifty Years of Rapid Transit, 1864–1917. 2019. Originally publishing in 1918. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/0970671.0001.001?rgn=main;view=toc Washington, George. George Washington: Writings. Edited by John H. Rhodehamel. New York: Library of America, 1997. “Washington Post: Archives.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/. Webber, Charles Wilkins. Romance of Natural History: Or, Wild Scenes and Wild Hunters. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1852. Wheelock, John Hall, and George Garrett. The Last Romantic: A Poet among Publishers: The Oral Autobiography of John Hall Wheelock. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Wilbur, Sanford “Sandy.” “Colonel Webb’s ‘California Company.’” On the Trail. http:// www.condortales.com/onthetrail/colonel-webbs-california.html. Williamson, Samuel H., and Lawrence Officer. “Measuring Worth—Relative Worth Comparators and Data Sets.” https://www.measuringworth.com/index.php. Wilson, Rufus Rockwell. New York: Old & New; Its Story, Street, and Landmarks. 2 vols. 3rd ed. New York: J. B. Lippencott, 1909. Witheridge, Annette. New York Then and Now. 2nd ed. San Diego: Thunder Bay, 2002. Wright, Benjamin Cooper. Banking in California 1849–1910. San Francisco: H. S. Crocker, 1910. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Banking_in_California_1849_1910/P9IJ AAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover. Zeisloft, E. Idell. The New Metropolis: Memorable Events of Three Centuries, 1600–1900; From the Island of Mana-Hat-Ta to Greater New York at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. Reprint Forgotten Books, 2017 (CDRom).

INDEX

Abercrombie, Richard M., 55, 57, 65, 79, 112, 163, 330n5 Adams, Charles, 180, 284 Adams, Rev. Charles, 156, 335n21 Adams, Emma, 248 Adams, Michael Henry, 306 African Americans, 125, 221, 290, 303, 306; Audubon, Lucy, on, 327n10; in Audubon Park, 176; in Harlem, 298; home ownership of, 298–300 Agnew, Samuel, 248 Ahearn, John, 276 Aitken, Charles, 28 Alden, Henry Mills, 273 Alfonso (King), 269 Alfredo, the, 245–246 Alpern, Andrew, 260 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 273, 353n23 American Bible Society, 36 American Geographical Society, 268 American Numismatic and Archaeological Society, 254–255 American Ornithologists’ Union, 186–187, 286 American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society (ASHPS), 275

Annexed District, 174, 190, 212 Anton, Edward, 153 Archer, Edward, 72 Armistice Day, 290 Arnold, Amway, 273 ASHPS. See American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society Aspinwall, William Henry, 119 Athenaeum Society, 182, 183, 185, 188, 206–207 Attanasio, Mary, 295–296 Attanasio, Richard, 295–296 Atterbury, Elizabeth, 43, 51–52, 86 Aubert, Bertha, 87 Audubon, Annie, 103–104, 238 Audubon, Benjamin Phillips, 100 Audubon, Caroline Hall, 2, 9, 15, 17–18, 22, 44, 46, 47, 49, 74, 119–120, 121, 130, 141; Audubon, Lucy, and, 120; children of, 50–51, 57, 59, 83–84; in Europe, 52–53; property of, 126, 334n4 Audubon, Delia, 156, 196 Audubon, Florence, 83, 104; divorce of, 330n5 Audubon, Georgianna Mallory, 2, 49, 76, 108, 123, 126, 128, 130, 134, 141, 147, 157, 163, 164, 177; Audubon, Lucy, and,

371

372 ·

INDEX

Audubon, Georgianna Mallory (continued) 119–122, 158, 336n25; Audubon, V., and, 46–47, 48, 61, 77,100, 112, 326n4; children of, 50, 52, 57, 66–67, 71, 116, 168; death of, 177–178; property sold by, 115–116; Talman, G., and, 169–170 Audubon, Harriet (Hattie), 9, 12–13, 18, 46, 50, 52–53, 83, 86, 95, 100, 103, 116, 118, 127, 331n18; Audubon, Lucy, and, 22, 58, 77, 120–121, 123, 157–158, 163–164; as author, 156; as governess, 127; as teacher, 156–157, 164 Audubon, Jean, 19–20 Audubon, Jane (Jenny), 59, 83 Audubon, John James, 9–12, 14, 60–61; 125th birthday celebration, 239; bankruptcy of, 16, 18, 40, 62; birth of, 19–20; birthday celebrations of, 311, 349n23; Carman, R., and, 24–25; death of, 1, 65–66; dementia of, 51, 55, 58, 60, 64; as father, 11; gravesite of, 66; at Minnie’s Land, 1–3, 16–18, 44–45, 48, 323n16; obituaries for, 65; parents of, 19–20; self-sufficiency of, 18–19; slavery, and, 21; travels of, 44; will of, 15 Audubon, John James (Jack), 50–51, 334n3 Audubon, John Woodhouse, 1–2, 9, 10, 12, 13–14, 46, 51, 55, 76, 96, 144, 232, 246–247; Audubon, G., and, 100, 112; Audubon, V., and, 62–64, 70–71, 73–74, 77; on Birds of America, 99–100; children of, 47–48, 57, 66–67; death of, 117, 118–120; in Europe, 52–53; farming endeavors of, 49; finances of, 88; in gold rush, 58–60, 93; Grinnell, George Bird, on, 83; Harden, J., and, 109, 324n30; house of, 77, 286–287; Kingsland and, 58–59; marriage of, 17–18; on Minnie’s Land, 19, 21–22, 40–41, 47–49; original drawings sold by, 117; Pentz, J., and, 108; property leased by, 88–89, 109, 117; property sold by, 62, 75–76, 84–86, 106, 115, 122–123; in Texas, 51–52; Tiemann and, 99 Audubon, Lucy, 1–2, 9–11, 16–19, 21; on African Americans, 327n10; and Adams, Rev. C., 156; Audubon, C., and,

120, 126, 130; Audubon, G., and, 62, 95, 126, 130, 336n25; Audubon, H., and, 157–158, 163–164; Audubon, V., and, 62, 74; on Audubon, J. J., 65; Burgess, G., and, 88–89; death of, 163–164; engraving plates sold by, 118–119, 141; Grinnell, Helen, and, 114–115; Harris, E., and, 118–119; as host, 49–50, 86; Jerome, A., and, 126, 127–128; legacy of, 164–165; in Louisville, 156; at Minnie’s Land, 24–25, 41–42, 57, 61, 71–72, 82; in New York City, 156; original Audubon drawings sold by, 119, 123, 126; property leased by, 88–89; property sold by, 67, 73–74, 77, 106–107, 128, 326n4; savings bonds purchased by, 124; as teacher, 21, 46, 50, 83, 176– 177; Wheelock, W., and, 89, 118, 122 Audubon, Lucy (Lulu), 10, 13, 17, 22, 77, 83, 86, 157; children of, 331n18; marriage of, 100 Audubon, Maria Rebecca, 41, 47, 52, 130, 334n24 Audubon, Maria Rebecca Bachman, 9–10, 12–13; death of, 14–15 Audubon, Mary Eliza, 17, 50, 115–116, 117, 137, 176, 196, 225, 238, 239, 270–271 Audubon, Mary Eliza Bachman, 11, 13–14, 46–47, 69, 323n10; death of, 15–16 Audubon, Rose (John James Audubon’s half-sister), 14, 20, 52 Audubon, Rose (John James Audubon’s granddaughter), 52, 168 Audubon, Victor, 1–3, 9, 13–16, 40–41; alcoholism of, 95–96, 330n5; Audubon, G., and, 46–47, 100, 112; Audubon, John W., and, 62–64, 70–71, 73–74, 77; Audubon, Lucy, and, 62; business operations of, 42, 50–51; children of, 66–67; death of, 112, 115; finances of, 74–75, 84, 88, 115; health problems of, 70, 95, 100, 107, 112; house of, 77; on Hudson River Railroad, 54–55; injury of, 95–96; Intercession founded by, 55–57; investments of, 61; on Minnie’s Land, 22, 47, 61–62, 73–74; mourning of, 46; property purchased by, 48, 61; religious

INDEX ·

beliefs of, 55–56; on Viviparous Quadrupeds, 70, 74–75, 88 Audubon, Victor Gifford, 57, 116, 123, 147 Audubon, William, 57 Audubon Avenue, 289; extension of, 196–199 Audubon Family Vault, 66, 116, 126, 164, 178, 187, 196 Audubon Hall, 258, 260, 261 Audubon Homestead, 21, 22, 24, 41, 43, 75, 117, 126, 144, 168, 191, 235, 248, 264, 274; demolition of, 287; mortgage on, 112; preservation of, 276–277, 284– 286; sale of, 128 Audubon Lane, 6 Audubon Monument, 187, 196–198, 225, 289, 349n23 Audubon Mural Project, 311, 312 Audubon Park, 2, 6, 78, 82, 219; African Americans in, 176; Bolton reimagining, 276, 277; Clapp, W., in, 108; development of, 79–81, 85; dismantling of, 4, 6; evolution of, 3–4; expansion of, 148; fires in, 105–106; Grinnell, George Bird, leaving, 257– 258, 272; Grinnell, George Bird, on, 103–104, 257; Grinnell, George Blake, at, 90–92, 142, 147–148, 173, 185–186; Grinnell, H., in, 101–102, 185–186; as growth area, 229; Hawley, Lavinia “Minnie,” in, 140–141; Knapp, S., in, 94–95; local needs in, 122; map of, 111, 197, 259; multiracial demographics of, 305; naming of, 81–82, 303; public improvements and value of, 229–230; real estate transactions in, 163; religion in, 102–103; representation in, 153; revival of, 303; social life in, 78–79, 81–82, 94–95, 96, 151 Audubon Park Alliance, 309–310 Audubon Park Apartments, 247; amenities, 260; apartment layouts in, 244–245; architects of, 243, 259–260, 350n6; investments in, 264–265; rents in, 245–246 Audubon Park Historic District, 6–7, 303, 312

373

Audubon Partnership for Economic Development, 302–303 Audubon School, 170 Audubon Society, 186–187, 239, 276–277, 312; in Great Depression, 287 Audubon Station, 130, 134, 336n30 Audubon Syndicate, 256–257 Audubon Terrace Historic District, 290, 295, 301 Augrave, Clifton, 46 Bachman, Catherine, 44, 51 Bachman, Harriet, 12, 44, 69; death of, 53 Bachman, Jane, 44, 51–52, 57–58, 69, 109 Bachman, Rev. John, 9, 44, 49–50, 51, 53, 57–58, 71, 74–75, 96, 100 Bachman, Julia, 51, 53 Bachman, Lynch, 57 Bachman, Maria Martin, 14–15, 44–45, 71, 77, 112; on slavery, 69–70 Bagge, George A., 258, 262–263, 266 Bailey, Arthur Joseph, 299 Bailey, Josette, 299 Baird, Spencer Fullerton, 41, 50, 52 Bakewell, Alicia, 43 Bakewell, Benjamin, 156–157 Bakewell, John Howard, 59 Bakewell, Maria, 100, 106, 112, 121, 156– 157, 163, 331n18 Bakewell, William, 42, 43, 52, 54–57, 64, 95, 331n18; death of, 156–157; marriages of, 328n20 Baldwin, Henry de Forest, 220 Baldwin, Natalie. See Grinnell, Natalie Ball, Alwyn, Jr., 245 Barney, Charles Spencer, 192 Barney, Charles T., 238, 256 barouche, 24–25 Barri, John, 183 Barril, Maria de, 269 Barry, Rev. Edmund, 17–18, 42–43, 47, 50 Battle of Harlem Heights, 29, 30, 31, 209 Beaux-Arts, 7–8, 232, 243, 256, 270, 278 Beaverbrook Farm, 185, 201, 206, 217, 225, 232, 236, 249–250, 253 Beck, Edward J., 300 Beebe, Henrietta, 183

374 ·

INDEX

Beecher, Catherine, 3 Beekman, Henry, 220 Beekman, Lydia, 34, 36 Belasco, David, 182 Bella Flats, 185, 187 Bendheim, Adolph M., 257, 270 Benedict, Frances, 129, 147, 148 Benedict, Jesse, 128, 129, 144–145, 147, 168, 263, 286; death of, 148 Bennett, James Gordon, 59, 65, 99, 121, 133 Bentley Holding Corporation, 278 Berler, Nathan, 282–284 Berthoud, Eliza, 14–16 Bien, Julius, 100, 115 Bird, George, 91 Bird, Jonathan, 113, 333n16 Birds of America, 1–2, 9, 17, 19, 21, 24, 41, 51, 69; Audubon, John, on, 99–100; Bien Chromolithographic Edition, 101, 115–116, 333n22; double elephant folio edition of, 99–100, 117; octavo editions, 329n16; second octavo version of, 88 Bishop, William, 141, 166 Black, Frank S., 208–209 Blackwell, Samuel, 67 Blackwell Farm Map, 110–111 Blauvelt, Benjamin, 275–276 Bleeker, Anthony J., 70, 96 Bliss, Douglas, Wheelock & Company, 98 Bliss, John C., 179 Blum, Edward, 270 Blum, George, 270 Board of Alderman, New York City, 7, 33, 36–37, 49–50, 202, 211, 213 Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners (RTC), 213–214, 222 Bogle, James, 106 Boller, Alfred P., 190 Bolton, Ethelind, 300 Bolton, Reginald Pelham, 205–206, 249, 275–278, 284–286, 300; Audubon Park reimagined by, 276, 277; on Riverside Drive, 276 Booth, Edwin, 135, 182 Booth, John Wilkes, 131 Bosworth Machine Company, 194, 247

Bouffard, Catherine, 19–20 Boulevard, x, 133, 138, 140, 148, 150–155, 169, 180, 181, 189; real estate on, 171–172 Boulevard Lafayette, 202–203, 208–210, 226 Boxer Rebellion, 225 Bradhurst, Henry, 60–61 Bradhurst, John Maunsell, 55 Bradhurst, Samuel, 33 Braender, 244 Brandt, Emanuel, 286 Brandt Brothers Building Corporation, 284–286, 287 Briesen, A. V., 180–181 British Museum, 117, 119 Brooklyn Savings Bank, 294 Brown, Henry Eyre, 138 Brown, J. Romaine, 169–170, 175, 226, 336n30 Brown, Vernon H., 162, 163 Brozik, Maurice de, 273 Brunner, Arnold W., on Riverside Drive, 278, 279 Bruno, Joseph, 248 Buchanan, Robert Williams, 156 Bulman, Henry, 238, 243–244, 350n6 Bunker, Harold, 219 Burgess, George, 14–15, 46, 47, 88, 95, 119, 334n4; Audubon, Lucy, and, 88–89, 120, 123, 126, 130, 158 Burgoyne, William Moser, 89–90, 103– 104, 112, 119–120, 164, 192, 334n4 Burr, Aaron, 29, 31 Bushelle, Kendrew, 299–300 Bushwick, 304 Bussings Point, 35 cable road, 187–188 Callahan, Patrick, 168 camera lucida, 11, 13, 41 Cantor, Jacob A., 226 Carman, Mary, death of, 152 Carman, Richard, ix, 7, 17, 96, 110, 117, 171, 181, 336n30; Audubon, G., and, 42; Audubon, J. J., and, 24–25; businesses of, 37–39; death of, 152; Intercession

INDEX ·

and, 55–56; property developed by, 72–73, 119 Carman House, 96, 108–109 Carman Rowing Association, 181 Carmansville, ix, 4, 17, 48, 55, 68, 82, 96, 127; competing interests in, 181; education in, 127, 190; fires in, 105–106; growth of, 50, 73, 86–87; map of, 82, 111; real estate development in, 190; religion in, 102, 148; social life in, 151 Carnley, Thomas, 72–73, 95 Carstensen, George J. B., 75 Carter, Peter, 148 Carter, Sherman, 299, 300 Catherwood, Clinton, 252 Catherwood, Jennie, 217, 252–253 Central Pacific Railroad Company, 232 Chaddom, Louise, 273 Chamber of Commerce, 213 Chapin, James P., 286 Chapman, Frank M., 239 Chapman, Rose, 262 Chapman, William, 262 Charleston, 11–13, 15, 21, 69–70, 75, 89 Chase, Nelson, 152 Chase National Bank, 285 Cheston, Nettie, 255 chicken pox, 83–84 cholera, 45, 59 chromolithography, 100 Chubb, Harmsted S., 286 City Hall (New York), 12, 131, 213, 215, 221 Civil War, American, 4–5, 28, 109, 111– 112, 123, 200; end of, 131 Clapp, Cornelia, 76, 135, 167, 178 Clapp, Emma, 135 Clapp, Freddie, 110 Clapp, Harry, 110, 155 Clapp, Nellie, 167–168 Clapp, Wellington, 6, 98, 122, 134–135, 145, 153–154, 155, 166, 175; in Audubon Park, 108; house of, 178, 179; houses leased by, 90–91; lots purchased by, 76–77, 112 Clarendon House (Hotel), 129, 196 Clark, Horace, 135–136, 141–142, 159 Clark, James L., 286

375

Clarke, Charity, 28 Clarke, Thomas, 28 Claud-Mantle, Joseph, 248 Cleghorn, Sarah, 156 Clement Clarke Moore Ceremony, 28, 306 Clements, James, 49, 51, 59, 324n32 CLOTH. See Community League of the Heights clothing industry, 273 Cocker, Joseph, 241–242, 263 Cole and Chilton, 7, 71 Coler, Bird Sim, 214, 215 Colored Orphan Asylum, 80, 124–125, 167 Columbia College, 28, 212–213 Common Council, 34–39, 183 Community League of the Heights (CLOTH), 307 Comstock, Mary Louise, 130 Conklin, 84, 329n5 Conner, James, 7, 36–37, 39, 98; & Sons, 98 Connolly, Charles M., 110 Constitution, US, Thirteenth Amendment, 21 Convent of the Sacred Heart, 218, 323n17 Coogan, James J., 183, 184, 188, 190, 222 Cook, Emily, 237 Cooke, Jay, 158, 159 Cooke, Rose Terry, 181 Cordes, August, 195, 204–205, 276, 308 Cordes, Martha, 204–205, 276 Cortez, the, 263, 273 Cotton Triangle, 114 Cragmoor Dwellings, 278, 280 Cromley, Elizabeth Collins, 241 Crossing Broadway (Snyder), 290 Croton Aqueduct, 45, 123 Croton Distributing Reservoir, 75 Croton Water, 51, 122, 148 Croton Water Celebration, 45 Crypt Sessions, 308 Cuba, 14–15, 290 Cuba Week, 290 Currier, Elizabeth, 296–297 Cutler, Thomas, 273 Daddy Grace, 294–295 Dale, John D., 61

376 ·

INDEX

Dallam, Marie W., 294 Dalley, John, 73, 87–88, 99, 178, 213, 242 Dana, Edward S., 194, 233, 234, 257 Dark Hill Construction Company, 284 Davis, Andrew Jackson, 3 Davis, J., 241 Davis, Mary, 10 Day, Clarence, Jr., 338n5 d’Azy, Benoit, 194 d’Azy, Caroline Jones, 194 De Camp, Allen, 181 Decker, Harold, 286–287 Delafield, Edward, 44, 51, 52 De Lamos & Cordes, 195–196 Delgado, Walter, 302 Delmore, Herbert, 273 Democratic Party, 162 Denby, Edwin H., 262 De Witt, Simeon, 33 Dillingham, Maria, 328n20 Dillingham, Martha, 74 Dillon, Mary, 223 Dinkins, David, 291, 298 Dock Department, 278 Dolkart, Andrew S., 259–260 Dominicans, 290–291, 294, 302 Donald, Elijah Winchester, 166, 168, 177, 178, 193, Downer, Samuel, 63, 71, 84, 326n24 Downing, Andrew Jackson, 143 Draft Riots, 123, 125, 139 drug dealing, 301–302 Dubnau, Dave, 305 Dubnau, Jeanie, 305 Ducat, Vivian, 306 Duncan, Margaret, 90 Dunkin, Elizabeth, 34, 36 Durand, John, 112 Dutch Reformed Church, 87, 148 Dyckman, Isaac, 110 Dyckman, Jan, 27 Dyke, Fanny, 273 Eames, Emma, 269 East Village, 296–297 Edison, Thomas, 176 Edward VII (King), 113

Edward M. Morgan Place, x, 309 Egleston, Thomas, 187 El Dorado (apartments), 294 Elevated Railway Company, 154 Elliott, Charles, 134 Elliott, Henry H., 110 Emancipation Proclamation, 123–124 Empire State Building, 196 Employers’ and Builders’ League, 203–204 Enesbe Realty Corporation, 283 Engel, Gertrude, 273 Engel, Iphigenia (Iffy), 273 Englehardt, Charles, 223, 225 Enrollment Act, 123–124 Entzer, Louis, 205, 345n8 Episcopalians, 55, 56, 78, 102–103, 148, 154, 246, 308 Evacuation Day, 31 Everett, Edward, 86 Everitt, John, 75 Excelsior Fire Insurance Company, 84–85 Excelsior Power Company, 342n3 Famous Old Fairy Tales (Audubon, H.), 156 Fanwood, 79–80 Farley, John, 269 Farrelly, Mary, 218–219 Farrelly, Stephen, 218–219, 226 Federal Census, 33, 111, 147, 175, 223, 260–261, 273, 292–293, 322n16, 326n24, 341n6, 347n16; destruction of, 347n16; on slave ownership, 322n16 Federal Office of Price Administration, 294–295 Ferguson, Paul, 127, 129, 167 Field, Hickson, 55, 68, 96, 125 financial crises. See specific crises The First Tycoon (Stiles), 159 Fishman, David, 155 Fisk, James, 159 Fitzwilliams, John, 258 Five Points, 12 Fleischmann Brothers, 257–258 Fleming, Kenneth, 224 Foreman, John, 297 Forest and Stream, 186, 187, 216, 219, 239, 250

INDEX ·

Fort Sumter, 114, 115 Fort Washington, 29, 31 Fort Washington (apartments), 241, 241–243 Fort Washington (neighborhood), ix, 48, 55, 82, 96, 172, 200 Forys, Blanche, 300 Foster, Pell, 270–271 Foster, William, 101, 147, 153–154, 166, 172, 175, 177, 181, 183, 189, 202, 206–207; family of, 88, 109–110; Lincoln, A., and, 122; property of, 134; tax rate of, 121 Fraker, Louise, 169 Francis Skinner & Company, 85 French, Rose, 90 French flats, 87, 145, 173, 241–242, 243 Fuller, Lawson N., 202, 206–207 Gabrilowitsch, Ossip, 224 Gallup, Charles V. E., 208 Gandy, Sheppard, 94 Garage Village, 6, 278, 280, 295–296 Garland, Hamlin, 225, 247 Gates, Milo, 239, 270, 286, 306–307 Gaylor, Clarence, 175 G. B. Grinnell & Company, 135 gentrification, 303–306 George III (King), 26 George Bird Grinnell & Company, 159–162 George Washington Bridge, 52, 281 Germania Life Insurance Company, 204–205 Gifford, Euphemia, 10 Gilbert, Rufus, 154–155, 163, 171–172 Gilded Age, 143 Gildemeister, Karl, 75, 89, 328n25 Gildemeister, Wilhelmina, 75, 89, 336n26 Gilder, Richard Watson, 239 Gillespie, Harry, 273 Gilroy, Thomas Francis, 199 Gilyard, Gwen, 297, 301 Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 105 Godwin, Parke: on Audubon, J. J., 45–46; at Minnie’s Land, 45 Gogorza, Emilio de, 269

377

gold rush, 58, 89; Audubon, John, in, 59–60, 93 Goldstein, Morris, 298, 306 Goldstone, Lafayette A., 266 Goodhue, Bertram G., 270–271 Goodman, Mose, 278, 283 Gordon, Ann, 57 Gordon, Barbara, 305 Gordon, Mark, 305 Gordon, Willie, 51–52 Gould, Jay, 159, 211, 213 Gould, Phares, 120–121 Goya and Velasquez, 262, 273, 306 Graça, Marcelino Manuel da. See Daddy Grace Gradual Abolition Act, 20 Gradual Emancipation Act of 1799, 33 Graff, John, 127 Grand Central Station, 213, 253 Grant, Julia, 207 Great Blizzard of ’88, 212 Great Chicago Fire, 159 Great Depression (1873), 162, 290 Great Depression (1929), 7, Audubon Society in, 287; the Grinnell during, 272–273 Great Fire of 1835, New York City, 37–38 Greeley, Horace, 65, 139 Green, Andrew Haswell, 132–133, 175, 202 Greenell, Matthew, 90 Greer, David H., 239 Grennell, Eliza Perkins, 91 Grennell, George, 91 Griffen, James, 72–73 Griffin, Edward, 147, 181 Griffin, Elizabeth, 291 Grinnell, Elizabeth Williams, 225, 232, 234, 249, 256, 257, 272 Grinnell, Frank (Frankie), 102–104, 110, 135, 137, 166–167; education of 101, 116, 120, 122, 127, 129, 166; and scarlet fever, 109; death of, 166 Grinnell, George Bird, 7, 91, 101, 110, 155, 167, 181, 239; on Audubon, John W., 83; on Audubon Park, 103–104, 257; conservation efforts of, 186–187; during Riverside Drive construction, 230–231,

378 ·

INDEX

Grinnell, George Bird (continued) 233–238; education of, 122, 135; as family head, 193–194, 200; finances of, 159–161, 194–195, 216, 246–248, 250– 251, 254; Grinnell, Morton, and, 217, 252; Grinnell, W., and, 225; leaving Audubon Park, 272; marriage of, 225; Page, H., and, 250–251; in property lawsuit, 219–221; real estate investments of, 181–182, 204; servants of, 224, 249 Grinnell, George Blake, 4, 103, 116, 120, 127, 134, 153; at Audubon Park, 90–92, 141, 142, 147–148, 173, 185–186; bankruptcy of, 161–163; business reestablished by, 113, 135–137; death of, 193; debts of, 155, 165, 177; family of, 131– 132; on local improvements, 206; Martin, Isaac P., and, 160–161, 163; obituary of, 161, 194; property of, 348n8 Grinnell, Helen, 90, 92, 103, 109, 113, 127, 141–142, 187; Audubon, Lucy, and, 114–115; in Audubon Park, 101–105, 185–186; death of, 200–202; on Draft Riots, 125; funeral of, 200; journal entries of, 333n16; on Lincoln, A., 131–132 Grinnell, Mary, 180 Grinnell, Morton, 166–167, 193; death of, 252–253; Grinnell, George Bird, and, 217, 252; Huntington, A., and, 232; marriage of, 185; second marriage of, 216–217 Grinnell, Natalie, 185, 193–194; death of, 216–217 Grinnell, William, 104, 109, 120, 127, 147, 202, 208, 217, 342n3; Grinnell, George Bird, and, 225; houses designed by, 185–186; lawsuit of, 218–219, 221 Grinnell, the, 6, 264; community in, 301; Daddy Grace purchasing, 294–295; floorplan, 268; during Great Depression, 272–273; occupations at, 273; ROA at, 296 Grinnell Stable, 144 Grinnell Tenants Association, 301 Gross, Arthur, 243, 265–268

Guenther, Lambert, 273 Gunnell, William C., 342n3 Haggerty, John, 163 Haggerty, Robert A., 88, 89, 97, 106, 163 Haines, Napoleon John, Jr., 194 Hall, James, 14–15, 43, 61, 75, 84, 88–89; death of, 81–82; on Minnie’s Land, 63 Hall, Mariah, 15, 88–89 Hamilton, Alexander, 33, 189 Harden, John, 75, 95–96, 109, 137, 144, 168, 338n1; Audubon, John, and, 324n30 Harden, Tom, 110 Harlan, George, 121 Harlan, Richard, 121 Harlem: African Americans in, 298; churches in, 323n17 Harlem Heights, 27, 29, 34. See also Battle of Harlem Heights Harlem Railroad, 48 Harlem River, 27, 28, 35, 143, 154, 175, 188 Harlem River Speedway, 198–199, 200 Harnett, Richard, 220 Harriman, Edward H., 219–220 Harris, Ann, 67 Harris, Dennis, 62, 67–73, 86, 87, 93–95, 102 Harris, Edward, 16, 50; Audubon, Lucy, and, 118–119; death of, 121 Harris, Sarah (Dennis Harris’s wife), 94, 142, 213 Harris, Sarah (twentieth-century real estate developer), 262 Harris, William, Jr., 90 Harris, William, Sr., 68–69, 77, 90, 106, 166 Harrison, Benjamin J., 99, 128 Harrison, (Pres.) Benjamin, 188 Harrison, William, 151, 158, 165 Hastings, Warren, 88–89 Hasty Pudding Club, 85 Havell, Robert, 12, 16 Haven, John A., 110 Haven, J. Woodward, 112, 126 Hawley, Lavinia “Minnie,” 138–139, 182, 192; in Audubon Park, 140–141; wealth of, 140 Hawley, Lavinia Steele, 140

INDEX ·

Hawley, Seth, 124, 138–139, 139, 175; death of, 178 Hawley, Seth, Jr., 141, 168 Hayes, Rutherford B., 167, 200 Hayward, Lemuel, 85, 90, 97, 98, 109, 177, 258 Hayward, Martha, 109 Hebrew Orphan Asylum, 80, 190, 221 Hebrew Technical Institute, 243 Hedley, Frank, 235 Hein, Josephine, 273 Heinrich, Anthony Philip, 115, 196 Hemlocks, 109–110, 116, 120, 137, 142, 146, 150, 165, 167, 168, 177, 185, 194, 222, 225, 256–257; acreage of, 128–129; construction around, 230–231, 249; demolition of, 258; expansion of, 144; guests at, 151; interior of, 251; ownership of, 128, 219; Page, H., at, 200 Henriques, George, 125 Herrick, Francis Hobart, 20, 95, 99, 101, 115, 196–197, 324n30 Herrick, Walter R., 284–285 Hessians, 29–30 Hewitt, Abram S., 212 Hill, David B., 212 Hispania Hall, 258, 260–262, 273 Hispanic Society of America, 2–3, 231, 234, 252, 255; construction of, 233, 291, 292 Hodge, William, 102 Hoffman, Samuel Verplanck, 286 Hoguet, Robert J., 208 HoHoKus, 29 Hollander, Lewis, 248 Hopping, W. B., 227 Hortense Arms, 262, 297 Hoven, Amos, 110 Howe, Elias, 147 Howe, Simon, 147 Howe Machine Company, 147 Hubbard, William, 90 Hudes, Quiara, 304 Hudson River, ix, 19, 22, 37, 67, 96, 133, 207, 245, 284, 290, 293 Hudson River Railroad, 4, 61, 69, 81, 86, 96, 130, 134, 143, 154, 170–171; Audubon, V., on, 54–55

379

Hughes, Langston, 299 Huguenot Society, 218 Huntington, Arabella, 255–256 Huntington, Archer M., 2–3, 231, 236–237, 268, 349n11; Grinnell, Morton, and, 232; property of, 348n8 Huntington, Charles, 231–232, 254–255, 353n23 Huntington, Collis P., 231–232 Husted Act, 171 Ilka Tanya Payan Park, 307, 309–310 Illustrated Notes of an Expedition through Mexico and California (Audubon, John), 75, 76, 77 immigration, of Jewish people, 293 Indian Bureau, 237–238 Intercession, 65–66, 78–80, 84, 134, 160; apartment buildings on, 242; Audubon celebration, 239; Carman, R., and, 55–56; as chapel, 270; Christmas traditions of, 306–307; cornerstone ceremony, 150, 154; finances of, 102–103, 165–166, 177, 242; founding of, 55–57, 56; interior, 164; mourning Lincoln, 131; in Panic of 1873, 163; property of, 152; Spanish-language services at, 308; and subway, 223, 224, 236; value of, 87 In the Heights (Miranda & Hudes), 304 Inwood, ix, 110, 283 It’s My Park events, 306, 309, 310 Jackson, Henry, 176 James, Richard, 296, 302 Janssen, Ben, 273 Jeffrey’s Hook, 52 Jencks, Francis M., 208 Jenny Lind, 68–69, 94, 104, 166 Jerome, Addison G., 120, 122, 125–126, 127–128 Jerome, Julia, 120–121, 126, 143, 168, 175, 208; death of, 200 Jerome, Kellogg & Company, 126 Jewish people, 290–291; immigration of, 293 Jheri Curl gang, 302 John James condos, 303

380 ·

INDEX

Johnson, Andrew, 136 Johnson, Henry Ward, 84, 177 Johnson, Robin, 300 Johnson, Ruth, 300 Johnston, John Taylor, 117 Jones, Mary Weir, 200 Jones, Nathaniel S., 194 Jones, Walter Restored, Jr., 84 J. P. Pinard & Sons, 185 July Fourth, 33, 103, 290 Jumel, Eliza, 33, 110, 152 Kannawah, 263 Keeling, Loretta, 300 Keeling, Marshall, 300 Keenan, Edward, 248 Keep, Henry, 125 Kellog, Clara Louise, 129–130 Kelly, John, 175, 182 Kendall, William Mitchell, 353n23 Kerner, Charles H., 129, 147, 168, 178, 196, 268; property of, 348n8 Kerner, Emma, 129, 212–213 Kilpack, Bennett, 273 King, John, 67–68 Kingsbridge Road, x, 21, 28, 33, 37, 55, 67, 73, 87, 121, 127, 132, 199 King’s Bridge, 189 Kingsland, Ambrose, 67; Audubon, J., and, 58–59 Kirtland, Cornelia, 138–139 Kirtland, Frederick, 129, 134, 136, 138–139 Kitzler, Sidney H., 284 Knapp, Billy, 103, 122, 175 Knapp, David, 134, 142 Knapp, Kate, 168 Knapp, Shepherd, 61, 71, 77, 96, 98, 199; in Audubon Park, 94–95 Knapp, Shepherd F., 94, 95, 98, 99, 122, 164, 175; death of, 178–179 Knickerbocker Trust Company, 238, 256 Knights of Columbus, 240 Knox, Roderick, 86 Knyphausen, Wilhelm von, 29–30 Koch, Frank, 192

Kramer, William, 190–191, 208, 220, 246 Kristallnacht, 293 Kuhn, Isaac, 226 Kunz, George F., 286 Kyuter, Jochem Pietersen, 27 Ladew, Harvey, 168, 176 Lafayette, the, 241, 242, 243, 244 Lamont, Charles A., 94 Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), 6, 303, 308, 342n3 Landon, Edward, 166, 180 Landsiedel, Frank L., 282 languages, 301, 309 Lansing, Dirck C., 91, 101 Lansing, Edward, 116 Lansing Corporation. See Lansing Investment Company Lansing Investment Company, 220–221, 231 Latino Americans, 297, 306 Le Barbier, Adolphe, 16 Lee, Gideon, 94 Lema, Bartolomé Blanco de, 94 Lenape, ix, 7, 290; on Minnie’s Land, 26–27 Lenox, James, 119 Leo, Isabelle, 204 Leo, John Patrick, 203–204, 223, 239, 242; houses of, 205, 206; rowhouses of, 298–299 Levy, Charles, 282 Levy, Samuel, 285 Lewisohn, Adolph, 240–241, 258, 271, 308–309 Lilliendahl, John G. R., 205, 217 Lincoln, Abraham, 122, 140; assassination of, 131; funeral of, 131–132 Lincoln, Thomas, 50 Lind, Jenny, 68–69 Linnaean Society, 187 Lockman, Jacob, 169–170 Lockwood, Rembrandt, 148, 154, 271 Lockwood, Roe, 115 Lord, Edwin, 16 Losing, Benson J., 38

INDEX ·

Louis Wendel Battery, 21 Low, Sampson, 156 Lowenstein, Stephen M., 293 LPC. See Landmarks Preservation Commission Luna, Maria, 302 Lutheran Church, 14, 55 Lutz, Annie Miller, 176 Lutz, John, 225 Lutz, John Theodore, 175–176, 225 Lutz, Warren, 248 MacGillivray, William, 9–10 MacMullen, Alice, 147 MacMullen, John, 128–129, 147, 181–182 Macomb, Caroline, 88 Macomb, Robert, 35; dam bridge of, 35 Macomb’s Dam Bridge, 36, 135, 184, 188, 190, 191, 199, 212 Magee, Robert, 176 Magnetic Telegraph Company, 52–53 Mallory, Eliza, 46; death of, 177–178 Mallory, Georgianna. See Audubon, Georgianna Mallory, Henry, 46, 49, 59 Manhattan: cemeteries in, 36–37; growth in, 229; population growth in, 5, 148; property in, 5–6, 21, 174–175 Manhattan Bridge, 189 Manhattan Railway Company, 211, 213 Manning, William T., 270 Mansard roofs, 136, 144–145, 203, 242, 255, 263, 286 Marcus, Bertram M., 243 Marra, Louise, 281 Marshall, James M., 60 Marshall, Thurgood, 299 Martin, Isaac P., 110, 112, 147, 154, 186, 202; Grinnell, George Blake, and, 160–161, 163 Martin, Isaac P., Jr., 181–182 Martin, Janet, 219 Martin, Laura, 236, 249; marriage of, 185 Martin, Maria. See Bachman, Maria Martin Martin, Nancy, 69–70

381

Martin, Newell, 177, 185, 186, 194, 208, 221, 224, 231, 236, 249, 256; marriage of, 185; on property, 210, 219–220; on transit system, 214–215 Martin, William, 225 Marx, Max, 257 Maunsell, Elizabeth, 27–28, 32, 36, 48, 73; slave ownership of, 33 Maunsell, John, 27–28 Mawuhle congregation, 308 May Day (moving day), 24, 106, 109, 170, 174, 176, 228 Maythorn, Andrew, 71–72, 327n16 McAdam, John Loudon, 73 McAneny, George, 278 McAvoy, Thomas, 221 McCabe, Lawrence B., 215, 222, 224, 240, 248 McClaren, Rita, 299–300 McClaren, Robert, 299–300 McClellan, George B., Jr., 234 McConnell, T. R., 121–122 McDonald, Christie, 273 McDonald, John B., 215 McGrath, James, 275 McGrath, Margaret, 275 McGrath, Patrick, 275 McKinley, William, 200 McNally, Andrew, 134 Mechanics’ Bank, 94 melancholia, 120, 167 Mellins, Thomas, 155 Melville, Herman, 60, 98, 136 Merchants Exchange, 97–98 Merrihew, Stephen, 126 Met Life, 293–294 Mexican-American War, 51, 58, 59, 93 Meyer, Frieda, 258 Meyer, Siegmund, 178 Michigan Southern Railroad, 125 militias, 34 Miller, Agnes, 204, 274 Miller, Arthur, 295–296 Miller, Darius, 180 Miller, Julius, 280–281 Miller, Nathan G., 176, 180, 204, 234

382 ·

INDEX

Mill Grove, 20 Mills, Abiel Buckman, 73, 87–88, 122, 152, 154, death of, 168 Mills, Fanny, 176 Miner, Lewis, 102, 106, 121, 122, 129 Miner, Maria, 106 Minnesota Iron and Brass Foundry, 61 Minnie’s Land, 5, 23, 128, 139, 196; as Asclepion, 43; Audubon, J. J., at, 1–3, 44–45, 48, 323n16; Audubon, John, on, 22, 40–41, 73–74; Audubon, Lucy, on, 24–25, 41, 61, 71–72; Audubon, V., on, 22, 61–62, 73–74; division of, 70; enlargement of, 48; evolution of, 302– 303; financial stability of, 40–41; at Godwin, 45; Hall, James, on, 63; Lenape on, 26–27; lots of, for auction, 71, 72, 182–183; monetizing, 61–63; naming of, 18; purchase of, 1–2, 17–18, 38–39; reforestation of, 31; renaming of, 81; sale of, 6, 7–8, 71, 73–74; self-sufficiency on, 19; taming of, 19–20 Minuet, Peter, 26 Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 304 Monroe, Elizabeth, 79–80 Monroe, Jack, 250–251, 257 Monroe, James, 55, 79–80 Monroe, Marilyn, 295–296 Montagne, Jean de la, 26–27 Monteith, James, 134, 177 Moore, Benjamin, 28 Moore, Clement Clarke, 28 Moore, Fred W., 282 Moore, Geraldine Loretto, 291 Morewood, John, 55, 60 Morgan, J. P., 257, 269 Morgan, Lucinda, 48, 67–68 Morgan, Matthew, 48, 67–68 Morgenthau, Henry, 238, 245 Morningside Heights, 259–260 Morris, Lewis, 35 Morris, Mary Philippse, 27–28, 29 Morris, Roger, 27–28, 29 Morse, Samuel F. B., 52, 97, 106 Morton, Grinnell & Co., 113, 114; collapse of, 333n16 Morton, Levi P., 91, 106, 188, 193, 208

Morton, Samuel G., 11 Moses, Charles Griffith, 229 Moses, Robert, 299 Moses, Solomon, 192 Moulton, Rodman G., 120 Moynet, Anne, 19–20 multiracial demographics, 305 Munkittrick, Alexander, 75, 78, 81, 83, 84, 88, 329n17 Munkittrick, Lillie, 88 Munkittrick, Richard Lansdale, 329n17 Munson, Audrey, 274, 353n5 Museum of the American Indian, 353n23 musical skill, 46 Myers, Henry, 161 Nagel, Louis, 75, 77, 84–85, 115 Nagel & Weingaertner, 75 Nasarolu, 282 National Academy of Design, 52–53, 106, 112 National Association of Audubon Societies, 276–277, 285, 286 Native Americans, ix, 26, 51; culture of 225 Nazis, 290–291, 293 Nelson, Cornelia, 117, 118, 128 Nelson, John, 117 Neville, Thomas P., 258, 262–263, 266 New Congress Refinery, 67, 68 New Harlem, 26, 27 Newhouse, John, 94, 147–148 Newman, Allen George, 274 New York 1880 (Stern, Mellins, & Fishman), 155 New York Bowery Fire Insurance Company, 17, 38–39 New York City, 11, 21; Audubon, Lucy, in, 156; Board of Alderman, 49–50; cable road in, 187–188; Department of Buildings, 145, 185, 241, 258, 266, 284; drug dealing in, 301–302; economic collapse of, 98; financial infrastructure of, 114; gentrification in, 303–304; Great Fire of 1835, 37–38; housing law, 137; languages in, 301, 309; neighborhoods of, 12–13; population of, 12; public transit

INDEX ·

in, 211; real estate sector in, 155; redlining in, 299–300; subway system, 211, 221–222, 223, 224; tenements of, 86–87. See also specific topics New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. See Landmarks Preservation Commission New York Daily Tribune (newspaper), 65, 163 New York Herald (newspaper), 59, 65, 99, 132, 133, 148, 154, 165, 172, 178, 188, 212, 221, 265, 272, New-York Historical Society, 117, 119, 123, 164, 277, 285 New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, 48, 79, 80, 167 New York Observer, 165 New York State census, 86, 248, 269–270; abolition of, 292 New York Stock Exchange, 135, 156, 159– 160, 162 New York Times, 5–6, 17, 81, 85–86, 97, 98, 127, 136, 141, 145, 148, 165, 171, 174– 175, 179, 181, 182, 183, 187, 188, 190, 192, 196, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 220, 226, 228, 250, 257, 263, 264, 280, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 287, 294, 301, 302 New York World (newspaper), 162, 245, 264 NextDoor, 306–307 Niblo’s Garden, 104 Nicholson, Jack, 257 North Presbyterian Church, 238, 239, 308 Nourse, William, 298 Nute, Frank Scammon, 262 Oakes, Peggy Gill, 295 Oastler, Frank R., 286 O’Brien, James, 258, 262 Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, 97 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 98 Olmsted, Frederick Law, Jr., on Riverside Drive, 278, 279 Oppenheimer, Joel, 101 Ornithological Biography (Audubon, J. J.), 9–10, 126

383

Oscanyan, Constance, 212–213 Oscanyan, Hatchik, 192 Oscanyan, Isabel, 192–193 Oscanyan, Paul, 192 Page, Donald, 225 Page, Helen Grinnell, 180, 219, 232, 262; Grinnell, George Bird, and, 250–251; at Hemlocks, 200; marriage of, 177 Page, Laura, 219 Page, Sylvia, 257–258 Page, William, 166, 180, 194; death of, 199–200; marriage of, 177 Palisades Park, 278, 296 Panic of 1819, 18 Panic of 1837, 12, 47 Panic of 1873, 158, 159, 161–163; Intercession in, 163 Panic of 1893, 195, 198–199, 201 Panic of 1907, 254, 256, 276 Parfitt, Charles R., 99 Parker, Alton B., 239 Parker, George F., 239 Payan Park. See Ilka Tanya Payan Park Pelham, George Fred, 258, 260, 261, 278, 283–284, 352n10 Penadnic, ix, 27 Pentz, Jacob, 95, 108, 119 Perry, Robert, 89 Peters, McClure Thomas, 163 Philippoteaux, Paul Dominique, 182 Plume, George T., 94 Plume, John Visscher, 89 pneumonia, death from, 117, 168, 177–178, 193 Polk, James, 52 population growth: of Audubon Park, 5, 173, 175, 223, 242–243, 272; of Carmansville, 54, 72, 86, 173, 190; in Manhattan, 5, 45, 122, 148, 228; of Washington Heights, 35, 55, 211 Post, Daniel, 88, 101, 115 Post, Julia, 88, 101, 115 Post, Marion, 249 Postlethwaite, William, 150, 153, 160, 163, 165 Pratt, George DuPont, 285

384 ·

INDEX

Presbyterians, 55, 95, 102, 129, 137, 148, 163, 167, 181, 239, 246, 308 Prevost, James Marcus, 29 Prevost, Theodosia Bartow, 29, 31 Prime, Samuel Irenaeus, 165 public education, 50, 83, 127, 134 Public Stock Board, 125 public transit, in New York City, 211 Quebec, 45 Quindlen, Anna, 301 R & C Degener, 168 Rabine, Jeanne, 20 Ramsey, Amy, 262 Randel, John, Jr., 33, 110–111 Rapid Transit Act, 171 Rapid Transit Bill of 1891, 212 Rapid Transit Commission, 202, 213, 215, 240 Ratner, Harris, 284 Reading Railroad, 195 Real Estate Record and Guide, 21, 132, 171, 182, 186, 188, 190, 201, 209, 228, 239, 241, 244, 264, 270, 276 Record and Guide. See Real Estate Record and Guide redlining, 299–300 Reed, Morton, 178, 185 religion, 55; in Audubon Park, 102–103; in Carmansville, 102, 148 RENA. See Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association Renwick, James, Jr., 39, 56, 134, 270 Revenue Act of 1862, 121 Rhinecleff Court (788 Riverside Drive), 263, 264, 266, 273, 294, 296, 297; floorplan, 267 Rice, George, 202, 231, 237 Rio Grande City, 59 Rivercrest, 350n6 Riverside Drive, x, 209–210, 220, 226, 229–230, 274; amenities in, 293–294; Bolton on, 276; Brunner on, 278, 279; construction of, 235, 248, 249, 281; houses on, 282, 283; Olmsted on, 278, 279; promenade, 265; protests against

reconfiguration of, 307; Stover on, 278; Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association on, 285 Riverside Drive Extension Association, 208, 276 Riverside Drive West, x, 281, 282, 287, 290 Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association (RENA), 297–298 Riverside Extension Association. See Riverside Drive Extension Association Riverside Oval Association (ROA), 306; at Grinnell, 296 Riverside Oval Park, 273, 274, 290, 310, 311, 353n5 Riviera, the, 263, 264, 265, 266, 272; modern amenities in, 293–294 ROA. See Riverside Oval Association Robert Fulton Court, 258, 263 Robinson, Scott, 6 Rodenstein, Louis, 270–271 Rodgers, J. C., 230 Roe Lockwood & Son, 100, 115, 126, 141 Roman Catholic church, 20, 47, 194, 323n17 Rosberg, Ernest, 248 Rouse, William L., 266 RTC. See Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners Rutherford, John, 33 Rutkins, Harry B., 284, 287 Sage, Richard Carman, 169–170 Sage, Russell, 211, 213 Saint Dominique, 19–20 Sandy Hook, 34 Santos Suárez, Don Leonardo, 94 savings bonds, 123, 124 Scallon, John, 144 Scammon, Eliakim Parker, 200 Schaefer, Albert E., 284, 287 Schnugg, Francis, 205 Schönlein, J. L., 13–14 Schramm, Arnold, 203, 218, 226, 236, 242, 263 Schumann, Charles H., 240 Schwartz, Simon I., 243, 244, 265–168 Sconcia, John A., 87

INDEX ·

Scruggs, Joseph, 299 Scruggs, Lavonne, 299 Seaman, John F., 110 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 239 Seven Years’ War, 27–28 Seward, William H., 139 Seymour, James, 91 Shaw, Charles, 206 Shaw, John C., 210, 276 Shufeldt, Robert, 330n5 Sisters of Annunciation, 238, 246 Sisters of the Academy of the Visitation, 218, 223, 226 Sixth Avenue El, 172 slavery and slaves, 19–21, 94, 176; federal Census on, 322n16; Harris, D., and, 67; Martin, M., on ownership of, 69–70; Maunsell, E., ownership of, 33; Watkins, J., ownership of, 33; Watkins, L., ownership of, 33–34 Small, Franklin M., 240 Smith, Augustus, 96 Smith, Charles Robinson, 219 Smith, Howard, 152 Smith, J. Howard, 79, 131, 152, 153 Smythe, Henry A., 77–78, 85, 98, 122, 136, 194–195, 232; death of, 178; house of, 78; property of, 109, 119–120, 126–127, 129 Smythe, Sprague, & Cooper, 98 Snyder, Robert W., 290, 303 socioeconomic class, 78–79, 304, 305 Sonn, Henry, 257 Sonn, Hyman, 257 Sorolla, Joaquín, 269 Soulard, Adeline, 144, 145, 147, 192, 283 Soulard, Andrew, 142, 144, 145, 147, 175, 188, 283 Southack, Frederick, 245 Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 232 Special Committee of Defense, 34–35 Speir, Louis Dean, 219–220, 221 Spohn, Howard, 273 Stabler, Walter, 214–215, 273 Steinway, William, 212, 213 Steinway Commission, 212–213 Stern, Robert, 155

385

Stevens, John O., 59, 97 Stewart, William, 78–79 St. George’s Church, 160 Stiles, T. J., 159 Stillman, William J., 112 Stillwell, Mercy Sands, 27 Stillwell, Richard, 27 Stiver, Frank, 248 St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal Church, 308 St. Mary’s Church, 55, 156, 157 Stockwell, Alden (A. B.), 147, 180, 338n5 Stockwell, Jane, 147, 168, 180 Stockwell, Levi, 147, 149, 166, 168, 338n5; death of, 180 Stoddard, Charles, 102, 164–165, 175, 178, 179, 181, 250 Stone, Elsie, 192–93 Stone, Charles F. (Frank), 169, 176, 192– 193, 208, 224, 234, 248 Stone, Mary Louisa, 169 Stone, Minnie, 176–177 Stone, Sally, 176, 193 Stover, Charles, 276; on Riverside Drive, 278 Strathcona Construction Company, 270 streptococcal infections, 109 Streshinsky, Shirley, 11 Strong, George W., 168 suburbs, 3–4, 86, 96, 99, 289, 295, 296, 303 subway, 4, 5, 212, 214, 221–222, 226, 228, 229, 230, 234–235, 240, 250, 257 265, 275; excavations, 223, 224, Grinnell, George B., on, 235 subway system, 211 Sun (newspaper), 173, 174, 189–190, 193, 219, 255 Supplement to Apartment Houses of the Metropolis, 260–261 Supreme Court, New York, 210, 213 Suspension Bridge, 150, 151 Sutton, Cornelius, 58 Sutton, J. Lord, 349n13 Swackhammer, Conrad, 136 Swackhammer, George, 136 Swanson, Gloria, 273

386 ·

INDEX

Taliaferro, John, 7 Talman, Delia, 76, 163, 168 Talman, Edward, 2, 76, 78, 85, 130, 141, 163, 340n18; death of, 168, 169–170 Talman, George, 163, 169–170; Audubon, G., and, 170–171 taxes, 1, 2, 41, 61, 84, 106, 121, 134, 174, 201, 219, 278, 297, 300, 302, 336n26 Taylor, Moses, 94 telegraph, 52–53, 97, 131 Tenants Interim Lease (TIL), 301 Tenement House Act of 1901 (New Law), 241, 242, 246 tenements: housing law, 137; of New York City, 86–87, 145, 171, 241 Thirteenth Amendment, Constitution, 21 Thoreau, Henry David, 3 Tiemann, Daniel, 191; Audubon, John, and, 99 TIL. See Tenants Interim Lease Tone, John (Jack), 21, 59, 60, 111–112, 325n12 Tone, Richard, 36–37, 325n12 Tone, William, 111 Topping, William, 204 Tracy, George H., 120 Trask, Charles, 109–110, 115 Treat, E. B., 214 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 52 Tribune (newspaper), 65, 163, 164, 174, 179, 187, 202, 208, 210, 215, 239, 256– 257, 273 Trinity Cemetery, 38, 39, 47, 125, 133–134, 149, 152, 169, 177, 187, 226, 270–271, 290; Audubon monument in, 196, 198; Audubon plot in, 65, 66, 116, 196, 326n2; Clement Clarke Moore Ceremony in, 28, 306; crematorium in, 188– 189; fence surrounding, 169 Trinity Church, 28, 47, 56, 103, 134, 150, 188–189, 242 Trinity Corporation, 7, 149, 188–189, 196, 209, 212 Trinks, Christian, 263 Trudeau, James, 42–43, 44, 53 tuberculosis, 13–14 Tweed, Boss, 155

Tweed Ring, 134, 155 Twellane Company, 276 Tyler, Alice Jaynes, 95 Tyler, Frank, 156 Tyler, Morris, 196 Tynan, James William, 345n10 Tynan, Patrick J. P., 206, 224, 248–249 Tynan, Sadie, 224 Tyng, Stephen H., 160 Uhlarn, Susan, 147, 168 Underground Railroad, 67, 69 Unitarian Church, 55, 176 urbanization, 3–4, 45, 172, 206, 288, 303, 308 Valentine’s Manual, 35, 43 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 135, 140, 153, 159, 161, 199 Vanderbilt, Mrs. Frederick, 269 Vanderbilt, George, 140 Vanderburgh, Federal, 44, 323n10 Vanner, Lena, 231, 248, 256, 348n8 Van Wyck, Robert Anderson, 215, 221 Vaux, Calvert, 143 Vaux, Withers, & Company, 143, 150 Vauxhall, 269–270, 295 viaduct, 191, 278; bill, 188–189; design of, 190–191 Vismes, Anne Bartow de, 29 Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, 9, 11, 13, 41, 49, 51, 57, 69, 84, 117, 126; Audubon, V., on, 70, 74–75; octavo volumes of, 326n28, 326n3, 329n16; production of, 326n28; second edition of, 66–67; subscribers to, 44, 46, 48, 55, 64; third octavo edition of, 88 Voorhis, William Van, 165–166, 168 Vrendendal, 26–27 Walker, James, 281 Wall Street, 162, 178, 192, 194, 214 War of 1812, 34 Washington, George, 29–31 Washington Heights, ix, 5, 82, 127, 132, 137, 148, 154, 172, 189, 211, 228; expansion of, 175; gentrification in,

INDEX ·

303–304; population growth of, 4, 211; property in, 174–175, 180–181 Washington Heights Methodist Church, 148, 149, 154, 308 Washington Heights Presbyterian Church, 102, 129, 137–138, 138, 163, 165, 167, 175, 179, 181 Washington Heights Progressive Association, 263 Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association, 189, 190, 214–215, 240, 275, 278, 280; on Riverside Drive, 285 Watkins, Cynthia Ann, 48 Watkins, John, 27–28, 29, 31; slave ownership of, 33 Watkins, Lydia, 27, 28, 29, 31, 260; death of, 33–34; slave ownership of, 33–34 Watkins, Samuel, 36, 47–48 Watkins Farm, 32, 68; during the American Revolution, 29–31; sale of, 31–32 Watkins Glen, 36 Watson, Sarah, 72 Webb, Henry Livingston, 58–59 Webb, James Watson, 42–43 Weber, Louis, 192 Weckquasgeck Path. See Wickquasgeck Trail Weed, Thurlow, 139 Wells, Alice, 248 Wesleyan Methodists, 67 West, Emma, 147, 154 West End Association, 214 West Point, 113, 140, 143, 165 West Side Association, 134 Whalen, John, 190, 214, 215, 221, 222 Wheeler, George C., 280 Wheelock, Harriet, 89, 114, 136 Wheelock, William Almy, 89, 98–99, 102, 114, 136, 144, 147, 178, 188, 213; Audubon, Lucy, and, 89, 118, 122;

387

death of, 250; lots purchased by, 120–112, 126–127, 134; and Washington Heights Presbyterian Church, 137–138, 181 White, John, 249 White, O. H., 102 White Street, 6, 9, 11–13, 21 Whitman, Edmund S., 153, 239 Whitney, Edward, 241 whooping cough, 83–84 Wickquasgeck Trail, ix, 26, 27 Willet, James C., 110 Williams, Delancey Barclay, 100, 331n18 Williams, Elizabeth. See Grinnell, Elizabeth Williams, Howell L., 94 Williams, Joseph C., 155–156, 161, 162, 167 Williamsburg, 304 Wilson, Angeline, 88 Wilson, William, 88 Winfield, Ruth, 248 Withers, Frederick Clarke, 143, 144, 152–154 Women’s League for the Protection of Riverside Park, 284 Works Progress Administration, 287 The World’s New York Apartment House Album, 245, 264 World War II, 290, 298–299 Wright, Adin, 224 Wright, E. J., 222 Wright, J. Hood, 222 Yale, 135, 155, 161, 166, 175, 177, 182, 185, 233, 235 Yellowstone Park, 234 Yorkville, 272 Zedendaal, 27 Zeisloft, E. Idell, 216, 229, 243

Matthew Spady is the creator of the virtual walking tour AudubonParkNY.com and curator for AudubonParkPerspectives.org, a news site that reflects on the constant intersection of past and present in a vibrant and historic neighborhood. He was a leader in the decade-long community effort that culminated in the Audubon Park Historic District.

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select titles from empire state editions Patrick Bunyan, All Around the Town: Amazing Manhattan Facts and Curiosities, Second Edition Salvatore Basile, Fifth Avenue Famous: The Extraordinary Story of Music at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Foreword by Most Reverend Timothy M. Dolan, Archbishop of New York William Seraile, Angels of Mercy: White Women and the History of New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum Andrew J. Sparberg, From a Nickel to a Token: The Journey from Board of Transportation to MTA New York’s Golden Age of Bridges. Paintings by Antonio Masi, Essays by Joan Marans Dim, Foreword by Harold Holzer Daniel Campo, The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned John Waldman, Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbor, Revised Edition John Waldman (ed.), Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature and New York Howard Eugene Johnson with Wendy Johnson, A Dancer in the Revolution: Stretch Johnson, Harlem Communist at the Cotton Club. Foreword by Mark D. Naison Joseph B. Raskin, The Routes Not Taken: A Trip Through New York City’s Unbuilt Subway System Phillip Deery, Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City. Photographs by Christopher Payne, A History by Randall Mason, Essay by Robert Sullivan Stephen Miller, Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole Tom Glynn, Reading Publics: New York City’s Public Libraries, 1754–1911 R. Scott Hanson, City of Gods: Religious Freedom, Immigration, and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens. Foreword by Martin E. Marty Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: The Miracle of Our Continuance. Edited, with an Introduction and Additional Text by Kate Hennessy, Photographs by Vivian Cherry, Text by Dorothy Day

Mark Naison and Bob Gumbs, Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life in the Bronx from the 1930s to the 1960s Robert Weldon Whalen, Murder, Inc., and the Moral Life: Gangsters and Gangbusters in La Guardia’s New York Joanne Witty and Henrik Krogius, Brooklyn Bridge Park: A Dying Waterfront Transformed Sharon Egretta Sutton, When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story about Race in America’s Cities and Universities Pamela Hanlon, A Wordly Affair: New York, the United Nations, and the Story Behind Their Unlikely Bond Britt Haas, Fighting Authoritarianism: American Youth Activism in the 1930s David J. Goodwin, Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street. Foreword by DW Gibson Nandini Bagchee, Counter Institution: Activist Estates of the Lower East Side Susan Celia Greenfield (ed.), Sacred Shelter: Thirteen Journeys of Homelessness and Healing Elizabeth Macaulay Lewis and Matthew M. McGowan (eds.), Classical New York: Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham Susan Opotow and Zachary Baron Shemtob (eds.), New York after 9/11 Andrew Feffer, Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism Colin Davey with Thomas A. Lesser, The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way. Foreword by Kermit Roosevelt III Wendy Jean Katz, Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press Lolita Buckner Inniss, The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson Mike Jaccarino, America’s Last Great Newspaper War: The Death of Print in a Two-Tabloid Town Angel Garcia, The Kingdom Began in Puerto Rico: Neil Connolly’s Priesthood in the South Bronx Jim Mackin, Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan’s Upper West Side: Bloomingdale– Morningside Heights For a complete list, visit www.fordhampress.com/empire-state-editions.