bloomingdale history

This is a fourth post on colonial and post-Revolution Bloomingdale written by Pam Tice, member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group.

Now that I’ve written three posts about Bloomingdale in the 18^th Century, I’m turning to the topic that caught my interest initially: slavery in Bloomingdale. As those who research family history know, finding details about African American ancestors is difficult. I had the same problem in trying to find factual information about slavery in Bloomingdale. Census information is available, and I’ll share what I found. Newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves or attempting to sell enslaved people are another source. Church records have some detail. I looked at all of these. I also looked for evidence of African American burial grounds.

First, though, I had to understand the history of slavery as it played out in New York City. Scholars have explored the institution of slavery in New York City in recent years in great detail, producing a great number of books and articles.  The discovery of the African American Burial Ground in lower Manhattan in the early 1990s encouraged many scholars to pursue the detailed research which has amplified the experience and historical identity of African Americans in our city. Of the books I read on this topic, I found Thelma Wills Foote’s book, listed below, of particular interest.

The enslavement of African Americans was prevalent in colonial New York, where 40% of Europeans owned slaves, averaging 2.4 per household. By the 1720s, there were 5740 slaves in New York City, the greatest number of urban slaves outside the South.  In 2015, the City recognized this part of its history by installing signage downtown at Wall and Water Streets to mark the 18^th Century slave auction block.

Under the Dutch West India Company, the first slaves arrived in 1626 and were put to work building the company’s infrastructure and working on the farms that grew the local food supply. Dutch merchants and artisans taught slaves how to handle their businesses, a practice that continued when the British took over the city in 1664. The Dutch extended some leniency: allowing some enslaved people to negotiate their freedom, and to own property. This image of Dutch New York pictures the enslaved people of that era.

British merchants in New York were closely tied to the slave trade of the Royal African Company, and set out to make New York City the chief North American slave port. Early laws passed in the colony regulated the practice, and, by the early 1700s, freed slaves could no longer own property, and the hereditary nature of slavery was ensured by having children inherit their mother’s condition. Early laws made it very costly to manumit slaves.

New Yorkers did not want untrained slaves coming directly from Africa. They preferred acculturated slaves whom they could train for various businesses such as tailoring, carpentry, or sail making. They began importing slaves from West Indian merchants, as payment for the provisions New York supplied them.  New York’s enslaved people did not live in separate enclaves as they did on the southern plantations, but were given living space in the attics of larger homes or small outbuildings. They were often referred to as “servants.” In a 1780 advertisement in the New York Mercury for the Apthorp estate in Bloomingdale, the description includes “a two-story brick house “for an overseer and servants” in addition to the Manor House and other buildings.

In the 1740s, in the time of what is called the Great Awakening, Quakers and Methodists began to call upon their members to free their slaves. Trinity Church began to baptize slaves, but would not admit them as church members. By the 1760s, the Dutch Reformed Church began baptizing slaves, after religious arguments settled the matter that baptism would not necessarily lead to freedom. These two churches were the first to build in the Bloomingdale area, although not until the early 1800s.

African Americans In New York City During the British Rule, 1776-1783

There is a rich and complicated story about the British officials who offered freedom to the slaves of the American patriots. During the time of British rule in New York City, thousands of slaves fled to the City from all the North American colonies. They were given tasks related to both the war effort as well as keeping the City functioning. Many worked on clearing and rebuilding after the massive downtown fire of September, 1776. Other runaway slaves were absorbed into the Black Brigade of New York City, and housed in downtown barracks. One British officer of Bloomingdale, Brigadier General Oliver Delancey, was against using former slaves, but his opinion did not prevail.

When the British evacuated the City in 1783, they issued “travel certificates” to black people who wanted to leave, thus giving a passport to freedom. In the Foote book cited below, she states that during the evacuation time April 23 to July 31, 1783, approximately 81 ships carried 3,000 black refugees away, most of them to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where they founded free black communities. While most of these former slaves were from the southern states, 21 percent were from New York and New Jersey, and perhaps were former Bloomingdale residents. There is a document known as “the Negro’s Book,” that names those refugees, another opportunity to dig deeper into individual research on those enslaved in Bloomingdale.

Many of the northern states ended slavery just after the Revolutionary War but New York did not, and continued to rely on slave labor. Even free blacks were close to slave status: they could not vote, nor be witnesses in a court of law, and they were taxed without representation. There were free African Americans in the Bloomingdale area, as noted in the comments on the federal censuses further on in this post.  

Before the first U.S. census in 1790, finding evidence of slave owners in Bloomingdale is anecdotal. A reference to Theunis Idens slaves is made by one historian. Some of the reports of the 1777 raid on the Delancey property in Bloomingdale mention slaves being driven off during that event; in his discussion of New Yorkers involved with the founding and management of King’s College, Eric Foner states that Oliver Delancey owned 23 slaves, and was a business partner of slave trader John Watts.

Newspaper databases provide evidence of how enslaved people were described in colonial New York City. These newspaper advertisements cited here use the exact words that are in the ad or reproduce the ad itself; some may find them disturbing, but this is the reality of 18^th century New York City. The word “wench” was used to refer to female Negro slaves.

Here is a property sale in “Bloemendale” from 1758:

TO BE SOLD … A Farm, situated at Bloemendale, near New York, containing about 100 acres, more or less; is in good Fence: There is on it a good Dwelling House, Barn and Orchard: — it is well timbered and watered, and has very good Meadows. There will also be sold at the same time, on the Premises, Horses, 19 Cows, Sheep, Hogs, & one Negro Wench, and a Negro lad about 20 years old; together with sundry farming Utensils, and household goods. New-York Gazette, November 13, 1758.

Here is a April 18, 1763 newspaper advertisement from the New-York Gazette offering a reward for the return of a runaway slave:

Another Bloomingdale neighbor, Garret Striker, offered this advertisement for the sale of one of his slaves in 1763:

To be sold, being useless in the Family, a very likely well-set stout sober Negro Man, about 20 years of Age, is fit for Town or Country; with very little instruction he may readily be brought to wait on a Gentleman: He is Guinea born, can talk tolerable good English: Enquire of Garret Striker, Bloomingdale.

The many long years of ending slavery in New York

The New York Manumission Society was founded in 1785 by John Jay with the goal of gradually ending slavery in New York state by encouraging citizens to choose to manumit the people they enslaved. The Society was made up of influential white men; merchants, bankers, lawyers and judges.  However, many of the Society’s members, including John Jay and Aaron Burr, kept their own slaves through the years of their involvement.  Just last year, a paper was written about Alexander Hamilton’s role in the Manumission Society and his own participation in slave dealings both for his family and friends, known through entries in his personal cash book.

The Federalists, as many of our Bloomingdale merchants were, favored a limited freedom for African Americans, guided and controlled by elites.  After 1784 when a group of slave traders tried to seize a group of free blacks and sell them to the South illegally, New York state made this type of action illegal.

New York State’s Gradual Emancipation Act of 1799 freed all children born to slave women after July 4, 1799, but indentured them to their mother’s masters until age 28, if male, and age 25, if female. If a slave master did not want to support and educate this child, he could turn him or her over to the City’s almshouse, where they would be indentured to a new master. While not from a Bloomingdale slave owner, this image is typical of this type of action:

In 1817, New York State passed a law that freedom would be given to all slaves born before July 4, 1799, but not until July 4, 1827. Thus, in the early years of the 19^th Century, slavery continued throughout the City and in Bloomingdale, where the census records reveal the practice from 1790 to 1820, as discussed below.

Census Counts of Enslaved People in Bloomingdale

The 1790 federal census, the first in the new United States, counts the numbers of slaves owned by the people enumerated, after grouping males and females by age categories. Using the table for the “Harlem District” which contained the Bloomingdale area, I was able to narrow down the entries for known Bloomingdale families and counted their reported slaves.  There are a total of 50 enslaved people, with Mr. Apthorp reporting eight, Nicholas de Peyster seven, the Somerindyke residents nine slaves among three families. The relatively high numbers perhaps imply that these were working farms.

Of interest are a few lines in this census listing only the first name of a person, and giving a number in the column “all other free persons.” There is no notation among the Bloomingdale families, but under In        the listing for Susanna Day, presumably of the Day’s Tavern mentioned in my previous post, there are two slaves listed. Under her name, “Cuff” and two free persons are listed. Cuff has no surname. “Cuff” was a popular slave name, reflecting the Akan-Asante society of Africa’s West Coast, where “Cuffee” meant “Friday.” There are several other such listings with only a first name, and a count of free persons, in the district.

In the federal census for 1800, Bloomingdale is in Ward 7, and the names are arranged in some order with the de Peysters at the top of the page and the Harsen family further down, as if the census taker moved from north to south. There are 41 slaves counted. But certain Bloomingdale property owners were not counted here; John van den Heuval and John McVickar were counted downtown in Ward 4, where van den Heuval reported ten slaves and McVickar just one.  Brockholst Livingston was also counted as a downtown resident; he owned four slaves in 1790 and one in 1800.

When we get to the 1810 federal census, the names of Bloomingdale property owners are more scattered as if the census taker did not move through the district in one sweep. The de Peysters are listed close to Mr. Harsen, and the Clendening and Jauncey families on another page. However, there are still slave owners in Bloomingdale. The de Peysters have three slaves between them; Mr. Rogers has one person enslaved. Jauncey and Clendening have none. The Ward 9 census also included the east side of Manhattan where there are many more, perhaps a sign that there was more intense farming there.

The 1820 census for Ward Nine shows the Bloomingdale families on several pages, not grouped together. This census is more complicated in its data collection. First there are 11 columns counting males and females in a household broken into age categories. Then there are 4 columns indicating non-naturalized foreign persons in the household, and three columns to check if the group engages in agriculture, commerce or manufacturing. This section is followed by 8 columns to count enslaved people, breaking down the count by age. Finally, there are 8 columns to indicate “Free Colored Persons” by several age groupings.

Here, we can see the James Striker family with seven family members, a check that the family is engaged in agriculture, four slaves, and five Free Colored Persons. Nearby, Frederick de Peyster 15-person count of males and females indicated that commerce is the family business, with no slaves and three Free Colored Persons. The relatively few enslaved people in the 1820 census in Bloomingdale is representative of the overall city, where only 518 slaves are enumerated.

A research project emerged from using the first four censuses: noting non-property-owning residents of Bloomingdale, and then attempting to discover who they were. This only proved successful if other records were found, particularly newspaper advertisements or stories, or vital records reproduced in various genealogical sources. This process uncovered two Bloomingdale tavern owners who owned slaves whom I’ll write about in a separate post.

African American Burial Grounds

I have uncovered no mention of a burial ground for Bloomingdale’s enslaved people. There may be a link to African Americans interred in the recently rediscovered African American Burial Ground connected to the Harlem Reformed Dutch Church at 121 Street on the east side. The historians working on that site have a website showing the results of their work over the past several years. There are details here:  https://www.habgtaskforce.org/home.   Records available through the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society show that the Church had members Gerard de Peyster and his family married and baptized there.  If a Bloomingdale family was worshipping there, perhaps enslaved people were also, and could access the burial ground.

.In the early years of the 20^th Century a road-building project in northern Manhattan uncovered an African Burial Ground in Inwood. The discovery and history are detailed here: https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2018/06/13/african-burial-ground-inwood/   This discovery made me wonder if Bloomingdale ever had such a burial site that may now be lying under an apartment building or street.

In his history of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Reverend Peters states that large landowners often established private family burial places on their estate, and, one can imagine, a place for slave burials. The Church was not established until 1806, and its burial ground surrounding the church was reserved for members. There are records of the baptism of enslaved people, some referred to as “servants.” Anthony, son of Catherine, a black woman, servant of Mr. McVickar, was baptized in 1809; John and Jane, slaves of Mr. Davis, were baptized in 1816.  In 1828, the Church established a cemetery on 103^rd Street, to the east of Amsterdam Avenue near Clendening Lane, for “poor people,” but this happened after slavery had ended.

This research process is fairly dynamic and new information is sure to be discovered, but my work will end here for now.

Sources

African American Burial Ground site:  https://www.habgtaskforce.org/home

Ancestry’s census information at www.ancestry.com

Burrows, Edwin G., Mike Wallace, et al Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 New York, Oxford University Press 1999

Columbia University’s site exploring slavery and the University; in particular, Eric Foner’s paper:

https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/eric-foners-report

Foote, Thelma Wills Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City New York, Oxford University Press, 2004 (Accessed online through the New York Public Library September 6, 2020)

Goodfriend, Joyce D. “Slavery in Colonial New York City” Urban History, Volume 35, Number 3 (December 2008) pp. 485-496oodfriend, Joyce D. “Burghers and Blacks” The Evolution of A Slave Society at New Amsterdam” New York History Volume 59, Number 2 (April 1978) pp. 125-144

Harris, Leslie M. In The Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City 1626-1863  Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 200

John Jay College Slave Records Index online at https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

Newspaper databases at www.genealogybank.com and www.newspapers.com

New York Genealogical and Biological Society at www.nygbs.org.  I used the Record for October 1986 Vol 117, issue 4 to find Harlem’s Reformed Dutch Church, and a 1902 article in Volume 13, reprinted in 1968.

Peters, John Punnett Annals of St. Michael’s, Being The History of St. Michael’s Protestant Episcopal Church, New York for One Hundred Years 1807-1907  New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907

Salwen, Peter Upper Westside Story New York, Abbeville Press, 1989

Serfilippi, Jessie “As Odious and Immoral A Thing: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver” Schuler Mansion Historic Site, Albany, New York, 2020

Stokes, I. N. Phelps The Iconography of Manhattan Island (all volumes) New York, Robert H. Dodge, 1928.

This is the third post about 18th Century Bloomingdale, written by Pam Tice, member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group Planning Committee.

So many historians have written about the Battle of Harlem Heights on September 16, 1776, that I do not need to re-tell the story here.  Jim Mackin presented a program about the Battle, centered around the Jones and Hooglandt farms, one evening back in 2019, and then wrote a post about here.  There’s a much more detailed description of the Battle here:  http://www.revolutionarywarjournal.com/battle-of-harlem-heights/

I’m focusing here on observations about Bloomingdale leading up to the Battle, and the seven years following, when the British had taken over New York City and imposed military rule.

First, though, a detail about the battle I had not found before. The Striker house at West 96^th Street became a sort of “field hospital” for the wounded of both sides during the Battle, as described by Hopper Striker Mott in an article he wrote for the publication known as the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record in July, 1908.  

James Striker and his mother cared for the British and American soldiers that day, using his family wagon to convey the men from the battlefield to their home. Mott writes that a patriot and two Tories were killed in the lane which led from the Bloomingdale Road to the house, and they were buried near where they fell.  British officers were quartered at the house and, Mott claims, one party of captives were billeted there, pending their removal to the improvised prisons at the lower end of Manhattan. 

James Striker eventually signed up with the American troops and fought in battles in New Jersey. While he was away, his house was pillaged twice during the British occupation and all the livestock lost. In 1781, he writes, “the slaves and servant men were driven off and the women compelled for days to cook and attend the wants of their captors.”

At the time of the Battle of Harlem Heights, the British had sent three ships “to Bloomingdale on the North River,” the name of the Hudson often used at that time. The Phoenix and the Roebuck were 44-gun ships, and another ship, a frigate, had 20 guns.  They were there to prevent the Americans from removing any provisions from the city. This Bloomingdale naval expedition also figured in the reports of American Sgt. Ezra Lee, who twice attempted to attack enemy ships using a “submarine machine” known as Turtle, in an attempt to blow up the enemy’s ships. He was not successful, but his efforts are noted by military historians as a first to use this type of warfare.

Humphrey Jones also lost the use of his home in Bloomingdale during this time. After the war his son, Nicholas, submitted a memorandum of “sundry seizures and damages” done to his home by the British and Hessian troops, as they occupied his farm from September 17, 1776 to June 20, 1783. I have not seen the memo itself; copies of it were donated to the New York Public Library in 1921. Nicholas Jones’ papers are also archived at the New-York Historical Society.

Merchant New Yorkers worked harder and longer to try to come to an equitable settlement with Parliament.  The property owners of Bloomingdale were a mix of Tories and Patriots. Charles Apthorp made his money provisioning the British military in North America. Robert Bayard was the agent for the East India company in New York City. The Delancey family were activists for the Crown in the years preceding the Revolution; Oliver Delancey, owner of “Little Bloomingdale,” was a Brigadier General in the British Army.  Both Charles Apthorp and Oliver Delancey were serving on the Colonial Council in 1776.

Having grown up in New England where the story of the years preceding the Revolutionary War played out differently, I was amused by the report of John Adams himself being enraged by the behavior of the New Yorkers who even in June 1776 had not mobilized behind the war effort. “What is the Reason that New York is still asleep or dead in Politicks and War? …Have they no sense, no feeling…no passion?” he fumed.  New York was the last of the thirteen colonies to declare independence in 1776.

The prominent de Peyster family was politically mixed, but they did not settle in Bloomingdale until after the war, when Nicholas and his brother James bought the Hooglandt and Vandewater property. Their father, William, was reported in Albany during the War, which implies that he was a Patriot. Frederick de Peyster, a cousin, fought for the British and left for Nova Scotia in 1783. But he soon returned and owned property in Bloomingdale, according to property maps. One of his heirs, also named Frederick, headed the New-York Historical Society in the late 19h Century and organized a huge celebration of the Battle of Harlem Heights on its 100^th anniversary.

Day’s Tavern, located north of Bloomingdale at about 123^rd Street (between Ninth and Tenth Avenues), is mentioned in various reports around the time of the Revolution. John Adams stopped there when he came through New York on his way to the Continental Congress.  It is also a part of the detailed descriptions of the Battle of Harlem Heights. It is mentioned again when, in 1783, Washington made his way back into the City.

The northern quadrant of Central Park, north of today’s 97^th Street Transverse, was a major gathering point for British and Hessian troops during the War. At times, there were more than 1,000 soldiers there whose presence must have had an impact on anyone still trying to farm in Bloomingdale. Recent archaeological studies pinpoint the Great Hill and the area around McGown’s Pass as principal areas where evidence of Revolutionary War activity can be found.

There was one incident in Bloomingdale that is cited by many historians writing about the Revolutionary War in New York City. On November 26, 1777, a band of Patriots tied up on the Hudson shore in the early hours of the morning and burned and pillaged the Delancey house. The story of that raid has been told multiple times, but this report in the New York Mercury is particularly brutal. The raiding party …plundered his house of the most valuable furniture and money, set the house on fire before Mrs. Delancey, her two daughters, and two other young ladies could remove out if it, which was effected through the flames, in only their bed dresses, when they were most cruelly insulted, beat, and abused, and what money they had, taken from them; an infant Grandchild in a most barbarous manner thrown on the ground; at last, in their fright and distress, they were made prisoners, and two infant children consumed in the flames.

Other reports have the women hiding in the Bloomingdale woods until morning when they made their way to the safety of the Apthorp house. No children were harmed, and Miss Delancey manages to hold her brother’s infant in her arms all night, which she spent hiding in a swamp.

The British occupation of New York City lasted until November 1783, when George Washington returned to the City, marching down through McGown’s Pass in Central Park and taking charge. The British evacuated on November 25, 1783, a date that was celebrated for many years in the City.

After the war, the Delanceys lost all of their New York property as the state of New York confiscated it. Oliver Delancey’s Bloomingdale estate was broken up, with Mr. McVicar and Mr. Livingston owning portions of it. For unknown reasons, the Apthorp property in Bloomingdale was left alone. Perhaps Mr. Apthorp’s daughter’s marriage to a member of the Congress played a role in that decision. When Martha Lamb wrote her history of New York, she describes Charles Apthorp as “a courtly gentleman of wealth” welcoming all of wealth and fashion to his elegant Bloomingdale home for his daughter’s wedding.  New York lifted legal restraints against Loyalists in 1793, and some who had fled the City, like Frederick de Peyster, were able to return.

In the early years of the 20^th Century, the New York Historical Society published numerous articles in their Quarterly magazine by various members who dug up British military buttons, and other parts of uniforms of both British and Hessian troops that they found in the Bloomingdale neighborhood and points north.

Sources

Howe, Adrian “The Bayard Treason Trial: Dramatizing Anglo-Dutch Politics in Early Eighteenth Century New York City” The William and Mary Quarterly Volume 47, No 1, January 1990

Hunter Research Inc., A Preliminary Historical and Archaeological Assessment of Central Park to the North of the 97^th Street Transverse Volume 1. Central Park Conservancy and The City of New York 1990

Lamb, Martha History of the City of New York, Volume II New York, The A.S. Barnes Company, 1880

McKito, Valerie H. From Loyalists to Loyal Citizens: the DePeyster Family of New York Albany, State University of New York Press, 2015

The Nicholas Jones memo is included in the New York Public Library’s 1921 Annual Report on “items purchased”

Mott, Hopper Striker The New York of Yesterday: Bloomingdale New York, The Knickerbocker Press 1908

Mott, Hopper Striker “Major General Garret Hopper Striker” The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record Volume XXXIX, Number 3, July 1908

“The Old Country Seats of New York Island” American Journal of Numismatics Volume 2 Number 11, March 1868

Stokes, I. N. Phelps The Iconography of Manhattan Island Volume 5 New York, Robert H. Dodge, 1928.

Pam Tice, Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group Planning Committee member

Here is a second post in my series exploring Bloomingdale in Colonial times and after the Revolution.

Colonial New York

New York City’s colonial history provides a context for Bloomingdale’s history before the American Revolution.  The City became an economic powerhouse in the 18^th Century after Queen Anne’s War ended in 1717.  The development of the plantations in the British West Indies to meet the rising demand for sugar drove the New England and the Middle Colonies to become the suppliers of food and other essential supplies for the plantations. New York became, in that time, one of the imperial centers of the British North American empire, the others being Jamaica in the West Indies, and Halifax in Canada.

New York City began to lose its original Dutch cultural heritage as the British economic and cultural practices prevailed. Merchants in New York were drawn into the slave trade as slaves were needed to labor on the farms surrounding the city, as well as to work in building ships, handling cargo, and even the day-to-day work of operating businesses.  Some slaves also worked as domestic servants. While we don’t have actual headcounts of enslaved people in Bloomingdale until the 1790 federal census, we can be quite sure that many slaves labored for their masters here. An enslaved population was one of the major features of New York City life in the 18^th Century. Another blog post in this series will provide more details about slavery in New York City and the details found about enslaved people in Bloomingdale.

New York City’s aristocracy was one of wealth, not lineage. The merchant princes of colonial New York became the leaders of fashion, politics, intellectual life, and philanthropic projects.  They moved to a life of ease and comfort similar to their peers in London.  Their personal fortunes were tied-up in real estate and the elegant homes they built in downtown Manhattan. But soon they began establishing “country seats” up the island along both the East and the Hudson Rivers. Along the Boston Post road to Harlem,  the Stuyvesants, Beekmans, LeRoys, and Gracies established estates. In what became Greenwich Village, the Delanceys, Bayards, and James Jauncey established themselves. South of Vandewater Heights—in Bloomingdale—the Apthorp, Striker, Delancey and Bayard estates were established by mid-century.The Delanceys named their estate “Little Bloomingdale.”

These estates mixed with the farms that were already well established.  Some country seats raised crops for market as well as serving as country retreats. Most estates were what one writer called “theaters for refinement.” Both employed slave labor where the footman who stood behind the master of the house at dinner was a slave, as were the maids and coachman, a colonial version of the gentrified home in England.  Gardening and landscaping were important for some, as reflected in the advertisements of the land. Gentlemen were focused on fast horses and fox hunting in Bloomingdale.

Downtown, assembly balls, theater and the Vauxhall filled with waxen figures were features of winter social life.  Kings’ College and the New York Society Library were founded. Religious life was important but Bloomingdale did not have enough population to support churches until after the Revolution.

The merchant princes of Bloomingdale were conservative, and many remained loyal to the British Crown when the Revolution came. Their choice would determine the property changes that came after the War.

Early Property Owners Along the Bloomingdale Road

In 1667/68, New York’s Governor Richard Nicolls sold nearly 500 acres on the Upper West Side to Isaac Bedlow, one of the City’s aldermen. In 1688, Bedlow’s widow sold the land to Theunis Idens Van Huysen, often referred to as Theunis Idens or Eidens. He moved his farm from Sapokanikan (Greenwich) to his new property, stretching in some descriptions from 89^th Street to 107^th Street, encompassing 460 acres. Theunis Eidens’ land was surveyed by the town of New Harlem in 1690, determining that it was in the City’s Out Ward, not the town.  In his old age, Theunis Eidens surveyed his 460 acres, dividing it into parcels of 57 ½ acres each, numbered from one to eight, and conveying them to his children, most of whom were daughters. Lot Number 8 went to Rebecca Eidens and her husband Abraham “De La Monontanie,” or Montayne, a Huguenot family, whose farm was east of Morningside Park’s cliff, on the then-called Montayne’s Plain. This name lives on today in the name of the little stream that flows across the northern end of Central Park, Montayne’s Rivulet.

Theunis Eidens Lots Numbered Six and Seven went to his daughter Catalina and her husband George Dyckman. Lots 4 and 5 went to the Eidens son, Eide Van Huyse, Number 3 to daughter Sarah, Number 1 and a portion of Number 2 to their daughter Dinah and her husband Van Vleckeren. Later, in 1762, Charles Apthorp, a merchant originally from Boston, would establish his “country seat” on Eidens’ land, as he came to own Lots 1 to 5.

Eidens’ land was in the City’s Out Ward, the section of Manhattan Island above Wall Street. The Dutch East India Company had divided the downtown section into wards that covered the population living there; later, the British expanded the downtown wards as the population grew. In 1660, the town of New Harlem had been laid out, covering the northern part of the island from 129^th Street on the North River —as the Hudson was called —to 74^th Street on the East River. The town had surveyed Eidens land to make sure he was not encroaching on the Town.

In 1700, the New York Common Council ordered that land to the north of Theunis Eidens be sold to pay for the new City Hall they planned to build downtown at Wall Street and Nassau Streets, the same building that later served as the Federal Hall for the new capital of the United States. They sold to John Miseroll, who quickly re-sold it to Jacob de Key. In 1732, one of Jacob’s descendants, Thomas de Key, advertised a farm for sale with “a very good stone house.” One record places the house near where Columbia’s Low Library stands today, while another describes it as standing on the south side of West 114^th Street, 380 feet east of Tenth Avenue.

De Key’s sale of his farm went to two new owners, Adrian Hoogelandt and Harmon Vandewater. Vandewater took the land to the east of Hoogelandt, leaving him no shoreline on the North River. After his death, Hoogelandt’s land was advertised for sale in 1772 with this description:

That very valuable farm of Adrian Hoghland, late deceased, situated in Bloomingdale, in the outward of the City of New-York, containing 121 acres of choice land, well wooded and watered, with salt meadow sufficient to supply the farm with hay; there is on the premises a large commodious dwelling house and kitchen, a large barn, with stables for horses and cows, with other out-houses, all well covered with shingles, also a large orchard with choice apples, and a very great collection of fruit trees, such as English, and common cherries, pears, peaches, etc. Its vicinity to the City of New-York, together with very extensive and beautiful prospects (commanding a view of new-Harlem, the Sound, Long-Island, New- York, and its Bay, down to the Narrows; and up Hudson’s River for many miles) fitly adapt it for a gentleman’s country seat; and the goodness of soil, for the farmer. The whole will be sold together, or in two parts, as best suits the purchaser.

Another pre-Revolution property owner in Bloomingdale was Johannes Van Beverhoudt who purchased western portions of the land owned by the Eidens’ sons-in-law, de la Montayne and Dyckman. Van Beverhoudt was Dutch, of a family that had settled in the West Indies, on a plantation in St. Croix. Johannes came to New York City with his children and fourth wife, Margaret. They joined the Dutch Reformed Church and, in 1750, the children were recognized as naturalized citizens by the Legislative Council of the Colony. Johannes died in 1751, and Margaret sold his Bloomngdale land to Humphrey Jones. The sale included the stone house which later became the Abbey Hotel, a Bloomingdale landmark. It was placed south of West 102^nd Street, west of West End Avenue. Mr. Jones assembled other land as well, including the remaining land George Dyckman owned.

Further south in Bloomingdale, Theunis Eiden’s son, Eyde Van Huysen had sold about 115 acres to Dennis Hicks in 1746. In 1763, Hicks sold his land to Charles Apthorp who established his country seat, building a splendid mansion in 1764 between West 92-93 Streets, west of Columbus Avenue. The construction of the mansion house was in the news in 1764 when George McIntosh, a Scotsman laborer, working there was killed in a quarrel by another workman, Frederick Loudon, a Dutchman, one of the earliest crime reports of the Upper West Side.

 In 1764, Apthorp sold the old Eidens homestead and some land to Gerrit Striker, whose holdings were around 96^th Street, with the inlet on the Hudson gaining the name Striker’s Bay. Striker built his own house on the bluff where the Eidens home was located. Later, the Striker house became a tavern and then a hotel, one of the popular stops along the Bloomingdale Road.  Apthorp also sold to Humphrey Jones the rights to use the old road that went from the cove at 96^th Street to Mr. Jones’ property.

South of Apthorp, another portion of Eiden’s land, owned by his daughter Dinah, was sold to Stephen Delancey, who made it his country seat, naming “Little Bloomingdale.” By 1747, the estate was in the hands of Oliver Delancey, whose family story continued into the years of the Revolutionary War. Delancey built his own house, selling the original house to Apthorp, who transferred it to his brother-in-law James McEvers. McEvers died soon thereafter, and further transfers put the property back in the hands of the Apthorps. It went eventually to Charlotte Apthorp, who married John Cornelius Vanden Heuvel. They built a new house west of the Bloomingdale Road, between 78^th and 79^th Streets. Their home eventually became Burnham’s, another popular resort on the Bloomingdale Road in the early days of the 19^th Century. 

In 1774, Apthorp sold a piece of his land opposite the McEvers parcel to Major Robert Bayard, who was married to one of his sisters. He was the agent for the East India Company in New York City. 

Further south on the Upper West Side developed in a similar fashion, with the area around 70^th Street gaining the name “Harsenville” for Jacob Harsen. Close by was the Somarindyke/Somerindike family’s property which stretched from West 57^th to West 70^th Streets from the common lands in mid-island to the Hudson River. The Cozine family had property on the mid-town west side as well. Even further south, the Hopper family farmed around 50^th Street, west of Seventh Avenue.  All of these names proved useful in locating Bloomingdale families on the federal censuses starting in the 1790s.

As more homes were built along the Bloomingdale Road, smaller lanes and roads were developed off the main road, including Apthorp’s Lane (later Jauncey’s) between 93^rd and 94^th Streets, running through today’s Central Park to the Eastern Post Road, and Harsen’s Lane that ran over to the east side of Manhattan to the Middle Road, an alternative to the Post Road on the east side.  Clendening’s Lane ran northeast from the Bloomingdale Road to a point at around 105^th Street to Mr. Clendening’s home, built in the early 19^th century.  Clendening Lane was named “Goodever’s” first, according to the author of the history of St. Michael’s Church; in reviewing property records, however, the property owner appears to be “Goodeve.” The same writer notes “Kemble’s Lane” leading to the former Jones estate, “Striker’s Bay Lane” at 96^th Street, “Mott’s Lane” just below 94^th Street, and “Livingston’s Lane” at 91^st Street.

Sources

Ancestry family histories at www.ancestry.com

Hall, Edward Hagaman “A Brief History of Morningside Park and Vicinity” Twenty First Annual Report of the American Scenic and Historic Society, 1916

Harrington, Virginia D. “The Place of he Merchant in New York Colonial Life” New York History October 1932, Volume 13 No. 4, pp 366-380

Mott, Hopper Striker The New York of Yesterday: Bloomingdale  New York, The Knickerbocker Press 1907

Newspaper databases at www.genealogybank.com and www.newspapers.com

Peters, John Punnett Annals of St. Michael’s, Being The History of St. Michael’s Protestant Episcopal Church, New York for One Hundred Years 1807-1907 New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907

Riker, James Revised History of Harlem New York, New Harlem Publishing Company, 1904

Salwen, Peter Upper Westside Story New York, Abbeville Press, 1989

Stokes, I. N. PhelpsThe Iconography of Manhattan Island (all volumes) New York, Robert H. Dodge, 1928

van Beverhoudt family: https://200inparadise.blogspot.com/2012/06/van-beverhoudts-take-manhattan.html.

by Pam Tice, member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group

Introduction

A few months ago, a new website developed by John Jay College caught my attention. Like many institutions of higher education, the College was exploring the link between slavery and the famous man whose name adorns it. One of the resources used was the 1790 federal Census. I looked up Charles Ward Apthorp, whom I had written about previously, one of the colonial property owners in our Bloomingdale neighborhood. He owned eight slaves.

That got me thinking: who were the other people in this census? How was the Bloomingdale neighborhood settled in the era before the Revolution? What was Bloomingdale like after the Revolution and in the early 1900s?  I started to dig a bit deeper into the Bloomingdale history, beyond the work of numerous local historians who write about a particular property owner and the history of a mansion house, as I myself had done in writing about Apthorp’s mansion that became Elm Park.

The Bloomingdale Road, authorized in 1703, and laid out in 1707, was key to the area’s development; Bloomingdale became more like a suburb of the city than what we call a neighborhood today. I am especially grateful to my colleague at the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group, Gil Tauber, for his help on the details of the Bloomingdale Road history.

To provide context, I read books and articles about New York City’s colonial history, about how the American Revolution played out here, and the role slavery played in New York City. I also learned about the yellow fever epidemics in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries as they played a role in developing our neighborhood, an escape from the crowded streets of downtown Manhattan.

The districts of the 1790-1820 federal censuses covered much more geographical space than just our neighborhood.  In order to find just the Bloomingdale residents, I first had to learn about many uptown Manhattan families and where they settled. I used numerous publications such as Riker’s History of Harlem, Stokes’ six-volume Iconography of Manhattan Island, and Mott’s New York of Yesteryear, along with innumerable newspaper clippings.  (Those books are listed in the Sources section below.)

The blog posts that follow share what I’ve learned about colonial Bloomingdale and its history in the late 18^th Century and early 19^th Century.

Along the Bloomingdale Road in the 18^th Century

Bloomingdale referred to a district on both the lower and upper West Side of Manhattan Island named by the Dutch as Bloemendahl, a vale of flowers. When the British took over the colony in 1664, changing the name from New Amsterdam to New York, they Anglicized the district’s name.  Bloomingdale was never an organized village, like New Harlem. Later, Greenwich Village, although not incorporated, also had more specific boundaries than Bloomingdale which remained somewhat amorphous. Later, it would be defined as a settlement around 100^th Street and the Bloomingdale Road.  Other neighborhood names developed: Harsenville, in the 70s, was to the south, and Vandewater Heights to the north, where we find Morningside Heights today.

In his Iconography of Manhattan Island, Stokes cites 1688 as the earliest example he could find of the use of the name Bloemendahl, mentioned in a marriage record of the Dutch Reformed Church. Similar names would be given to other early farms: the de Montayne family named their farm near today’s Morningside Park Vredendal or “peaceful dale.”

On June 19, 1703, New York’s Colonial legislature passed an Act naming the Bloomingdale Road as a public road. Later legal actions would cite the fact that it was four rods in breadth as proof that it followed an existing road, since new roads in the Colony were to be six rods. (A rod is 16.5 feet in British measurement.) The existing road was no doubt a Lenape trail, as this was the formation pattern of many Manhattan roads. The Bloomingdale Road would stretch from 14^th Street and the Bowery, cross the island in a northwest direction, and end up at the dwelling house of Adrian Hoogelandt at 116^th Street, near today’s Riverside Drive. In 1787 legislation about the Road this same place was referred to as Nicholas de Peyster’s barn, the site of Hooglandt’s old house.

In 1707, the Committee responsible for surveying the road declared their work finished. Two of these landowners were “Theunis Eidens” and “Captain Key,” who are mentioned in the next post covering property owners.

In 1751 legislation concerning the Road, it was allowed to have a breadth of two rods. The City also required the appointment of a surveyor of the public road, one who was a resident of the Bloomingdale district. He was in charge of road repairs and had the authority to summon any number of Bloomingdale inhabitants to work for up to six days each year on the Road. If someone produced a cart, spades and pickaxes, that would be counted as three days of labor. Anyone failing to appear would be fined six shillings.

After the Revolution, in 1794, the City’s Common Council decided to “…look into the expediency of continuing the Road until it intersects with the Post Road in Harlem Heights, and to determine if the proprietors through which the Road will pass may be asked of their willingness to give the land for this purpose.” All but two (Molonear and Meyer) were willing, and by 1797 the Council ordered that the new Road should be “put in good order.”  Many years later, in 1868, the Bloomingdale Road was officially abandoned after major portions of it had become part of Broadway.

Milestones on the Bloomingdale Road

Colonial roads typically had mile markers to help travelers pinpoint where they were. The 200-mile trip from Boston to New York City along the Boston Post Road would take one week with mile markers helping a weary traveler to gauge the distance. As taverns developed along the road, the mile markers would help locate them. Mile markers were established along the Albany Post Road in 1753, and continued into Manhattan along the Kingsbridge Road. The 12-mile marker was at today’s 212^th Street, still in place and incorporated into the wall surrounding Isham Park in Inwood. Other old mile markers are in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York Historical Society.

The original mile markers in the City measured the distance from the old City Hall on Wall Street. Later, in 1812, they would be adjusted to measure from the new City Hall, in the park where it stands today.

In 1769, a series of mile markers was established along the Bloomingdale Road, measured from the old City Hall. A new series was put in place in 1813, measured from the new City Hall. In that series, mile number five was at 74^th Street, number six at 94^th Street, and number seven at 112^th Street. These mile markers are helpful in determining the locations of taverns advertised in the newspapers, and for property sales in the Upper West Side area. For instance, in 1785, John Somarindyke advertised a lost cow that had wandered onto his property “near the five mile stone.” Another advertisement, in 1799, described the property at the five mile stone as “one hour from the City.”

The Bloomingdale Road as a recreational space

After the Revolution, when George Washington lived in New York City as the capital of the United States, his diary notes long carriage rides taken:

“…long drives in the family coach with Mrs. Washington and the two Custis children on the ‘fourteen miles round’ being covered between breakfast and dinner time. This tour led over the Bloomingdale Road to Harlem Heights thence by a crossroad to Kingsbridge and returning along the Boston Post Road.”

Thus, while many localities boast that “Washington slept here,” our neighborhood can point to the many times President Washington drove through here, as a way of relaxing from the duties of his job. It may have been on one of these drives when he expressed the opinion that the new capital buildings might be located on the bluff overlooking the Hudson, near the location of the Claremont estate at 123rd Street.

Bu the nineteenth century, while Bloomingdale remained rural, before Central Park was developed, the Road up the west side provided pleasure to those who owned horses and carriages. Mr. Mott, in his book about Bloomingdale, writes,

“the country on either side of it was so fresh and rural, the houses so charming whether they were the villas of millionaires or two-story cottages of dwellers with small revenues, and the glimpse of the Hudson sometimes at the foot of a narrow lane, where the water was but a point of lightness closing the vista, sometimes a broad expanse showing a large and noble view of the grand river.” 

Farming in Bloomingdale

The land in Bloomingdale was farmland, growing the crops needed to feed the city’s residents on the southernmost tip of the island. Food grown in New York also fed the slaves in the Caribbean islands, as the land there was more valuable for growing sugar cane. The Dutch had introduced wheat to the colony; native people already grew beans, squash, and other domestic plants. Initially, cattle, sheep, and swine had to be imported. The Village of Harlem to the north and east of Bloomingdale grew wheat, maize, buckwheat, and flax. By the late 18^th Century, grain production had shifted upstate, while those with farms close to the city produced the highly perishable products that could be brought to market quickly and easily. Manhattan farming concentrated on fruits, vegetables, and milk.

My research about 18^th century Bloomingdale did not reveal any specific details of growing crops locally and taking them to market, although the early owners of land here were presumed to be farming their land. By 1728, there were five markets in downtown Manhattan along the East River waterfront. Many crops, from Brooklyn, Queens and uptown Manhattan, were moved to their markets by water. When one early landowner purchased land that included the shoreline at West 96^th Street, an owner further north made sure to purchase the right to use the road that connected his estate to this shore point, suggesting that access to the water was important, perhaps for moving food supplies downtown.

Later in the 18^th Century, when merchants began to purchase Bloomingdale land as their “country seat,”

it appears that farming the land continued, but I found no details of a relationship with an overseer, or tenant leases for a portion of the land. Tenancy on farmland was well-established in colonial New York, as the great manorial estates north of the city belonging to the Livingstons and Van Rensselaers were farmed by tenant farmers. As I scanned the federal censuses—finding many unknown names—it may be that they were tenant farmers on the Bloomingdale estates.

Certain writers have mentioned growing tobacco in Bloomingdale, and then linking that fact to slavery. There may well have been tobacco growing there, just as there was further east in Harlem. However, slavery was pervasive in New York throughout the 18^th Century and enslaved people worked on many of the farms and estates of Bloomingdale, as will be discussed further on.

Advertisements for land in Bloomingdale provide the most specific examples of farming during this era. The Apthorp estate, established in 1764, was described in an advertisement in 1780 as including many features besides the elegant mansion house:

“Also a two story brick house for an overseer and servants, a wash house, cyder house and mill, corn crib, a pidgeon (sic) house, well-stocked, a very large barn, and hovels for cattle, large stables and coach houses, and very other convenience… excellent fruit trees. 

The ad refers to the estate as being “very profitable” for a gentleman, suggesting that economic activity would be occurring.

A 1782 advertisement reads:

Between fifty and sixty acres of exceedingly good land, lying at Bloomingdale, in the island of New-York, on which is a good Dutch barn, well-floored, with stables, cow stalls, hog pen …The Farm is well-wooded and watered, a great quantity of fruit trees of all sorts, above one hundred locust trees of a very large size,a nd produces near fifty loads of hay yearly. There are also eight acres of Grain now in the ground.

Finally, an 1808 advertisement for a House and Farm, situated at Bloomingdale, about 20 rods north of the six mile stone, includes:

On the Farm are more than fifty cherry trees of the best kinds, more than one hundred peach trees of excellent sorts, a great number of plumb (sic), quince and pear trees, and a good-sized apple orchard, all in full bearing. The Garden is well-stocked with currants, gooseberries, raspberries, and strawberries, with asparagus beds.  The Farm consists of 25 acres, which affords pasturage for six cows, besides producing annually about 5 tons of hay.

Colonial Bloomingdale property owners will be covered in my next post.

Sources

Riker, James Revised History of Harlem New York, New Harlem Publishing Company, 1904

Mott, Hopper Striker The New York of Yesterday: Bloomingdale New York, The Knickerbocker Press 1908

Newspaper articles from www.genealogybank.com and www.newspapers.com

The Green Bag, a Magazine for Lawyers Volume XXIII covering 1911, The Riverdale Press, Brookline, Boston, Massachusetts. Article “Bradley vs. Crane” regarding the Bloomingdale Road history

Koke, Richard J. “Milestones Along the Old Highways of New York City.” New York Historical Society Quarterly Volume XXXIV, Number 3

Burrows, Edwin G., Mike Wallace, et al Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 New York, Oxford University Press 1999.

January 17, 2020 was the 100^th anniversary of the beginning of the Prohibition era. I’d planned to write a blog post about that era in our neighborhood, especially since we were the site of the Lion Brewery on Columbus Avenue at 107^th Street. The 2020 Pandemic intervened and I diverted to the 1918 Flu Pandemic. Now I’m returning to Prohibition in Bloomingdale.

Since so much about this time involved illegal activity, it took more digging than usual to find places in our neighborhood where the 1920s era played out.   What I found may be merely the tip of an iceberg, revealing only those places that were reported in the newspapers because they were caught breaking the law. If you are reading this and know of a speakeasy operating in our neighborhood in the 1920s, please do let us know! My sources, listed below, include books by historians who have looked at this era, particularly in Manhattan; the newspapers reporting day-to-day enforcement and political activity, and online resources covering Prohibition.

Introduction: Prohibition Dates and Laws

On January 17, 1920, the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquor within, into, and from the United States and its territories were prohibited by the 18^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Volstead Act that implemented it.  The ban was in effect until December 1933, when the 21^st Amendment was ratified, making the 18^th Amendment and the Volstead Act null and void.

As Michael A. Lerner states in the introduction to his book Dry Manhattan,

Prohibition fostered new forms of urban culture, redefined leisure and amusement in the city, and promoted corruption and crime. It changed the relationship between the middle class and reform, and challenged traditional gender roles that assumed women were the moral guardians of society. Eventually… the rebellion against Prohibition in New York reshaped politics.

Prohibition came into effect gradually. Before the 18^th Amendment, a “wartime prohibition” law passed as a temporary measure in September 1919 that barred the manufacture of beer and wine in the United States after May 1919. It also prohibited the sale of beverages containing more than 2.75 percent alcohol anywhere in the nation after July 1, 1919. There were numerous arguments against this measure since the war had ended. Some said it was passed just to appease the Anti-Saloon League, which had grown into a formidable political force.

New York City’s reaction to the wartime prohibition was a preview of its years-long reaction to the 18^th Amendment. Illegal activity began to happen all over town. Prohibition came to be seen as a game; hotel bars quietly just kept serving liquor to long-time patrons. Tourists were amazed at how easy it was to get a drink in New York City. Agents of the U.S. Justice Department, the agency responsible for enforcement under Wartime Prohibition, began to roundup violators. Two of the earliest mentions of activity in our neighborhood were the arrests of Nicholas Rama of the Lion Café at 110^th and Broadway, and of a couple operating a saloon on Amsterdam Avenue.

Many people expected beer and light wines to be exempt from the restrictions of the 18^th Amendment. They were not. However, individuals with stores of liquor purchased before Prohibition were allowed to continue to enjoy their investment at home, although many transferred their cache to a flask and showed up at a hotel bar, paying for ginger ale, ice and glasses set up.  Physicians were allowed to prescribe whiskey for various ailments as was common at that time. The 1918 flu was still circulating, and there was concern about getting prescribed whiskey for those patients. Churches and synagogues were allowed to purchase sacramental wines.

Soon, even the legal uses of liquor were corrupted. Ministers and rabbis, or those posing, as such, were caught making illicit purchases. Drugstore pharmacists were caught writing hundreds of whiskey prescriptions on stolen or acquired pads, some sold to them by doctors looking to make a profit. I did not find any arrests for these crimes in Bloomingdale, but the practice was widespread.

Another solution for many was to make their “hooch” at home in a still. Recipes were readily available, with even the New York Public Library formally stating it would not restrict any book containing the needed information. When the stills grew in size and sometimes exploded, or the manufactured product proved to be poisonous, there were other rounds of investigations and arrests. Again, no story of such activity emerged in Bloomingdale, although many areas had cases of wood-alcohol poisoning, including twelve who died one day in Red Hook, and, in another case, six “bad rum deaths” on West 64^th Street.

For a few months, Prohibition raids and arrests were slow to start up as many awaited the Supreme Court’s decision regarding challenges to the Volstead Act.  Bloomingdale’s brewery, the Lion, made one of the challenges in federal court in 1920 “states’ rights” argument that lost.  There were also legal challenges to the definition of “intoxicating,” although eventually it was defined as one-half of one percent. Even the weak “war beer” was now illegal.

Then there was New York City’s less-than-enthusiastic efforts at enforcing the law through its Police Department. Many in the city thought that the 150 federal agents appointed to serve in the city should handle it. Finally, the “dry forces” in the New York State Legislature enacted the Mullan-Gage Law in 1921 that mirrored the federal law, and the NYPD had to cooperate. However, with a tepid response, the state law was ended in 1923.

The Lion Brewery  

While the Lion shifted to wartime beer in 1919, the company also took other measures to keep its operation going. The newspapers reported that it would convert part of its complex to store furs and, in a later announcement, planned that the brewery would make ice. In early 1919, the brewery assured its customers that it had one of the largest storage cellars in the city and that it would have plenty of beer up to July 1, when the wartime prohibition went into effect. The Brewery management also sent a strong warning to its saloons not to mix the “near beer” with its lager, in a move to preserve the reputation of its product.

But for all their legal and political moves, the German brewers of New York City were prevented from fighting too hard because of the anti-German feelings running high in the City as World War I progressed.

In November 1921, the neighborhood around the Lion Brewery was thoroughly frightened one evening when a large pipe connecting ammonia to the brewery’s refrigerating plant on the second floor exploded. Patrons at the Belvedere Restaurant at 954 Columbus Avenue, right across the street, frantically ran out as a large plank came crashing through the window. Hundreds of families were out on the street thinking a bomb had exploded. The windows were blown out in many nearby buildings. After all, just a year or so before, in September 1920, New Yorkers had been rattled by the Wall Street bombing when 38 people were killed and scores injured. Concerns were real about radical political agitation.

Another nearby brewery, Bernheim and Schwartz, former owners of the Lion, gave up their brewing in 1923 and sold their buildings at Amsterdam and 128^th Street to a refrigeration company. As the sale took place, the 163 vats of pre-Prohibition beer, being held in the hope it would be legal again, were released through a main sewer drain and flowed into the Hudson River. The value of the beer at $400,000 had a bootleg valuation of more than $1 million.

The Lion Brewery stirred up the neighborhood again in 1927, on July 5, when a fire broke out and destroyed one of its buildings. The fire went to five alarms and created a remarkable smoke condition watched by many thousands from high points all around the city. Some thought a fire cracker tossed from the Ninth Avenue El was the cause, but Mr. Murray, the President of the Brewery Company thought it had started in the malt storage. Poor Mr. Murray: he and his wife and their chauffer were killed in a car accident in 1931. Nevertheless the Brewery went on, announcing new hiring in late 1932 as they prepared for the end of Prohibition later in 1933.

Speakeasies and Saloons  

During the Prohibition era in New York City numerous sources noted that the city had twenty to thirty thousand places where liquor could be purchased. Many of the Prohibition raids carried out and reported in the newspapers focused on Midtown Manhattan and Greenwich Village. Here, famous nightclubs and speakeasies developed before and during Prohibition, giving New York City its glamorous image. The Central Park Casino where Mayor Walker and his mistress held court was another famous spot. The Upper West Side had Reisenweber’s, at 58^th Street and Eighth Avenue, where 3,000 could gather in multiple buildings in its restaurants and nightclub. This West Side spot was closed in 1922 after a raid.

Before Prohibition, Bloomingdale’s predominantly residential area hosted many restaurants, both stand-alone and in the numerous apartment-hotels around the neighborhood. The area also had numerous saloons serving working class residents on Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. The Anti-Saloon League focused its activity on saloons which were deemed the breeding ground of multiple social problems. Even the Progressives wanted to get rid of them, at a time when many social problems were being cleaned up.  The Prohibition cause was helped by the World War’s anti-German feelings, coupled with anti-Irish and general anti-immigrant prejudice. African American community leaders thought that removing liquor helped their cause as well.

Later, sociologists would wax nostalgic about the saloon as a “poor man’s club” and the role it played for a newly-arrived immigrant. Saloons were also a gathering place political bosses used to spread messages or organize followers. Just as an historic note, the term “blind pig” was applied to lower-class establishments in the 19^th century when the saloon keeper would bring in business by charging patrons to see an animal with unusual attributes, charge admission, and then provide liquor at no cost. For some, the blind pig was the officer on the beat who looked the other way.

The newspapers reported raids by the federal Prohibition Agents and sometimes officers of the NYPD, depending on the year and the political push at the city level. One report, referring to Bloomingdale as part of Harlem, noting raids at 354 West 103^rd Street and 705, 930, and 984 Amsterdam Avenue. A raid report in 1922 mentioned 840 Amsterdam and another reported 974 Amsterdam where Thomas Fisher was the saloon keeper who had been arrested multiple times. That raid was performed by Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, two Prohibition enforcement agents who always seemed to have the press covering their work and clever disguises. They were dismissed in 1925 as their antics were deemed inappropriate for federal agents.

Finding speakeasies in Bloomingdale was more difficult. Fortunately, when perusing a collection of speakeasy “membership” cards at the Museum of the City of New York, one was found for a business at 241 West 103rd Street called “Bobbie and Jimmie Restaurant.” Landmark West notes that this address is at the end of a group of row houses on that street and still stands today. No report of a raid there was found. But this quotation from a 1929 New York Times article may better capture what was happening at 241 West 103rd: “The brownstone front, somewhat run down, often conceals an interior the passer-by would never suspect. There are handsomely appointed dining rooms, soft lights, well-trained waiters, a French menu, and the clink of ice in wine buckets.” The Times story was about the impossibility of eliminating the city’s speakeasies, estimated at 30,000, and making a point that many were quietly operated and had no “criminal element.” Given the vast numbers, no doubt Bloomingdale had many such spots. Further down the West Side, another speakeasy card was found for the Villa Mignon on West 78^th Street.

Vice in Bloomingdale

Twenty years before Prohibition, the city made efforts to clean up or at least tamp down areas where prostitution was evident. An earlier blog post described “Little Coney Island” up on West 110^th Street (LINK) around the turn of the century. Here, saloons were taking advantage of the infamous Raines Law meant to eliminate Sunday drinking, and turning themselves into cheap hotels where drinks could be served on Sundays. Setting up a saloon as a cheap hotel with a few partitioned areas invited the prostitution that followed. The Committee of Fourteen was formed in 1905 as a citizens’ association dedicated to abolishing the Raines Law. They were successful. They continued their work, and by 1920 were overseeing undercover investigations of what they called “disorderly houses.”  The Committee included at that time Reverend John P. Peters of St. Michael’s Church at Amsterdam Avenue and 99^th Street.

In the Spring of 1920, the Reverend John Roach Stratton of the Calvary Baptist Church, a member of the Committee of Fourteen,  preached in his Easter sermon about the “hive of vice” in New York.  He named places the Committee’s undercover committee had surveilled. Drawing attention to such places was part of a campaign to have Police Inspector Dominick Henry of the NYPD removed from his position. Indeed, the Inspector was indicted later for neglect of duty as he ignored 160 disorderly houses in his district. At his trial, he was found to have a $50,000 brokerage account while receiving a salary of just $4,000.

Thanks to Michael Lerner’s book, listed below, there are details of the Committee’s Report about Peter’s Italian Table D’Hote Restaurant at 165 West 97^th Street.  After the Easter sermon, Peter’s was raided and Peter Gallotti, the owner, was charged and then convicted of serving liquor illegally, receiving a fine of $500 and 10 days in jail. (Later, this dining spot became Chateau Stanley, at 163 West 97^th, and, much later, PS 163 which it is today.)

Here’s what the Committee of 14’s surveillance team found at Peter’s: “… twenty un-escorted women, smoking cigarettes, … some appeared to be under the influence of liquor.  The investigator witnessed single women moving from table to table exchanging addresses and phone numbers with men.” However, when the investigator attempted to secure the services of a prostitute through the manager, he was unsuccessful. At another club, the Rendezvous on West 84^th Street, there was an even more aggressive action by “hostesses” to ply a patron with drinks and take all of his money while he got drunk and is later dumped into a taxi.

Prohibition increased the number of places where women and men could meet, in an era where sexual openness became the norm. While some found this change in social customs reprehensible, others found that commercial prostitution actually diminished at this time.

Cordial Shops

Another common practice and one that surely happened in Bloomingdale was the “neighborhood cordial shop.” As time passed into the twenties, the bootlegging operations became very well organized, bringing liquor into the country through Canada, down the East Coast by ships that anchored off Nantucket and eastern Long Island (“Rum Row”) and then onshore by speedy motorboats ducking the U.S.Coast Guard. One of the bootleggers sales outlets was a neighborhood storefront with “importer” or “broker” on their door. Flyers would appear under the windshield of your car or under your door. The Museum of the City of New York has samples of these printed lists in their collection, the simplicity of purchasing the product seemingly innocent and harmless. You might even get an added prize, such as the Bakelite tumblers offered here.

Our Famous Prohibition Resident

Arnold Rothstein was a mob kingpin in New York City. Even before Prohibition he had a reputation as the fixer of the 1919 World Series. Prohibition produced plenty of mobsters, often associated with one ethnic group or another. But there was something special about Rothstein, as one writer described him, conceiving his operation like a successful corporation with good management and marketing.  He made crime not just thuggish activity but big business. He expanded to loan sharking and narcotics, and even owned an insurance company.

One source gave this quotation from him:

“I will travel to London and Edinburgh and other major European cities and see the Scotch distillers. I’ll lay out hard cash and ask them to deliver their top-quality whiskey to us. We’ll have crews we can trust and ships to bring it across the Atlantic … I want to lay down an important principle … we must maintain a reputation for having only the very best whiskey.”

Arnold Rothstein was living with his parents Abraham and Esther on West 93^rd Street in the 1900 federal census. In the 1910 census, after he married his wife Caroline at Saratoga in 1909, they were living on West 94^th Street. Later, he moved to other West Side locations, and owned an apartment building on West 72^nd. Rothstein was such an important figure in the crime world that he became a character in popular culture. Damon Runyon befriended him and created the “Nathan Detroit” character in Guys and Dolls. F. Scott Fitzgerald alludes to him in The Great Gatsby. He appears again in the HBO Series Boardwalk Empire.

In 1928, Rothstein was assassinated at a poker game in the Park Central Hotel. He is buried at a cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens.

The 1920s came to an end and soon the Depression became the predominant news and political story. Prohibition, a colossal failure, finally ended in December 1933. Both federal and state governments lost huge amounts of income, many jobs were lost, and there was a significant corrupting influence on law enforcement. New Yorkers celebrated the end of their Prohibition years with a Beer Parade. In Bloomingdale, the name lives on at a successful bar named “Prohibition” on Columbus Avenue, although closed now during our current pandemic.

Sources

Lerner, Michael A. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007

Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Scribner, 2010

Susi, Michael The Upper West Side Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2009

Museum of the City of New York, digital collections

The New York Times archive

Digital newspaper collections at www.genealogybank.com and www.newspapers.com

Digital newspaper collection at the Library of Congress

www.Ancestry.com

New website on 1920: https://www.ny1920.com

The blog at www.themobmuseum.org

Reisenweber’s at Columbus Circle: https://www.brighteningglance.org/reisenwebers-columbus-circle.html.

This post was written by Pam Tice, a member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group Planning Committee

I had a little bird, Its name was Enza, I opened the window, And in-flu-enza.

Children’s Rhyme, 1918

 As our 2020 Pandemic Spring unrolled over the past few months, there have been numerous articles reaching back to 1918 when the “Spanish Flu Epidemic” spread across the United States. On the 100^th anniversary in 2018 historians looked back on that time, most not imagining that we would be re-living this type of historic event just two years later. As I get ready to upload this post in mid-May 2020, New York’s City’s 20,000 + deaths from the Covid-19 Flu are close to matching the number of deaths in the fall of 1918.

Back in March when New York went on “pause” I decided to learn about the 1918 flu epidemic in New York City, and then learn how the illness may have played out in the Bloomingdale neighborhood on the Upper West Side. I wanted to understand what local life would have been like at that time.

I started with the articles about 1918, focusing particularly on New York City. I looked in the academic journals, and searched the newspapers. My search was all online, of course, as all archives are currently closed. I read all the contemporary pieces where the historians discuss 1918 in light of today’s ongoing event. Nothing I found (almost) related directly to Bloomingdale. Nevertheless, I learned a lot about New York City in 1918. I decided to share what I’ve learned—about the flu epidemic, about the public health and the nursing profession, and about World War l in New York City—and how all of these things might have touched the lives of those living in Bloomingdale.

Many who have written about the 1918 flu epidemic—no one called it a “pandemic” then—note how it was barely even remembered. The disease killed 33,000 in New York City when our population was 5.6 million. In the second wave of the disease, the fall of 1918, more than 20,000 New Yorkers died. In the United States, 675,000 died. There are a few written memorials, but, in general, everyone simply moved on after it was over.  In his novel “The Plague,” Albert Camus describes the many millions of bodies as no more than an intangible mist drifting through the mind. Many of us today find evidence of the 1918 flu as we research family history, stories of the long-time grief experienced when parents and siblings were lost to the epidemic. The stories aren’t always sad: a recent comment to a New York Times article tells the story of a grandmother telling of the time she woke up in the hospital in 1918, heard the bells of Armistice Day ringing, and thought she’d gone to heaven!

1918 in New York City had kicked off with a new Mayor, John F. Hylan, supported by the Democratic machine. He replaced John Purroy Mitchel, whose progressive ideals were reflected in the City’s Health Department with its work in combatting tuberculosis and other communicable diseases. In the Spring of 1918, Hylan’s first Commissioner of Health had tried to cut back the expenses of the Department and created an outcry from the public reflected in news reports. By May, 1918, a new Commissioner, Dr. Royal S. Copeland, was appointed and assurances made that the medical community and the City would work together. Commissioner Copeland was in the news nearly every day as the epidemic became apparent late in the summer.

Later, medical historians would analyze the Department’s data and conclude that February to April 1918 was the first wave of the pandemic in New York City.  Medical historians saw the beginning of the U.S. epidemic at Camp Funston, part of Fort Riley in Kansas, where U.S. Army recruits suffered thousands of losses among the troops preparing to go to Europe. By summer, the flu was raging at the east coast military facilities. The disease’s arrival may have been under-reported as such news was felt to undermine our military strength. However, Spain was neutral in the War, and the flu there was publicly reported.  This led to its name, the “Spanish Flu.”

It wasn’t until the second wave of the virus began on August 14^th that New York City’s Health Department required that physicians report flu and pneumonia cases. Medical historians pinpoint the New York City epidemic when the Norwegian vessel Bergensfiord arrived with ten people ill (two had died at sea) and all of the sick were taken to Brooklyn’s Norwegian Hospital. Typically, at that time, vessels were quarantined at the Swinburne and Hoffman Islands off South Beach on Staten Island. At this point, the disease was often still referred to as “the grippe,” the name given during the earlier epidemic in 1889-1891. On August 15^th, the Health Commissioner declared that there was “not the slightest chance of a Spanish Flu epidemic here.” By August 20^th, he was describing the influenza “of a mild form” and declaring there was “no cause for alarm.”

On August 20^th, The New York Tribune published a list of dos and don’ts for treatment of the flu:

• Don’t use a common towel at home
• Avoid contact with anyone sneezing or coughing
• Don’t expectorate (spit)
• Burn or boil the bedclothes of anyone who is sick in your home
• Ventilate your home and workplace
• Avoid dry-sweeping that raises dust.

By late August and into early September, the news of cases if the flu and the accompanying pneumonia at military camps in New England: Camp Devens near Boston, and the naval forces in New London, Connecticut. For New Yorkers, many recruits were at Camp Upton at Yaphank, Long Island. Families in the City were allowed to visit the Camp. Soon the flu was spreading there.

Meanwhile, Copeland was still reporting that the cases in New York City were all from those coming here on ships. On September 19, The New York Times reported that three cases of the flu on Central Park West were home-grown, not from any ship’s arrival. Now the City had two jobs: isolate the sick, and prevent the disease from spreading in the healthy population.

How did the Department of Health’s new rules and warnings affect our Bloomingdale neighborhood?

First, in an early ruling on September 19, the Commissioner said that anyone in a house or apartment who caught the flu could stay at home, in strict quarantine. There was no way to monitor this, however, except through a family physician. Those who lived in tenements or boarding houses would be removed to a city hospital.

At this time, there was just one city hospital in each borough, but Manhattan had two: Bellevue Hospital and the Willard Parker on West 16^th Street. Over the next few weeks, the City scrambled to add beds in each hospital as well as develop new beds, such as re-working the Municipal Lodging House down on 25^th Street as a place to care for those ill with the flu. The hospital ship The Riverside was brought to the East River near the Willard Parker hospital to add beds.  During the height of the crisis, the Health Commissioner admitted that the city’s hospitals were crowded, and that there was no room for women patients.

The City’s private hospitals were no doubt flooded with patients also: the Park Hospital on Central Park West at 99^th Street, and St. Luke’s up on West 114^th Street, to name those nearest to Bloomingdale. The Park Hospital had only 64 beds. It was originally developed by the Red Cross as a teaching hospital for nurses, and re-named the Park Hospital in 1915 when the Red Cross decided to no longer operate hospitals.

Copeland was particularly worried about the potential spreading of the virus on the transportation system: the subways, trolleys, ferries and trains. He had 10,000 placards printed, spreading them throughout the system. They warned “To prevent the spread of Spanish influenza, sneeze, cough or expectorate (if you must) in your handkerchief. You are in no danger if everyone heeds this warning.”  Our Bloomingdale neighbors would have seen this placard on the elevated train along Columbus Avenue, the trolley cars on Central Park West, and the subway running under Broadway. The posters were also in store windows, at the police precinct on West 100^th Street, and other public places.

Here are a few additional images of printed material:

The City started an anti-spitting campaign 20 years earlier; the Sanitary Police reinforced it in 1918. Even the Boy Scouts got involved, handing out cards to anyone seen spitting, reminding them it was illegal. The newspapers reported cases of spitting arrests, and fines were imposed.

Another area of concern was the popular movie theaters. Copeland declared that the large well-ventilated theaters could be kept open so long as no more than two rows of standees were allowed in the back, and no smoking was allowed. He also saw the theaters as a way to communicate his messages about using a handkerchief if you sneezed or coughed. Copeland also saw that he might cause panic if people saw their beloved movie theaters closed. He did appear to be against the “dirty, stuffy, hole-in-the-wall” small, unventilated theaters, and threatened to close them. In Bloomingdale, there were two that may have been small and stuffy. There was the Park West on West 99th Street near the Fire Department Training School and The Rose on West 102^nd Street next to the Post Office, on the same block as PS 179.

The “movie palaces” on Broadway at 96^th Street, the Riviera and the Riverside, stayed open. The “Shubert-Riviera” advertised on October 2^nd that the film “The Very Idea” would be showing, with orchestra seats for the evening show at $1. There were other larger movie theaters in the neighborhood.

Copeland also warned about using shared cups and utensils. Drinking fountains in city parks had cups hanging on them. Soda fountains were targeted as they often did not wash drinking cups and food utensils between users. Like the people caught spitting, soda fountain operators were brought to court and fined, with their names printed in the news.

Wearing a gauze mask became common, first by hospital workers, and then by others. The most-often printed photos of the 1918 flu show a New York City postal worker, a sanitation worker, and a police officer wearing masks. This young women workers photo has been shared a lot too.

By early October, the cases of the flu and pneumonia were mounting fast. There was great pressure on the Commissioner to close the schools, although it was not clear until later that children were not particularly targeted by this disease. Young adults 20 to 45 were more likely to get sick. Later, after the data collected was analyzed it was generally thought that older people, in their sixties and older, had some protection from the 1889-91 epidemic they had lived though.

Since 1897, the schools were part of the City’s disease prevention system. In 1908, Dr. S. Josephine Baker, a leading expert in public health, had taken over the Department of Health’s Child Hygiene Bureau, leading 192 medical inspectors and 195 nurses who worked in the schools to check for signs of illness. In Bloomingdale, PS 54 at 104^th Street, PS 165 on West 108-109^th Streets, and PS 179 on West 102-103rd Streets would have been part of the system.

In October and November 1918, children were directed to report directly to their classroom in the morning with no loitering in the schoolyard. Teachers looked for signs of the flu, and, if found, the medical inspector took over and made sure the child went home and was seen by a family physician or public health doctor.

Dr. Copeland and Dr. Baker thought that this system of daily inspection was far better than letting all the children stay at home. They were also able to send flyers home with the children on how to handle family members who caught the flu.  Public Health and education about disease was so important at this time that the American Museum of Natural History had a “Public Health Hall” where exhibits visited by many New York schoolchildren added to their classroom work.

Private schools may have had a different outlook. A newspaper reported that Dr. Copeland’s son caught the flu and his school, Ethical Culture, was closed.

There were daily newspaper reports, by borough, of new cases of flu and pneumonia. By October 5, the Surgeon General was calling for New York City to close its schools, churches and theaters, but Copeland was still insisting that we were not stricken in the same way as Boston; he also said that half of the 1,600 cases that day “were in 600 families.”  However, that day the Health Department issued new rules that asked stores, offices, textile manufacturers and “other manufacturers” to stagger their hours so that crowding on the subway could be lessened. Copeland’s solution seemed to be to “keep calm, and go about your business.”

As often happens during a crisis, multiple events take place. For New Yorkers, that happened on October 6 when the T.A. Gillespie munitions-loading plant near South Amboy, New Jersey, blew up in a succession of explosions, causing buildings all over Manhattan to tremble, and all the bridges and “tubes” closed in fear that they would be compromised. Hundreds died, and nurses and doctors rushed to the scene.

The next day, the reported flu cases increased to over 2,000. Copeland set up a “Hospital Clearing House” to assign patients to one of the city’s hospitals, and asking the private hospitals to suspend all elective surgeries. Medical students who were nearly finished with their training were released from their universities to help. Many doctors and nurses were called upon to help at the explosion site in New Jersey, leaving the city’s facilities badly understaffed. The war had also taken many doctors and nurses away, with estimates as high as 30% of the City’s medical workers serving in the military and the Red Cross.

In 1918 nursing care was the primary treatment for the flu. There were no antiviral medications, although during much of the autumn, the Commissioner kept mentioning that a vaccination might be happening soon. Nurses kept a patient warm, nourished with chicken soup, and with bed linen kept clean. If there were signs of pneumonia, a “pneumonia jacket” might be used; this was another warming technique—some had coils of rubber tubing arranged to cover the chest that circulated hot water.

Lillian Wald had started what became the Visiting Nurse Service down on Henry Street in 1893. She was well-regarded for her work in public health, and so Copeland consulted her in forming the New York City Nurses Emergency Council in early October as a way to coordinate trained nurses and volunteers with experience in care for the sick to help them. All the nurses who worked in the various bureaus of the Health Department, such as those assigned to schools, became part of this effort.

To this cadre of women was added the Women’s Motor Corps, an organization formed for war work, but now asked to drive nurses and assistants around a neighborhood, stopping to see those who had requested nursing help. Women supplied their own cars—many women with access to cars were driving electric cars that did not need hand-cranking. They were supplied with linens, soup, and pneumonia jackets to take care of the sick. They were also expected to help with the household if a woman was a patient, making sure the children were tended to. Trained nurses were accompanied by volunteers, women who had some experience in care of the ill, who could help the nurse with more mundane tasks.

On October 10, the Department of Health set up a city-wide “influenza clearing house” in 150 neighborhoods, to provide a place to go to ask for help with nursing a patient at home. In Bloomingdale, this was at the Bloomingdale Clinic, part of the outreach program at St. Michael’s Church, at 225 West 99^th Street. There were also outreach centers established at Bretton Hall on Broadway at 86^th Street, at the neighborhood house of the Free Synagogue on West 68^th Street, and at the Young Women’s Hebrew Association on West 110^th Street.

By October 17^th, the reported number of flu cases was over 10,000. However, based on the death rate, Copeland said that he thought only 50% of the cases were being reported. Undertakers were now experiencing problems handling the deceased. Florists were unable to fulfill orders.

The Department of Health issued orders to arrest landlords who did not supply sufficient heat with the wartime limits on fuel lifted.

The Mayor and Copeland attacked private physicians with “profiteering” by overcharging. The private physicians shot back that the publicly-paid physicians made no effort to arrest the disease when it came to New York. Rabbi Stephen Wise gave a speech at Carnegie Hall that the Department of Health had become less skilled and effective. This open criticism was matched by conspiracy theories such as the fact that German spies had come to the city “via submarine” and had released the flu in a crowded movie theater.

The peak day on the epidemic curve seems to have been October 20. The New York Times reported on October 22 that there had been 37,025 cases of the flu and 4,332 cases of pneumonia in the preceding week, October 14-21. Deaths from the two were 5,372 that week.

A few stories of difficulties with undertakers emerged in the newspapers. One was labeled “coffin fraud” when two undertakers were accused of receiving bodies of soldiers who had died in the training camps and placed in coffins with a government stamp, of removing the stamp and reselling the coffin.  In what may have been a typical story, the newspaper reported a “West Side family” contracted for $60 with an undertaker to handle a burial. When the time came for the funeral, the undertaker told them the charge would be $150; when the family sought another undertaker, the first one refused to release the death certificate.  The Health Department answered their appeal, turning the undertaker over to the District Attorney. The newspapers reported that, in general, coffins were scarce, and profiteering and extortion were common.

One undertaker in Bloomingdale, was at 68 West 106^th Street. There may have been others. Poor people and those of modest income may have held funerals at home or in a local church with the undertaker removing the body for burial. For middle and upper class New Yorkers on the Westside, the Frank E. Campbell “Funeral Church” building on Broadway between 66^th and 67^th Streets was the place to go.

In a newspaper listing of deaths on October 27, 1918, there were 109; for the same day in 1917, there were 45. Not all deaths were attributed to the flu or pneumonia, but the deceased’s age, in the 30s and 40s, or the use of the word “suddenly” gave a hint of the reason for the death.

While the flu epidemic was expanding across the City, our Bloomingdale neighbors were also coping with the demands of their lives caused by the U.S. entry in April, 1917, to World War I. War demands were often about changing behavior. In the spring of 1918, “American Wheat Wasters,” people living on West 76th and 77th Streets, were severely criticized for their alarming indifference to food conservation. The Department of Health accompanied garbage wagons along these streets and actually counted and weighed the food waste, criticizing the people who lived there, described as “sufficiently well-to-do so as to have the services of two to six servants”. A cook commented that the family she cooked for did not eat toast that had gotten cold.

 

In the Spring of 1918, the second enrollment for the draft was called. Bloomingdale’s Local Draft Board 134 was at 2875 Broadway. The New York Times printed 500 names of those selected that day, including Board 134’s selections, and they left for Camp Upton a few days later.  Rafael Albert, 331 West 101; Isidore Rosenblum, 160 Manhattan Avenue; William Kuhn, 972 Amsterdam Avenue; and Jack Carlos, 230 West 107^th Street were chosen.

For young women, the war created opportunities. The trolley cars recruited women to be conductors. At the West Side Y.M.C.A. there was an auto school to train women as drivers and mechanics. The Westinghouse Lamp Company on 512 West 23rd Street, a clean, well-lit factory, with fresh air, advertised for girls at 20 cents an hour with a 10-cent increase in two weeks.

The Red Cross was very active, leading the effort to organize knitters, collecting donations, even organizing a big parade as a way to demonstrate patriotism. There was a big knitting event on the Central Park Mall.

Some Bloomingdale lives may have been upturned in early September 1918 when a day-long “hunt for slackers” took place all over the city under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Justice. Young men were stopped on the street, and, if they could not produce a draft card, they were first taken to the local police station—in Bloomingdale, the 32^nd Precinct on the south side of 100^th Street—and then put into automobiles and driven to the Armory on 25^th Street where they were signed-up. Over 20,000 agents fanned out over the city that day.

On September 1, The New York Times announced that the third draft would be held on September 12. Draft Board 134’s registration site that day was at PS 165 on West 108th Street. Police and firemen were generally exempt, along with men in “war work” jobs.

Simultaneously, the newspapers were printing lists of soldiers and sailors killed in the War, printing the exact address for the New Yorkers. Typically, the listing showed a summary of the number who died, and the reason, as “in battle,” or “of wounds,” or “injured,” and then the actual names by service rank.  Maurice Longstreet, a young man who worked as a butcher on Columbus Avenue, was severely wounded on August 17, 1918, but recovered, and was discharged in February 1919. He appeared in the 1920 census, living on West 106^th Street. The October 4 report printed in The New York Times announced that Pvt. Fletcher Battle, 72 West 99th Street was killed and Corporal M. A. Lynch of 107 West 98^th Street was severely wounded.

Mrs. Merriles on West 107^th was written about in a separate article. Her son, Charles, was killed in an explosion in an ammunition shop and a foster son, Leslie, was killed in action in France. Two other sons were in the Navy.

Another concern in Bloomingdale, site of the Lion Brewery on Columbus Avenue, would have been the September 7 story in the Times that all the nation’s breweries would have to be closed down by December 1. The Fuel and Food Administration would be cutting off supplies of grain and fuel to conserve materials needed to win the war. One observer imagined that beer would be an obsolete drink six to eight weeks after the breweries closed. We have to assume that this action was not implemented but, of course, it would not be long before Prohibition happened, and the brewery was affected.

Another neighborhood activity in October 1918 was voter registration. The newspapers printed lists of where to go to register. Several churches in the neighborhood were listed: Grace Church on West 104^th, St. Michael’s on West 99^th Street, and the Presbyterian Church at 105^th Street and Amsterdam. Registration was also at the Home for Aged Hebrews, on West 105^th Street and the Half-Orphan Asylum on Manhattan Avenue. The neighborhood schools were also sites.

Election Day was November 5, the first in New York State when women were able to vote. The State Constitution had been amended in 1917 to grant women suffrage; the U.S. Constitution was still waiting to be amended in 1919.  In Bloomingdale, the polling places, listed by Election District, were numerous: barbershops, laundries, tailors, and shoe stores along Columbus Avenue, perhaps reflecting that men were more comfortable in these places of business. PS 179 was also used. Mary Garrett Hay of West 112^th Street, New York Suffragist and good friend to Carrie Chapman Catt, was quoted: “It seemed as natural as breathing, and I felt as though I had always voted.”

The number of new flu and pneumonia cases dropped during November and December, but grew again the first seven weeks of 1919. It also came back in the winter of 1920 but Commissioner Copeland declared it to be of a milder version. However, in 1918 the excitement of the war ending, on November 11, and then the parades celebrating the Armistice dominated the news more than flu stories, leaving families to deal with the illness on their own. The Women’s Motor Corps operated in the winter of 1919.

One especially heartbreaking effect of the widespread illness, particularly its effect on young adults, was the number of orphaned children created by the epidemic. Jewish families, in particular, were appealed to, to take in orphans. Perhaps of use in the Bloomingdale neighborhood was the Manhattanville Day Nursery, an emergency shelter for babies where “forelorn fathers” who could afford the $5 weekly boarding fee would send their infant children if the mother was ill. Other infant-care institutions that sought private homes where an infant could be cared for, as it was recognized that private home care was better for the child. The Department of Health counted 650 babies that it helped during the time of the epidemic.

On November 17, 1918, Commissioner Copeland was interviewed by The New York Times and gave himself high praise for remaining calm, preventing panic, and allowing the city to “go about its business.” While he was still Health Commissioner in 1923, Copeland was elected to the U.S. Senate, and served until his death in 1938.

After the data for the 1918 flu epidemic was sorted out, New York came in with a lower “excess death rate per 1,000”, reporting 4.7 compared to Boston at 6.5 or Philadelphia at 7.3. Public health historians gave the city credit for its disease management techniques.  Newspapers also compared the deaths from the war to the deaths from the flu epidemic, noting the alarming numbers for the epidemic.

One of the impacts of the epidemic may have been in the numbers of fairly young widows and widowers observed in the 1920 federal census for Bloomingdale. The census district pages show about one-third more, especially adults in their 30s and 40s, compared to a similar district in 1910. The war, of course, may have added to the numbers.

As I finish writing this piece, the deaths in New York City from our 2020 Pandemic have reached over 20,000 and are still climbing. Local historians have begun working on how we will document and remember this time.

Sources

Aimone, Francesco, “The 1918 Influenza Epidemic in New York City: A Review of the Public Health Response” Public Health Reports (1974-) Volume 125, Supplement 3, April 2010, pp 71-79. (downloaded March 14, 2020)

Federal Census data at www.ancestry.com

Gladwell, Malcolm “The Deadliest Virus Ever Known” The New Yorker September 22, 1997. Accessed online, March 2020

Keeling, Arlene W., “Alert to the Necessities of the Emergency: U.S. Nursing During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic” U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Public Health Reports. Accessed online on April 20, 2020

New York City Department of Health, Annual Report 1918. Available at: www.tlcarchive.org (The Living City Archive at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University)

Newspaper articles from The New York Times online archive, newspapers accessible online at GenealogyBank. com, and newspapers at the Chronicling America collection at the Library of Congress (The New York Tribune, The Evening World, The New York Herald, The Sun, The New York Daily Tribune)

 Olson, Donald R., Lone Simonsen, Paul J. Edelson, Stephen S. Morse and Edwin D. Kilbourne, “Epidemiological Evidence of an Early Wave of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New York City” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America Vol 102, No. 31 (August 2, 2005) pp 11059-11063 (downloaded March 29, 2020)

Stern, Alexandra Mina, Mary Beth Reilly, Martin S. Cetron and Howard Markel, “Better Off In School: School Medicine Inspection as a Public Health Strategy During the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic in the United States,” Public Health Reports (1974-) Volume 125, Supplement 3, April 2010, pp 63-70. (downloaded March 26, 2020)

Wallace, Mike, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City, 1898-1919, Oxford University Press, New York, 2017

“Women of the Red Cross Motor Corps in World War I” available online at the website of the National Women’s History Museum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Home for Old Men and Aged Couples and St. Luke’s Home for Indigent Females

Both of these homes, developed by New York’s Protestant Episcopal Church, were in Morningside Heights, to the north of our Bloomingdale neighborhood. They were both founded by The Reverend Dr. Isaac Tuttle, Rector of St. Luke’s Church. He first established a home for women in 1852 at 543 Hudson Street, for “gentlewomen in reduced circumstance.” When larger space was needed in 1859, the women were moved to a house next to the church at 487 Hudson Street. The congregation of the church and their friends supplied all the needs of the home.

By 1872, the home for women was relocated to Madison Avenue and 89^th Street. Meanwhile, seeing the need for care developing for elderly men, Rev. Tuttle formed the Home for Aged Men and Aged Couples in the building at 487 Hudson Street. The men were “rescued from lonely want and suffering” and aged couples were “saved from the bitterness of separation.”

When the Cathedral of St. John the Divine construction began in the 1890s, the Episcopal Church moved both homes to the Morningside Heights neighborhood. The Home for Old Men and Aged Couples was moved into a new five-story building at Amsterdam Avenue and 112^th Street, on the northwest corner, across the street from the Cathedral. The land was purchased in 1897 and the home opened the following year. The St. Luke’s Home for Aged Women was built in 1899 at 2914 Broadway, at 114^th Street. The Home for Old Men and Aged Couples had a “Board of Lady Associates” in addition to its regular Board.

Both homes required admission payments: in 1921 the fee was $500 for the women at St. Luke’s, $400 for the men and $700 for a couple in the Home for Old Men and Aged Couples. Applicants had to be resident of the City for five years, 60 years or older, and a member of one of the City’s Episcopal Churches.

The two homes were only in the news when a bequest was made or when a fundraising “fair” was held. Certain men who had careers in the clergy or academia were worthy of an obituary in The New York Times. In fact, one description of the Home said it “cares for persons of the intellectual and business class.” The St. Luke’s Home for Aged Women used the resident’s sewing skills to make clothing for the children of the Episcopal Church’s Sheltering Arms Orphanage.

In 1928, the Episcopal Diocese held a fundraising dinner to kick off a campaign and announced a gift of $250,000. Their campaign to expand the Home must have been successful because later, in the 1970s, when the Home was closed, it was comprised of two buildings.

In the 1970s, most likely due to the new federal regulations, St. Luke’s Home combined with the Peabody Home in the Bronx, another Episcopal Church Home, formed a corporate entity called Morningside House which was not an Episcopal Church organization. Eventually both moved into the same new building in the Bronx.

Meanwhile, the Home for Old Men and Aged Women incorporated separately from the Episcopal Church and eventually became the Amsterdam Nursing Home we have today. For a time in 1970, a group of squatters took over the empty buildings of the Home at 112^th Street, handling the care of the building, and even convincing the Episcopal Diocese to provide heat for them that winter. Two of the squatters interviewed in the Times said that squatting there was much better than their housing on Manhattan Avenue near 100^th Street.

Lynwood Nursing Home, 306 West 102nd Street

By the 1950s, another home for care of the aged had opened in Bloomingdale, the Lynwood Nursing Home in a brownstone built in 1902.  Research on the facility has not uncovered who was the operator and exactly when the home opened; one listing described it as “proprietary.” It appears to have been in operation by the 1950s, based on obituaries in the New York Times for those who passed away there. It was still in operation until the 1980s. The obituaries found were typically for actresses, lawyers, and writers, people who were not poor, and giving an air of gentility to the home. When the federal government began to warn nursing home operators in 1974 that they were not meeting regulations, the Lynwood was on the list of those warned. Today the site is a home for recovering addicts owned by St. Luke’s Hospital.

The Infamous Towers Nursing Home

Writing about nursing homes in our neighborhood would not be complete without the events of the 1970s when the nursing home scandal played out right here, at the Towers Nursing Home on Central Park West at 106^th Street.  The distinctive round towers gave the building its name.

Charles Haight’s stone building has been a distinctive feature in Bloomingdale since it was built for the New York Cancer Hospital in three sections, from 1884 to 1890. Later, the health care facility was named The General Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer and Allied Diseases. In the 1950s, when the hospital withdrew from the site, Rabbi Bernard Bergman turned it into a nursing home, one of many in his “syndicate” that grew over the years. He also owned the Park Crescent at Riverside Drive and 87^th Street, and the Mayflower at West End Ave and 89^th Street, both former hotels that were converted.

In a series of articles in the mid-1950s, the New York Times detailed the growth of the population in the United States of over-65 adults* sounding the alarm about health care costs that could wipe out a life’s savings, and the lack of sufficient care facilities for the elderly. By the 1960s, Medicare and Medicaid were enacted, and then the nursing home business became one of the fastest growing in the United States. Elderly people who used up their resources were moved into Medicaid automatically. The federal funding of homes for the aged was a challenge to the old-fashioned non-profit homes of our neighborhood, as they struggled to meet the new rules. But for proprietary homes, the federal funds underwrote what became a real estate development opportunity.

Bergman’s Towers Nursing Home at 2 West 106^th Street had been labeled “appalling” by the early 1970s, with firetraps, medical inattention, and filthy conditions noted, but Bergman’s ties to local legislators were strong. Somehow, he and other operators managed to get the inspection process moved from the City to the State of New York where they had more control. John L. Hess of the The New York Times began a regular drumbeat of stories in 1973 and 1974. Assembly Member Andrew Stein was appointed by Governor Rockefeller to open an inquiry, soon coupled with another investigation by the U.S. Senate. What emerged from all this was the full story of the deception and administrative mismanagement of the operators in the Medicaid system, with the Towers standing for all that was wrong. The abuse of the elderly was almost a side-story, as the charges brought against Bergman were financial: stealing and tax-evasion.

As Bergman’s property was sold off to pay back his debt to the State, the Towers was landmarked in 1976 but then sat empty for many years, an eyesore and reminder of what had happened there.

The scandal of the 1970s changed the rules for nursing home operations, but now, years later, we may be on the edge of another with “assisted living” the next group of elderly care facilities needing attention. Since there are no federal dollars involved, oversight remains at the state level, where regulations vary widely.

Meanwhile, our society continues to grapple with how to care for the infirm aged while simultaneously reshaping this period of the human lifespan into a fulfilling time.

 

*According to the article, one in twelve adults was over 65 in 1955; today it is one in seven.

Sources

Aging In America, Inc. “Serving the Elderly with Care and Compassion Since 1852” (report at www.aginginamerica.org)   (History of Episcopal Church institutions)

American Society on Aging, “A Brief History of Aging Services in the United States” (www.asaging.og/blog)

Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females, various Annual Reports (1814-1914), on microfilm at The New York Public Library

Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females, Minute Books, etc. in the Rare Book Collection at Columbia University’s Butler Library

Bangs, Mrs. Julia A. An Historic Outline of the Methodist Episcopal Home in the City of New York, New York, 1893 (accessed through Google Books)

Charity Organization Society, Directory of Social and Health Agencies of New York City, 1892 and

Volume 30, 1921 (accessed through Google Books)

www.daytonianinmahattan.blogspot.com   (Hudson Street building)

Newspaper archive at www.genealogybank.com

King, Moses, Kings Handbook of New York City, Boston, 1892 (accessed through Google Books)

McClure, Mrs. Frank Newell, ed., The Methodist Church Home for the Aged in the City of New York, J.M. Laverty & Son, New York, 1950 (accessed at www.archive.org, January 27, 2020)

Melder,Keith “Ladies Bountiful: Organized Women’s Benevolence in Early 19^th Century America” New York History Vol 48, No 3, July 1967

Museum of the City of New York, photo collection

New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, Manhattan Avenue Historic District, May 15, 2007

New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Bracklow Photograph Collection (digital access)

The New Jewish Home, Annual Report, 2018

The New York Times archive, online

Richmond, Rev. J. F. New York and Institutions 1609-1873 (Google Books)

U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Administration on Aging “2017 Profile of Older Americans” (accessed on line February, 2020)

Weiler, N. Sue “Religion, Ethnicity and the Development of Private Homes for the Aged” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol 12, No. 1, Fall 1992

Westside Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing “Red Oak Apartments” (www.wsfssh.org)

www.wikipedia.org

The Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged indigent Females

 

Since the 2013 post (linked in Part 1) on the history of the organization and its homes for elderly women, the Annual Reports from 1814 to 1924 for the Association were discovered at the New York Public Library. This historical review includes several insights discovered in those reports.

The women who founded the Association were profoundly religious in their mission but were not from any particular Protestant church. In their first Annual Report their purpose is stated “God in his religious providence has reduced many respectable aged females to want. We feel it is our duty and esteem it a privilege to administer to them in comfort.”  The women were the wives of merchants of the City, comfortable in their own lives. Nearly all of them were married and typically held positions on the Board. Many served for a lengthy time.

In their first three years, the Board met at the Brick Presbyterian Church on Beekman Street, and then moved to private homes until they built their first Home on 20^th Street, between Second and Third Avenues, after which all meetings were held there. Until the Home opened, the women collected funds and dispersed them to worthy recipients. A Visiting Committee was charged with using “the utmost endeavor to ascertain the real character of every person they visited, closely questioning them and inquiring the surrounding neighbors.” By 1818, they were concerned that “a great number of aged poor are constantly immigrating from Europe” and made a rule that, to receive their help, someone must be a resident of New York City for three years.

By the early 1830s, the Association began a process to build an Asylum. The minister of the Church of the Ascension, then on Canal Street, preached a supportive sermon one Sunday, resulting in Mrs. Peter Stuyvesant convincing her husband to donate land on 20^th Street. John Jacob Astor donated $5,000 provided the women could raise the remaining $20,000. And they did! These two leading New York City citizens gave the Association a social boost, and the Board became one that socially-connected women would spend their time.

When the Home was opened on 20^th Street, daily prayer and Sunday services were an integral part of the operation. The students at the nearby Episcopal Seminary helped staff the Chapel. The Home was expanded in the 1840s, and William B. Astor contributed another $3,000. They bought land in Yorkville in the 1850s to move uptown and build a larger home, but the Civil War, followed by the 1870s recession, held back their expansion.

By the time the Association bought their land in Bloomingdale, Mrs. Edward Morgan was the “First Directress.” As the wife of ex-Senator and ex-Governor Edward Morgan, she also had the social aspects of her husband’s public life to handle. In 1877 the Morgans hosted a party at their Fifth Avenue mansion for President Rutherford Hayes.

Engaging the well-established American architect Richard Morris Hunt to design their new home on Amsterdam Avenue at 104^th Street gave the Association’s project the feature that has kept the building standing today. Hunt had designed an earlier version of the Asylum, when the Board thought they would be building on Fourth (Park) Avenue, but later found that the trains would be too close. When it was time to design the building for Amsterdam Avenue, Hunt may have simply dusted off his earlier plans. He was also busy then with the design of the base of the Statue of Liberty and William K. Vanderbilt’s home on Fifth Avenue. A “Committee of Gentlemen,” Headed by Edward Morgan, helped the women with their real estate dealings.

The Association’s 69^th Report in 1881 has a description of the features of the Home, as designed by Hunt. The original building was in a squared “C” shape with an interior courtyard, starting at the 104^th Street corner, and fronting in Amsterdam Avenue, then Tenth Avenue. (In 1907 an extension was added by Charles Rich that extended the building to 103^rd Street.)

Starting at the bottom, the cellar extended under the entire building, and further extended under a portion of the sidewalk on Amsterdam Avenue. The Matron’s Room had “center speaking tubes and bells reaching to different stories and to the kitchens and laundry.” There were two large staircases and a “commodious elevator near the north staircase.”

The basement had the kitchen, pantries, a laundry room, a drying room, and a linen room along with “Servants’ apartments.” There were bedrooms—doubles and singles—on every floor, linen rooms and shared bathrooms on all floors.  The Board had their meeting rooms on the first floor, along with a parlor that may have served as a visitor’s room, and there was a “bright, airy chapel.”

The Association’s Meeting Minutes, in a few that are available at Columbia University’s Library, provide a glimpse of the issues the Board handled in administering the Home. In early reports, the residents are often referred to as ‘family,’ but later reports call them ‘inmates.’ The work of Board members was considerable, much more than a Board member is expected to do today. Besides constant fundraising and seeking donations of food and clothing and other items, Board members made many of the purchases for the Home. One Board member complained that the women in the Home were unhappy with the type of “porous plaster” she had purchased since they wanted a more expensive brand. Residents who mis-behaved were warned and threatened with dismissal; one woman “of intemperate habits” was dealt with. Another woman accused a nurse of stealing, using language that was “coarse and vulgar,” and had to be “severely reprimanded.”

By the 1880s, the admission fee to the Home was $150 and all property had to go to the Association; nothing could be left in a will to anyone else. Another meeting note dealt with a daughter who had removed a bank book from her mother’s room upon her death, and the Association wanted it back.

The 1908 addition to the Home was substantially funded by Olivia Sage, whose robber-baron husband Russell Sage had died and left her $75 million. Mrs. Sage has been written about as a “Gilded Age” woman created a whole new identity for herself, fashioning an image of benevolence. She gave the Association $250,000. The Chapel in the new addition had Tiffany windows that honored many of the Association’s founders and activists.

The Home kept operating through the 20^th century as a place for refined women to spend their final years. Sometimes written about in a New York Times obituary, or commented on in a news story about a fundraising bazaar held at the Home, they were teachers and actresses, and many were college-educated. One report mentions a vegetable garden tended by the building’s superintendent, in the rear garden. By 1930 the entrance fee was up to $1000, and applicants had to have been a resident of Manhattan or the Bronx for ten years. A 1939 Times story describes the “tenants” as coming and going as they please, shopping in the neighborhood and going to the beauty parlor. “On stormy days they played bridge in the sun room, listened to lectures or concerts, read books in the library, listened to the radio in their own rooms.” An old-fashioned clapper bell summoned them to meals.

By 1951 there was a major reorganization, and the fee changed to $70/month. Older people were living longer and their “pacts” for care the remainder of their lives were no longer financially viable. The Association limped along, one senses, during these post-war years until Federal programs—Medicare and Medicaid—came along and totally changed the game.  In the mid-1960s, the Home underwent a renovation that turned old closets into space for more shared bathrooms, adding 52 to the building. At that point the name was modernized to the “Association Residence for Women, Inc.” but retained its non-profit status.

The story of saving the Association Residence from destruction is described in detail in the earlier post, so will not be repeated here.

The Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews

This facility that cared for both men and women got its start in 1848 when Hannah Leo was called upon to visit an elderly woman of her faith and subsequently organized other women in her synagogue B’nai Jeshurun to help the aged and indigent women. They provided “outdoor” relief for a number of years.

In 1866 the group was reincorporated as the B’Nai Jeshurun Ladies Benevolent Society and leased a building on West 17^th Street that served as their first asylum. The group operated in leased buildings, on West 32^nd Street, then Lexington Avenue at 63^rd Street, and finally by 1876, on East 86^th Street in a mansion overlooking the East River. Along the way, their homes were opened to men also.

The Benevolent Society bought eight adjoining lots on West 105th and 106th Streets and built their first building, the “Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews.” The address of the original building, dedicated on March 24, 1883, was 125 West 105th Street, located between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues.  The red brick building on West 105th was connected to another on West 106th Street with a structure connecting them.

Admission to the Home did not require a fee. Applicants initially had to be 60 years of older, of good moral character and of sound mind. By the 1920s, there was accommodation for 350 people. Visitors were allowed on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 1-4 pm.

From the beginning through 1920, Dr. Simeon N. Leo, Hannah Leo’s son, served the home without pay as its physician. Every year, the Home’s Purim celebration was noted in the news, as that holiday featured bringing food to the poor. The Home was known for several innovations in the care of the elderly, including employing professional social workers, and creating individual care plans for its residents.

The Hebrew Home building was expanded numerous times over the years, until it reached the complex that we have today, now called “the New Jewish Home,” providing services to New Yorkers of all faiths and backgrounds.

 

Home for the Aged, Little Sisters of the Poor

The Little Sisters of the Poor established their home at 135 West 106th Street in 1883-1885, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, on the north side of the street. In 1894 they added to the original building, to the east, in the same style, using the same architectural firm.  Their initial purchase of lots in 1883 stretched to 107th Street where they added an extension in 1912.

This was the only home where care of the aged was in the hands of a religious order but, amazingly, those admitted did not have to be Roman Catholics. There was no fee for admission, and both men and women were accepted providing they were 60 years or older. One had to be “of good moral character.”

Little Sisters of the Poor was formed in France in 1839 in St. Servan, on the coast of Brittany, by Sister Jeanne Jugan. Members of the order made vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, but also took a vow of “hospitality.” Sister Jugan was canonized in 2009 by Pope Benedict XVI. The Sisters work spread to other countries in Europe, and in 1868 they came to the United States, to Brooklyn, and soon had a home established on DeKalb Avenue. By the 1890s they had established 39 homes across the U.S.

The Little Sisters of the Poor also came to Manhattan, first to 31^st Street, and then to East 70^th Street near Third Avenue. The brick home on West 106^th Street was dedicated by Archbishop Corrigan on May 23, 1886, with separate male and female wings, including a chapel in the center. No information about the operation of the Home was found for this article, other than in the charity listings for New York City. One listing noted that applicants to the Home on West 106^th Street must be from the west side, while the East 70^th Street Home served eastsiders.

Residents of the Home were provided food, clothing and shelter and were supposed to be “happy” as they lived their final years. Visitors were allowed every day from 11 to 5 pm. Residents were not required to attend religious services.

One attribute that made this home different from the others in our neighborhood was that the Sisters upheld their tradition in every location by venturing forth to the community every day to “beg.” Pairs of Sisters would go out, on foot, or with a cart, to ask restaurants, hotels, private homes, butcher shops, bakeries, grocery stores and even breweries for donations of food, money, clothing, or fuel. Today’s non-profit organizations, such as City Harvest, that recycle leftover food are in this same tradition, although we don’t call their appeals “begging.”

While other Homes regularly held fundraising events, working through their Boards of Lady Managers, there were no news reports of such events for the Little Sisters. Once, however, in 1908, a charity event in a New York City hotel, held by French chefs to show their skills, benefited the Little Sisters of the Poor. They were also often named as a beneficiary of many people whose wills were printed in news reports, a popular practice in early New York.

No report of when the Home was torn down was found; however, it was listed as “active” in a 1975 guide to nursing homes. In 1978 the property was an empty lot when the West Side Federation of Supportive Senior Housing began discussions with the Little Sisters of the Poor to purchase it, which they did in 1980. The WSFSSH opened their “Red Oak” apartments, housing for low-income seniors, in 1982.

Note: the Sources used for this post will be included at the end of Part III.

This post and the two that follow on the same topic are written by Pam Tice, member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group planning committee.

In the early days of the nineteenth century as the population of New York City expanded, how to care for elderly citizens, particularly the poor, became a problem. Until then, old people were cared for by their families, or taken into the home of a friend. Poor people who ended up in the City’s Poor House were not differentiated from the mentally ill or dissolute people who were unable to care for themselves.

One of the West Side’s historic organizations, the Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females, was formed in 1814 to deal with the problem of poor elderly women. The history of their Home at 891 Amsterdam Avenue has been covered in an earlier post but will be described here again, with new information recovered from a trove of their Annual reports discovered at the New York Public Library.

Five other homes were in close proximity, starting in the late 19^th century and into the early days of the 20^th century, some lasting until the 1970s when everything changed with new Federal programs. This three-part article covers the history of caring for the aged in our neighborhood at these institutions and two others from more modern times, covered in Part 3.

The Methodist Episcopal Home for the Aged at 673 Amsterdam Avenue, between West 92^nd and West 93^rd Street

The Home for Aged Hebrews, originally located at 121 West 105th Street

The Old Age Home operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor, at 135 West 106th Street

Across 110^th Street in the Morningside Heights neighborhood,

The Home for Old Men and Aged Couples at 1060 Amsterdam Avenue at 112^th Street

The St. Luke’s Home for Aged Women at 2914 Broadway at 114^th Street

Civil engineer Egbert L. Viele wrote about the area:  There is no dampness here on the west side. There is a dry tonic atmosphere which is not felt elsewhere in the city.  It is more healthy than elsewhere. Elderly people like it here much better and with excellent reason.

 

Introduction

While the Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females got an early start in 1814, as the nineteenth century progressed other organizations formed to care for the elderly, at first for old women, and later for men. Older women were expected to be in need of support, but it took a while longer for men to be viewed in the same way. While numerous homes were operated by religious organizations, there were others established by mutual aid societies of workers’ organizations, or by certain immigrant groups. Today, for instance, we still have the buildings of Sailors Snug Harbor where “aged, decrepit and worn out” sailors were cared for, starting in the 1830s.

Over time, the religious organizations, particularly Protestants, defined those who deserved their support, extending it to those who were poor because of illness or loss of fortune in contrast to those who could not take care of themselves or their families, perhaps through alcoholism. Even as they became adept at managing an asylum, groups turned away those who were mentally ill, leaving them to go to public institutions. In general, they wanted fairly healthy individuals, although they had infirmaries for those who became ill as they neared death.

Four of the six home discussed here came about as a result of the efforts of women. The two north of 110^th Street, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, were connected to the Episcopal Church, and founded by one of its pastors, Reverend Isaac Tuttle, but had committees of women who were integral to the operation. Women who engaged in charity work in the nineteenth century became adept working outside the home, extending their social influence, and learning organizational and financial management. These skills carried over to the abolitionist movement, the temperance movement, and eventually the suffrage movement.

The rules governing the position of Matron for both the Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females and the Methodist Episcopal Home for the Aged are remarkably similar, as if the two institutions were in close contact. The Matrons were charged with being respectful and kind to everyone, keeping the home in neat order, and enforcing the rules. The lights were to be extinguished by 10 pm, with others left burning throughout the night only as needed. No “spiritous” liquors were allowed unless a physician had ordered them, and then the Matron had to keep the supply and administer it. She was responsible for the preparation of meals, for the quality of the food, the timing of the meals, and that the prayer of grace was said at each meal.

The women managers of the Home performed many duties that would later be handled by staff:  ordering supplies, visiting each resident regularly in committees of two, visiting those they supported outside the home, and delivering clothing, food, cash and sometimes fuel.

Three of the homes in Bloomingdale were designed by the firm D. & J. Jardine. David and John Jardine had immigrated from Scotland and formed one of the prominent firms in the city. They designed the asylums built by the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Methodists, and the B’Nai Jeshurun Ladies Benevolent Society. Landmark West Jardine buildings still standing in the West 80s. Research underway by one of the members of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group has identified 910 Amsterdam Avenue, 200 to 208 West 105th Street, and 202 West 108th Street as D. & J. Jardine buildings, all still standing.

As time went on, and the population of elderly citizens increased, facilities changed. When Social Security began in the 1930s, there was a general increase in care homes in the U.S. and the “poor house” came to an end since those committed there could not receive Social Security payments. During the Depression, many people opened up their own homes to old people since they brought some income, although we have no particular knowledge of this activity on the Upper West Side. Finally, after World War II and beyond, when Medicare and Medicaid began, nursing homes became a business, and had significant impact on our neighborhood.

The Methodist Episcopal Home for the Aged

Just like the women of the Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females, and those of the Home for Aged Hebrews, the women of the Methodist Churches in New York City followed a similar path. They wanted to do something about caring for elderly women who faced the almshouse. In 1850, a group formed the Ladies Union Aid Society and, very quickly, a home was rented at 16 Horatio Street for 30 women.  By 1857 space was tight, and they had raised enough funds to combine a two-lot gift of land with one lot purchased on West 42nd Street near Eighth Avenue. Here they built a 4-story building that housed 75 people, men included.

The residents, referred to as “the Family,” had to belong to one of the many Methodist churches in Manhattan and apply through their own church. Every church had a committee to consider applicants. They did not accept anyone who was “insane or weak minded.”

The Methodists had the usual “subscriptions” (annual donors) and those who left bequests to their Home. They accepted donations of food, clothing and furnishings, all scrupulously noted in their annual reports. They also offered two Benefits each year, celebratory events, such as an “Autumn Harvest Home Festival” that attracted church members from around the city, with special teas, and items for sale. The women in the Home always made some of the knitted and crocheted items, giving them useful work, and also helping the Home.

In 1884 they bought eight lots on Amsterdam Avenue, on the block between West 92 and 93 Streets, and by October 1886 the residents were moving into their new home. One of the physicians said, “Its very location is suggestive of health, being on high and rocky ground, and in one of the non-malarious portions of the island. The Outlook is grand with a commanding view of the Hudson River and the Palisades.”

Just inside the front door of the brick home was a chapel that could seat 400, and on the first floor there was a dining room, the Board’s committee rooms, parlors, the physician’s office, and offices for the matron and the housekeeper, along with ten bedrooms. The basement held the kitchen, laundry and drying rooms, the engine and boiler room, various closets and pantries, and a smoking room for the men.

Up on the second floor, the group’s Young Ladies Reading Association had a reading room with volunteers ready to read to those who could no longer read for themselves. The young ladies were also responsible for the Christmas celebration at the Home where each member of the Family was sure to get a gift. On the fourth floor was an Infirmary, and a small dining room for those who could not descend the stairs. All together there were 120 sleeping rooms, all with sunshine and fresh air as they faced outward on the streets or over the interior courtyard.

Anyone who could do so was expected to assist in the work of the Home. Several physicians donated their services, and various Methodist ministers came to preach on Sunday afternoons. There were prayers every morning and evening. Board members served on various committees, performing tasks that today would be handled by hired staff. The Visiting Committee, in two-person teams, was charged with coming into the Home three times a week, one of them at a mealtime, and getting to know the residents and hearing their stories.

Residents were not required to pay a fee to enter the Home, but they did have to turn over all of their property to the Home. Visitors were allowed only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Home had cemetery plots at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn and Maple Grove Cemetery in Queens.

News reporting on homes for the aged tended to focus on the members of the Board, gifts and bequests they received, and their building and expansion projects. Any comments about the residents were usually focused on how happy they are, and the home’s lovely atmosphere and comforts. In a 1906 news report, the Home’s annual “Christmas Market,” just after Thanksgiving, was held at the Home. The reporter focused on a blind woman, Jane Bennett, who, despite her lack of sight was able to make two pretty napkin rings with beads strung on wire and a pincushion shaped like a wheelbarrow. Another woman, age 97, who had been at the Home and the earlier one for 48 years, enjoyed the event, dressed in her “pink shawl and white tulle cap with ruchings and rosettes.” An old man, a “seadog,” in a sealskin visored cap and Uncle Sam chin whiskers” was helping collect payments for the items, and chatted about his days as “a mate or second-mate on ships from ’56 to ’60.”

The Methodist Home has two written histories, one from its founding to 1892 and the other from 1850 to 1950. The second report gave a few details about the effort to relocate the Home in Riverdale. In the 1920s, the Methodists conducted a fundraising campaign, and, at the end in 1927, concluded that their Amsterdam Avenue property was worth more to them if they sold it and built a new home.

The members of the “Family” were not happy with the plan to relocate much further uptown. One resident lamented that she would no longer be able to “go the Five and Ten, or walk down the Avenues to look in the shop windows.” But the plans went forward, and the new home was occupied in September, 1929. The history book provides the details of moving the elderly residents, getting them to part with years of accumulations and to leave their rooms with the walls covered with “pasted illustrations.” Each resident had a strong-minded volunteer assigned so that excess clothing could be tossed out, although one elderly woman insisted on bringing her heavy tailor’s iron, although she did agree to leave behind her corset covers.

The plan to sell the Amsterdam Avenue property was thwarted by the Depression, so the property was instead leased for twenty years. One source says it was vacant until 1940 when it was taken down and two six-story apartment buildings were built.

Sources used for this article and the two that follow are posted following Part 3,

 

Once we had a wall running right through our Bloomingdale neighborhood. Only it wasn’t called a wall; it was the Clendening Bridge, a portion of the Croton Aqueduct, the city’s first major infrastructure project to address the problem of getting clean water to New York City. Thanks to a young engineer named Fayette Bartholomew Tower, we have this drawing of our Clendening Bridge, published in his 1843 book after the Croton Aqueduct was finished. Even though the Bridge remained in place until the 1870s, no photograph has been found (yet).

The Croton Aqueduct, including the Clendening Bridge, ran through our neighborhood about 100 feet west of Columbus Avenue. It came down Amsterdam Avenue and swung over at an angle toward Columbus Avenue, straightening out at 105-104 Streets to head downtown in a straight line. Of course these avenues were Tenth and Ninth then, and not the roadways they are today. Much of the entire Croton Aqueduct was an above-ground “horse-shoe shaped brick tunnel 8.5 feet high by 7.5 feet wide, set on a stone foundation and protected by an earthen cover and stone facing at the embankment walls” according to a description by the Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct.

 

The Aqueduct embankment came through our neighborhood until it had to cross the Clendening Valley, the dip between West 102 and West 95^th Streets, requiring a bridge. This was the Clendening Bridge, named for the local property-owner, John Clendening.  This earlier blog post covered John Clendening’s estate in Bloomingdale: https://bloomingdalehistory.com/?s=Clendening

The Croton Aqueduct was developed in 1840-41 just as the Clendening estate was being divided and many house lots sold. Mr. Robert Marshall bought the Clendening home.  This 1867 map showing the Aqueduct’s route has Mr. Marshal’s name where the homestead was located. Another place name, Manhattan Valley, referred to the deep valley north of our neighborhood, in Harlem, not today’s Manhattan Valley that runs west of Central Park from 100^th to 110^th Streets.

 

It took New York City many years to come to an agreement about the need for the Croton project. The need for water to supply a growing city resulted in numerous schemes,  the most notable the Manhattan Water Company of Aaron Burr that was contrived more to fund a bank than to supply water.  The bank survived, as today’s JP Morgan Chase.

Yellow fever and cholera epidemics occurred regularly in early 19^th century New York. An understanding as to the cause of the epidemics was slow to develop, although Dr. Joseph Browne wrote a treatise in 1798 about the need to clean-up unsanitary conditions. Many wealthy New Yorkers who lived downtown had their water brought in buckets from the country rivers and streams to the north.  The world-wide outbreak of cholera that reached New York City in 1832 was especially severe, killing more than 3,000 people. Then, in January 1835, a fire in lower Manhattan destroyed 17 blocks while firemen struggled unsuccessfully to get water out of the frozen East River. All of these events gave urgency to the need to bring in a clean and plentiful water supply.

 

Thanks to Mr. Jervis, the Croton project’s chief engineer, the Aqueduct was planned section-by-section, starting with the reservoir created at the Croton River Dam in Westchester County, and traveling down to Manhattan to the distributing reservoir at Murray Hill, the site at Fifth Avenue and 42^nd Street. The 41-mile length of the Aqueduct was divided into four divisions of roughly ten miles each. Many contractors worked on it, employing as many as 300 workers, many of them Irish immigrants. In all, the project had 97 sections of varying lengths, depending on the topography. Our Clendening Bridge, 1900 feet long, was Section 94.  The 41-mile Aqueduct ran over a varied landscape, sometimes tunneled, sometimes above ground, and at other times over a bridge.

The Croton project had started in 1835 when the New York City Board of Water Commissioners hired Major David Bates Douglass as Chief Engineer. Major Douglass, a West Point-trained engineer, worked until October 1836, when he was dismissed, planning the 41-mile route of the Aqueduct, but not completing any plans for its structures. The Board decided he was lacking in “practical experience.” The man they hired then, John Jervis, had no university training, but he had a lot of practical experience gained from working on the Erie Canal, and the Hudson and Mohawk Railway. Jervis designed the Aqueduct’s masonry conduit, the dam on the Croton, the two reservoirs in Manhattan and the major bridges needed to cross valleys and rivers, along with gatehouses, waste weirs, ventilators, and culverts.

Mr. Jervis hired a young engineer Fayette B. Tower in 1837 when Tower was just twenty years old.  Born in Waterville, New York, he had cobbled together an engineering education after missing out at an opportunity to be trained at West Point. He was doing railroad surveys in 1837 when he was hired by Jervis at $83 per month. There were other engineers hired to supervise the contractors’ work in the various divisions of the Aqueduct route, including James Renwick Jr.,  who went on to become a well-known American architect.

Fayette Tower plays an important role in the history of building the Croton Aqueduct because of his book of illustrations and description of the project.  He also wrote letters to his mother during the construction, a resource Mr. Koeppel used when he wrote his book, listed below. Mr. Tower worked in Westchester County on the Acqueduct through 1839.  Then, in 1839, construction reached Manhattan. Mr. Tower became the supervisor of the Clendening Bridge section in Bloomingdale. He married Elizabeth Huntington Phelps of Baltimore in the summer of 1839, and they settled in Bloomingdale to be near his work. We know from the letters that Elizabeth, known as Bessy, redecorated their living quarters and helped with her artistic husband’s math calculations. They are listed in the 1840 federal census of Ward 12 of Manhattan.

The 1839 contract for the Clendening Valley Bridge work was awarded to a contractor named Bishop  & Campbell. The New York City Comptroller’s Report for 1841 shows a payment of $112,500 to them. While the original plan had been to make more arches over street crossings, only 98^th, 99^th and 100^th streets were built. Three others at 96^th, 97^th and 101^st Streets were eliminated to save money. Actually, the Water Commissioners considered eliminating all of the arches, but work on those first three had been started and it was decided to finish them. The reported discussion of the issue reveals the comment “that roads on the Upper West Side would probably not be opened for a century or two to come.” Here is another of Tower’s etchings that shows the street crossings:

 

After 95^th Street, the Aqueduct continued in a straight line down to 85^th Street where it took another angled turn across to the receiving reservoir stretching from 86^th down to 79^th Streets, and covering the wide block from Seventh to Sixth Avenue. This was the original 1842 Croton project known as the Yorkville Reservoir. The later reservoir, north of 86^th Street, was built between 1858 and 1862 when “New Croton Water” was developed. It was designed by Olmsted with curving edges to fit more attractively into the new Central Park landscape.  There was a Keeper’s House built in 1866 (destroyed in 1935) for the Overseer of both of the Central Park reservoirs. In the 1930s, the old Croton reservoir was filled in and this space became Central Park’s Great Lawn.

In April 1840 when the work on the Aqueduct in our neighborhood would have been underway after the winter break, there was labor unrest when the contractors reduced the wages of the workers. The labor unrest looked serious at first but then fizzled. The newspaper reports contain the usual mocking tone used against the Irish immigrants. The actual potential confrontation with the workers was east of the “vale of Clendening” as one report called our neighborhood.

Bessy Tower, Fayette’s beloved wife, died of consumption in early 1841. When she became ill in October 1840, he took a leave of absence to care for her, and they moved downtown to Orchard Street. He was back at work in 1841, wrapping up his supervision duties at the Clendening Bridge. Later, in September 1843, Tower married Bessy’s sister, Anna R. Phelps. They left New York after the Croton project, to live in Cumberland, Maryland. In the 1850 federal census, there is listed a 10 year old girl, Agnes Tower, listed who may have been a child from his first marriage.

Tower engaged in manufacturing in Maryland, and also had a public life, serving in the Maryland legislature and then as the Mayor of Cumberland. However, his health wasn’t good, and he died in 1857 at only 40 years old.

The work on the Aqueduct as it came into Manhattan comprised multiple projects. There were arguments over the costs of what eventually became the High Bridge over the Harlem River; for which the Commissioners considered tunneling under the River, or building a lower bridge. Eventually the High Bridge we have today was started, but it wasn’t finished until 1848, six years after the Aqueduct became operational. For some time while the High Bridge was under construction, a pipe went across the River and had a water jet that made a wondrous show for those who came in their carriages uptown to see it.

The Aqueduct crossed the Manhattan Valley at 125^th Street along Amsterdam Avenue with an inverted siphon of cast-iron pipes. A siphon is defined as a pressure pipeline that carries water uphill and then downhill again on an upside-down U-shaped trajectory. The falling liquid at the top of the U pushes the liquid in front of it uphill to continue flowing on the other side by means of gravity.

In his book, Tower describes the route of the Aqueduct. “From Manhattan Valley . . . passes through a tunnel and following its course to the next work of interest is the Clendening Valley, 1900 feet across. The Aqueduct is supported by a foundation wall of dry stonework having the face laid in mortar, except over three streets where bridges are built, having an arch of 30 feet span for the carriage-way and one on either side of 10 feet span for the side walks. These bridges are over 98^th, 99^th, and 100^th Streets.”  Tower described the Clendening Valley work: “These bridges are beautiful specimens of mechanical work; indeed the whole structure across this valley has a degree of neatness, finish and taste, not surpassed by any on the line of the Aqueduct.”  Lafayette Tower’s drawings were exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York in 1942.

Later, in the 1870s, the Clendening Valley Bridge and all the Aqueduct structure above ground was buried in underground pipes as the neighborhood was developing.  The stone from the Clendening Valley Crossing was used in 1876 to build the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, at 60^th Street and Columbus Avenue, according to the Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct, and in a 2002 New York Times article by Christopher Gray about the history of the church.

The New Croton Water project gave us the still-standing Gatehouse at Amsterdam and 113^th Street, constructed in 1874, and the Gatehouse at 119^th Street, constructed in 1894.

This undated photograph from Mr. Wegmann’s book, listed below, shows the destruction of the Aqueduct at West 104^th Street.

Another structure that appears on old maps of the Upper West Side is the “98^th Street High Service Works” built in 1879. This 170-foot tower housed the pumping operation needed to maintain water pressure. It was dressed in Wyoming Valley blue sandstone. Its pumping operation was coal-fired, pumping the water 100 feet high in its six foot wide standpipe.   A similar water tower, still standing, was built in 1872 near High Bridge for the same purpose.  This photo from Mr. Wegmann’s book shows the 98^th Street Tower in the 1890s, on the block just west of Columbus Avenue.

There’s another photo of the 98^th Street in this brochure produced by the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group back when it began as the Park West Neighborhood History Group:

https://www.upperwestsidehistory.org/blog/park-west-village-history-of-a-diverse-community

There are two other Manhattan locations where you can see the remains of the Old Croton Aqueduct.  One is at the main branch of New York Public Library, which was the site of the Murray Hill Receiving Reservoir. Here you can see a piece of the reservoir wall on the lower level of the South Court near the Celeste Auditorium.

The second spot is in Central Park where the sloping reservoir wall is tucked up against the east end of the Central Park Precinct, according to the Ephemera New York site. The Untapped Cities site notes also that the back retaining wall of the Precinct parking lot is indeed the north wall of the old Croton reservoir. And, of course, much more of the Old Croton system in Westchester County can be hiked and visited at the many sites described on the site of the Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct.

 Sources

Koeppel, Gerald Water for Gotham: A History  Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2000

Wegmann, Edward The Water-Supply of the City of New York 1658-1895 John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1896

Lankton, Larry D. “Valley Crossings on the Old Croton Aqueduct” in The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology Vol 4, No 1, pp. 27-42 (1978)

Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct published map “Old Croton Aqueduct in New York City” and online at  https://aqueduct.org/

Tower, Fayette B. Illustrations of The Croton Aqueduct New York, 1843.  Available online:

New York Times archive: http://www.nytimes.com

This wonderful work by Columbia students on the Croton Waterworks:

https://www.nycgovparks.org/pagefiles/132/Croton-Preservation-Interpretation__5bbe77fbd78ee.pdf

Genealogy and census information: http://www.ancestry.com

https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/croton-reservoir-central-park/

John Noble Wilford “How Epidemics Helped Shape the Modern Metropolis”

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/health/15iht-15chol.11988148.html

https://untappedcities.com/2019/05/17/the-top-10-secrets-of-the-nypls-main-branch-at-42nd-street-bryant-park/.