The two heiress sisters who in 1890 funded a Yorkville school for needy kids

In 1686, Philip Jacob Rhinelander, a German-born French Huguenot escaping religious persecution in Europe, immigrated to New York.

A century later, his descendants comprised one of the richest families in Gotham. The Rhinelanders made their money as shipbuilders, sugar importers, and stewards of a vast real estate empire across Manhattan, states the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts.

The Rhinelander Sugar House once on William Street, Rhinelander Row and Rhinelander Gardens in Greenwich Village, the Hardenburgh-Rhinelander Historic District on East 89th Street—all are named for 18th and 19th century family members from this old-money clan.

But there’s another landmark in Manhattan that still bears the Rhinelander name: the Rhinelander Industrial School at 350 East 88th Street.

These days, the school is a ghostly shell between First and Second Avenues, its stepped gables and terra cotta “R” on the front facade (below) behind construction scaffolding.

But within its brick walls (now sadly covered in stucco) holds the story of two Rhinelander family heiresses and the gift they gave to needy children in what was then a poor immigrant neighborhood.

The sisters, Julia and Serena Rhinelander (in the above illustration), were born into a wealthy household at 477 Broadway in 1824 and 1829. In 1840, their father, William C. Rhinelander, moved the family to two adjoining houses that formed one mansion at Fifth Avenue and Washington Square North—at the time a fashionable enclave for Manhattan’s most elite.

In time, Julia and Serena’s sister and brother left the family mansion; their parents passed on. But the sisters, who never married, continued to live in the house at 14 Washington Square.

As heirs to a reported $50 million fortune, they didn’t have to work. Instead, they traveled, they attended social events, and they devoted themselves to philanthropy.

One of the philanthropic measures they decided to take on was the funding of a school that would be owned and operated by the Children’s Aid Society. The Society, launched in 1853 by Reverend Charles Loring Brace, began opening schools across New York City in the 1880s and 1890s where poor children could take regular classes while also learning a trade.

Wealthy New Yorkers donated the funds to build these schools. Julia and Serena decided they would as well, and they also donated a plot of Rhinelander family land on East 88th Street where the school would be located.

Unfortunately, Julia Rhinelander never lived to see the school completed; she died in 1890 while vacationing in France. Serena, now alone in the family mansion (below, the house on the corner), did see the Rhinelander Industrial School open in May 1891.

Designed by Calvert Vaux (the architect behind many of the Society’s schools and homes for kids), the facility was described as a “beautiful building” by the New York Times, who noted that it had space for about 300 children, including a “kindergarten, sewing, and cooking schools.”

The school thrived as Yorkville’s population boomed. “By 1902, the Rhinelander Industrial School was serving 477 children, only up through age 12 because ”the children go to work at the age of 13,” according to the annual report of that year,” wrote Christopher Gray in the New York Times in 1989.

“Boys were taught manual trades and girls were taught cooking to provide household economy to those who needed it most,” added Gray.

Serena Rhinelander died in 1914 in her mansion at 14 Washington Square, after a lifetime of donating liberally to churches and charities in her “quiet and unostentatious way” according to her obituary in the New-York Tribune.

Meanwhile, the school changed with the times throughout the 20th century. The building was remodeled in the 1950s, noted Gray, gaining its stucco facade.

It’s unclear how long classes were held and what subjects were taught. Yorkville by the late 20th century was no longer an immigrant neighborhood, and industrial schools that taught sewing and cooking had outlived their usefulness.

In 1989, the school was renamed the Rhinelander Children’s Center. As of 2014, the Children’s Aid Society was trying to sell the building to raise money for a new facility in the Bronx. Considering that the former industrial school is behind scaffolding, it appears to have been sold.

What does the next chapter hold for this relic of Gilded Age benevolence? Perhaps the school is undergoing redevelopment—or waiting for the wrecking ball.

[Fourth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collections;

The story of a reclusive heiress—and what she saw outside her Fifth Avenue window

New York City has always had its share of recluses. Many remain anonymous after years of seclusion behind apartment walls, others become infamous later in life or after death.

Huguette Clark (above photo) falls into the latter category. More than a decade ago, headlines appeared revealing that this forgotten heiress—born in 1906 to rakish copper magnate and Montana senator William A. Clark (below) and his much younger second wife—had been living out the past 20 years in a Manhattan hospital suite, tended to by private nurses.

Following Huguette’s death at Beth Israel Medical Center in 2011, a few weeks shy of her 105th birthday (and with a $300 million fortune to be divvied up), more details of her unusual life came to light.

As a girl (above right), the “Baby Copper Queen” took the path of other rich Gilded Age daughters. She traveled abroad with her parents, studied the violin, graduated from Miss Spence’s School (now Spence), made her debut in society, and married a Princeton graduate described as a “promising young bond salesman” in 1927.

After a divorce in 1930 (Huguette claimed abandonment, her former husband said the marriage had been unconsummated, according to her New York Times obituary), she returned to the palatial twelfth-floor apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue (below) where she had been living with her mother, Anna, since her father’s passing in 1925 at age 86.

Previously, the family resided in a 121-room mansion fronting Fifth Avenue at 77th Street dubbed “Clark’s Folly” because it was so insanely ornate.

Her retreat over the next decades from society events and social outings went unnoticed by the press. Apparently she was content to lead a small life, collecting dolls, visiting the family’s Santa Barbara estate, and staying out of the public eye—a lifestyle her mother seemed to pursue.

“Mrs. Clark did not care for social distinction, nor the obligations that would entail upon my public life,” William Clark once wrote of his wife, according to Bill Dedman’s 2010 NBC News article and photo gallery exploring the family backstory and re-introducing Huguette to contemporary viewers.

When her mother passed away in 1963, Huguette isolated herself even more. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that a frail Huguette arrived at Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side for treatment for skin cancer lesions that disfigured her face. Doctors removed them, but she opted to stay in the hospital.

She transferred to Beth Israel when it merged with Doctors Hospital…and never left.

Huguette’s reasons for leading much of her life in seclusion from the outside world remain a mystery. She left no diary or trail of clues. Maybe she was simply an introvert, or very much her publicity-shy mother’s daughter. Perhaps her reclusiveness was driven by grief after losing her mother, her father, and in 1919, her sister Andree (second photo on the left), who died at age 16 of meningitis.

What she did leave behind are her paintings. While her father was an avid art collector whose collection of 800 or so paintings, sculptures, and antiquities are now housed at the Corcoran Gallery, Huguette herself was an artist with a focus on portraits, landscapes, and still lifes.

The image above is a self-portrait of the heiress as a young woman. Holding her palette and standing before a canvas, she seems to see herself a serious artist. There’s a softness to her face and form that reveals a comfort in this space, most likely a studio in her Fifth Avenue apartment.

The second and third photos have self-evident titles. The first is “Scene From My Window, Night,” (above) which overlooks Fifth Avenue traffic, illumination from headlights and street lamps, and the modern skyscraper cityscape including the Empire State Building in the background.

“Scene From My Window—After the Snowstorm” (below) is a similar nocturne featuring soft lights, a snowy Central Park, and prewar apartment buildings like her own in the distance.

When she painted these and others isn’t known. Huguette did exhibit some of her work at the Corcoran Gallery in 1929, and I imagine these date to about that time. If she exhibited elsewhere, I couldn’t find any reference.

The last two paintings intrigue me. On one hand, they’re lovely landscapes showing what makes New York so enchanting: the lights, the snow, the skyline. They seem to have been painted by someone who took pleasure in this side of Manhattan and wanted to recreate it.

On the other hand, the window panes mimic jail bars. Was Huguette’s Fifth Avenue apartment a kind of prison for her? It’s impossible to know, but I prefer to think that this heiress, one of the last human links to the Gilded Age, put herself there by choice—and created a life behind these masonry and glass walls that gave her fulfillment.

[Top image: NBC News; second image: Wikipedia; fourth image: Indianapolis Star; fourth, fifth, and sixth images: Artnet.com]

A night at Mrs. Astor’s January ball, the crowning event of the Gilded Age social season

Right now, if we could flip back the calendar to January in the Gilded Age, we would find ourselves in the middle of the exhilarating swirl of balls, parties, and charity events that made up elite society’s winter social season.

It was an annual ritual for decades. The season kicked off in November with the horse show and the opening of the Academy of Music’s opera series. (Though some of the select box seat holders tended to arrive late and leave early, more interested in gossip than opera.)

December was reserved for the weekly Patriarchs Balls held at Delmonico’s. And in January, the most anticipated gathering of old-money New Yorkers would commence: Caroline Astor’s annual ball.

Caroline Astor, of course, was Gilded Age Gotham’s society doyenne, a plump, plain-looking woman with a black pompadour (later a black wig) and a penchant for diamonds.

With her Knickerbocker heritage and 1853 marriage to John Jacob Astor’s grandson (who preferred sailing his yacht and carousing with other women over playing second fiddle at his wife’s social events), Mrs. Astor was able to propel herself into the role of society queen bee from the 1870s into the early 20th century.

Mrs. Astor reigned with help from her sidekick, Ward McAllister. The Southern-born McAllister was the inventor of the Patriarch Balls as well as the “Astor 400″—a list of the most socially prominent New Yorkers. At some point “the four hundred” were thought to be the number of people who could fit comfortably in the Astor ballroom, but the origin of this is in question.

In any event, Mrs. Astor’s mansion was certainly roomy enough to hold hundreds of people. But who would receive an invitation? According to Gilded Age socialite and memoirist Elizabeth Wharton Drexel, Mrs. Astor would carefully scan the Social Register, winnowing down potential invitees.

“Failure to be invited signified that, whatever your pretensions, you were a goat and not a sheep,” wrote Lloyd Morris, author of 1951’s Incredible New York.

Once a guest list was finalized, each hand-written invitation would be sent out. This “coveted slip of cardboard,” as Drexel described it, began with “Mrs. Astor requests the pleasure….”

What would these chosen guests—the “graded ranks of her hierarchy,” according to Morris—expect as they alighted from their carriages in front of Mrs. Astor’s rather staid mansion (second image) on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street?

On that night, “her mansion was ablaze with lights, and all its splendid rooms were banked with masses of flowers,” described Morris. “Through a wide hall, guests proceeded to the first of three connected drawing rooms, where their hostess received them, standing before the life-size portrait which she had recently commissioned from [portrait artist] Carolus-Duran.” (Top image, from 1890)

As she greeted her invitees, Mrs. Astor glittered in her Gilded Age finery, purchased during her annual trip to Paris.

“A tall, commanding woman of formidable dignity, she was magnificently gowned by Worth,” continued Morris. “Precious antique lace draped her shoulders, edged her huge puffed sleeves. Her pointed bodice and long train were of rich dark velvet, her skirt was of satin, embroidered with pearls and silver and gold.” A diamond tiara rested on her pompadour.

After greeting Mrs. Astor, guests made their way through the drawing rooms to the mansion’s art gallery (above photo), which functioned as a ballroom. While the orchestra played, a supper catered by prominent French chef J.A. Pinard was served in Mrs. Astor’s dining room where “the delicately embalmed bodies of terrapin and fowl reposed on ornate silver.”

In 1896, Mrs. Astor departed her Murray Hill mansion and moved into a sumptuous new palace on Fifth Avenue and 65th Street (below, in 1926). This French Renaissance double mansion was shared with her son John Jacob Astor IV and his young family.

After the move uptown, Mrs. Astor resumed holding her January ball, receiving 600 guests. “It was the largest and most elaborate ball given this season,” the New York Times noted.

The atmosphere was more luxurious than ever. On January 8, 1901, The New York Times covered the festivities once again, noting that this year’s ball had a record attendance of “the most representative men and women in society.”

“It was fully midnight before the last guest had arrived,” the Times wrote. “The entrance of the house was banked on either side by boxwood trees and masses of Southern smilax, in which were placed crimson poinsettias.”

“Mrs. Astor received alone in the drawing room, which was decorated with mauve orchids in golden vases, to the left of the main hall,” continued the Times. “She wore a superb gown of black velvet pailletted in silver, and all her famous diamonds.” (Below, in black with her tiara)

Supper was catered by Sherry, the restaurateur who operated his eponymous French eatery on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street frequented by old money and nouveau riche New Yorkers. The menu consisted of several dishes, including terrapin (clearly a Knickerbocker New York favorite), canard canvasback, foie gras, bonbons, and pommes surprises.

After supper, the cotillion began. Ninety couples danced to a live band. After the dancing ended around 3:30 a.m., many stayed for a second supper, the Times reported, along with a list describing some of the gowns female guests wore.

Mrs. Astor died in 1908; when she held her final ball isn’t clear. According to her obituary, she had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1906, living mostly in seclusion until her passing from heart disease two years later at age 78.

Her timing was impeccable. Lavish balls like hers were falling out of fashion, old money and new money had long intermingled, and society as she understood it was about to be lost to the ages.

[Mrs. Astor portrait: Metmuseum.org; second image: MCNY X2010.11.4466; third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: Wikipedia; fifth image: MCNY X2010.11.4462; sixth image: NYPL; seventh image: Wikipedia; eighth image: Wikipedia]

The delightful 1890s sidewalk clock on Third Avenue is missing its ancient symbol

You could say that sidewalk clocks (along with street lamps and fire call boxes) are the original New York City street furniture.

These elegant cast-iron timepieces began towering over Gotham’s sidewalks in the late 19th century in business districts thick with pedestrian traffic. (In one fanciful instance, the clock was embedded into the sidewalk itself on Broadway and Maiden Lane.)

They were designed for function—this is an era before wristwatches made their debut—as well as advertising. What better way to establish your business as solid and dependable then having its name emblazoned on a charming cast-iron clock?

That’s likely why, in 1898, Adolph Stern placed this black and gold sidewalk clock in front of his shop on Third Avenue near 85th Street. According to a New York Daily News article from 2001, Stern owned a jewelry store on this busy section of Yorkville under the elevated train.

Stern’s store was less a jewelry store and more of a pawn shop that sold jewelry. The Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) has it in their 1981 historic designation report that the clock stands in front of 1501 Third Avenue, which was “occupied by a pawn broker for many years.” The clock “was probably installed as an advertisement for that business,” per the LPC report.

The 17-foot tall double-faced clock standing outside Stern’s shop on 1501 Third Avenue (above and below in 1940, now Stern & Son) became a fixture on the streetscape. “With its paneled base, fluted column, and scroll top, this clock is almost identical to the Sherry Netherland clock,” states the LPC report, of the clock in front of the hotel at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street.

“The dial, however, is crowned by a giant screw and watch fob ring, creating a delightful oversized pocket watch.” The Third Avenue clock had something even more unique above the fob ring: an ancient pawn shop symbol consisting of three gold balls supported by a three-pronged bar (see above and below photos).

For decades, this giant timepiece stood as a witness to a changing neighborhood and a changing world. Wristwatches became normalized; Yorkville began losing its German population, the elevated train came down, Stern’s shop gave way to a furniture store…and handsome examples of street furniture were often left to fall into disrepair.

As the 20th century went on (below in 1932, mostly hidden by the el train) and the old clock became marred by graffiti, it went missing.

“Century-Old Clock Gone From the Sidewalk,” a newspaper headline read in August 1985, explaining that someone made off with the clock after $4,000 had been raised to refurbish it. A witness from a furniture store said they saw several men in a van take it away, claiming they had “police permission.”

Apparently it was just a mix-up: a Long Island man who collects clocks got the go-ahead from a city administrator to buy it and haul it away, according to a Newsday article a month later. The city got it back with the intent of doing repairs.

Restoration came in the late 1990s, and the sidewalk clock was reinstalled in front of 1501 Third Avenue in 1999, according to a plaque on the base of “The Yorkville Clock,” as it’s now called.

Delightful as the clock is (and a comfortable place to lean against, as the man in the photo at top demonstrates), something has been left off it: the three balls that comprises the ancient pawn shop symbol.

Too bad—the symbol (or a reproduction of it) could have served as a wonderful reminder that a pawn shop had the idea to install the clock here more than a century ago.

If the clock looks familiar and you’re an old movie fan, you may have seen it in a scene in the 1945 drama The Lost Weekend, starring Ray Milland. The site nycinfilm.com has photos from the scene where the clock appears and info on how it was shot.

[Third image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fourth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fifth image: MCNY, 33.173.234]

A Yorkville shop from the 1950s hangs on to its old-school phone exchange

Small businesses with their roots in the early to mid-20th century still abound in the pockets and corners of Manhattan. And what a treat it is to come across one of these old New York businesses still using a pre-1960s two-letter phone exchange.

Case in point: Abbey Locksmiths, at 1558 Second Avenue just shy of 81st Street. The main sign for this business, established in 1952, has an all-numerical phone number.

But look closely at the neon signage in the front window: the phone number starts with LE.

LE for Lexington? After years of looking into these old-school phone exchanges, I’ve found that though some are named for local streets and landmarks, others have no ties to the neighborhood.

But Lexington Avenue is just two avenues away, a shopping street with a subway stop at 86th Street. In the absence of a comprehensive guide to old New York phone exchanges, it’s as good a guess as I can come up with.

Check out more two-letter phone exchanges found around the contemporary city here.

All that remains of a Yorkville toy store referenced in 1947’s “Miracle on 34th Street”

“You can get those fire engines on Schoenfeld’s on Lexington Avenue,” Macy’s confident department store Santa tells the irate mom played by Thelma Ritter in the 1947 holiday classic Miracle on 34th Street. “Only $8.50, a wonderful bargain.”

You know the plot: Macy’s hires a kind old fellow to be their store Santa Claus. But it turns out the chunky, bearded man is Santa Claus, aka Kris Kringle. And Kris doesn’t give a hoot about Macy’s desire to make tons of money selling toys during the Christmas season.

So if Macy’s doesn’t have the exact toy a child asks for, Kris tells the parents where they can find it. “I keep track of the toy market pretty closely, does that surprise you so?” Kris asks Ritter’s character, who is shocked that Macy’s Santa is sending customers to another retailer.

It’s a movie not only about the true spirit of Christmas but also the ruthless department store wars of the middle of 20th century Manhattan. The names of competing department stores referenced in the movie are all recognizable, even if the store itself no longer exists, like Gimbels and Wanamaker’s.

But Schoenfeld’s? This small toy store was definitely not a department store. It operated on the ground floor of a tenement building at 1254 Lexington Avenue between East 84th and East 85th Streets.

The German store name leads me to wonder if a local Yorkville family launched this business, but details are hard to come by. Schoenfeld’s was open as early as 1927, when this ad for a toy motorboat appeared in Scribner’s Magazine.

When Schoenfeld’s folded is a mystery, though clearly it vanished after the movie hit theaters. At least one photo of this toy emporium exists—taken around 1940 and part of the Tax Photo Collection at the NYC Department of Records & Information Services.

The photo (top image) and the Scribner’s ad are all that remain of a piece of New York City retail history, immortalized in a short line in a Christmas classic movie.

The lonely last days of Gilded Age New York City’s biggest Fifth Avenue mansion

The story of the Cornelius Vanderbilt II mansion begins the same way New York’s other Gilded Age palaces got their start: with a socially prominent family in need of a showpiece of a home.

In 1879, Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt—who had been living in fine style in a home on Fifth Avenue and 32nd Street—”commissioned George B. Post to design their new house on the lot they had purchased on the corner of 57th and Fifth,” states Wayne Craven in his book, Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society.

Cornelius “Corneil” Vanderbilt II was the favorite grandson of railroad and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. He and his wife, Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt had seven children throughout their long and apparently happy marriage.

They also had Corneil’s $70 million inheritance, plus his earnings as president of the New York Central Railroad, to spend on a lavish Fifth Avenue home steps away from Vanderbilt Row. This stretch of Fifth Avenue had been colonized by other Vanderbilts—included William K. and Alva Vanderbilt, who built their “Petit Chateau” on Fifth and 53rd Street.

A decade after Alice (below, in 1880) and Corneil’s mansion was completed in 1883 (second image), the couple embarked on a renovation and expansion—spurred on by competition with Alva Vanderbilt and other Gilded Age movers and shakers who were building more extravagant houses.

Corneil bought and bulldozed several existing homes on the block; Post again was commissioned (with help from architect Richard Morris Hunt) to more than double the size of the original house.

Spanning Fifth Avenue from 57th to 58th Street, the renovated limestone and brick palace (top image) now boasted 137 rooms across six floors, including 37 bedrooms, 16 bathrooms, various salon rooms, a grand dining room that doubled as an art gallery, and a Louis XIV-inspired ballroom, according to The Gilded Age Era blog.

Ornate detailing, stained glass windows, and mosaics by artists like Augustus Saint-Gaudens and John La Farge decorated the interior rooms. The porte-cochere at the entrance contained six sculptured reliefs by Karl Bitter of boys and girls singing. A tall iron fence and gates surrounded the property.

After dropping an estimated $3 million over more than a decade, Corneil and Alice finally had the home they desired—one that earned the title of the largest private residence ever built in New York City. But not long after the expansion was completed in 1894, the beginning of the end commenced.

In September 1899, Corneil, 55, died in his mansion of a cerebral hemorrhage. His health had already been diminished after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1896.

Alice continued living in the house, helped along by a $7 million trust fund her husband left her to help maintain the Fifth Avenue home as well as the couple’s spectacular Newport residence, The Breakers. Beset by grief, she dialed back her social appointments and sequestered inside—along with a staff of over 30 servants.

As the early 20th century continued, the opulence of the Gilded Age began to be viewed as gauche and excessive. Fifth Avenue remained the city’s most impressive address, but the residences just south of Central Park were being replaced by banks and retail stores. (Below, Everett Shinn’s “The Old Vanderbilt House.”)

Architectural styles also changed. Instead of commissioning a mansion that mimicked a chateau or palazzo, many of New York’s rich were migrating to luxury apartment buildings—where they no longer had to manage a staff of servants and pay ever-increasing property taxes.

The cost of maintaining her Fifth Avenue mansion began to hit Alice hard. “The upkeep of the place was a burden on the estate, and its neighborhood encroached upon by business was no longer considered suitable for residential purposes,” wrote the New York Times in 1934.

It didn’t help that the Pulitzer Fountain had gone up right outside her bedroom in 1916, and the naked backside of the female figure gracing the fountain reportedly shocked her. All of these factors contributed to Alice’s leaving her mansion for a more manageable residence at 857 Fifth Avenue owned by her son-in-law.

The Fifth Avenue mansion’s days were now numbered. “The mansion became unused and boarded up, a white elephant amid the commercial establishments that began to encapsulate it,” wrote Craven.

In 1925, Alice “applied to the Supreme Court today for permission to sell the Vanderbilt mansion at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, for $7,100,000 cash,” reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in August of that year. (Why she had to apply for permission isn’t clear; perhaps it had to do with the legalities of the trust she was left by her husband.)

A year later, the mansion was sold for close to her asking price. “One week before it was scheduled to suffer the fate of the wrecker’s ball, in January 1927, she arranged to have the house opened to the public, charging fifty cents’ admission to raise money for charity,” stated Craven. “The public flocked to see how the highest of High Society had lived during an era that was by then fading.”

During the spring of 1927, New York City’s largest private residence became a demolition site (above photo). In its place one year later rose Bergdorf Goodman. The elegant department store has now occupied this stretch of Fifth Avenue for almost a century—more than twice as long as Corneil and Alice’s mansion stood.

Alice, still living at 857 Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, died in 1934 at age 88. Like her mansion, she outlived the Gilded Age.

[Top image: Alamy; second, third, fourth, and fifth images: Wikipedia; sixth image: Everett Shinn; seventh image: Larry Froeber/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images; eighth image: Bain Collection/LOC]

How a 200-year-old Yorkville farmhouse ended up as a private home in today’s West Village

The West Village is rich with historic houses—especially diminutive Federal-style survivors from the early 19th century and elegant brownstone rows constructed before and after the Civil War.

But this modest white clapboard farmhouse on Charles and Greenwich Streets might be the most intriguing of all. Every day, it attracts curious views from passersby—who peer through its iron fence and peek over the thick ivy walls to catch a glimpse of the antebellum city on a quiet West Village corner.

Dwarfed by its tall tenement neighbor, the tidy farmhouse (with a suburban-style driveway) resembles something out of a storybook: three small sections that kind of unfold like a book, two short stories, one slender brick chimney, and a roof that looks, well, a bit askew.

This New York relic has been at 121 Charles Street for more than 50 years, and its dollhouse-like presence delights and puzzles newer generations of West Villagers.

But like so many Village mysteries, the farmhouse has a fascinating backstory. This one began miles away in the Manhattan countryside and involves urban redevelopment, renters unwilling to part with of a beloved home, and a flatbed truck.

The farmhouse’s journey started in Yorkville roughly 200 years ago. At the time, Yorkville was a bucolic part of Manhattan dotted with farms and estate houses by the East River—connected to the main city only by the Boston Post Road (about today’s Third Avenue) and stage lines.

In this remote enclave, someone built the little farmhouse, putting in small paned windows and a staircase outside that connected the two floors, per a description from a 1966 New York Times article. Its location corresponded to today’s York Avenue between 71st and 72nd Streets.

Exactly when it went up isn’t known. “Saw marks found on the wood indicate that it was built after the introduction of saw mills, which would date the house to the early 19th century at the earliest,” states a post on Off the Grid, part of the website of historic preservation group Village Preservation.

In the 1860s, as Yorkville began losing its rural feel, the farmhouse was purchased by a man named William Glass, who with his wife ran a dairy inside.

The couple also built a two-story house in front of the farmhouse, 1335 York Avenue, thereby blocking it from view from the street. “The property became known as Cobble Court because of the cobblestones that paved the area between the two houses,” notes Village Preservation.

After spending time as a restaurant in the early 20th century, the farmhouse became a residential rental. In the 1940s, children’s book author Margaret Wise Brown (above, in a Life magazine photo) became the latest occupant. Perhaps living in a farmhouse walled behind another house helped inspire her most famous book, 1947’s Goodnight Moon.

In the 1960s, a man named Sven Bernhard (below), and later his wife, Ingrid, made their home in the farmhouse. “Time and various tenancies had dealt harshly with the two-story clapboard dwelling, and when Mr. Bernhard moved into it in 1960 it was virtually uninhabitable,” wrote Thomas W. Ennis in the 1966 New York Times article on this newly rediscovered “hidden house.”

“From 1960 to 1963, Mr. Bernhard, working alone, rehabilitated the dwelling, for which he is paying $65 in rent,” continued the 1966 Times article. The outside staircase was enclosed, per the article, and Bernhard added a glass porch.

This is where urban redevelopment makes its appearance. The Archdiocese of New York City now owned the farmhouse; it had been sold to them by descendants of the Glass family. The Archdiocese planned to raze a row of houses on York Avenue, including Number 1335 and the farmhouse behind it, to build the Mary Manning Walsh Home for the Aged.

“Still renters but unwilling to give up their beloved house, the Bernhards went to court and eventually won ownership around July 1966,” states Village Preservation. They had six months, until January 31, 1967, to move it elsewhere.” The lot at Charles and Greenwich Streets was found and secured.

After much bureaucratic wrangling with permits and permissions, the move took place in March 1967 (above). “The cobbles from the York Avenue site were brought here to recreate Cobble Court,” adds Village Preservation.

The Bernards stayed in their farmhouse until 1986. In 2001, another owner—who told The New York Times in a 2008 article that she’d “pined for the house” since she was a child in the late 1960s, when she “spotted it from the back of her parents’ station wagon”—took on a renovation. About 500 square feet was added, cedar planking restored, and new electric and plumbing put in.

In 2014, the farmhouse had a brush with potential demolition when the house was briefly put up for sale for $20 million. These days, this securely landmarked anachronism of rural New York City seems to have found its forever home.

[Fourth photo: Life magazine via Literary Hub; fifth photo: New York Times; sixth photo: Jack Manning/New York Times via Village Preservation]

Gilded Age Manhattan’s primitive shack houses, as painted by landscape artists

In the decades after the Civil War, New Yorkers with money had several options for housing.

For the really loaded, there were stand-alone mansions and the new luxury residential hotels; upper middle class residents could go with a brownstone row house or one of the early “French flats” apartment buildings.

If you were working class or poor, however, a tenement awaited you. And if you were so broke you couldn’t afford (or were excluded from) a tenement, you could cobble together a shack—housing so primitive that it’s hard to believe existed across Manhattan.

Photos of some of these ramshackle houses exist, like these images of wood shanties on a pre-luxury Riverside Drive. But most of the photos only date back to the 1890s.

Yet thanks to some talented but unheralded landscape painters, viewers can get a visceral sense of the substandard wood shacks some residents called home in the 1860s and 1870s.

Ralph Blakelock is one of these landscape painters. Born on Christopher Street in 1847 and the son of a doctor, Blakelock dropped out of the precursor to today’s City College in the 1860s and devoted his life to painting romantic, sometimes darkly evocative moonlit landscapes of New England and the American West, explains Artsy.

Back in Manhattan in 1874—where he tried to support a wife and nine children with the meager proceeds from his art while slipping into the throes of mental illness—Blakelock depicted these wood shacks (top image) in a painting he titled simply “Shanties in Harlem.”

Harlem at the time was transforming from a rural district into a place for the middle class, but the hardscrabble shacks in Blakelock’s painting are startling.

Blakelock also painted “Shanties, Seventh Avenue and 55th Street” (second image). These shacks would have stood four blocks below the new Central Park, and area fast becoming a wealthy enclave of mansions and early apartment houses.

An earlier work from 1868 shows a lonely small wood house with a sloping roof at Fifth Avenue and 89th Street, today the site of the Guggenheim Museum (third image).

Another landscape painter, Howard Nesmith, born in 1859, captured the shacks that once stood on today’s Second Avenue and East 72nd Street. Nesmith painted this image (fourth from top) in 1879, showing hilly terrain and rough-hewn homes.

Nesmith’s “East Foot of 72nd Street,” from 1876, is something of an impressionist view of a wood house perched precariously on the side of a hill by the East River (fifth image).

What became of these shacks and shanties? By the early 1900s, they had all likely disappeared, replaced by brick and mortar residences and office buildings. I wish I knew what drew Blakelock and Nesmith to them.

[Top image: MuturalArt; second image: Sotheby’s; fourth image: MCNY, MNY33853; fifth image: MutualArt]

An early 1900s laundry detergent ad comes back into view on East 72nd Street

It’s the upside of urban redevelopment: when old and unloved buildings meet the wrecking ball, sometimes a long-concealed faded ad comes back into view.

This has happened at the southwest corner of Second Avenue and 72nd Street. On the side of a still-standing tenement inside a walled-off construction site are the remnants of a full-color ad for a very 19th century-sounding soap brand.

Much of the ad has been painted over. But enough remains to decipher the product, which happened to be manufactured in Manhattan.

“James Pyle’s Pearline Washing Compound,” the first part of the ad says. “The Great Invention,” it continues.

The rest of the ad is hard to read, but it may say “for saving toil and expense without injury to the texture, color, or hands—as vintage print ads (below, about 1910) for the product state.

Larger letters against a blue background read “Pearline: Best by Test.”

So what was Pearline? Apparently it was detergent for washing clothes, and its appearance on store shelves coincided with the beginnings of advertising and marketing.

“Pearline soap began appearing as a product around 1877, was trademarked on November 21, 1899, and continued to be active use well after the rights to the name was purchased by Procter & Gamble around 1912,” states the Hagley Library’s Digital Archives.

According to the Faded Ad Blog, James Pyle manufactured Pearline first at 350 Washington Street in the 1850s, then at 414 Washington Street (now a very pricey Tribeca condo loft residence). A 1903 issue of Soap Gazette and Perfumer reported That Pyle was moving his soap factory to Edgewater, New Jersey.

How long will the Pearline ad be visible from the street? It depends on the pace of construction at this prime piece of Upper East Side real estate.

Whatever replaces it (a 21-story residential tower, according to New York Yimby), you can bet this piece of ephemera—which tells us a little about how laundry was done in an era before machines—will be concealed from view once again.

[Thanks to Ephemeral reader Johnny Jets for alerting me to this find!]