Join Ephemeral New York on a time-traveling walking tour of Gilded Age Riverside Drive!

Which still-standing mansion built in 1907 has a mysterious basement tunnel leading to the Hudson River? Where is one of the few Beaux-Arts row houses that has its original wood-carved doors? Why is the Drive the only avenue in Manhattan that branches off into small carriage roads?

Which famous American writer came to a rock outcropping in Riverside Park every day to stare across the Hudson River? Who was the rich wife and mother so disturbed by tugboat horns on the riverfront that she formed a committee to suppress “unnecessary” noise?

Join Ephemeral New York on a time-traveling walking tour that answers these questions and delves into the backstory of the city’s most beautiful avenue!

Opened in 1880, Riverside Drive came into its heyday in the Gilded Age—but the tour will explore the long history of this western edge of Manhattan that was once isolated farmland and then one of the city’s mansion-lined millionaire miles.

Tours have sold out so far this spring, but tickets remain for two tours coming up on Sunday, May 5, Sunday May 12, and Sunday, June 2:

Sunday, May 5, 1-3:15 pm: get tickets at this link

Sunday, May 12, 1-3:30 pm: get tickets at this link

Sunday, June 2, 1-3:30 pm: get tickets at this link

The tours are fun, breezy, and filled with secrets and insights. Hope to see everyone there!

A cluster of delightful West Side row houses that look like one enormous mansion

Look up at the massive brick and mortar confection at the southeastern corner of West End Avenue and 102nd Street, and you might think you’re facing one wildly idiosyncratic Gilded Age mansion.

There’s the center tower with four stories of bay windows capped by a bell-shaped roof. On the West End Avenue side are chimneys, carved panels, stained glass, and windows of all styles. On the 102nd Street end, balconies, pedimented parapets and a stoop entrance animate this sleepy side street.

Because all these ornamental eccentricities are united in brownstone and fronted by a lacy iron fence, it seems like one house—specifically a surviving example of one of the mansions built in the late 19th century in the rapidly urbanizing West End of Manhattan (the Upper West Side of today).

But a closer look tells a different story. Rather than one mansion, this corner features four separate townhouses completed in 1893. As a group, it’s the “sole surviving example of a type of site planning used on several corner plots on West End Avenue in the early 1890s,” stated the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) in 1990.

Number 858 is in the center, and numbers 854 and 856 face West End Avenue. Number 254 West 102nd Street is around the corner, unattached to its three sisters except by a thin band of brownstone above a path leading to the shared backyard (below left).

These clusters of fanciful row houses were a popular house style on the Upper West Side of the late 1800s, as the LPC pointed out. The style worked for builders, who wanted to maximize profits on the corner lots they purchased by putting up as many separate houses as possible.

Meanwhile, discerning middle- and upper middle class buyers were turning up their noses at the traditional brownstone row houses built in the 1860s and 1870s. Instead, they desired dwellings that rebelled against what was then considered boring, woefully out of date uniformity.

They also sought lots of light, an amenity traditional row houses didn’t offer. That might be why the architects decided to build one of the houses unattached—it afforded the opportunity for more back and side windows, plus a yard in the middle and Hudson River views from the top floors.

“Highly animated by recessed entrances and balconies, these lively Queen Anne/Romanesque Revival–style houses typify the eclectic residential architecture of West End Avenue in the 1890s,” wrote Barbara Diamonstein-Spielvogel in her book, The Landmarks of New York. (Below, two of the houses in 1910).

“By detailing each building individually, the architects also expressed a reaction against the uniform look of the city’s older Italianate row houses.”

Like so many other houses on West End Avenue, which like Riverside Drive was designated as a commerce-free residential thoroughfare, this group of houses was built on speculation.

The interiors featured several bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens with butler’s pantries, and front parlors with music rooms. “All the principal living and sleeping rooms have mantels, mirrors, and open fireplaces, with tiled hearths and onyx or marble facings,” wrote the Real Estate Record and Guide in an approving nod published in February 1893. (Below, in 1940)

Such an attractive cluster of row houses should have had no problem finding buyers. But with the city and nation in the grip of the Panic of 1893, the developers found themselves with few takers.

Number 856 was sold first, noted the LPC. Two years later, the remaining houses were sold to the investors, and architect/developers Ernest Schneider and Henry Herter took title to Number 858. That house sold in 1897, then the title reverted to Schneider and Herter in 1898. (Below, the row houses in 1893)

The others sold in the mid-1890s but seemed to change hands often. Number 254 West 102nd Street became a boarding house.

These days, the cluster of Gilded Age row houses are charming anachronisms on a West End Avenue long dominated by rows of prewar apartment houses. Each of the four, now all rental buildings, seems to be in decent shape. A few front entrances have been altered; some ornamentation has disappeared.

But as a surviving example of a type of housing once found on many corners of the Upper West Side, this group continues to delight passersby with its whimsical style and beguiling backstory.

[Fifth photo: NYPL Digital Collection; sixth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; seventh photo: Real Estate Record & Guide]

What a breathtaking aerial view of Riverside Drive says about Manhattan in 1910

Riverside Drive was just 30 years old when this stunning birds-eye panorama of the Drive between about 110th and 123rd Street was taken, according to the Kermit Project, which posted the photo (via Shorpy.com) and some information about it.

Though it’s more than a century old, click into the photo to magnify the view—you’ll see that the landmarks of the Riverside Drive of today are already in place.

The dome and columns of Grant’s Tomb stand to the north, some elegant prewar apartment towers loom over low-rise dwelling houses (almost all of which will disappear in the ensuing decades), and the carriage road and traffic road are separated by a wide swath of Riverside Park.

But the enlarged view of the photo reveals some vestiges of the Riverside Drive of old. On the lower left are people riding horses—a reminder that Riverside Park once had a popular bridle path.

See that pier sticking out into the Hudson? It belonged to Columbia University. A larger pier juts out at 125th Street that served ferries going back and forth to New Jersey, according to the Kermit Project. No George Washington Bridge quite yet!

Is that an early form of scaffolding on the lower right side of the image? It blocks the front of a bow-fronted row house, which resembles 292 Riverside Drive, a C.P.H. Gilbert–designed house that still stands on Riverside between 101st and 102nd Street—putting this view south of 110th Street.

The theater ads on the lower left are a lot of fun, and a reminder that popular entertainment a century ago was no smarter than what we stream today.

Want to learn more about the history of Riverside Drive, especially the Drive in the Gilded Age—when this avenue rivaled Fifth Avenue as the city’s millionaire row? Join Ephemeral New York on an upcoming walking tour! Tour dates are as follows:

Sunday, April 14: A few tickets remain for The Gilded Age Mansions and Monuments of Riverside Drive, organized by Bowery Boys Walks.

Sunday, May 5: Sign up for Exploring the Mansions and Memorials of Riverside Drive, organized through the New York Adventure Club.

Sunday, May 12: Sign up for The Gilded Age Mansions and Monuments of Riverside Drive, organized by Bowery Boys Walks.

Hope to see everyone on these fun, insightful walks up one of New York’s most beautiful avenues!

[Photo via Shorpy]

The eclectic Riverside Drive houses inspired by Elizabethan England

Is that the crenellated crown of a faux Medieval castle looming five stories above Riverside Drive and 83rd Street—flanked by European-inspired row houses with dormer windows and tiled roofs?

The separate dwellings that compose this delightful design mashup are quite a sight among the Drive’s mostly uniform prewar apartment houses. Who built these eclectic residences and what inspired him is worth delving into.

Let’s go back to the New York City of the 1890s. Upscale residences were going up in the part of the city known as the West End, especially on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. But buyers were tired of brownstones—unbroken row upon row of which filled Midtown and the East Side.

Once considered elegant, brownstones were now derided as gloomy cookie-cutter homes for speculators to sell to the city’s nouveau riche. Edith Wharton reportedly proclaimed brownstone as the “most hideous” stone ever quarried.

Architect-developer Clarence True also disliked brownstones. Born in Massachusetts in 1860, True came to New York at age 20 and trained with Richard Upjohn before establishing his own design concern in 1889.

True called brownstones “bad copies of the Farnese palace [that] ought all to be torn down,” according to “The Magnate-Messiah of the Upper West Side” by architectural site Urban Omnibus.

Instead of mud-brown facades and high stoops, True favored an entirely different kind of residential design—one that contained elements of Romanesque and Renaissance Revival, explains a 1991 report from the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC).

True called it “Elizabethan Revival,” according to the LPC report. This pastiche is best expressed at 107-109 Riverside Drive. With its castle-like battlement, it anchors the cluster of houses True constructed at the 83rd Street corner (above in 1910).

True built this group of idiosyncratic dwellings in 1898-1899 on speculation. He was especially drawn to Riverside Drive, which opened in 1880 and was supposed to overtake Fifth Avenue as New York’s “millionaire colony.” True called the Drive “the most ideal home site in the Western Hemisphere.”

“True designed several hundred houses, primarily in groups, on the Upper West Side in the years between 1890 and 1901, and was largely responsible for promoting the development and establishing the character of lower Riverside Drive,” states the LPC report.

True certainly was bold. He designed the townhouse group from 102-109 Riverside Drive to have extended stoops and bays that went beyond the property lines. The Department of Buildings protested, but True didn’t back down—until the owner of a neighboring property took him to court claiming that “his sprawling row houses devalued her property by obstructing her view, light, and air,” explained Urban Omnibus.

The neighbor won the case, and the buyers of the houses fronting Riverside Drive “were forced to hire new architects to trim their façades, erasing True’s undulations.”

Even with the less fanciful facades (above in 1940), True’s Elizabethan Revival row still stuns more than 120 years later. Over the 20th century, changes hit the group of houses—several (if not all) have been carved up into apartments, and Number 102 was demolished before 1932.

But what a treat it is that this collection of confection-like houses remains on Riverside Drive, charming passersby with design bells and whistles created as antidotes to plain, restrained brownstones.

True’s Elizabethan Revival townhouses are part of Ephemeral New York’s Gilded Age Riverside Drive Walking Tour! To join the tour scheduled for Sunday May 12, click this link. More upcoming tour dates will be announced soon.

[Fourth photo: NYPL Digital Collections; sixth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

What remains of an 1880s apartment house holding out on West 58th Street

It’s on the eastern end of a small row of 19th century holdout buildings—three survivors huddled together amid a stretch of boxy hotels and office towers near Billionaire’s Row.

On its left is a French Renaissance-style carriage house commissioned by the oldest daughter of unscrupulous Gilded Age financier Jay Gould. On the other side of the carriage house is a Beaux-Arts firehouse, built around 1905 for one of the city’s oldest engine companies.

Next to its stunning neighbors, 211 West 58th Street doesn’t seem so impressive: a five-story red brick walkup with commercial space on the ground floor. It’s about the width of a tenement house, could use a power wash, and the blueberry-colored fire escape hides much of the facade.

But look past the building’s unassuming traits and see the Romanesque arches over the second floor windows, the slender classical columns at its edges, the carvings in the lintels, and the fanciful parapet crowning the top.

These details are clues that Number 211 isn’t just your typical low-rise. It’s actually one of West Midtown’s early apartment buildings—built in the mid-1880s, just after the Dakota was completed on Central Park West and the Osborne on West 57th Street began filling up with tenants willing to try out the novel concept of apartment living.

Known today as the Sire Building (hence the name SIRE above the fifth floor windows), “this five-story flats building was constructed in 1884-85 to the designs of William Graul for owner Benjamin Sire,” explains the Historic Districts Council (HDC). “It was built to house 10 residential units and a ground floor store.”

Flats buildings like this one “had been constructed since the 1870s on the Upper East Side, however, the area in the West 50s and West 60s was largely undeveloped in the early 1870s, making this an early multiple dwelling from the first phase of residential development in this area,” continued the HDC.

The Sire Building wouldn’t be an outlier for long. This area west of Columbus Circle would soon be joined by other flats buildings like the Wyoming at Seventh Avenue and 55th Street and the short-lived Navarro Flats, a spectacular set of buildings on Seventh Avenue and Central Park South.

At the time the Sire Building was completed, the area wasn’t the hotel and office corridor it is today. Thanks to Carnegie Hall, the streets centered around West 57th Street gained an artsy reputation, with galleries, studios for artists, and art schools popping up. Close proximity to the theater district also meant the flats might be attractive to actors and stage workers.

Indeed, the Sire Building was home to an actress named Rose Beckett. In her 50s by now, she was described as “once a noted stage beauty” who had a role in the 1860s theatrical sensation, The Black Crook. Sadly, she was found dead in the apartment she shared with her husband, per a 1904 newspaper. (Despite bruises on her face, her death was deemed to be due to “natural causes.”)

The Sire Building’s evolution from early apartment house to a regular Manhattan walkup might start with the fact that it went into foreclosure in 1901.

A variety of tenants took over the commercial space, including a Studebaker car dealer in the 1910s, a pet shop in the 1930s (as seen in the fourth photo, from 1940), and the Museum of the American Piano in the 1980s, per a document from Community Board 5 concerning landmarking the building.

Today, a piano dealer occupies the ground floor. As for the tenants of these historic, under-the-radar flats, they get to enter and exit their building using the original ornately wood-carved doors with lion heads and beveled glass, as seen above.

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

An 1895 photo shows one of the last “squatter shacks” on Riverside Drive

Wen Riverside Drive opened in 1880, the expectation was that this winding avenue opposite the new Riverside Park would attract well-off folks looking for a choice spot to build a stand-alone mansion or Beaux-Arts row house with riverfront views.

But as upper-class families began moving to what was then known as Riverside Avenue, poor New Yorkers and their flimsy shanties were right down the block.

These New Yorkers came to the area around the Drive before an avenue officially opened—when the smoke from the Hudson River railroad, lack of public transportation, and sparse population of the area kept well-to-do New Yorkers away and attracted some who lived on the margins.

The photo, from 1895, shows one of these shacks on Riverside Drive and 80th Street. Looking north, fine houses and are in view—a stark contrast to this hard-luck shelter.

The caption notes that the photo is “showing the transitional aspects” of the Drive, calling the shack in the foreground “one of the last” on the street. Maybe the caption is referring to 80th Street, because it’s likely not the last squatter shack on Riverside.

Others still existed at about the same time above 96th Street, like these in this previous post. In the early years of the 20th century, with new apartment houses joining the mansions and row houses on the drive, the shacks vanished. Where the occupants went is a mystery.

Curious about the backstory of Riverside Drive? Join Ephemeral New York on a fun and insightful walking tour of the Drive. A handful of tickets remain for tour dates on Sunday, March 24 and Sunday, April 14—sign up here!

[Photo: NYPL Digital Collections]

Join Ephemeral New York on a Tour of Gilded Age Riverside Drive!

I’m thrilled to announce that Ephemeral New York’s walking tour of Gilded Age Riverside Drive is on the calendar in March and April 2024 and ready for signups:

Tour Dates and Times:

Sunday, March 24, 1-3:30 p.m.
Sunday, April 14, 1-3:30 p.m.

“The Gilded Age Mansions and Memorials of Riverside Drive,” in conjunction with Bowery Boys Tours, starts at 83rd Street and ends at 108th Street.

In between, we’ll stroll the gentle curves of Riverside Drive opposite Riverside Park at a breezy pace and explore the history of this beautiful avenue born in the Gilded Age.

The land that became Riverside Drive was once home to small farms and wealthy estates. After Riverside Park opened and residential development of the city’s “West End” began, the Drive became a second mansion row and rivaled Fifth Avenue as the city’s “millionaire colony.”

The tour will explore the mansions and monuments that still survive, as well as the incredible houses lost to the wrecking ball.

We’ll also take a look at at the people who made Riverside Drive their home—from wealthy industrialists and rich business barons to actresses, artists, and writers.

Sign-up information can be found here. I hope to see a great turnout on a tour that is always a fun, insightful adventure!

What it was like walking under the Ninth Avenue El

Not many New Yorkers today have memories of the city’s elevated trains, which shook tenement windows and roared above the streetscape from the 1860s to the 1950s—when the final line, the Third Avenue El, was dismantled.

Let Bernard Gussow, a Russia-born artist who studied, taught, painted, and created lithographs in New York City in the first half of the 20th century, give you a glimpse of New Yorkers walking under the Ninth Avenue El. This line was the first to open in 1868, and most of the tracks met their demise in 1940.

“Late Afternoon, Columbus Avenue, New York,” was completed in the 1920s or 1930s; the date is unclear. In this view, an unnamed Upper West Side side street, with charming brownstone steps and little traffic, is framed by rusted steel tracks and support beams. Faceless men and women go about their day.

Gussow certainly isn’t the first artist to paint New York’s networks of elevated tracks. But he seemed to have an interest in depicting humanity amid the machinery of urban transit. These midcentury paintings capture the anonymity and intimacy of riding the New York City subway.

[Image: 1stdibs.com]

The wrecking ball comes for a Gilded Age relic mansion on Riverside Drive

The house stood for 42 years: a French-style chateau surrounded by beautiful terraced gardens. Completed in 1906, it spanned the once wide-open block of fashionable Riverside Drive between 73rd and 74th Streets.

By 1948, it had been abandoned for almost a decade following the deaths of the husband and wife who built it and made it their home. That year, the chateau was reduced to dust by a two-ton wrecking ball.

Such a house—one of the largest residences in New York City, a leftover relic of Gilded Age excess that remarkably stuck around until the post-World War II era—deserves an elegy.

The builder was Charles M. Schwab, the affable, big-spending president of U.S. Steel and then Bethlehem Steel. Schwab, who hailed from a small Pennsylvania town and began his career as a teenage stake driver, rose to become a steel magnate on par with Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick.

Unlike Carnegie and Frick, who created large yet restrained mansions on Fifth Avenue, Schwab decided to construct his dream home on Riverside Drive—which was supposed to overtake Fifth Avenue as the city’s premier “millionaire colony.”

“Carnegie and Frick have more money than I have, but I’m getting more value for my dollars than they are,” Schwab said, according to author Andrew Tully in Era of Elegance.

After arriving in New York, Schwab purchased the land in 1901, formerly the site of an orphanage. Five years and an estimated $10 million later, Schwab, his wife Eurana, and an army of servants moved in.

This palace on the Hudson featured 75 rooms, 50,000 square feet of living space, a power plant, a chapel, “a gym, a bowling alley, a pool, three elevators, and interiors in the styles of Henry IV, Louis XIII, Louis XV and Louis XVI,” wrote Christopher Gray in a 2010 New York Times Streetscapes column. Eurana happily took the job of overseeing the design of each and every room.

Schwab had the business smarts and optimistic personality of a successful industry leader, but he also had some potentially wallet-busting habits. He entertained lavishly, won and lost money at his weekly poker game, and played the casinos in Monte Carlo. He bought a 1,000-acre country estate in Pennsylvania and owned a villa in France.

Though he professed his love for his wife, he had a roving eye. At some point he launched an affair with the nurse of his sister-in-law that produced his only child, a daughter (who he supported and visited a few times a year, according to a Pittsburgh Quarterly article).

The Schwabs hosted parties in their chateau, but they didn’t strive to be part of the old money or nouveau riche elite. Schwab loved music; the couple held weekly concerts and salons, inviting musicians to play the pipe organ in their mansion.

Eurana, or “Rana” as she was known, “was a gardening enthusiast, and eschewed the numerous afternoon teas and other daylight functions for the verdant pleasures of her own backyard, which she transformed into an orderly jungle of blooms,” wrote Tully.

The Schwab mansion was also the site of charity efforts. In 1917 the couple opened their home to 200 Red Cross workers who needed a space to knit clothes and make bandages for World War I. In the 1930s, they hosted a carnival for 300 kids who lived in the rundown Gas House District of the West 60s.

After years of massive spending, the Depression hit the Schwabs hard. And their palatial dwelling was now an outlier surrounded by row houses and apartment residences. In the Gilded Age, single-family mansions, particularly in the chateau style, were in vogue. By the 1930s, most had been demolished.

A 1930 New York Times article announced the sale of the mansion to make way for an apartment building, but nothing came of it. (Below, the chateau in 1933)

In 1936, Schwab offered his mansion to the city as an official mayor’s residence. The offer was turned down. Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor at the time, reportedly said, “what me—in that?”

Three years later, Rana died at the age of 79. Schwab moved into an apartment hotel at 290 Park Avenue soon after, leaving the chateau, which he could no longer afford, for good. At 77 years old, he passed away later that year—in debt, per Tully.

The mansion lingered, empty and forlorn. Chase took title to it after Schwab’s death. But the bank couldn’t find any buyers for this white elephant of a house that came with massive expenses.

In 1947, the chateau was purchased by Prudential for a reported $1.25 million, according to Tully. The insurance giant’s plan was to invite buyers to pick over the interiors, then tear it down and replace it with a contemporary apartment house.

The wrecking ball came on March 31, 1948.

“Exactly at noon Fred Hoffman, operator of the crane that swings the giant ball unsentimentally into the sides of doomed buildings, worked a series of hand levers that smashed it with great force against the northwest tower,” stated a 1948 New York Times piece.

“A second blow knocked a hole up the 100-foot-high structure about 20 feet from the top. The hole widened as the ball struck twice more and then, on the fifth attempt, the whole top of the tower, weighing five tons, slowly started to sag in the north.”

“As a score of children watched eagerly and some old-timers a little sadly, the top suddenly plunged to the ground with a roar and a cloud of white dust,” per the Times.

It would take six more weeks to finish the job, razing to the ground this emblem Gilded Age excess and the life of a couple lost to the ages.

In 1950 a new apartment tower, Schwab House, opened in its place—with none of the bells and whistles of the magnificent mansion that preceded it.

[Top photo: Pinterest; second image: MCNY 26908.1E; third image: LOC; fourth image: Carmel of St. Therese of Lisieux; fifth image: New-York Historical Society Robert L. Bracklow Collection; sixth image: unknown; seventh image: MCNY X2010.18.314; eighth image: MCNY X2010.11.3076; ninth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

What became of Virginia—the girl who asked the New York Sun in 1897 if Santa Claus is real?

It might be the most famous reply to a reader letter ever printed in a New York City newspaper.

Published in the broadsheet New York Sun (below, on Printing House Square in the 1860s) on September 21, 1897, the letter came from a schoolgirl living on the Upper West Side who wanted to know if Santa Claus was real.

“Dear Editor, I am eight years old,” read the letter to the newspaper, one of the city’s oldest and founded in 1833. “Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘if you see it in The Sun, it is so.’ Please tell me the truth: Is there a Santa Claus?”

This short note prompted a tender answer, which featured the famous line, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” The then-anonymous writer bemoaned that Virginia’s friends “have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age” and explained “the most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.”

Despite the fact that it originally ran in September, the letter and reply have become emblems of the holiday season—reprinted in newspapers every year at Christmastime to urge still-skeptical adults and kids to believe in the goodness and magic of Old St. Nick.

But who was Virginia, and what was her life like after her letter made her a household name? Fame followed her through life, which continued to center around her childhood block of West 95th Street.

Born in New York City’s Gilded Age in July 1889, Laura Virginia O’Hanlon lived with her family first on West 20th Street “not far from the spot where Clement Clarke Moore wrote the verse that begins “T’was the night before Christmas,” noted one newspaper in 1958.

In 1896, the O’Hanlon family—Virginia, her mother, and her father, a police surgeon and deputy coroner—rented the house at 115 West 95th Street (house on the right, above). The new home was one of the hundreds of row houses going up on the tidy blocks of the city’s rapidly urbanizing West End, or today’s Upper West Side, according to a New York Times Streetscapes column from 1993.

They were only the second family to occupy this house between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. Built in the 1880s and designed by Charles T. Mott, the row consisted of brick and brownstone-trimmed upper middle class homes described by the Times as “a furious mixture of Queen Anne, Victorian picturesque and just plain builder-vernacular.”

A year after moving to Number 115, Virginia approached her father with her question about Santa Claus. In a 1958 interview, Virginia told a reporter that she was “just at that age when most children get their first touch of cynicism.”

Teased by friends who said “the only Santa Claus there is your father, who dresses up and slips presents in the house when you are not looking,” she took her dad’s advice to ask The Sun (headquarters below in 1895).

“Father laughed,” Virginia recalled. “‘A newspaper has no time to waste on a little girl. Write if you want to, but don’t be disappointed if you never hear from your letter.'”

But she did hear. “[The Sun’s] editor-in-chief, Edward P. Mitchell, showed editorial writer Frances Pharcellus Church (above) a letter received from an eight-year-old child, Virginia O’Hanlon,” wrote Hy B. Turner in When Giants Ruled: the Story of Park Row, New York’s Great Newspaper Street. “Mitchell thought it might lead to a worthwhile editorial.”

Church “bristled and pooh-poohed at the subject,” then wrote a response, reportedly in just one afternoon. Published without a byline, it was described by fellow journalist Charles Anderson Dana as “real literature,” per Turner.

When the letter appeared in print, “father hustled out and came back loaded down with Suns until he looked like a pack mule,” Virginia recalled. The notoriety “spoiled me for a while…it used to make me proud as a peacock to go along the street in the neighborhood and hear somebody say, ‘Oh look! There’s Virginia O’Hanlon.”

New York City readers were charmed, but the rest of the nation had yet to hear of it. “It did not become an instant success, as legend has it,” wrote Peter Applebome in the New York Times in 2006. “Instead, it was first reprinted five years later, with no great enthusiasm, after repeated requests from readers.”

Finally in the 1920s, The Sun gave in to growing reader demand and began reprinting it every year until the venerable paper folded in 1950. Church was unmasked as the writer after his death in 1906.

Meanwhile, Virginia and her family continued to rent Number 115 until 1900, when they bought a row house down the street at 121 West 95th Street (middle house above), according to the Streetscapes column. By the 1920s, “Number 115 had become a rooming house, with 11 occupants.”

Virginia didn’t leave her block after she became a young adult. She graduated from the public city institution that became Hunter College in 1910; she got a master’s degree from Columbia a year later and landed a teaching job at a New York City public school in 1912.

In 1913 she married and became Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas. A baby daughter arrived, but her husband soon left her, per a 2010 New York Times piece. Virginia and her daughter continued living with her parents at Number 121.

For the rest of her professional life, Virginia worked in city schools, earning a doctorate at Fordham University and becoming a “junior principal” at PS 31 on the Lower East Side. After a few years as principal at PS 401 in Brooklyn, she decided to retire. This milestone, in 1959, was covered by the New York Times.

“Her curly hair is now as white as that of the Christmas saint,” the Times wrote, describing Virginia (above photo) as a petite school teacher with “bubbling blue eyes and generous smile.” The reply to her letter had inspired her through her entire life, she said, which was marked by speaking engagements and appearances related to her famous letter.

By this point in her life, Virginia had left West 95th Street and was living at 26 West Ninth Street in the Village. Following her retirement, she planned to move out of New York City and relocate upstate to reside with her daughter’s family outside Albany, per the Times.

She died in a Valatie, New York nursing home in 1971 at age 81. More than 125 years after her letter and its reply were published, they continue to charm and inspire.

The letter’s reply “has resonated for 109 years not because of what it said to children,” wrote Applebome. “Its appeal is what it says to adults—about the fleeting nature of childhood; the importance and difficulty of faith, hope, and belief; the thin line we walk between being responsible adults and a world with, as Mr. Church wrote, ‘no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.'”

[Top image: Wikipedia/NY TImes; second image: Wikipedia; images four, five, and six: Wikipedia; eighth image: Wikipedia; ninth image: Rooney/AP via CBC; tenth image: Hunter College Archives/thesantaclausgirl.com]