Esther Crain's Blog

Spaces are still available on tomorrow’s Gilded Age Mansion & Memorials RIverside Drive walking tour. We’ll explore the backstory of this winding, scenic drive and the houses and monuments that marked it as millionaire mile that rivaled Fifth Avenue.

The forecast is for spring sunshine—join us at 1 pm for an insightful walk on the city’s most beautiful avenue! Click the link for more info.

Fractional house numbers can be found across New York’s older brownstone and townhouse neighborhoods. Usually the half refers to an adjacent carriage house or backhouse, or sometimes even a basement apartment.

But as far as I can tell, this is the only 3/4 fractional on a Gotham doorway or entryway.

It’s at 184 3/4 West Fourth Street—an appropriately old Manhattan street that depending on the block was originally known as Chester Street, William Street, and then Asylum Street. In the 1830s, this crooked, then-residential thoroughfare .

So what’s behind that heavy black door with the 184 3/4 painted above it? A closer look shows it’s something of an alley lined with garbage receptacles rather than an actual attached living space.

But who knows, New Yorkers are known to squeeze into some pretty small places and make them their homes. This one does have a roof. Maybe someone does live in or behind this space, and their mail is delivered to 184 3/4 West Fourth Street.

When you think of Gilded Age millionaires, the name Darius Ogden Mills probably draws a blank. Born in 1825 in Westchester, Mills based himself in Buffalo and California and made a fortune in banking and railroads.

He got his modest start in business as a teenage clerk in Manhattan. Perhaps he remembered throughout his adult life the loneliness of being a young man in a big city, and the difficulty of getting a foothold and resisting the many temptations that could ruin the chance of success.

This might explain why, as a retired older man, Mills moved back to New York to build Mills House No. 1 on Bleecker Street in 1897—the first of three “philanthropic hotels” he named after himself and funded in Manhattan.

What’s a philanthropic hotel? Conceived by social crusaders alarmed by the sin and vice of the late 19th century Metropolis, its mission was to provide sanitary, morally uplifting lodging for working people whose only other options may have been a cheap flophouse or low-class boarding house.

“At a time when more single men than ever were migrating to New York City, Mills intended to keep single men away from women and families in the crowded tenement districts,” wrote Brian J. Pape in a 2020 Westview News article.

At the turn of the century, it would have been very unusual for a single adult to rent or buy living space of their own. Though bachelor apartments for men were popping up, most unmarried adults either lived with their family, in a room in a decent boarding house, or in a residential hotel, which could be expensive or dicey.

Mills House No. 1 was “one of a number of similar residential hotels established by moral reformers as safe, clean, and wholesome alternatives to the city’s supposedly licentious rooming houses, transient hotels, and the like,” stated Pape.

Philanthropic hotels were a popular cause among socially conscious millionaires at the time. Many were built specifically to guard the morals of the young women pouring into New York to study or work.

Department store magnate A.T. Stewart built a nine-story, baroque-style working women’s hotel on today’s Park Avenue and 32nd Street in 1876; it failed after a year because of stringent house rules. A Rockefeller family member funded Laura Spellman Hall on Hudson Street, run by the YWCA and open through the 1950s.

Like the men behind these hotels, Mills (at left) wanted to build something impressive. He purchased a block-long stretch of downtrodden Bleecker Street, a tenement district of Italian immigrants, between Thompson and Sullivan Streets.

Earlier in the century when Bleecker Street was an elite address, the land was the site of posh terraced residences called DePauw Row (below, 1896).

Mills commissioned architect Ernest Flagg (the genius behind the Singer Building, among others), who completed Mills House in the Renaissance Revival style.

The new residence had a central entrance, two wings, a marble tiled floor, electricity, eleveators, and 1,554 tiny rooms measuring no larger than 5 by 8 feet spread across nine floors.

“Each had only a bed with a mattress, two pillows, a chair, and a clothes rack; the walls stopped about a foot below the ceiling, allowing air flow but no acoustic privacy,” wrote Pape. “There were four toilets and six washbasins on each floor (for 162 rooms) and bath facilities only on the ground floor.”

A room per night at what was dubbed by curious New York newspapers as the “Waldorf of the slums” cost 20 cents—on par with what a flophouse on the Bowery might charge for much less impressive accomodations.

Dining options were also available at 15 cents a meal, with restaurant-style menus (below).

One meal tried by journalist Jacob Riis after he stopped by for a visit was not “as savory as the one they would serve at Delmonico’s, but he comes to it probably with a good deal better appetite, and that is the thing after all,” wrote Riis in The Battle With the Slum, published in 1902.

Riis noted that residents could take use of the “smoking and writing rooms, and a library for his use; games if he chooses, baths when he feels like taking one, and a laundry where he may wash his own clothes if he has to save the pennies, as he likely has to.”

Lounging around during the day, however, was strictly forbidden.

“Mills House hotels were closed during the day to encourage residents to seek work or be at their jobs,” wrote Pape. “The residents were required to pay in advance, and could not gain entry after midnight. If they arrived drunk at the hotel, they were refused entry even if they had prepaid.”

Mills was motivated by a sense of benevolence and concern. Yet he also operated the hotel as a business that could turn a small profit. He hoped to help men move up the economic ladder by fostering self-reliance and not treating them as charity cases.

So who were the men who took a room at Mills House No. 1—and then the second Mills House constructed on Rivington and Chrystie Streets in 1898 and a third in Midtown on Seventh Avenue in 1907?

“Although the hotel was planned for people of limited means, its quality attracted those from all income levels,” wrote Christopher Gray in a 1994 New York Times column.

“The 1900 census taker found clerks, cashiers, janitors, coachmen, laborers, porters, waiters, one acrobat, and a doctor, a lawyer and a stockbroker among the residents.”

“A reporter for The New York Tribune in 1899 also found a man who would not give his name but was called by others ‘Old Solitaire’ because he played cards by himself in a lounge every night without a word to anyone else.”

Another type of New Yorker also found the hotel to be a housing option, one that might have shocked Mills’ moral sensibilities.

According to the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, “Mills House’s “all male-housing accommodations was also particularly desirable to working-class gay men because they could live and socialize more easily undetected, though they still faced being harassed and arrested.”

Mills died in 1910, but he had set up a family trust to continue funding his three hotels until 1949, according to Pape. Mills House No. 3 on Seventh Avenue was converted to office space, and Mills House No. 1 slid into decline.

“When No. 1 was sold it became the Greenwich Hotel (for men), and by the 1960s it became the first hotel in New York to be called a ‘welfare hotel,'” noted Pape. A 1970 Village Voice article stated that 900 men lived in the Greenwich, which was the site of 17 robberies a day and massive lice infestation. (Hotel ad from the NY Post, December 1970)

Meanwhile, the Village Gate nightclub moved into the basement in 1958 in a space that once held Mills House’s laundry facilities. The Rivington Street Mills House would close and be demolished in the 1960s.

By the 1980s, the Greenwich Hotel was gone, and Mills House No. 1 was converted into an apartment building called the Atrium. The Village Gate left in the 1990s, though its iconic sign remains on the facade.

These days, what was once a dignified SRO hotel built by a philanthropist with a special concern for working-class men is now a co-op with 189 luxury units, according to Streeteasy.

Flagg’s handsome building still stands, and the initials of Darius Ogden Mills are still visible on a pediment cartouche above the entrance.

[Top photo: Wikipedia; second image: MCNY, 90.13.1.324; third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: New York Historical; fifth image: MCNY, X2010.11.9984; sixth image: MCNY, X2010.11.226; seventh image: author’s collection]

Riverside Drive is one of Manhattan’s most beautiful and dramatic avenues. It’s also a place of legend and mystery, especially during the Drive’s early decades as a Gilded Age “millionaire colony” rival to Fifth Avenue.

Which mansion built in the early 1900s has a basement tunnel leading to the Hudson River? Where can you find the remnants of an 18th century colonial farm lane? Why are there no brownstones or stores on the Drive?

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? How did Joan of Arc end up in bronze at 93rd Street?

Join Ephemeral New York on a breezy and insightful walking tour in partnership with the Bowery Boys: “The Gilded Age Mansions and Memorials of Riverside Drive.”

We’ll explore these mysteries and many more on this former millionaire’s mile—once home to the city’s Gilded Age elite (plus some eclectic artists, actresses, and New York characters) and still the site of surviving mansions and spectacular monuments.

Tickets remain for the Riverside Drive tour for Saturday, April 18 from 11-1:30 pm. Hope to see everyone on what promises to be a gorgeous spring day!

Conceived as a romantic English landscape garden and enhanced by sloping contours, rock outcroppings, and dramatic river views, Riverside Park began opening in stages in the 1870s.

Since then, it’s undergone a lot of changes—and it helps to click into the image above to see them.

For starters, the original Riverside Park only stretched from 72nd to 125th Street. In the early 20th century, the city began extending the park northward to 158th Street.

Another change? The addition of monuments. Inspired by the City Beautiful movement, granite and marble sculptures, memorials, and fountains gave Riverside Park a sense of honor. Perhaps the most iconic is the one in the photo, Soldiers and Sailors Monument at 89th Street, which opened on Decoration Day 1902.

The 20th century also saw the burying of the railroad tracks, seen in the photo, that had run along the water’s edge since the 1840s.

West Side residents had been advocating this for decades, but it took Parks Commissioner Robert Moses’ mid-1930s West Side Improvement Plan to cover them (and then put the new West Side Highway/Henry Hudson Parkway above them).

Finally, when the park opened, it spanned a slender 191 acres. By the end of the 1930s, landfill extended the park into the Hudson River with an additional 132 acres, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

That new land supported more walking paths, ball courts, and playgrounds—none of which existed in the original 19th century plan. As New York’s population and needs have changed, so have our parks, as the birds-eye photo reveals.

Want to learn more about the backstory of Riverside Park and the carriage road that runs along side it? Spaces are still open for Ephemeral New York’s Gilded Age Riverside Drive walking tour this Saturday, April 18 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., in conjuction with Bowery Boys Walks.

It’s going to be a beautiful day for an insightful walk up one of Manhattan’s most historic streets—sign up here!

[Photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

Margaret Bechstein Hays (at right) was a well-off 24-year-old residing on a fashionable Upper West Side block and living a life similar to that of other young women of her class in early 20th century New York.

In the spring of 1912, that meant taking a trip abroad with a school friend, Olive Earnshaw, and Olive’s mother.

The trip was supposed to help take Olive’s mind off her crumbling marriage. To distract her, the three spent two weeks touring Italy and the Middle East, according to Encyclopedia Titanica.

For their return voyage to New York, the women booked two first-class rooms on the Titanic, boarding at Cherbourg on April 10 with 274 other passengers.

Four days later, the liner was ripped by an iceberg. At first, a steward told them there was nothing to worry about. But soon they became increasingly frightened. They got dressed, wrapped Margaret’s pomeranian in blankets, and headed for deck.

As the magnitude of the damage became apparent, the women were put in lifejackets, lowered into lifeboat 7, and picked up by the Carpathia hours later as the unsinkable ship met its grim fate in the frigid Atlantic. (Margaret’s pom also made it out alive.)

Margaret’s survival was remarkable—but her situation not unique. A total of 712 passengers, mostly women and children in lifeboats, were rescued by the Carpathia around daybreak on April 15. (Below photo, Titanic passengers on the deck of the Carpathia)

But her story took a heartbreaking turn on the Carpathia when she encountered two other survivors—a pair of French-speaking brothers, about four and two years old, without parents or any identity at all.

Touched by the boys’ situation, Margaret decided to take charge of them on the Carpathia. She continued caring for them back in Manhattan, as officials tried to figure out who the children were and how to reach their family.

Newspapers dubbed them the “waifs from the deep” and the “Titanic orphans.” Desperate for some good news amid the tragic toll the disaster took on New York City, reporters eagerly followed the story of the boys and Margaret’s devotion to caring for them.

Margaret spoke to the Evening World on Friday, April 19, a day after the Carpathia docked in New York, piecing together accounts from other passengers of a desperate, anonymous man who tossed his young sons into the last lifeboat to leave the Titanic.

“He held up the children, and the passengers in the boat understood that he wished to send the babies to them,” she told the World.

“Several men stood up in the lifeboat and held out their arms. The man dropped the larger boy first and saw him safely caught by a sailor. Then he dropped the little one. As the lifeboat pulled away the passengers could see the father hanging over the rail watching.”

“When the children were brought aboard the Carpathia, there was no one there to care for them. Almost all the survivors had lost friends or relatives or were so distracted by their experience they could do nothing. I can speak French and volunteered to take them in charge,” explained Margaret.

In New York, Margaret brought the boys to the home she shared with her parents at 304 West 83rd Street. The Children’s Aid Society tried to uncover the identity of this desperate man, likely their father.

Margaret spoke lovingly of th two boys. “The children have been brought up nicely, for the first thing this morning when they arose they demanded in baby French to be bathed,” Margaret told the Evening World, adding that she called them Louis and Lump, as the boys could not tell her their names.

She reitered her quest to help find their parents, but in the meantime, the “little chaps” were clad in new clothes she had purchased and spent their time in the family parlor, “which looks like a day nursery” filled with picture books and toys, noted another Evening World article.

The next day, another New York newspaper claimed Margaret was thinking of adopting the boys.

“Miss Hays believes that the father of her new charges was a widower who was bringing his children to relatives in America. It is presumed that they boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg. But it is all a presumption. No one knows and the two curly heads cannot tell.”

A breakthrough came a few days later. Apparently their father was a “Mr. Hoffman” traveling in second class. Meanwhile, the waifs were enjoying their New York “life of luxury,” as the New York Times reported on April 22.

“They seem not the least bit homesick, and are having the time of their lives, for the family lives in a fine, big house not far from Riverside Drive….”

“Every effort has been made to get the children to talk of themselves and their parents, but their answer to all questions is a babble of almost unintelligible French,” wrote the Times.

Meanwhile, Margaret continued to describe the waifs as healthy and happy boys who play all day. She noted that numerous New Yorkers have inquired about adopting them.

“I am in no position to allow any of them to adopt the children,” Margaret told the Evening World on April 23. “My father and I want to look after them until we find their family. Meanwhile we are making every effort to find their people.”

By April 23, their incredible backstory emerged, just as the older boy began asking about his “maman” and recalled that he came from Nice.

The boys were Michel and Edmond Navratil. They were kidnapped by their tailor father (above left), Michel Sr., from their home in Nice; he had planned to move with the boys to America to start a new life without his wife, from whom he was separated.

Officials learned that Michel Navratil, Sr. was traveling under an assumed name, Louis M. Hoffman. He perished in the Atlantic and was buried in Nova Scotia, but not before saving his sons.

The boys’ mother back in Nice recognized photos of her sons and sailed to New York in May to retreive them. “Marcelle Navratil recognized her boys from the many newspaper stories about their plight and was brought over to America by the White Star Line where she was reunited with her sons on May 16,” states Encyclopedia Titanica.

Margaret and her father met Marcelle on the dock, who expressed her gratitude for taking care of her sons before being reunited with her black-haired boys (two photos, above), who she called Lolo and Manon.

“They had begun to call me ‘mamma’ and I had come to love them,” Margaret told a newspaper that day, expressing her sadness at seeing them go but understanding that they belonged with Marcelle.

The Navratils sailed back to Nice, and a year later, Marcelle filed a $30,000 suit against the White Star Line for the loss of her husband.

In 1914, after her marriage to Dr. Charles Easton and a move to Rhode Island, Margaret (above) visited France and spent some time with Michel and Edmond. The boys instantly recognized her and “showed great delight in seeing her again,” according to the Buffalo News.

Otherwise, the boys and their story retreated from the spotlight. Edmond, an architect, died in 1953. Michel became a philosophy professor and one of the last survivors of the Titanic, passing away in his 90s in 2001. Later in life he recalled his time on the Titanic:

“My brother and I played on the forward deck and were thrilled to be there,” said Michel. “One morning, my father, my brother, and I were eating eggs in the second-class dining room. The sea was stunning. My feeling was one of total and utter well-being.”

He remembered the “plop” of being tossed into the lifeboat and his father’s last poignant words—asking him to tell his mother he loved her and planned for her to follow them to America. Of course, Michel was unaware that this would be the last time they would see each other, according to titanicuniverse.com.

And Margaret? Her fame as the caretaker of the Titanic orphans followed her for a few years; her 1913 wedding annoucement had the headline “Titanic Waifs’ Friend to be Doctor’s Bride” in the Evening World.

She had two children and died at 68 in 1956—her Titanic heroism mostly forgotten, and the home where she cared for the boys on West 83rd Street replaced by a larger apartment building.

[Top image: Hidden Her Stories blog; second image: Encyclopedia Titanica; third image: Bain Collection/LOC; last image: Bain Collection/LOC]

I wonder what the proprietor of the Speedway Livery & Boarding Stables would have thought about his handsome brick building transforming from a home for pricey horses to a pricey home for people?

This four-story, Romanesque-style stable at 457 West 150th Street was no ordinary boarding place for teams of working drays.

The name of the stable gives away its focus. It was a carriage house for the elite horsemen who raced their trotters on the Harlem Speedway, a two and a half mile entertainment-focused roadway that spanned West 155th Street to Dyckman Street.

“The Harlem Speedway Stables have in their stalls a number of fast horses that are often seen on the Speedway,” noted the New-York Tribune in May 1903.

Completed in 1898, the Harlem Speedway followed the western edge of the Harlem River through stretches of Upper Manhattan not yet fully urbanized. The dirt road was closed to cyclists; crowds gathered on a pedestrian pathway to watch the trotters and the men who rode them.

The Speedway Stables were also a product of the 1890s. Like many carriage houses, the facade featured sculptures of horse heads. These two powerful equines look like they were sculpted mid-trot, with their flared nostrils and wild eyes.

The Stables were sold in 1909, per a New York Times article, and not long afterward become a motor garage.

The circa-1940 photo above displays the name the Convent Garage, for nearby Convent Avenue. The Speedway Stables faded sign is still on the side of the building.

These days, the stable is empty of horses and cars; it’s been renovated and renamed the Carriage House Lofts, a 26-unit rental building.

And why not? New York is filled with former factories and carriage houses that were redone as residences. Plus, the Harlem Speedway has long been transformed into the Harlem River Drive.

The price to come home to those angry horse heads at the front entrance? A one-bedroom is listed for more than $3K per month.

[Third image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]

New York is all about secret sanctuaries and private oases. But I’d say Greenwich Village is Gotham’s land of clandestine gardens, a neighborhood of many lush green spaces behind 19th century buildings and churchyards.

To come across another of these secret gardens—a block from Washington Square Park no less, with a mystery bronze statue at the end of a wide concrete walkway—would be a delightful way to welcome spring.

Lucky for me, that’s what happened on a recent Saturday walk down lower Fifth Avenue.

Beyond a colonnade-style entrance between the former stables of Washington Mews and “The Row” of 1830s townhouses on Washington Square North, my eyes caught sight of a slender patch of green.

Though it’s not open to the public on weekends, I managed to get past the colonnade and down the path into the garden.

A canopy of pink and white petals overhead, patches of ivy crawling up walls, a couple of bird baths, bushes and flowers budding closer to the ground—it’s the kind of not overly manicured garden that reflects the Village’s historical refusal to adhere to convention (or the street grid).

Still, it’s not just an accidental, no-name garden. This is “Willy’s Garden,” on a slender stretch of New York University’s Greenwich Village campus.

According to the Park Odyssey blog, the 8,000 square foot garden—named for who exactly, no one seems to know—is landscaped by NYU and “functions as the entrance to the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and some faculty residences.”

All the garden’s greenery is part of a plan. “The garden was planted in zones: woodland, flowering meow, berry patch, and Three Sisters,” all species “collected by the Lenape peoples,” per the now defunct Local Ecologist website, via Park Odyssey.

The statue at the end has an appropriately cast-off history. It’s a bronze of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote—one of three replicas of an 1835 statue on display at the Palacio de las Cortes in Madrid.

In 1986, the mayor of Madrid presented the replica Cervantes to the city of New York, which placed it in Bryant Park. But when Bryant Park underwent a renovation in the late 1980s, the city donated it to NYU in 1989.

Its found a home in this easy-to-miss garden, which makes the most of its location on the lower Fifth Avenue of carriage houses and cobblestones.

Take a walk through it on a weekday. Unlike some of Greenwich Village’s other hidden gardens that lie behind fences and gates, it’s open to the public five days a week but feels like a private oasis.

New York didn’t invent April Fools Day; this holiday might date back all the way to ancient Rome.

But starting in the 19th century, April 1 in Gotham has been a day to celebrate with stupid pranks, outrageous hoaxes, the mocking of politicians and business leaders, and since 1986, a parade down Fifth Avenue.

This 1901 trading card from the American Tobacco Company gets the April Fools spirit right—a mischievous boy, an unsuspecting man, and an escape route into the city after the kid plays his simple prank on his target.

[Image: NYPL Digital Collections]

If you’ve ever found yourself descending from the Court Street entrance into Brooklyn’s Borough Hall subway station, you may have rushed past it—a blue, subway-tiled corner surrounded by a network of overhead pipes.

The three shuttered metal windows look vaguely institutional, and like the rest of this part of the station, the corner storefront is unattractive and neglected amid excess platform grime.

So you can be forgiven for not stopping and taking a closer look. But only then, when you see the faded words “commuter banking” in black above the metal window frame, will you realize what this strange relic once was.

Beginning in the 1960s, this corner structure served as a branch of the Brooklyn Savings Bank, where tellers sat at the windows and catered to the financial needs of on-the-go postwar Brooklynites.

“Service call buttons are centered on the ledges at the base of the windows where a second inscription states, ‘Banking Hours – Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m,'” notes Atlas Obscura in a 2020 article.

“Stainless steel drawers for the exchange of currency and documents are located beneath the teller windows.”

The Brooklyn Savings Bank was founded in 1827, when Brooklyn was just a small town in Kings County. It maintained a prominent presence in Brooklyn Heights until 1990, when the bank became defunct.

The commuter banking idea was actually pretty canny. What better way to reach new customers and provide convenience to existing bankers than by putting a couple of friendly, efficient tellers below ground?

When the branch handled its last transaction isn’t clear, but my guess is the 1980s, as subway crime surged and 24-hour ATMs made their appearance on sidewalk-level branches.

Most in-person banking is now handled by ATMs and banking apps. But isn’t it cool to pass this relic from an era when you had to speak to a human to deposit your paper paycheck, and then have that transaction stamped by the same human in your cardboard bank book?

[Third image: Staten Island Advance; fourth image: Wikipedia]