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The neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay sits at the far end of Brooklyn’s alphabetical grid of east–west avenues, stretching from Avenue U to Avenue Z before giving way to Emmons Avenue, which Joseph Mitchell once called “the most attractive waterfront street in the city.”

For much of the twentieth century, Sheepshead Bay was largely a middle-class Jewish and Italian neighborhood.

Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, like neighboring Brighton Beach, it saw a major influx of Russian and other Soviet immigrants. A trip along the marina, past creaking fishing boats and waterfront restaurants serving seafood towers and bottomless Aperol spritzes, feels less like a walk through Southern Brooklyn than a stroll in a small town on the Baltic.

Sidewalk conversations are often in Russian. Storefronts advertise caviar and smoked fish, while boutiques display mannequins that feel distinctly Eastern European. Grocery stores stock jars of black cherry varenye and sprawling salad bars devoted almost entirely to pickled foods, while in-house bakeries turn out hundreds of loaves of dense dark bread each day.

The farther you get from the water, the more residential the neighborhood becomes, with rows of brick homes and tidy front yards.

Near the neighborhood’s northern edge, Russian gradually gives way to Cantonese, as Avenue U borders Brooklyn’s second-largest Chinatown.

TEETH

Until this week, I assumed that the neighborhood got its name either from its resemblance to a sheep’s head or, perhaps, from some apocryphal tale involving the ovine byproducts of the glue factories that once operated nearby. The borders of the neighborhood roughly form a rectangle, so unless we are talking about Minecraft, the sheep resemblance is out. And sheep bones, compared to horse bones at least, make lousy glue. As it turns out, the name is an homage to perhaps the most ridiculous-looking fish on the planet, Archosargus probatocephalus, aka the sheepshead fish.

The creature’s large, squared-off teeth invited comparisons to sheep, hence the name. Sheep, like all ruminants, don’t even have upper teeth, so whoever came up with the name was clearly not much of a biologist.

Though it was part of Gravesend, one of the six original towns of Kings County, founded in 1643, Sheepshead Bay remained largely unsettled except for a jumble of fishermen’s cottages near the shore. In 1844, Benjamin Freeman opened a hotel to accommodate a small but steady stream of intrepid tourists. Freeman decided to name his place The Sheepshead because so many of the prominently toothed creatures could be found in local waters.

In the 1870s, a large farm was sold and subdivided, and soon the sleepy fishing village had over 400 homes, dozens of shops, a handful of churches and a post office. One of the early residents of this nascent settlement was the notorious “boss” of Gravesend, John McKane, whose construction company was credited with building nearly two-thirds of all buildings in Coney Island and Gravesend. Before going to jail for election fraud in the 1890s, McKane oversaw the expansion of several rail lines that connected the coast of Brooklyn to the rest of the city.

THE BIG APPLE

This new, improved accessibility sparked a racetrack building boom that, for a brief period, made South Brooklyn the horse racing capital of the world. The 1821 repeal of a law banning horse racing had ushered in a golden age of the sport, which dethroned competitive speed walking as the country’s number one spectator attraction. Tracks were built in Woodhaven and Morris Park and especially the vast flat expanses of South Brooklyn where racecourses in Gravesend, Brighton Beach, and Sheepshead Bay drew tens of thousands of racing enthusiasts.

The craze for horse racing even gave rise to the city’s most enduring nickname, “The Big Apple.” The phrase reportedly originated in a conversation overheard in New Orleans between two stable hands discussing a trip to the tracks up north to compete for racing’s richest prize, or biggest apple. The expression was picked up by a local sports reporter who popularized the nickname in his weekly column.

In 1880, a group of prominent and wealthy New Yorkers, including August Belmont and William Vanderbilt, opened the Sheepshead Bay Race Track, which quickly became the "pearl of New York racing," hosting the sport's most prestigious events, attracting the city's largest crowds, and outgrossing every other track in New York.

One of the course’s most well-attended annual events was the Futurity Stakes, first run on Labor Day 1888 and won by a horse named Proctor Knott for a purse of $41,675, then the richest prize in horse racing. Proctor Knott, in case you were wondering, was named after a Kentucky congressman whose chief claim to fame, beyond sharing a name with a prizewinning thoroughbred, was the savage thirty-minute takedown of Duluth, Minnesota he delivered on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The speech, an argument against government subsidies for westward railroad expansion, is a masterclass in late nineteenth-century sarcasm:

Roasted Duluth.

The racetrack attracted New York’s elite, many of whom built docks for their yachts and sprawling homes along Emmons Avenue, earning the strip the nickname “Millionaire’s Row.” It also drew thousands of seasonal, highly specialized workers like farriers, stable hands, trainers, grooms, and hotwalkers. The vast majority were African Americans, many of them formerly enslaved people or their descendants, who came north from states like Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

One of those transplants, Maria J. Fisher, had moved from Virginia in 1885 and supported herself selling pies at the nearby Brighton Beach Race Course. Fisher petitioned track owner William Engeman to donate land for a church, and on October 21, 1901, the First Baptist Church of Sheepshead Bay became the first Black house of worship south of Prospect Park.

VIN FIZ

Passage of the Hart–Agnew Law in 1908 outlawed sports betting and spelled the end for the racetracks of southern Brooklyn. Though the law was repealed in 1913, the tracks at Brighton Beach, Gravesend, and Sheepshead Bay never reopened. The Sheepshead Bay Race Track was converted into an automobile racetrack.

Over three million feet of pine was used in construction of the laminated wood track and the grandstand was greatly expanded, now able to accommodate a crowd of 175,000. The track was used for car races and aviation shows, sometimes simultaneously.

The speedway also served as the launching point for the first transcontinental flight attempt. On September 17, 1911, just a week after earning his pilot’s license, which consisted of a single ninety-minute training session with Orville Wright, Calbraith Perry Rodgers took off from Sheepshead Bay in a bid to claim William Randolph Hearst’s $50,000 prize for the first coast-to-coast flight completed in under thirty days.

Processed meat conglomerate Armour & Company, which had recently begun dabbling in beverages, sponsored the attempt, foreshadowing Red Bull's fusion of extreme sports and carbonated beverage marketing by a century. They named the plane after their new grape drink, Vin Fiz, and painted the logo in large green letters on the underside of the wings.

Reviews of the beverage were not encouraging. One critic described it as “a cross between river water and horse slop.” Another documented the drink’s “laxative effect.” A third concluded, “You have to sneak up on it to get it down.”

Reviews of the flight were not much better. With a top speed of roughly fifty miles per hour, the Vin Fiz made more than seventy-five stops and crashed sixteen times during the journey west. Rodgers finally reached California on December 10, several weeks after the contest deadline.

In 1919, in one of the largest real estate deals in New York City history, real estate developer Max N. Natanson bought the speedway and thousands of surrounding lots in a deal ultimately valued at more than $20 million.

A few years later, the demand for the now subdivided land was unprecedented. In a 1923 auction, 2,000 lots were sold in the first two days. At one point, a parcel was sold every ten seconds for half an hour. 1

Sheepshead Bay’s transformation from elite playground to middle class residential had begun.

LUNDY’S

Right around the time all this buying and selling was taking place, Frederick William Irving Lundy (who went by Irving) opened what would become one of Brooklyn’s most famous restaurants on a rickety pier off Emmons Avenue.

Lundy was born in Sheepshead Bay in 1895, the oldest of seven children. By the time he came along, his family had built the region’s dominant wholesale seafood operation, supplying the grand hotels that lined the Atlantic shore. Irving got his start early, selling hot chowder and coffee from a pushcart on the docks at the age of nine. Both his parents died in the 1918 influenza pandemic while he was serving overseas. When he came home, he picked up where he had left off, selling clams from a barge moored in the bay.

Irving handled the business side while his brothers Clayton, Allen, and Stanley worked the oyster beds and fishing boats. In 1920, on a foggy winter day, Clayton and Stanley drowned in Jamaica Bay when their rowboat hit a block of ice and sank. Irving never swam or set foot on a boat again.

By 1923, the seafood business had made him a millionaire. He purchased the pier where the family fish operation was based and, in 1926, opened the first F.W.I. Lundy Brothers restaurant, bringing in his surviving brother Allen and their three sisters to help run it.

Lundy’s success, however, did not go unnoticed. One evening, soon after the restaurant’s opening, Irving and his manager and lover, Henry Linker, were kidnapped and driven out to a shack in Maspeth. The thieves managed to get $4,000, but when Irving refused to reveal the location of his diamond ring, the kidnappers relented. Clearly not criminal masterminds, they told their captives how much they’d enjoyed the restaurant, and even forked over the $9 cab fare back to Sheepshead Bay. A few days later, Conrad “The Bull” Bulto, James “Hot Air” McNulty, and “Two-Gun Texas Bill” Maag were arrested for the kidnapping.

Lundy began carrying a gun and became increasingly reclusive. When the city announced plans to widen Emmons Avenue, Lundy purchased a prime site across from the soon-to-be-demolished pier and constructed a sprawling Spanish Colonial building to house the new incarnation of F.W.I. Lundy Brothers Restaurant.

The new Lundy’s seated nearly 2,000 diners, and by the mid-1950s it employed 385 people and served more than a million guests a year. On busy weekend days, upwards of 10,000 patrons lined up for steamed lobster, butter-soaked clams, chowder, biscuits, and huckleberry pie.

When Henry Linker died of a heart attack, Lundy retreated even further from public life. He moved into a small apartment above the restaurant annex where he rarely entertained visitors. His closest companions were sixteen Irish setters and his chauffeur, Ciro Autorino, who cared for the dogs and gradually became Lundy’s personal attendant, bathing and dressing him each morning.

The 1970s brought an escalating series of violent episodes. In September 1972, two managers, including Lundy's nephew, George Higgins Jr., were shot and wounded in the restaurant parking lot. Two years later, during an armed robbery, Higgins barricaded himself in a second-floor apartment with a hunting rifle and a twelve-gauge shotgun. When police arrived, he mistook them for the robbers and opened fire through the door, injuring three officers. One of them had tried to calm him down by pretending to be an Irish Catholic priest. "Apparently, he's a Protestant Irishman and he doesn't like priests," the officer later remarked.

Then in 1975, Lundy’s sister and brother-in-law were found murdered in their home in Forest Hills. As with the previous incidents, Lundy refused to speak to police. The killings were never solved.

When he died in 1977, Ciro Autorino, who was described by Lundy’s lawyer as his lover as well as his attendant, was found to have conspired with four other men to defraud the restaurateur of approximately eleven million dollars in property and securities.

Lundy's shut down in 1979. A smaller portion of the dining room, "a mere eight hundred souls," reopened in 1995 but closed again in 2007. Today the former Lundy's is home to Cherry Hill, a gourmet grocery offering Russian delicacies, a Turkish restaurant, and, until last month, the hibachi steakhouse MOMO.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week’s audio captures the sounds of a Sunday softball game and a particularly rambunctious recess at the Yeshiva of Kings Bay, before winding things down at the edge of the marina.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

Arthur Tress was born in Brooklyn in 1940. For his best-known project, The Dream Collector, he interviewed children about their most vivid dreams, then staged and photographed those imagined scenes.

Tress also worked for the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s DOCUMERICA program, a documentary initiative similar to the Farm Security Administration’s photography campaigns of the Great Depression. The EPA hired more than one hundred photographers to document the condition of the American environment and everyday life in the 1970s, ultimately producing more than 80,000 images. These are some of Tress’s photographs taken in Sheepshead Bay.

ODDS AND END

• In 1977, the Roll-a-Palace Disco Skating Rink opened in a former movie theater on Sheepshead Bay Road. At its height, the rink had over 5,000 customers per weekend and inspired the recently remastered Roller Palace, the first (and only?) roller disco record.

• Gael Greene’s 1969 tourist’s guide to some of Brooklyn “traditionals, bastions of sentiment and temples of haute gluttony” includes a review of Lundy’s that is well worth a read.

• When he was 8 years old, Larry David moved from Brighton Beach to an apartment in Sheepshead Bay:

• And here is another Sheepshead Bay native, Terry Gross, interviewing Larry David.

• A new Lundy’s opened in Red Hook last year.

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While to some people the name Rockaway may conjure visions of rolling waves packed with surfers and sunseekers slathering on Coppertone or strolling the boardwalk scarfing down fried fish tacos, there is at least one neighborhood on the Queens peninsula where you can’t even see the Atlantic. The enclave of Bayswater sits along the edge of Jamaica Bay, between Mott Basin to the north and Norton Basin to the west, separated from the more commercial, ocean-facing Far Rockaway by Beach Channel Drive.

The area is a mix of modest one and two-family ranches and Cape Cod–style homes, interspersed with a handful of larger, rambling houses with oversized shingled gables and often peeling paint. At the turn of the century, Rockaway was a popular summer destination and Bayswater was described as one of the “brightest gems in the crown of Rockaway’s supremacy as a watering place.”

The luster wore off considerably when, in the 1920s, city authorities closed Jamaica Bay to commercial shellfishing because of excessive amounts of raw sewage and industrial waste. The pollution of the once-pristine bay, coupled with ever-growing city crowds, compelled the summer gentry to sell their homes and move further east.

By the mid-20th century, the peninsula had shifted from a seasonal retreat to a year-round community. Today, several of Bayswater’s homes are occupied by large Orthodox Jewish families, their lawns filled with jumbles of scooters and discarded tricycles. Institutions like the Bayswater Jewish Center and Khal Chassidim (“Not Just a Shul, An Experience”), along with the presence of a neighborhood eruv, have encouraged more Orthodox families to settle in the area.

Sitting across the bay from John F. Kennedy Airport and nearly surrounded by marshland and water, Bayswater smells of salt, silt, and the faintest undertone of jet fuel. From the edge of Jamaica Bay, the entire sweep of the Manhattan skyline is just legible on the horizon, its skyscrapers echoing the vertical geometry of the barnacled and rotting piers that line Bayswater’s coast.

THE BAYSWATER HOUSE

The neighborhood’s origins can be traced back to William Trist Bailey, an Englishman born in Bayswater, England in 1846. When Bailey and his wife, Hannah Holman, arrived in the United States in 1871, he immediately began dabbling in real estate. In 1878, he purchased 50 acres along the southern shore of Jamaica Bay from J. B. and W. W. Cornell, roughly half of it swampland.

He moved quickly to develop the tract, laying out Mott and Bayswater Avenues and adding streets as his spec houses multiplied. While digging the foundation for his own home, workers unearthed nine intact skeletons.

Several had what were described as tomahawk indentations in their skulls. The discovery, along with a nearby shell midden containing thousands of clam shells, suggested the remains were likely those of the Canarsie, whose ancestors had sold the Rockaways to the Cornell family in the 17th century.

Perhaps reconsidering the wisdom of building his home on top of an ancient burial ground, Bailey decided instead to put a hotel there, and in 1880 the Bayswater House opened. He later added a yacht club and staged regattas and fox hunts to attract an aristocratic clientele.

In one way, the strategy worked, enticing figures like Brooklyn lumber magnate Louis Bossert and Louis A. Solomon to build mansions in the area.

Financial success, however, proved elusive. The hotel eventually fell into foreclosure, forcing Bailey into bankruptcy. A colorful cast of creditors, including Princess Dolores Radziwill, William Waldorf Astor, a mysterious Countess Maradzibarm, and even Bailey’s own wife, filed suit to recover their investments.

In 1907, the property was acquired by the Elstone Park Realty Company and reopened as the Elstone Park Hotel, advertised as “the Gay Spot of the Rockaways.” The revamped establishment offered 120 steam-heated rooms to a “refined, discriminating clientele,” along with “thoroughly modern” amenities, high-class cabaret, and Japanese servants.

Of particular note was the rooftop dining room called the “Orchard.” The space was decorated with a cornucopia of the “choicest fruits,” scented with the fragrance of blossoms, and illuminated to “reproduce the effect of the sun’s rays through the branches of the trees.”

In addition to the hotel, the company developed an enclave of villas, with Summit Drive, running from Mott Avenue to the shore of Jamaica Bay, as its centerpiece. The street was wider than the surrounding roads and featured an elaborate roundabout with a large illuminated fountain surrounded by four statues. Then, one day, the statues disappeared.

BIG BILL

Well, they didn’t exactly disappear; the four statues resurfaced a few blocks away on Samuel Weiner’s front lawn. Weiner, a furrier from Manhattan, had a large house on Mott Avenue. The only reason this whole statue-moving gambit made headlines is because Elstone’s most notorious resident, William “Big Bill” Devery, sued to get them back.

Born in New York City in 1854, the six-foot-tall, 260-pound Devery worked as a bartender on the Bowery until he saved enough money to pay the requisite $200 bribe required to secure a job on the police force. Proving himself particularly adept at the kind of open graft that greased the wheels of the Tammany machine, he quickly rose through the ranks. He hit a small speed bump after his conviction for bribery and extortion in 1897, but after successfully appealing his case, he was reinstated and promptly promoted to inspector, then deputy chief, then finally Chief of Police in 1898.

Not only was he one of the most notoriously corrupt officers in city history, he also fancied himself something of a mentor, famously advising his subordinates to “hear, see, and say nothing. Eat, drink, and pay nothing.”

When anti-Tammany reformer Seth Low was elected mayor in 1902, Devery was relieved of his duties. Not one to rest on his laurels, Big Bill took some of the money he had accumulated and bought a stake in a Baltimore baseball team, then moved the franchise to New York. He later sold his share to Yorkville brewmaster Jacob Ruppert who renamed the club the New York Yankees. After mounting a spectacularly unsuccessful mayoral bid of his own, Devery retired to Bayswater, where he owned ten homes in the Elstone Park development.

One morning, while out for a walk, Big Bill was shocked to see that the Summit Drive fountain wasn’t running, and worse, that the four statues surrounding it were gone. Showing an investigative tenacity largely absent from his rise up the NYPD ladder, Devery determined that the statues had been removed by Edgar Lehman, head of the Elstone Park Realty Company, and relocated to Samuel Weiner’s summer home. Why Weiner was the beneficiary of Lehman’s largesse is unclear, though both men were involved in the fur trade, suggesting some sort of unorthodox business arrangement.

Whatever the reason, Big Bill was incensed by the “dastardly outrage” and took Lehman to court, where the case was promptly dismissed on the grounds that the statues belonged to Lehman and he could do whatever he wanted with them.

After spearheading Rockaway’s failed secession movement, Devery retired to his Elstone home at 3238 Mott Avenue, where he died of a stroke on June 20, 1919.

The once elaborate circle is still there, though the fountain has been replaced by trees and the street has been renamed.

GENTLE STRANGER TURN BACK

In 1907, a banker named Louis A. Heinsheimer bought Louis Bossert’s house on the tip of Bayswater, tore it down, and spent half a million dollars building a new one in its place. If you’re keeping track, that makes the third Louis (and second Louis A.) to erect a mansion in Bayswater. Heinsheimer hired architect Rudolphe Lawrence Daus to design the residence. Daus, who was born in Mexico to a German Catholic family of Jewish descent, was responsible for several notable Brooklyn buildings, including the massive 13th Regiment Armory in Bedford-Stuyvesant and, one of my favorites, the Mechanics Temple in Clinton Hill.

Heinsheimer’s house, which he called “Breezy Point,” was two and a half stories tall and was constructed entirely of granite and marble. The interiors featured fine woodwork and carvings, with grand marble staircases rising from the great hall. At the southern end, a glass conservatory opened onto landscaped grounds filled with flower beds connected by wide, serpentine paths.

Long before the proliferation of video doorbells and signs declaring “No Trespassing—We’re Tired of Hiding the Bodies,” Breezy Point discouraged trespassers with a simple notice affixed to the gate: “GENTLE STRANGER TURN BACK.” The Brooklyn Eagle called the mansion “one of the finest residences on Long Island.”

Unfortunately, Heinsheimer, like the hero of last week’s newsletter, Alexander Hamilton, had little time to enjoy the house. Less than two years after completing his dream home, he died of appendicitis. The Breezy Point estate passed to his brother Alfred, who lived there for a time with his mother, several German-born maids and butlers, a French chauffeur named George Bucquet, and an English gardener named Ernest Stubbs. In the 1920s, Alfred donated the building to the Hospital for Joint Diseases to serve as a home for disabled children. The estate later housed the Maimonides Institute before being sold to the Trust for Public Land in 1986.

By then, the once-grand mansion was, in the words of Time Magazine, “a bag lady of a building”—its roof destroyed by fire, windows smashed, walls covered in graffiti, and the bones of rodents accumulating in the corners. Given its sorry condition and a lack of funding, the building was demolished.

Today, the grounds of Heinsheimer’s former estate make up the seventeen acres of Bayswater Point State Park. Because the park is so remote, it doesn't get many visitors. I've been there several times over the years and have only ever seen a handful of people — mostly a few brave souls fishing, along with an enthusiastic cohort of plane spotters armed with massive telephoto lenses.

On the grassy expanse in the middle of the park, you can still make out traces of the mansion: subtle depressions in the earth marking its footprint, the worn edge of a brick foundation wall, a patch of tile poking through the grass.

On my latest visit, just as I was leaving the park, I spotted a man standing near the entrance gates, staring at his phone in confusion. When I got closer, he asked if there were any houses in there, gesturing toward the empty stretch of grass and marsh behind me. When I said no, he shook his head and walked back to his work van.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week’s field recording features a veritable feast of birdsong which, if my Merlin Bird ID app is to be trusted, includes Northern Flickers, Laughing Gulls, black-necked Brant, Willets, and an Osprey, all of which can barely be heard over the low, persistent drone of overhead jet engines. There’s also a brief snippet of cantillation drifting from the steps of a newly built shul.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

Jeffrey Milstein was born in the Bronx in 1944 and trained as an architect at UC Berkeley before turning to photography.

Seeing that gaggle of photographers immediately made me think of his most well known project, Aircraft, a typology of airplanes photographed from directly below as they make their final approach.

Milstein was also the designer behind the Bolt-Together-House a modular $2,500 ($19,000 today) house whose plans were first published in 1972 by Family Circle magazine.

ODDS AND END

• Earlier this week, an email with the subject “Live with Rob Stephenson” went out to everyone who subscribes to this newsletter. Some may have thought I was looking for a roommate and ignored it; others marked it as spam. Those brave enough to click were rewarded with a sideways, pixelated, shaky video of the beach on Bayswater Point. Like the infamous Songs of Innocence album that U2 forced into everyone’s iTunes in 2014, the unintended email inspired a fair amount of confusion and a flurry of unsubscribes. Sorry about that. On the positive side, at least I didn’t inadvertently go live while in the bathroom.

  

• Famous opera tenor Enrico Caruso, the first international recording star, once had a house in Bayswater, where he undoubtedly crossed paths with Big Bill Devery. In 1906, after Caruso made headlines for allegedly groping a woman in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo, Big Bill vouched for him, dismissing it as an obvious shakedown. A reporter at the time noted: "Bill probably reasons from analogy, without knowing it."

• Samuel Gutowitz aka Sam Goody also lived in Bayswater.

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I often pick my next neighborhood based on proximity to whatever errands I have to run that week. I’m generally pretty scatterbrained, but every now and then I manage to pull off some entry-level multitasking. There is, of course, a limit to this approach, since most of my errands (volleyball practice, dentist appointments, threading) are in neighborhoods I’m already familiar with. Sometimes I’ll do the opposite and let the neighborhood dictate the errand. This has resulted in some unexpected but delicious grocery purchases and at least one truly regrettable haircut.

Fortunately, this week, I had an errand to run in a neighborhood I haven’t yet had the chance to cover, Hamilton Heights in Northern Manhattan, which happens to be home to the best guitar tech in the city. Apart from dropping off and picking up guitars, I'd only been to the area once before, to photograph a building for a show on adaptive reuse at the Center for Architecture.

At the time, I had no idea I was in Hamilton Heights, a realization I only came to after passing the same building again this week.

The neighborhood sits on an escarpment high above the Hudson River, stretching from 135th to 155th Streets, between St. Nicholas Avenue and the Hudson. These borders include the enclave of Sugar Hill, which has so much history that it merits a future newsletter of its own.

With its rows of meticulously preserved Romanesque Revival homes, early 19th-century low-rise apartment buildings, and various houses of worship, Hamilton Heights has been called one of the city’s most architecturally distinctive enclaves.

It is home to the first and only house built by Alexander Hamilton, the Gothic “Acropolis” of City College, and a 28-acre park built on top of a sewage treatment facility. It’s also where Royal Tenenbaum bought a house on Archer Avenue in the winter of his 35th year.

THE TEN-DOLLAR FOUNDING FATHER WITHOUT A FATHER

The neighborhood’s namesake is, of course, Alexander Hamilton, the only founding father (so far) with his own musical. In addition to inspiring the Tony Award–winning show, he served as George Washington’s chief aide, became the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and founded the New York Post. The Post, which has produced such unforgettable headlines as “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” “Obama Beats Weiner,” and “Hairy Plotter,” was created in part to give Hamilton a platform to attack his rivals, particularly Aaron Burr. We all know how that worked out.

At the end of the 18th century, Hamilton began to look for a retreat uptown to avoid the outbreaks of yellow fever that plagued lower Manhattan. Escaping the gossip surrounding his role at the center of America’s first sex scandal probably played a small part too.

Hamilton became enamored with the area after spending time at the estate of Jacob Schieffelin. In 1800, he purchased 32 acres from Schieffelin, stretching from what is now West 139th to West 146th Streets, between St. Nicholas Terrace and Hamilton Place. Schieffelin would go on to develop Manhattanville, while Hamilton focused all his attention on his “sweet project,” hiring architect John McComb Jr., who had recently completed Gracie Mansion.

McComb designed a two-story, 18-room Federal-style clapboard house, with porches on the front and back and piazzas on both sides. Hamilton obsessed over the details, overseeing the caulking of the porches, tinkering with the soil’s pH, and specifying the exact flowers and their arrangement.

Named “The Grange” after his ancestral home in Scotland, the house was completed in 1802. During the warmer months, Hamilton made the three-hour round trip by stagecoach between the Grange and his downtown office. Just two years after moving in, he was shot in the liver by Aaron Burr.

In 1833, Hamilton’s widow, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, sold the home. It passed through several owners who were less fastidious. By 1889, the house had fallen into disrepair, and since it lay right in the path of the northward-moving Manhattan grid, it was slated for demolition. Developers offered it to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, who moved it to a site adjacent to their new building on Convent Avenue.

In 1910, a six-story apartment building went up on the other side of the historic home, prompting New York Times reporter Christopher Gray to later write, “if you prize a varied streetscape, it’s a pleasing wonder; if you prefer untouched architecture, it’s a painful mutilation.”

MOVE ON UP

In 1962, the National Park Service took over the property and renamed it the Hamilton Grange National Monument. Then in 2008, the house was moved again. This time the job, complicated by the architectural sandwich formed by the church’s overlapping portico and the six-story apartment building, was entrusted to a team of German Baptist Brethren from Pennsylvania. The Amish are known for their extraordinary speed in building houses, and the German Baptist Brethren, a related sect who share a predilection for chin curtain beards and flat hats but have no qualms about using modern technology, are even better at moving them.

Over three weeks, Wolfe House and Building Movers lifted the 300-ton Grange 35 feet into the air, clearing the church’s porch, then slid it 50 feet forward and lowered it onto a lattice of cribbing towers. These were gradually disassembled until the whole thing rested on a bed of nine remote-controlled dollies and was rolled down the street to a site in St. Nicholas Park, a new home that was still part of Alexander Hamilton’s original 32-acre estate.

HARVARD-ON-THE-HUDSON

St. Nicholas Park marks the beginning of the downward slope into central Harlem. On the western edge of the park loom the impressive buildings of the City College of New York (CCNY). The college was founded in 1847 by Townsend Harris, who, in addition to taking great pleasure in experimenting with his facial hair, was instrumental in securing trade between the US and Japan.

It is the first free public institution of higher learning in the United States, founded with the intention to be “controlled by the popular will; not by the privileged few, but by the privileged many.”

When the school had outgrown its original Lexington Avenue and 23rd Street location, they hired architect George B. Post to design a new campus in Hamilton Heights. This was a golden era of sorts for uptown universities, with Stanford White’s NYU campus and Charles McKim’s Columbia campus both having opened within the past decade. Post went a different direction, fully embracing the Collegiate Gothic aesthetic and using the Manhattan schist excavated from subway tunnels and foundations as his building material.

The dark stone buildings were ornamented with bright white terracotta, a striking contrast that has been described as both “violent and disturbing” and looking “like a debutante wearing combat boots.”

Post really went hog wild when it came to gargoyles and grotesques, affixing over 1,000 of the creepy little guys to every overhang, lintel, and corner of the campus’ original buildings. They are incredible.

Somewhere along the way, the whimsy was lost.

One of the campus’ newer buildings, the Grove School of Engineering, is about as featureless and unadorned as you can get, the flat gray facades festooned not with gargoyles, but security cameras.

THE LITTLE RED SCHOOLHOUSE

The school, which had the nation’s first student government (est. 1867), has long had a reputation as a place of political debate and left-wing activism, earning the nickname “the Little Red Schoolhouse.” In the postwar years, the campus was the site of “the first general strike at a municipal institution of higher learning” after students protested the actions of two City College teachers. Prof. William E. Knickerbocker was accused of withholding honors from Jewish students, and William C. Davis, an economics instructor, was accused of segregating Black students from white students in the dorm he was overseeing.

In the late 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements, campus activism ramped up. On April 22, 1969, students chained the gates of the college, shutting down the campus for 17 days, demanding major reforms to address racial inequality in education. Led by Black and Puerto Rican students, they presented a list of five demands, including a dedicated school of ethnic studies, admissions reflecting the city’s public school demographics, and a Black and Puerto Rican history and Spanish language requirement for all Education majors.

When campus security guards refused to remove demonstrators and were fired, a sixth demand was added for their reinstatement. The strike grew into a full campus occupation, resulting in arrests and the resignation of the college president, and ultimately led to an open admissions policy, which lasted until 2000.

Earlier this week, in yet another example of history repeating itself, I came upon a group of students gathered around the entrance to a campus building, holding signs and chanting classic protest slogans like “What do we want? Dignity! When do we want it? Now!” These students, I found out, were from the A. Philip Randolph Campus High School, which was built founded in 1979 as a collaboration between the Board of Education and City College of New York.

A couple of students who saw me taking pictures came up to me and asked if I was with the news. Undoubtedly disappointed when I said I wasn’t, but that I did write a newsletter, they still spent some time explaining why they were protesting.

Their protest centered around a teacher who mandated that the students in his English Language Learners class write an essay in support of President Trump’s deportation policies. The high school, named after the greatest Black labor leader in American history, Asa Philip Randolph, has a student body that is 98% minority and 91% economically disadvantaged.

ROYALTY

The block just north of the school’s campus, between Convent Avenue and Hamilton Terrace, contains some of the neighborhood’s most beautiful architecture and storied residents. From 1939 to 1950, Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington’s close collaborator and the composer behind songs like “Take the A Train” and “Lush Life,” lived at 315 Convent Avenue. Jimmy Rushing, the famed Count Basie singer, lived upstairs.

Strayhorn would often head around the corner to 63 Hamilton Terrace, where pianist, arranger, and composer Mary Lou Williams hosted an informal salon, an incubator for what would become bebop. Every night, musicians like Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Charlie Parker gathered around her upright Baldwin piano to try out new compositions or techniques, or around her kitchen table for a round of poker.

In later years, after converting to Catholicism, Williams transformed the apartment into a halfway house and informal rehab center for musicians battling addiction. She died in 1981 at the age of 71.

A Woman’s Place: The Importance Of Mary Lou Williams’ Harlem Apartment

Between the Strayhorn and Williams residences stands the neighborhood’s most recognizable home: a large, turreted, Flemish-gabled red-brick mansion at the corner of Hamilton Terrace and Convent Avenue.

Designed by Adolph Hoak, who was responsible for several houses in the area, including the one rented by Strayhorn, the roughly 6,000-square-foot, 100-foot-wide residence was once owned by Charles H. Tuttle, who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 1930 against Franklin D. Roosevelt.

For six months in 2001, the house served as the Tenenbaum family home in The Royal Tenenbaums. Each child occupied a different room in the turret. The improbably New York house on “Archer Avenue” was emblematic of Wes Anderson’s effort to create a deliberately ambiguous version of the city, where familiar geography gives way to invented landmarks like the “Valenzuela Bridge” and the “375th St. Y.”

“HELL OF A DAMN GRAVE. WISH IT WERE MINE”

Another one of Anderson’s fictional-but-real New York City locations is “Maddox Hill Cemetery,” where Royal goes to visit his mother’s gravesite and stops to admire the epitaph of Nicholas Lundy, a veteran of two wars and father of nine children who drowned in the Caspian Sea.

The scene was filmed at Uptown Trinity Church Cemetery & Mausoleum. It is the only active graveyard in Manhattan, and was established in 1842 after burials south of Canal Street were banned due to overcrowding and public health concerns.

Though the neighborhood’s namesake is buried downtown, several of Hamilton’s contemporaries are interred in the cemetery. David Hosack, the doctor who attended to both Hamilton and one of his sons after their respective dueling losses, is buried here, as is Eliza Jumel, who later married Burr after her first husband died in an unfortunate pitchfork accident. When she discovered that the profligate Burr had blown through $13,000 (about $378,000 today) of her savings in just a few months, she quickly filed for divorce, hiring Alexander Hamilton Jr. to represent her.

Four New York City mayors are also buried here: Cadwallader David Colden; Fernando “the most corrupt man that ever sat in the Mayor’s chair” Wood; Abraham Oakey Hall; and, most recently, Ed Koch. Clement Clarke Moore, author of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, is buried on the western edge of the cemetery in the shadow of Riverside Drive.

Other notable locals include Ralph Ellison, Jerry Orbach of Law and Order fame, multiple Astors and Cuba Gooding Sr., father of the actor and lead singer of The Main Ingredient.

One of the largest monuments in the cemetery belongs to Richard Sands, who ran the American Circus and was best known for his “Human Fly” act, in which he walked upside down across ceilings. He debuted the stunt in the 1850s, using rubber suction cups attached to his feet—nearly a decade before the first patent for suction cups was granted. Though many reports claim he died when a ceiling collapsed during a performance, Sands actually succumbed to yellow fever in Havana in 1861.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week’s recording starts with some gospel from the Convent Avenue Baptist Church praise service, moves on to the protest at A. Philip Randolph High School, passes a playground, and ends with the sounds of Broadway.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

Though I couldn’t find it (and I’ve read it may be unmarked), famed Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee is buried in Trinity Cemetery. Born in 1886 in Lenox, Massachusetts, he got his first camera at 14.

In 1906, he moved to New York, where he worked as a waiter, elevator operator, and darkroom technician before opening his own studio, the Guarantee Photo Studio, in Harlem in 1916.

Van Der Zee soon became one of the most successful and sought-after photographers in Harlem. His work became synonymous with the Harlem Renaissance, and for decades he documented everything from weddings and funerals to parades and celebrities, photographing figures like Joe Louis and Marcus Garvey. He was as accomplished in the darkroom as behind the camera—retouching, hand-coloring prints, and creating photomontages, a skill he often employed in his funeral portraits.

In 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem announced that they would share ownership of Van Der Zee’s archive of over 20,000 prints and 30,000 negatives.

NOTES

• The roof of a functioning sewage treatment plant may not be the first place you’d think to put a park, but in New York City, you take what you can get. When the North River Sewage Treatment Plant began operations in March 1986, putting an end to years of dumping raw sewage into the Hudson River, residents of Hamilton Heights were not thrilled—especially when design flaws led to far worse odors than anticipated. Years of community meetings and advocacy resulted in Riverbank State Park, a 28.5-acre park built atop the plant that features an Olympic-size pool, skating rink, running track, courts, theater, and gardens. Today, the park, offering sweeping views of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades, draws millions of visitors annually.

  

• Hippocrates is credited with inventing the first artificial suction cups in the third century, B.C. The cups, made out of gourds, were used to suction “bad blood” from internal organs to the surface.

• On Memorial Day, May 25, 1981, Dan Goodwin, a.k.a. SpiderDan, scaled Chicago’s Sears Tower, wearing a Spider-Man suit and using suction cups. Goodwin, who bears a striking resemblance to a peroxided Christian Bale, said he scaled the building to call attention to inadequacies in high-rise firefighting, an admirably specific cause.

• A timelapse of an Amish barn raising

• In 2021, the Tenenbaum house was available to rent for $20,000 a month, Dalmatian mice not included.

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Tottenville sits at the very edge of New York City, at the confluence of the Arthur Kill and Raritan Bay. It contains the city’s southernmost and westernmost points and lies farther from Midtown Manhattan than any other neighborhood in the five boroughs. Water is never far, and the long stretches of reddish sand beaches that wrap around the peninsula have been drawing people here for thousands of years.

A 1939 New Yorker article described the area as “probably the most soothingly unprogressive place within LaGuardia’s jurisdiction… the natives have no feeling of being part of the world’s greatest metropolis.” At the time, the oyster industry, long the area’s lifeblood, had been shuttered for over a decade, and reaching this far-flung corner of the city required an hour-and-a-half journey by ferry and train, “enough to discourage progress for quite some time to come.”

After the completion of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1964, it still took an hour and a half to reach the neighborhood, but at least now you could do it in the comfort of your own car. Tottenville’s isolation kept the worst excesses of suburbanization that transformed much of the rest of the borough at bay. But in the ’80s, development began in earnest, mostly in the area between Hylan Boulevard and Raritan Bay.

Despite the uptick in housing and population, Tottenville still feels like a small town. With its modest Main Street and large, freestanding homes set back on generous lawns, the neighborhood moves to a slower rhythm. Kids in mirrored Oakley blades cruise the sidewalks on oversized bikes while impromptu Wiffle ball games unfold in the road, pausing only for the occasional passing car.

In many ways, this seaside enclave feels less like the end of New York than the beginning of New Jersey.

AAKAWAXUNG MUNAHANUNG

Tottenville is home to the largest pre-European burial ground in New York City, discovered in 1858 when human remains were unearthed during the construction of a house. In addition to the more than 100 graves, excavations have uncovered an extensive network of shell middens and a wide range of objects, including spear points, clay pipes, beads, knives, scrapers, and axes. These artifacts indicate an astonishing 8,000 years (roughly 300 generations) of occupation by Native American people, the most recent inhabitants being a branch of the Lenape known as the Raritan. The Raritan people referred to their home as Aakawaxung Munahanung, “Island Protected from the Wind.”

In 2021, twenty acres of land on the tip of Tottenville, including Burial Ridge, were designated a city landmark. The Aakawaxung Munahanung Archaeological Site is the only New York City landmark to specifically recognize Native American people.

BILLOPP

By 1670, the Lenape had sold their land to European colonists and departed Staten Island. The first European settler in Tottenville was Christopher Billopp, a British Royal Navy captain.

The English takeover from the Dutch in 1664 led to a territorial dispute between New York and New Jersey over ownership of the harbor islands. To settle the argument, the Duke of York ruled that any harbor island that could be circumnavigated in less than a day would belong to New York. Since most islands in New York Harbor can be circumnavigated on foot in less than an hour, the ruling was really only about Staten Island.

The Duke tasked the recently arrived Captain Billopp with undertaking the 35-mile voyage. Billopp, the story goes, packed the deck of his ship with empty barrels to increase its wind-harnessing power. While I’m no mariner, adding another sail would have made much more sense. In any event, the unorthodox innovation seems to have worked as he completed the journey in 23 hours and 37 minutes, securing Staten Island for New York, a development many Islanders resent to this day.

As a reward, the Duke of York granted Billopp nearly 1,000 acres of prime land on the southernmost tip of the New York archipelago, what would become Tottenville.

While the story is often repeated, the fact that Billopp’s father was a close friend of King Charles II makes for a far more likely explanation for the Duke’s generosity. Billopp built a home on his land called Bentley Manor, named after the ship he had supposedly used in his race around the island.

Though most accounts of Billopp stop here, Royal Navy court-martial records and London criminal proceedings reveal a less heroic side to the noxious Billopp.

In 1682, the captain was court-martialed by the Royal Navy for stealing enslaved people from a ship owned by the Royal African Company that he had been charged with overseeing. When summoned to face the authorities, Billopp, who claimed the enslaved people had died en route (he had actually sold them himself), feigned illness and snuck off in the middle of the night. His actions prompted the governor and council of Nevis to call him “one of the worst men they had ever seen in the king’s service,” an assessment that should be taken with a grain of salt given that the governor owned several large slave plantations. Billopp was acquitted of the embezzlement charge.

He then made a quick return visit to Staten Island, where, in a short period of time, he was arrested for beating a man who refused to work as an indentured servant and was fired from his position as Commander of the Delaware River and Bay after he “misconducted himself in extravagant speeches in public.”

In the 1690s, Billopp was back in court in London, this time accused of orchestrating several elaborate schemes that involved forging death certificates to collect government money. With a flair for alliteration, Billopp made up several men, including Thomas Tiplady, William Whitson, Humphry Humble, William Watkins, and Lawrence Ley, claiming that they had been killed in battle aboard his ship, the HMS Suffolk. He fabricated death certificates, enlisted women to pose as some of the men’s wives to collect money from war widows’ funds, and forged wills. Several witnesses claimed to have seen the forgeries being made, but their credibility was challenged, and Billopp’s defense leaned heavily on his reputation and support from prominent figures. In multiple trials, despite detailed accusations, Billopp was ultimately acquitted.

The last mention I could find of the scurrilous captain was his death in 1725 in Fleet Prison, a debtors’ prison in London, three thousand miles from Bentley Manor.

CONFERENCE HOUSE

Fifty-one years later, on September 11, 1776—three months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and just days after the British captured Long Island—Billopp’s grandson hosted a meeting at the old Billopp house, then being used as a barracks by British troops. There, over a “repast of claret, ham, mutton, and tongue,” Lord Howe met with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge in a last attempt to end the nascent revolution.

After three hours, the claret and tongue were gone, along with any chance of a diplomatic resolution. Four days later, the British landed at Kip’s Bay and took control of lower Manhattan.

After the war, the Billopps, owing to their Tory sympathies, were stripped of their land, and Bentley Manor was divided into smaller parcels. In 1781, farmer Samuel Ward purchased one of them, including the old house. The Ward family remained until 1835, giving the tip of the island the name Ward’s Point.

After the Wards moved out, the house went on a bit of a downturn, becoming, in turn, an inn, a multi-family residence, and a site for manufacturing rat poison. A 1918 explosion at a gunpowder plant in New Jersey broke all of the windows in the front of the old house, forcing the tenants to move out, and “two Italians” moved in and began to manufacture “sticky rat-poison.” After the Italians did well enough for themselves to move their operation to a larger facility in Brooklyn, the historic home was earmarked to become an insecticide factory. The author of an article in the August 1920 issue of Journal of Economic Entomology took particular pleasure in pointing out the “interesting coincidence” that the Hessian soldiers who occupied the Billopp house during the war were supposedly responsible for introducing the pernicious Hessian Fly to North America, one of the pests targeted by the insecticides of the day.

In the end, the factory was never built. In 1926, New York City purchased and restored the house. In 1966, renamed Conference House, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.

TOTTEN TIME

By the mid-19th century, the Totten family had eclipsed the Billopps in local fame. Known for their “respectability and influence,” they helped establish the Methodist church, and various Tottens could be found engaged in all sectors of the local economy, working as oystermen, mariners, merchants, and shipwrights.

First mention of the neighborhood (sort of) is in this 1854 map which labels the northern section of the peninsula Totensville while just a few streets away, Unionville and Mount Herman get their own designation.

The town's name was a source of contention for several years, with the traditionalists preferring Bentley, the Tottens naturally backing Tottenville, and the upstart Arents promoting the Seussical sounding Arentsville, even publishing their own newspaper to give their bid legitimacy. When Totten was appointed postmaster, the official name of the local post office was changed from Bentley to Tottenville, sealing the deal.

OYSTERS

Oysters were the 19th century equivalent of the dollar slice, with New Yorkers slurping down the briny bivalves by the bushel. None were more prized than those found off the coast of Tottenville and nearby Princes Bay. For several decades, the shellfish were the engine of the local economy. The demand was so high (New Yorkers were consuming an estimated one million a day) that the local oyster beds were depleted. A Staten Islander, Capt. David Van Name, pioneered the practice of seeding young oysters from other locations and letting them mature in the brackish waters off Staten Island. This innovation bolstered the local economy and by the end of the 19th century, in addition to its oyster operation, Tottenville was home to several shipyards, repair facilities, hotels and restaurants.

By the early 20th century, the hundreds of millions of gallons of waste that were being dumped daily into New York Harbor brought the party to an end. In 1927, by order of the New York City Health Department, the last of New York’s oyster beds were closed.

W.W.

This evocative excerpt, describing the exhumation of a freshly buried coffin on Hart's Island, marks the turning point in a mystery that had gripped Tottenville since the discovery, a month prior, of a body found "half floating" in the mud just offshore. The corpse's arms were crossed and tied with heavy packing twine, and a handkerchief with the initials W.W. had been rammed down its throat with a stick. An autopsy revealed that the man, identified as Karl Ruttinger, had not died by drowning but by strangulation. After the discovery of the handkerchief, the investigation immediately focused on Ruttinger's traveling companion and brother-in-law, William Wright. The problem was, nobody could find him.

On February 2nd, a small young man with an English accent, a soft, downy mustache, and an aristocratic face checked into the Astor House under the name Fred Evans. The next morning he was found with his throat cut from ear to ear, still holding a razor in his right hand. He had no identifying documents and was buried on Hart’s Island. Eventually someone made the connection between the mysterious suicide, which took place the day after Ruttinger’s death, and Wright’s disappearance.

On the day the coffin was dug up, District Attorney Fitzgerald had assembled a dozen people who had crossed paths with Wright. Ten of the twelve identified the corpse as William Wright. Afterward the body was brought back to Hart’s Island to be “replaced in the black mud.”

Fitzgerald was convinced that Wright had murdered his brother-in-law and committed suicide out of remorse, citing the timing, the men’s relationship, and especially the handkerchief with the “W.W.” monogram. Of course, if you were to frame somebody for a crime, leaving a monogrammed handkerchief stuffed down the victim’s throat would be an obvious first step. There was also the question of the size differential. Wright was a petite 5’4” while his German friend was half a foot taller and weighed 200 pounds. Fitzgerald concluded that Ruttinger had been drugged before he was killed, but a later autopsy found no alcohol or poison, only “a portion of a herring salad, prepared in the German fashion, and a few bits of beets.”

And then there was the fact that Ruttinger had doubled his life insurance policy just a few months before his trip to America. Conspiracy theorists speculated that the whole thing was an elaborate ruse and that both Ruttinger and Wright had killed the first mate of the German oil ship Charles Schneider who had recently gone missing, and were off somewhere stuffing themselves on herring salad and waiting for the money to roll in.

Despite these suspicions, the insurance company eventually paid out $22,000 to Ruttinger's mother in February 1892, concluding it was more cost-effective to pay than continue the expensive investigation.

CALLERY

Both times I visited Tottenville last week were bright, blue, sunny days, by far my least favorite conditions to photograph, but the timeline of this project has forced me to be less picky. On the plus side, the deep blue skies really set off this year's Callery pear tree blooms.

Callery pears are among the first trees to flower in the spring, and this is the first year I’ve really noticed just how ubiquitous they are. Third behind London plane and Norway maple, the pear trees make up more than ten percent of the city’s street trees—over 65,000 in total.

When the trees were first introduced to the U.S. in the mid-1960s they were touted for their affordability and ability to grow in harsh conditions. In cities, the trees were particularly prized for their upright shape (perfect for tight spaces) and their impressive blooms. The New York Times once wrote, “Few trees possess every desired attribute, but the Bradford (a type of Callery) ornamental pear comes unusually close to the ideal.”

By the 1990s, the crush had worn off. The very qualities that made the trees popular became their downfall. Their upright branch structure makes them especially prone to cracking and splitting, and their tolerance for poor conditions allows them to spread aggressively, crowding out native species. And, perhaps most notoriously, their dense clusters of white flowers give off an odor often compared to rotting fish or semen, earning them possibly the worst nickname of all time, “the semen tree.”

Many states now classify them as invasive. Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina have banned them altogether. The U.S. Dept of Agriculture has called Callery pears “an invader worse than murder hornets.”

I think I hate these trees now.

But, I do love this NYC tree map.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week's audio opens at the beach on the southernmost point of New York City, then heads inland where: a small child barks at me (much to his older sister's chagrin), ouzo is enjoyed at a backyard party, and a kid’s pickup basketball game gets rowdy.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

Another image from Accra Shepp’s fantastic Islands of New York Project.

In case you missed it last time, here is a piece from the New York Times on the project: This Land is Islands

ODDS…

• The Atlantic Terra Cotta company opened a factory in Tottenville in 1898. It became one of Staten Island’s largest employers with 450 men producing terra cotta for buildings like the Woolworth and the Flatiron.

• In one of his last major acts as New York City mayor, recently naturalized Albanian citizen Eric Adams granted a temporary reprieve to a Tottenville family and their 15-year-old rescue pig Lucy after an anonymous neighbor narced to the authorities — farm animals are illegal in New York City — and the city told the Gannones they would have to give up Lucy and face fines of up to $18,000. Several high profile New Yorkers got involved in the efforts to #savelucy.

  

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• A self-guided walking tour of old Tottenville

• The Journal of Economic Entomology is still published today. Recent articles include "Is the long-horned grasshopper a novel, nutritious, functional, and safe alternative food product?" "What is rindworm?" and "Predicting slug injury in corn.”

…AND ENDS

The end of New York deserves more than one end.

CHARLES BECKER

Sometimes, while researching a neighborhood, I’ll pin an address to remind myself to photograph it. Later, in the field, the address will show up on my map, so I’ll take the picture, having completely forgotten why I pinned it in the first place. That’s what happened with 3239 Olinville Avenue.

I assumed it had something to do with ASPCA agent Michael La Rocco’s exploits. Perhaps the peeping possum situation. But when I got back I learned that this was the last known address of Charles Becker, the second of three NYPD officers sentenced to death. Becker was born in 1870 in Callicoon, moved to New York in 1890, and started as a bouncer in a German beer hall off the Bowery. Three years later, he joined the NYPD.

Early in his career, Becker arrested a prostitute named Ruby Young (Dora Clark) while she was talking to Stephen Crane, who was reporting on the Tenderloin for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Fresh off the success of The Red Badge of Courage, Crane vouched for her, and she was released. Three weeks later, Clark filed charges against Becker for false arrest and harassment, with Crane as the star witness. The police raided Crane’s apartment and the defense spent the majority of their case portraying him as a man of dubious morals. The case was thrown out and Crane’s reputation took a serious hit.

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Olinville, in the north-central Bronx, is a small dogleg of a neighborhood tucked between White Plains Road and the Bronx River. East 222nd Street forms its northern edge, while the Parkside Houses mark its southern boundary. It’s often considered part of Williamsbridge, just to the east, though, confusingly, Williamsbridge originally referred to the area on the opposite side of the Bronx River, to the west.

An encounter earlier this week underscored the inherent fluidity of neighborhood names, especially in the Bronx. When I stopped to take a picture of an upholstery shop on White Plains Road, its facade an irresistible pastiche of hand-painted signs, I attracted the attention of the store’s owner.

After telling me his father had opened the shop over forty years ago and that their client list included Madison Square Garden and CBS, he asked me what exactly it was I was doing. After giving him my usual spiel, I asked what he called his neighborhood. First he said simply, “the Bronx,” then refined it to “the East Bronx.” Pressed further, he landed on “Gun Hill Road.” This kind of neighborhood agnosticism seems to be the norm in the Bronx, where the nearest major thoroughfare is typically the primary unit of geographic identity.

When I told him I was there to photograph Olinville, he gestured east toward Williamsbridge and said, “Oh, that’s a few blocks that way.” I briefly considered asking if was familiar with the 1868 Frederick Beers Atlas of New York and Vicinity, which placed Olinville squarely on the banks of the Bronx River and Williamsbridge completely on the other side—but I decided against it.

Back when everyone agreed that Williamsbridge was still west of the Bronx River, the arrival of the New York and Harlem Railroad in 1842 helped spur settlement in the area.

The village of Olinville first made it onto city maps a decade later, when $500 could get you an acre of land in the area, “beautifully situated between the Railroad and 1st Av., covered with fine fruit and shade trees.”

By 1854, there were two Olinvilles, No. 1 and No. 2, separated by what is today Gun Hill Road. Why someone felt the need to split the diminutive village into two parts and why they didn’t opt for a more conventional north–south designation, is a mystery I don’t think anyone cares enough about to solve.

THE RIPEST SCHOLAR

The man who inspired the name of the two adjacent villages was Stephen Olin, who, to the best of my knowledge, never set foot in the Bronx.

Born in Leicester, Vermont, to a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Olin was the valedictorian of his class at Middlebury College and was described by one professor as “the ripest scholar who had ever come.” Olin’s academic accolades came at a cost; one source indicated that the scholar’s “health was injured by severe study,” and his doctors urged him to move south. You’d think they might have simply told him to ease up on the studying a bit, but in any event, the move would change him profoundly.

In 1821, while standing in the forest, Olin had a spiritual awakening and soon was ordained into the Methodist Episcopal Church. He went on to become the first president of Randolph-Macon College and later served as the second president of Wesleyan University. In the pages of Methodist Quarterly, Rev. Dr. McClintock, tapped as his replacement at Wesleyan, had this to say about his predecessor:

“Dr. Olin was a man of remarkable organization. His physical and mental proportions were alike gigantic. His intellect was of that imperial rank to which but few of the sons of men can lay claim. At once acute, penetrating, and profound, it lacked none of the elements of true mental greatness.”

Perhaps the first residents of Olinville were subscribers to Methodist Quarterly; at the very least, they must have been Methodists. In 1852, they named their settlement in honor of the recently deceased minister.

FROM FIVE TO TEN

Olinville expanded in much the same way the rest of the Bronx did, its growth catalyzed by the arrival of the subway. The neighborhood had a head start thanks to the aforementioned Williamsbridge stop along the New York and Harlem Railroad. But the real boost was provided by the White Plains Road extension of the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit), which opened to great fanfare in 1917.

The expansion was a result of the Dual Contracts of 1913, a citywide initiative that linked the two competing transportation companies (the IRT and the BRT) in an effort to disperse Manhattan’s overcrowded population into the outer boroughs. As part of the deal, which included significant public funding, both companies had to agree to stick with a 5-cent fare for the duration of their 49-year lease. That cap meant the companies were unable to raise rates to keep pace with inflation, and in 1940 the city took over control of the transit system. In 1948, the nickel fare, which had remained intact through two world wars and ten mayors, was doubled to 10 cents.

PEEPING ’POSSUM PINCHED

In 1951, at 3020 Olinville Avenue, John Biele and his family were under siege. The perpetrators? A pair of peeping opossums who kept showing up in the evening and “staring solemnly into the dining room.” The Biele family found this behavior alarming enough to call in the police, but by the time the cops arrived, the meddlesome marsupials had moved on to ogle some other unsuspecting Bronx family. The police recommended that, next time, Biele shine a flashlight into the opossums’ eyes to “hypnotize them until aid arrived.”

On November 23, when the nosy opossums returned, he took their advice and, surprisingly, the trick worked—at least on one of the animals, which was clinging to a grapevine, blankly staring into the flashlight beam when an ASPCA agent named Michael La Rocco arrived to snare it.

Sometimes I like to research the names mentioned in these articles to see if I can learn anything else interesting about them. The article listed the whole Biele family, John, his wife Clara and their children: Concetta, 11; Emily, 10; Rose-Marie, 9; Barbara, 7; and John Jr., 5. I found a study published in a 1980 edition of The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery titled “Intercostal Pedicle Method for Control of Postresection Esophagitis” by Rose Marie Biele, who had apparently sufficiently recovered from the possum-induced trauma to become an expert on heartburn.

Otherwise, I couldn’t find much else on the Bieles, so I decided to look up the ASPCA agent, Michael La Rocco, and was rewarded with a treasure trove of information. For a particularly fertile period in the late ’40s and early ’50s, the papers were littered with the animal-saving exploits of La Rocco.

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF MICHAEL LA ROCCO

In 1946, when he was still just a chauffeur for the ASPCA, La Rocco was awarded a Medal of Honor after rescuing four horses from a burning stable. This early accolade kicked off a remarkable run of animal rescues that, to my knowledge, is unparalleled.

There was the 1951 swamp rescue of a swan from the mudflats off Clason Point:

Undeterred by the swan’s hostile honking, La Rocco made his way out through the mud, laying planks before him as he went. When he finally reached the ungrateful bird, a faceful of wing nearly sent him sprawling. But the unflappable La Rocco persisted, tucking the forty-pound bird under his arm and bringing it back to his truck.

Just two months later, the modern-day Dr. Dolittle was given the unenviable task of transporting a goat whose smell was so overpowering it caused the horses it shared a barn with to go on a hunger strike. The 160-pound goat had recently been adopted as the mascot of the Bronx’s Troop D police department, but the officers’ enthusiasm for their new addition was not matched by their horses. La Rocco was called in, and dutifully transported the reeking goat to a shelter.

In 1953, the animal wrangler was called in to capture a drunken snipe that had broken into a liquor store and headed straight for the scotch, sampling the goods with its perfectly suited-to-the-task five-inch beak. The store’s salesman, the incomparably named Bert Borkum, “wasn’t elated over the highest customer he had ever seen,” and called La Rocco in to deal with the scotch-sipping snipe.

The last mention I could find of our hero involved an injured raccoon rescued from a spring trap by a local Boy Scout troop. When the scouts came across the critter, they broke open the trap with their hatchets, brought the injured animal back to their campsite, boiled water, and cleaned and dressed its nearly severed left forepaw. They then threw it in a backpack and carried it to their scoutmaster’s house in the Bronx. When La Rocco was called in, the raccoon—which had been “resting cozily on a chair”—suddenly rebelled with vicious anger at the sight of him, baring its pointed teeth and refusing to budge.

Ever the consummate professional, La Rocco donned a pair of leather gloves and was eventually able to get the disgruntled raccoon to a vet, where it was said the Scouts’ quick action probably saved its paw.

PARKSIDE HOUSES

In 1951, the same year as the swan rescue and the goat relocation, the newly constructed Parkside Houses on Olinville’s southern border welcomed their first tenants. This was a moment when public housing projects were rising across the city to alleviate the severe postwar housing shortage brought on by returning WWII veterans. Beyond addressing scarcity, these relatively spacious, affordable apartments, with ample green space and playgrounds, were seen as a marked improvement over the city’s crowded tenements and aging housing stock.

Author Richard Price, whose books include The Wanderers, Clockers, and Lush Life, was among the original tenants, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his parents and younger brother.

In a piece for Guernica magazine (“The Rise and Fall of Public Housing in NYC”), Price refers to this period as the “Golden Age” of public housing. Moving into the Houses, he writes, was not “only a new beginning, it was a first beginning and, mingled with the tang of fresh paint was an air of optimism, of gratitude.”

He describes an almost idyllic world in which residents congregated on benches in front of their buildings, “Greek-chorusing about this and that, the talk easily reaching their friends directly overhead, hanging out of apartment windows in order to join in the conversation. The buildings were only seven stories high; there was no reason to shout.”

That world, according to Price, lasted nearly twenty years. Its end was marked in large part by the construction of Co-op City, whose 15,000 apartments were quickly filled with families lured by the coded promise of “no subsidized apartments.” Price’s family, along with twenty others in their twenty-eight-family building, decamped for the new “city within a city.”

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week’s audio captures the overhead 2 and 5 trains on White Plains Road, snippets of storefront gospel, and the Bronx’s smallest waterfall.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

There is not much information on Harris Pierce whose archive of photos taken in the late 19^th century is maintained by The New-York Historical Society. According to the NYHS, Pierce’s photographs “appear to have been made as evidence in supporting the cases of claimants filing for damages against the city.”

While that doesn’t sound remotely compelling, the photos he took in the Bronx, some of the earliest photographic records of the inchoate borough, are truly remarkable. This particular batch of photos, taken on the former Olin Avenue, represents properties belonging to someone named Irving Tier. The only mention I could find of Tier was in a 1912 obituary in the New York Times which, appropriately enough, lists his occupation as a “large property owner.”

ODDS AND END

• When looking into the feasibility of “hypnotizing” an opossum by shining a light in its eyes, I came across the curious fact that opossums will glow pink under a UV light. Initial studies indicated that opossums were part of a rarefied cohort of glowing mammals that also included such strange bedfellows as flying squirrels and platypuses. Disappointingly, for opossum fans, more recent studies have found that pretty much any mammal will glow to some degree under a blacklight

  

  Other fun (o)possum facts: opossums and possums are technically different animals, though the spellings are often used interchangeably. Opossums have more teeth than any other North American mammal, and they have opposable thumbs.

  When opossums “play dead,” they’re not acting; they enter an involuntary state similar to shock, triggered by intense fear. The response causes them to collapse, bare their teeth, foam at the mouth, and release a foul-smelling secretion from their anal glands which, to be honest, sounds a lot like me at parties.

• Olinville Old-Timer’s Day has been celebrated in the neighborhood since 1975. In 2010, the Olinville Old-Timer’s Association (OOTA) was formed to help organize the event, and has since expanded to provide a range of educational, recreational, and social services year-round through partnerships with local health, educational, and human service organizations.

• Of particular interest to local readers, registration for this year’s Jane’s Walk, the annual festival of free, community-led walking tours inspired by Jane Jacobs and organized by the Municipal Art Society, opens tomorrow. There are hundreds of events, from a bike tour examining Robert Moses’s impact on the city to a walk across Central Park visiting “iconic pigeon hangouts.”

  Friends of The Neighborhoods Norman Oder and Eden Seiferheld are both leading walks. Norman will answer the question What’s Happening with Atlantic Yards? while Eden will explore the world beneath our feet, with a tour focused on the sidewalks of SOHO.

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Kensington in Brooklyn is another one of those neighborhoods whose previous inclusion within a larger neighborhood (in this case Flatbush) makes pinning down its exact borders and history a bit of a challenge.

The general consensus places its boundaries at Coney Island Avenue to the east, Fort Hamilton Parkway and Caton Avenue to the north, McDonald Avenue and 36th Street to the west, and 18th Avenue to the south. It sits between Midwood, Ditmas Park, Windsor Terrace, and Borough Park. Running straight through it is Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn’s grand spine, which predates the neighborhood itself by about twenty years.

The name comes from the classic real estate developer trick of prestige branding, associating a place with an already established name to confer a sense of sophistication, in this case London’s Kensington. Despite those Anglophilic aspirations, the neighborhood has evolved into one of Brooklyn’s more diverse enclaves, a polyglot mix that includes one of the city’s largest Bangladeshi communities alongside significant Russian, Sudanese, Pakistani and Orthodox Jewish populations.

It’s the kind of place where you might pass under an eruv on your way to a Russian bath while the muezzin’s call to prayer competes with the clatter of the F train overhead on McDonald Avenue. This past week, the neighborhood was a flurry of springtime activity as Eid celebrations were winding down and preparations for Passover and Easter ramped up.

JERE

The man behind the name Kensington was Jeremiah Johnson Jr., a direct descendant of Joris and Catalina Jansen Rapelje, the Wallabout power couple that Russell Shorto dubbed the “Adam and Eve” of New Netherland. The Johnson family tree is a who’s who of Brooklyn history, including Remsens, Wyckoffs, and Vandervoorts. His grandfather, Jeremiah Johnson, was mayor of the City of Brooklyn from 1837 to 1839.

Jere, president and founder of the Brooklyn Real Estate Exchange, was a real estate man and a spectacularly successful one at that. By 1891, by his own estimation, he had sold “at least 200,000 suburban lots,” worth $50 million, and “hundreds of millions” of dollars worth of city real estate. He attributed part of his success to having live bands play at his auctions and “serving a really good lunch,” which truly does sound like a winning strategy.

Johnson was particularly proud of his signature flag which he had trademarked to protect against his competitors and displayed atop every one of his numerous print advertisements.

Though he spurned imitators, he had no qualms about piggybacking off journalist Nellie Bly's attempt to break the record for fastest trip around the world, insinuating that the pioneering investigative journalist was making the trip while carrying one of his flags.

Jere was remarkably prescient when it came to the future of Brooklyn. In his 1891 book Building a Nation and Where to Build Ideal American Homes, he imagined a consolidated New York of over eight million people, crisscrossed by bridges and tunnels, powered by electricity, and rivaling the great capitals of Europe.

Our country has increased in population five-fold, New York ten-fold, and Brooklyn thirty-fold, and yet all three are still in their infancy. New York and Brooklyn have become rivals of the great European capitals, as far as wealth, learning, and refinement are concerned, and are sure in the next few years to be consolidated into one great city.

Thousands of children are now living who will see this the Rome of the 20th Century. Before 1950 it will contain a population of over 8,000,000 souls, and will embrace the counties of New York, Kings, Westchester, Queens, and Richmond. This vast area will be densely peopled. The facilities for going from one part of the city to another will be far beyond anything our minds can now grasp. There will certainly be no surface railroads, for all tracks will be elevated or depressed. Scores of bridges will span the North and East Rivers, while beneath their waters numerous tunnels will have been constructed. All machinery will be run by electricity, of which subtle force we are just beginning to know something.

New York will be the financial center of the world, as well as the center of intellectual and social life. Its magnificent public buildings and parks, its museums and art galleries, its theatres and coliseums, will render it the Mecca of all travelers. Rich and poor will delight to live within its limits.

Unsurprisingly, his suggestions on where to build those “Ideal American Homes” were all on lots he happened to be selling, including his newly christened Kensington Heights. The area traded on its proximity to Ocean Parkway, “the finest drive in America,” already lined with large detached villas.