A Long Way from Scotland

Arrochar - Staten Island

While going through my archive last week, I noticed I had several images from a neighborhood in Staten Island called Arrochar. It occurred to me that I almost already had enough pictures to fill a newsletter. That meant no sitting in traffic or scanning the forecast for decent shooting conditions. Don’t get me wrong, getting to wander and explore and make photographs is why I started this project, but having a week to catch up with pictures I’ve already made takes some of the pressure off. Confident I had a good headstart,  I began to research the neighborhood.

I then made the fateful mistake of posting a question to Reddit. For those who don’t know, Reddit is the town square of the entire internet with discussion forums called subreddits on any niche subject you can think of: American Primitive guitar, Squirrels Eating Unusual Things (SEUT), and my personal favorite, Birds with Arms.

I decided to ask on the Staten Island subreddit where the borders fell between Arrochar and the adjacent South Beach neighborhood. Borders are contentious, but I’m usually able to come to some sort of consensus beginning with Google Maps and then fine-tuning through various other references, including Reddit.

After posting my question, I watched the number of replies quickly ramp up while, correspondingly, my neighborhood's borders began to shrink. Each reply seemed to constrict the edges further until I was left with the geographical equivalent of a box of chiclets.

Pretty much all of the pictures I liked and had earmarked for this newsletter, according to Reddit groupthink, fell outside of Arrochar’s borders

At this point, I had already begun my research, and after a frustrating start, I had finally found an interesting kernel of neighborhood history to write about. So this week, I let the pendulum swing a little to the writing/research side of the process rather than the pictures. At least I’ll have plenty of pictures for next time.

The only image that made the cut. From a series of bus stops.

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In 1880, a lawyer from Manhattan, William W. MacFarland, built his house in the neighborhood, naming it Arrochar after his birthplace in the Scottish Highlands.

According to Wikipedia, the name is pronounced Uh-row-shr. According to Reddit, pronouncing it that way will get you beat up. When I asked around the neighborhood, the most popular pronunciation was Arrow-Car, followed by the slightly more sophisticated Arrow-shr.

WHO’S COUNTING?

Besides the origin of its name, there was really very little history I could find about Arrochar, so I was excited when I stumbled upon an article mentioning the neighborhood in the Standard Union from June 28, 1929, with the headline “Duke of the Roses Wilted by Court Order to quit Staten Island Estate”.

The article went on to recount the imminent eviction of Major Gen. Count H.V. Von Broens-Trupp Cherep-Spiridovich, founder of the Royal Order of the Rose, from Barrett Manor in Arrochar.

They can not evict me! It is an outrage. I shall appeal to higher Courts

He was unsuccessful in his appeals, and a New York Times article a few days later describes the Count and the original owner of Barrett Manor, Mrs. Harriet Beauley, sitting on two rocking chairs, keeping vigil over a jumble of books and furniture that had been thrown out in the rain by the six deputy sheriffs in charge of vacating the 62 room house.

It was quite an image and story, but as I began to dig a little deeper, things began to take a turn.

I found Cherep-Spiridovich’s obituary, reporting that he died on October 22, 1926, at the age of 75, three years before the eviction I had been reading about. According to the obituary, he was found dead in his hotel room from gas poisoning. The hotel was listed as Barrett Manor. This was getting weird.

Major-General Count Arthur Cherep-Spiridovich was a tsarist, a major general in the Imperial Russian Navy who had moved to Harlem after the Bolshevik revolution.

He is perhaps best known for penning the anti-semitic manifesto, The Secret World Government, or "The Hidden Hand,” in which the Count posits that “the world is being clandestinely governed by a group of 300 individuals of ‘Judeo-Mongol’ ancestry.”¹

Amazingly, the book is still available on Amazon, where it gets a 4.4 out 5-stars rating. You could just download the original for free, but then you don’t get this version that unequivocally proves you can, in fact, judge a book by its cover.

Far from a fringe character, Cherep-Spiridovich once met with Theodore Roosevelt and counted Henry Ford and Pope Pius X among his admirers. It was the Pope, not Russia, who conferred upon him the rank of "count" for his “vigorous defense and promotion of Christianity.”

Still, his goal of uniting the globe’s 200,000,000 Slavs to create a “universal anti-satan federation to protect the Aryan race from Jews and Jewish influence” never came to fruition. His death, later ruled a suicide, occurred on the eve of a huge Slavic conference that he had been planning for months. He sent invites all over the world advertising the event. Only one man showed up.

That still leaves us with the question of how could he have been evicted 3 years after his death.

Upon closer inspection, the first Cherep-Spiridovich I found reference to was Major General Count H. V. Von Broenstrupp Cherep-Spiridovich, not Major-General Count Arthur Cherep-Spiridovich. If that sentence is as bewlidering to you as it is to me, you can see how I was confused.

It never occurred to me that there would be two Major General Count Cherep-Spiridovichs. To be fair, the latter Cherep-Spiridovich was actively trying to fool people into thinking they were the same people. He got me.

His given name was Howard Victor von Broenstrupp, which he slipped like some old deli meat between the title of Major General Count and the surname Cherep-Spiridovich. 

Broenstrupp would sometimes claim he was Arthur’s adopted son.  Why anyone would deem Cherep-Spiridovich’s reputation worth piggybacking off of is a mystery.  After his eviction, Broenstrupp continued to fully inhabit his adopted persona and was eventually brought to trial for conspiring with the Nazis to overthrow democracy in the United States.

Lois de Lafayette Washburn of Chicago - with Broenstrupp on her left - gives a Nazi salute as she leaves Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., April 17, 1944. (AP)

ST JOHN

The very street where the would-be Count sat vigil in a rocking chair over his rain-soaked possessions was recently the epicenter of NYC’s increasingly contentious clashes over the current influx of asylum seekers.

The first class of students graduated from St. John Villa Academy in 1926, the same year Count Cherep-Spiridovich poisoned himself. The school shut down in 2018 and was purchased by the city. With a dire need for housing, the former school was transformed into a temporary shelter this past summer.

The local response was vociferous, with hundreds of protesters showing up to vent their disapproval over several days. A neighbor set up a loudspeaker that continuously blasted anti-immigrant invective.

You are being lied to, this building is not safe for humans. The community wants you to go back to New York City; immigrants are not safe here.

Last I checked, Staten Island is part of New York City, but maybe not for long.

Others took to shining high-powered lights in the building’s windows. Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa declared, “The battleground, the Alamo, is right here, at St. John Villa Academy.”² You can be sure there were some Cherep-Spiridovich fans in attendance.

Just last week, the FDNY ordered the shelter to shut down, citing a lack of sprinklers and fire alarms. 170 asylum seekers have since been moved out of the neighborhood.

MONK ROBES AND MANSARDS

Arguably the most recognizable building in the neighborhood is the H.H. Richardson house on Lily Pond Road.

The house was designed by one of America’s most famous architects, Henry Hobson Richardson.  Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright have been called the trinity of American architects.  Richardson lived in the house from 1868 to 1874, when he moved to Boston to work on Trinity Church.

The grounds were designed by Ricardson’s closest friend, Frederick Law Olmstead.  Today, the Queen Anne-style house, with a tall red mansard roof, is occupied by doctor’s offices offering botox, fillers, and a service that promises “Booty Beauty.”

My favorite fact about Richardson is that he dressed himself in a monk’s robe to impress his clients.

Richardson’s clients would make the trek from Boston to his Brookline studio to meet with him.  When they arrived, Richardson’s assistant would sound a gong and the architect would appear from the back wearing his monk’s getup… Richardson wore the robes (and regularly disseminated the portrait to his potential clients) to reinforce his medieval and gothic design roots³

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week’s recording starts with what I thought was an exotic bird but turned out to be an annoyed squirrel, goes past the Arrochar playground, and ends up outside a social club that knows how to keep its mouth shut.

A squirrel that features prominently in this week’s field recording.

Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.

Another view of St John Academy

FEATURED PHOTO

Another photo from Percy Loomis Sperr, one of my favorites of his.

A row of abandoned bungalows on one of the town streets, August 25, 1929

NOTES

• If you’re curious about what the Arrochar in Scotland looks like, here is a link to some drone footage.

• Arrochar Alps a poem by Marion McCready

• Julian Onderdonk studied at the storied Arts Student League in NYC under William Merritt Chase, who also taught Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper. After 8 years in New York, he moved back to his native Texas and became famous for his landscape paintings, particularly his fields of bluebonnets which can sell for 1/2 a million dollars. Lesser known are the paintings he made in New York, probably because Onderdonk signed them with the pseudonym Chas Turner or Chase Turner or, when he was feeling particularly saucy, Roberto Vasquez. ⁴

  In any event, he made hundreds of paintings, sometimes two a day, during his time in New York and several in Staten Island, including this landscape, Arrochar Park in 1903.

  

• From the Birds with Arms subreddit

  

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Cherep-Spiridovich#:~:text=He%20is%20perhaps%20best%20known,%22Judeo%2DMongol%22%20ancestry.

2. https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bpb3/staten-island-immigrants-protest?utm_source=reddit.com

3. http://cubedesignresearch.com/tag/hh-richardson/

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/arts/design/shedding-light-on-a-landscape-painters-lost-years-in-new-york.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5Uw.gB51.MBzqMUYWhX8t&smid=url-share