It's been said that one cannot be either too rich or too thin. Petite, prosperous and supremely stylish, my friend Chiu-Ti Jansen, Publisher of YUE Magazine, certainly seems to subscribe to this adage. For she is elegantly as imperially slender as a reed and wears such perfect, beautifully made and accessorized clothes, always, that she gives every appearance of being as rich as Richard Corey!
The divine Ms. Jansen chaneling Sargent's Madame X
So did all her friends last Monday night who gathered as she hosted the magazine’s third anniversary celebration at the Harmonie Club. Designed over a hundred years ago by Stanford White, the venerable association sits serenely aloof on East Sixtieth Street, near Fifth Avenue. It proved to provide the perfect backdrop for the festive black tie gala honoring eight of the most powerful Chinese and Chinese American influencers in the world of philanthropy. This wonderful group included David Henry Hwang, Yue-Sai Kan, Anla Cheng Kingdon, Michelle Kwan, Lang Lang, Richard Lui, Hao Jiang Tian and Shirley Young.
"YUE," is derived from the Chinese rendition of New York. Literally, it means rendezvous and promise. More than a lifestyle magazine, YUE is about building an exciting community around shared ideas and aspirations. "What could be a better way to accomplish this objective than giving back to our communities?" Ms. Jansen remarked: "As we raise a toast to the third anniversary of YUE, we are privileged to honor great leaders in philanthropy and present their accomplishments as a meaningful way to understand that generosity is a time-honored tradition in the Chinese cultural makeup."
In addition to the worthy honorees and their guests, the fun party brought together Chinese and New York elite youth for crispy crab cakes, spring rolls and other delectable hors d'oeuvres accompanied by quite good wine and Royal Salute Scotch whiskey generously provided by Pernod Richard. Fittingly, Royal Salute's brand ambassador, Peter Ly, was on hand to be thanked and also acted as a presenter. Vertu, the presenting sponsor, offered an array of mobile devices featuring unique sound and visual experiences which showcased some of the honorees’ charitable achievements. The attending honorees were bestowed with finely engraved sparkling crystal Baccarat Louxor Obelisks that I coveted. Beijing Council, the associate sponsor, provided additional support for the event.
Notable guests at the gala, in addition to the honorees and senior executives of YUE luxury advertisers, included: Mr. and Mrs. Chen Guoqing, the co-founder of the HNA Group and Hainan Airlines, Datuk Zang Toi the brilliant fashion designer, who wore a glorious orchid,
Geoffrey Bradfield one of Architecture Digest top 100 interior designers, and RenéBelcer a Law & Order producer and Ms. Carolyn Hsu Belcer, among others, who happily and delightfully, included the darling Harlem developeer Diane Eamtrakul, and me! How lucky!
Honoree Lang Lang was a piano prodigy who performed at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. His Lang Lang Foundation promoters classical music education
Honoree Shirley Young is President of Shirley Young Associates; Chair of Lang Lang International Music Foundation; former VP at General Motors Corp, former member of the Business Advisory Council for the US State Department and the Agency for International Development; contributor to New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera
Mrs. Young dazzeled in a spectacular necklace of jadite and pearls
Elegant honoree Yue-Sai Kan, who shimmered in silver, is an Emmy-winning television producer and bestselling author whose programs Looking East and One World introduced the East and West to each other; Chairman of the China Beauty Fund, she advocates for the rights for women and children
The most extraordinary gown among so many exquisite dresses, was inspired by the couture of Worth from a century ago, exhibiting brocaded wisteria
Hao Jiang Tian, seen with his wife, Martha Liao and Harlem's Diane Eamtrakul, is an operatic bass who has sung with the Metropolitan Opera since 1991. He feels strongly about investing in young talent, as a supporter of the Asian Performing Arts Council, and I SING BEIJING, which fosters a Chinese-American exchange
More beguiling in conception? Taking his lead from housing peojects blocks away, David Adjaye referennces structures that tower outside of the historic Sugar Hill neighborhood, but which are not, and never have been, a part of it
What makes one so denounce David Adjaye's new "Sugar Hill Apartments"? Unmistakably the Anglo-African-rock-star-architect has created a stand-out structure, taller and larger than any of its neighbors. Cleverly, it's articulated by seemingly random square and rectangular windows, which imbue what might have been an otherwise utterly ponderous mass, with considerable redemptive vitality.
The new Sugar Hill housing development, designed by the architect David Adjaye, at 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue
A white friend of mine who moved uptown, has in the vicinity, the most marvelous Victorian house. Her tenants, in a ground floor and cellar duplex apartment, pay a rent for their loft-like unit, that's generous enough to cover my friend's taxes, utilities and mortgage. Yet she objects to all new affordable housing. She contends that there's enough already, that Harlem is saturated with poor residents perpetuating a cycle of failure and despair. Vainly, I have attempted to convince her otherwise, to explain how the displacement of ten families and 30 people her house alone, as a former rooming house, represents, was a great disservice to long-term former Harlemites. 'The security of decent housing can help to stabilize and uplift poor people!' I tell her. I have also noted the arrival of $3,000.00-per-month studio apartments for rent and $1-million-plus penthouses condominiums in Harlem. 'So, as long as people as well-off as you, are willing to pay $3-million or more for a row house, the supply of affordable housing will never meet the demand.' I assure her.
She is not persuaded, but she is not me, and happily, she is even an exception. Very few oppose the worthy and elusive goal of housing people at a rate within reach. It's because apart from caring for others, most of us have had a difficult time finding somewhere nice to live for a reasonable outlay.
So, most significantly, in a rapidly gentrifying community, where the demographic is ever increasingly more and more affluent, David Adjaye's new "Sugar Hill Apartments" boast 124 units meant to house low-income and formerly homeless residents. So far, so good! What's not to like?
Robert Wright for The New York Times
Looming 13 stories on the rocky precipice of Coogan’s Bluff, at 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, Adjaye's building is clad in pre-cast gun-metal colored concrete. This material is so dark that it appears black, completely obscuring reliefs of stylized roses, said to relate to historic buildings nearby. Worse, the building looks rather like three gigantic and teetering stairs that might with the slightest breeze, topple away. This is meant to be a nod at the current vogue in architecture for what is billed as a 'playful' and 'provocative' dialogue: between buildings and people. Neo-Baroque, gravity-defying gestures like "Sugar Hill's" dramatically cantilevered overhangs, are intended to impress us as brilliantly unexpected, counter intuitive examples of the designer's daring, as well as his engineer's skill. Instead they strike timid me, as a needlessly nihilist in-joke between people who will, and would never, live in such a place. Offensively, they make me and others afraid and uneasy, merely for the fun of it!
Topping off all these other things, Mr. Adjaye's "Sugar Hill Apartments are disrespectful of the very Sugar Hill Historic District it occupies. It's not a matter of local critics not appreciating modernism, as he contended with slurring defensiveness in a recent New Yorker article. The Tudor Revival tapestry brick and glazed terra cotta commercial garage raised for his building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Completed in the 1920's, it was designed by Springsteen & Goldhammer as an amenity to accommodate area residents with cars as well as Giant's fans attending the Polo Grounds. This was not a building that was meant to call attention to itself. Constructed with all the care and attention to detail exhibited by Sugar Hill apartment houses, it succeeded as contextural architecture that fit in.
Its replacement does the exact opposite. Instead of harmoniously blending in, it is that spoiled child amongst the tolerant elderly, jumping up and down, screaming, "Look at me! Look at me!" It is not a great work. But, depending on the future of design, things could turn out alright: It may well become for St. Nicholas Avenue, what the Guggenheim is to Fifth Avenue, or what the Church of the Crucifixion, to Convent Avenue, an iconoclastic landmark of the future. One gathers that was Mr.Adjaye's egotistical intent. Instead, for now, it is only an overpowering, over-scaled aesthetic affront, utterly unrelated to an otherwise highly intact historic precinct hallowed as an historic district of cohesive architectural distinction and black accomplishment.
Some neighbors say Adjaye's building looks like a prison. An “arty fortress,” was New York Magazine’s phrase.
On October 6, Michael Kimmelman of the Times, by contrast, was full of praise. From the headline, Building Hope and Nurturing Into Housing: Sugar Hill Housing Will Have a School and a Museum, to an effusive close, he championed all the architect maintains he has attempted:
It has been conceived to serve some of the very poorest New Yorkers, who will move into anything but a run-of-the-mill building. Designed by a marquee architect, with no concessions to timid taste, the project aspires to must-see status...measuring its success, now or ever, anything but simple... I like the building’s exterior. Most people I’ve quizzed on the street during a half-dozen visits to the area turn out to like it, too.
The architect is David Adjaye, the gifted British star. Along with getting the commission for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, he has produced expensive private houses with dark, fashionably textured exteriors. “Why is it that this is ‘cool’ for rich people but ‘tough’ for poor people?” he is right to ask, albeit houses and apartment blocks are different in scale.
"NO!!!!" posted Mary Marshall a local resident on Facebook.
It has shortcomings, but "high density housing project" isn't one of them...This design does not fit in with my neighborhood. This neighborhood is not the "poor" neighborhood that the NYT depicts. Yes, poor people live here; but it is also the neighborhood that Caucasians are moving in so fast I can hardly blink. And, it isn't because there are so many vacancies. It's because as apartments become available, landlords raise the rents so high others in the area can't afford them. It's because Columbia University has decided to rent apartments for students. Once that started to happen, landlords simply wouldn't rent to "us JUST folk." Students move in and out as students do. That means those "just" folk in that building who are subject to rent increase, when such increases are approved, will have higher than expected rents and be forced to move. No housing project I know of in NYC has what this one will have or had the millions put into it. No housing project I know had art exhibits going on so that artists from SOHO and international cities could exhibit BEFORE the building was finished. I thought I might like to live there when I first learned of it. As the months passed and I watched its growth, read about it and listened to community objections as well as did my own investigation, I changed my mind. Yes, I'm happy for those who will get an apartment, especially those who have been in shelters and homeless or both. Supposedly a few homeless artist will also live there. We will see. This building does not honor the history of Sugar Hill if that's the ruse under which it was builtThose selected to live there are being selected through lottery. However, in my sleuth style investigation, it appears that even the lottery was selective within the lottery contrary to what several articles written Bout this building indicated. With shelters over flooded and so many people homeless, the lottery should have been just that: a lottery with whomever chosen given the opportunity to say yes or no, whether artist, homeless, in shelter or whatever their circumstances. This site used to be a garage. Whenever there was a Yankee game, you'd better get your car in so that your PAID MONTHLY space wasn't taken. An apartment building may be a better use of the space, as Michael Henry Adams and so many from the community have said and continue to say, it looks like a prison. Even the NYT had to admit one has to get right up on the brick face to see the ROSE pattern. And, I do mean RIGHT UP ON IT. 100 spaces for pre-K is good. Now, did they come from this district alone? Ok, I'll stop I need to get to Harlem more often. I assumed that this was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
In response, Michael Benn, an attorney from downtown and an Adjaye defender wrote:
Quality, functional and affordable housing for those who need it is most important to me. I agree that it should not come at the expense of this neighborhood's cultural/historic integrity. The discussion around aesthetics is obviously important/necessary and should take place, in this case, especially because of the historical significance of the neighborhood. I’m a fan of Adjaye’s work …and don’t necessarily have a problem with a new building having a very different architectural style than its neighbors….. IF IT WORKS. Can be interesting if it engages a conversation between styles that WORKS. Sounds like a lot of locals don’t think it does.
Despite Mr. Kimmel's contention, this seems abundantly true, particularly among Facebook respondents:
"Looks like the sort of thing we'd be taking down, not putting up." said Don Matheson
Tod Roulette asked: Bauhaus--maybe it should be another color? or glass?
While Ms.Rene Gatling observed: They do a lot of this kind of buildings inEurope. Very depressing to see it here.
Onan Delorbe: It looks like the love child of Rikers Island's OBCC, and an aboveground BART Station .
Ellyn Shannon: Yup I thought it was Soviet Union too- before I read. Is the Community Board supporting this?
A.d. Minter, a Communiy Board menber, was the most adamant in his disdain, insisting that Adjaye's new "Sugar Hill Apartments" were but the latest example of the sport of the Illusion of Inclusion of Harlem Residents: This building was to provide a number of units under the NY Affordable Housing Agreement and the 60/40 clause but it also had over 40,000 applications most of which were/are willing to pay TOP DOLLAR to live there. I watched it being built from ground break to completion (took photos) and there were practically NO MINORITIES working on the construction site. When I addressed the issue, the next week the Developers hired a (Black) woman and a young Latino guy to sit doing security and a few day (Black and Latino) laborers holding signs to direct traffic.
If you want to make an issue (which is pretty much after the fact) you need to address your grievance to the following people who signed off on the deal, gave no oversight, no accountability for follow through or construction as well as a hands-off on their continued management of this building:
Charles Rangel
Inez Dicksens**
Robert Jackson**
Bill Perkins
Sharon Johnson-Mitchell : Why doesn't the bastard that design it live there with his family? Wouldn't let's my dog live there, or they can rent it to the exodus of White's coming to HARLEM. OH, THE NEW EUROPEANS.....
Jelena Pasic: I was wondering for a while why is this depresivne thing going Up. i drive by daily while going to NJ to pick up my kids to school. It is just ugly.
J.C. Calderón: You are absolutely right Michael Henry Adams. It once again it reminds us that even with fame and money good architecture is not guaranteed. Far from it.
Jonathan Robinson: This is hideous building is bloodless abstraction made to please Architects with Hollywood egos . Architects want to "F" us in the eye with their version of modernism. I just wish they'd get out of our face
Eliza Simmonds: This is an ugly building. Looks like a prison. Who wants to live in that? Truly sad....
Diane Zoetemelk : Oh Dear..yes this looks like a prison...so let me get this straight,do they envision family happiness living in this..or just house them ...?
Lauren Flanigan : Michael Henry Adams plus someone should look into how long the affordability clause will be in effect. I was a part of a project to buld affordable housing over a church on the upper west side until I learned that the plan was ponly affordable for twenty years and then all the apartments went up to fair market value. It's a little know thing developers do to reap the benefits of HUGE tax breaks and garner public favor unfortunately the "affordable" part usually has an expiration date. Oh yeah - And why do we insist on making lower and middle income people and the homeless live in ugly bunkers? It's super weird.
Indeed the usual plan for Broadway Housing, "Sugar "Hill's" developers, is for units’ income and price restrictions to generally expire after only 15 or 30 years, all the while generating a 10 percent return for the partners. As Broadway Housing's Director Ellen Baxter put it, "permanent affordability is not really accurate. It’s our intention, … but it is legally impossible to write into the documents because that would control the market."
This seems not to overly concern Michael Kimmelman:
Broadway Housing Communities is pushing the envelope, admirably. Mr. Adjaye has squeezed a lot into the building. But subsidized housing always involves trade-offs.
The housing shouldn’t be one of them.
Of course, even convinced that "Sugar Hill " was inappropriate for any historic district, too ungainly and stridently dissimilar to all around it, much as if it were the state of Israel, one was unprepared to oppose it. Greater injustices, a shortage of non-luxury housing and gentrification, would make one heartless to oppose almost any relief.
Neither difficulty, persecution or hardship, always engender empathy. Those who have suffered, yet meet out suffering, like those who profess that their hurt or good works makes them superior, can be insufferable. David Adjaye is unquestionably a darling of the intellectual elite. So to community residents who suggested that his building might be more acceptable in a more sympathetic color, Mr. Adjaye contended that such a compromise of his integrity, would be unconscionable.
Ellen Baxter is a quite different matter. Broadway Housing is a not-for-profit developer with an exceptional record. Yet Broadway Housing Communities' founder and executive director, having driven away her able and restraining African American assistant, is more reckless than ever. Presiding over what has evolved into an all-but-exclusively white-run organization, her suggestion that anything she might do, is both imperative and fair, as she works so hard and does so much, to help the poor, ignorant, down-trodden Coloured folks, has become more arrogantly emphatic than ever.
Indicative of Ms. Baxter's being a victim of "starcatecture', was her emphasis of seeking out "fresh perspectives" by an emerging architect to create an "icon". Such 'branding' she deemed, "Should be celebrated, and the result should be evaluated in the context of the financial and regulatory constraints BHC faced in developing the building."
Wonderfully light-filled, Adjaye's interiors are enlivened by both square and rectangular windows. Unfortunately, his small square casements open only a fraction, inhibiting cross ventilation or escape in case of fire
So lame a rational was why Broadway Housing choose Adjaye Associates, a prestige firm totally inexperienced in multifamily housing, but renowned for cool urban chic, to design its first ground-up project. Just what might such a building contribute, architecturally, to how affordable housing is furthered in Harlem?
As Mr. Benn suggests, the heart of the troubles pitting housing, jobs, a museum and pre-school against Harlem's heritage, are politicians. Most view culture as expendable while people who lived here making an abandoned neighborhood viable, vanish. It comes as no surprise then to learn that while three quarters of Greenwich Village is protected by landmarking and on the upper-West side half of the buildings are official landmarks, in Harlem, only five percent are protected.
It was hardly a mistake when this arresting photograph was selected for the cover of Harlem Lost and Found all those years ago. Paul Rocheleau's image depicts the very heart of Sugar Hill, where aristocracy have always lived. From far below this lofty elevation, whether Irish immigrants, or African American participants in the 'Great Migration', many have gazed upward with wistful admiration, imagining that here, in fine houses, life must be sweetly trouble-free. This was supposed to be so, because folks who lived on the hill, had plenty of 'doe, ray, me', the sweetness that makes the world go around.
Constant with narratives of the American Dream, are unlikely luck, unexpected misfortune and outstanding outcomes, Harlem's Sugar Hill has always been a destination of aspiration, if in doubt, just take a listen to Billy Strayhorne's and Duke Ellington's Take the A-Train.
The Westminster, a turreted bastion-like apartment marked the entrance to the fashionable section of St. Nicholas Avenue at West 145th Street. Designed by Theodore E. Thompson and completed in 1893, it was ajoined by a contemporary 5 house row to the north, on St. Niholas Avenue and backed by a group of 10 houses on Edgecombe Avenue. In 1915, on Edgecombe, Judge and Mrs. John P. Cohalan resided at number 706. At 263 lived Mr. and Mrs. Maximillian D. Berlitz of the Berlitz School of Languages fame .
In 1956 all these buildings gave way to the Bowery Savings Bank Apartments, a 13-storey structure designed by York & Sawyer. Long home to song stylist Miss Dinah Washington and home for a short span for singer Sarah Vaghan, according to the New York Times, the Bowery Building was Harlem's first "unsubsidised housing since 1938 with the first new bank here in fotyy-eight years..."
Stamped sheet metal cornices and parapets were originally painted stone-color to be indistinguishable from masonry. Today frequently black or green, they detract from rather than enhance architectural compositions.
The Albertina, from 1896, a drugstore and flats has lost its impressive stamped tin parapet. To the north stands Schwartz & Gross' neo-Georgian Harvard Court built in 1906.
1909: Retained by mason-builder Hugh Reynolds, in 1891, architects Thayer & Robinson designed a row of five houses, numbers 713 to 721 at the southwest corner of 146th Street. Here they devised a prominent corner tower like no other ever built. Buff-colored brick trimmed with agitated courses of red brick, they almost reach an A-B-A-B-A symmetry, until the corner house, which is, as historian Christopher Gray describes it, " a hot-air balloon of masonry."
First adapted into the exclusive Heights Club, by 1897, and converted within two years into the respected Barnard School for Boys by William Livingston Hazen, as Thaddeus Wilkerson's photograph from 1909 shows, number 721 apparently never did have a conical, or any other conventional kind of roof. From about 1920 through 1964 it was occupied by one of the area's first speakeasies, the Silver Dollar Cafe.
Ca. 1885: Koch's New Mount St. Vincents Hotel, originally Dr. Samuel Bradhurst estate called Pinehurst.
Ca, 1887: Rudimentary stables at Koch's New Mount St. Vincents Hotel are indicative of its role as a roadhouse catering to sports who raced their Thoroughbred steeds from Central Park along St. Nicholas Avenue.
West of Pinehurst, around 1842, Mary Elizabeth Bradhurst Field and her husband Hickson Field built this elegant villa where Broadway and 150th Street would one day cross
Ca. 1845: Elizabeth Bradhurst Field and her husband Hickson Field, Esq.
The New York Tennis Club courts behind Theodore Minot Clark's remarkable houses at 727-731 St. Nicholas Avenue.
Built for merchant Nathan Hobart’s occupancy, the impressive four-story northwest corner house was demolished by 1906, to be replaced by 723-727 St. Nicholas Avenue, a six-story Colonial Revival style apartment building, designed by Lorenz F. J. Weiher. Before it was unceremoniously swept away, the grand former 729 St. Nicholas Avenue was not after all ever inhabited by Mr. and Mrs. Hobart their two sons and four daughters. Instead, they lived next door, at 731, while their intended residence, boasting one of only two elevators private Harlem house, became a private club. First it served as the New York Tennis Club, and then as the elegant Heights Club.
Late in the 1890's the astonishing Hobart houses on St. Nicholas Avenue became even more extraordinary with the addition of a sensuously graceful new bronze railed stoop at number 331.
Frederick P. Dinkelberg's houses with iron s-scrolled bracketed parapets at numbers 401-409 West 147th Street.
Paul Franklyn Higgs' Italian Renaissance style for wealthy William Haigh built in 1890 at 412 West 147th Street.
Completed in 1893, architect Arthur Bates Jennings' seven-house row including numbers 718-730 St. Nicholas Avenue combine all of the elaboration and swager he habitualy displayed on the fifty-foot frontages of tycoon's mansions, on these twenty-foot houses built on speculation.
1909: St. Nicholas Avenue and Place looking north from West 148th Street showing Frederick P. Dinkelberg's numbers 757-775 St. Nicholas Avenue from 1896. The round tower at the center of Thaddeus Wilkerson's photograph anounces houses designed by Frank Wennemer, including 819-814 St. Nicholas Avenue and 11-19 St. Nicholas Place. The three houses on the east side of St.Nicholas Avenue are part of Paul Higgs' row comprising numbers 760-766 from 1895. Further north stands John P. Leo's dormered Purling Apartments at 768-770 from 1902 and Henri Fouchaux's Arundel Court at 772-778 from 1905.
Brick and brownstone tenements by W. H. Boylan from 1899, 783-789 were the most humble type of housing provided in this swell neighborhood. Yet 789 is significant as the home of Norman Rockwell and his family, from 1900 through 1902.
The engaged tower and bow window of Clarance True's 842 and 844 St. Nicholas Avenue, from 1894, correspond to the gifted designer's singular group of eight individualy treated speculative houses on St. Nicholas Place. Skillfully they reflect the ensemble to the north, built the same year from designs by John C. Bunre. More conventional, this swelled front brownstone group cost $25,000 each. African American engineer Leroy Frederick Florant, who studied at Howard and Columbia Universities, lived at 848 while working on the Manhattan Project from 1944-1946.
Clarance True's 842 and 844 St. Nicholas Avenue.
Frederick P. Dinkelberg's rythmic row, streching from 148th to 149th Streets, 757-775 St. Nicolas Avenue, unified by robust bowed fronts is subtly differentiated through contrasted materials and finely crafted detailing, including stone carving by Nugent & Doxey. The ten imposing five storey houses were built by local developer William Broadbelt, who like the family of Norman Rockwell was a parishioner of St. Luke'sEpiscopal Church where he led the vestry and Norman sang in the boy choir.
Splendidly detailed with bronze capitaled granite Ionic columns, 400 West 149th Street was home from the late 1920's onward, to Caribbean native and dentist, Dr. Charles Ford. A founder of the United Mutual Life Insurance Co. Ford became a wealthy property owner.
A remarkable entrepreneurial success Rose Morgan, though lesbian, married boxing great Joe Louis. Early in the 1940's she opened Rose Meta's House of Beauty, a pioneering day-spa-beauty salon catering to black women, on three floors of 401 West 148th Street, which was also known as 757 St. Nicholas Avenue. Late in the 1940's it caused a scandal when Miss Morgan was discoverd with singer Marion Bruce here in a situation of compromising intimatey
In 1943, famed stride pianist Charles Luckeyth Roberts, seen above, hat in hand, seated next to Willie 'The Lion' Smith, acquired number 753 St. Nicholas Avenue which had earlier been the Moonlight Bar and Grill. He opperated a nightclub here until 1947, before moving on to the ground floor of 773, which from 1935 to 1940 had served as the Poosenpahtuck Night Club. Robert's "Lucky's Renddezvous" was a gay-friendly club with a stellar clientelle. Clifton Webb, Lena Hornr, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorne and Billie Holliday all came here. One attraction was the waiters, classically trained artist who sang arias and ballads while delivering drinks. Evolving into the Pink Angel and the St. Nicks Pub, Harlem's oldest continuous jazz venue only recently closed.
Looking south at the towered row houses designed by Frank Wennemer, including 819-814 St. Nicholas Avenue and 11-19 St. Nicholas Place and W. H. Boylan's tenements from 1899, including 783 -789 St. Nicholas Avenue Number 789 is significant as the home of Norman Rockwell and his family, from 1900 through 1902.
Neville & Bagge's 828-834 St. Nicholas Avenue, also known as 31-37 St. Nicholas Place, were built in 1896. Written late in life, in his memoir Norman Rockwell recalls his family living here with his coal dealer grand father John William Rockwell from 1902 to 1903.
Number 464 St. Nicholas Avenue extends all the way through the blook to Edgecombe Avenue, incoperating numbers 313-317. Completed in 1901 the St. Nicholas Court Apartments were designed by prolific Henri Fouchaux boasting the areas most flamboyant cornice above an Ionic colonnade. Origionally this sheet metal projection would have been painted to match this stonwork. The entire complex cost $230,000. Durring the 1920's St. Nicholas Court was home to writer Arna Bontemps.
Henri Fouchaux's Arundel Court at 772-778 St. Nicholas Avenue, from 1905, by masking the newly mandated light-court with an arch and recessing fire escapes in subordinate archways, assumes a far more monumental presence than it might have otherwise. Operatic impresario Oscar Hammerstein was an early resident.
Featuring a canted square corner tower, 881-887 St. Nicholas Avenue and 411-425 West 154th Street, were designed as rental houses by James Stroud for retired City Comptroller 'Honest John' Kelly. Completed in 1885, this group with fanciful porches and roof tops was among the most semi-suburban in the area. By 1920, the towered corner house was replaced by a restrained neo-Classical six-storey brick apartment house by Rosario Candella, who was to gain fame devising luxury housing for the rich quite unlike this modest structure.
Community Hospital at 8 St. Nicholas Place.
Built originally as two imposing residences for prosperous merchants, the picturesque Queen Anne style John W. Fink house, on the left, started as number 8. Jacob P. Baiter’s residence next door, on the right, was number 6. Designed by Richard S. Rosenstock, the Fink house was completed in 1885. Despite an abundance of vacant lots still available in 1892 when Baiter commisioned Theodore G. Stein to design his house, it was optomistacally given the form of a conventional townhouse. A yeast manufacturer, Baiter had an elevator, employed eight live-in servants and had patronized the Linspar Decorating Company. In his great novel The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington's anti-hero George A. Minafer puzzles over the quandary that faced many as to the proper way to build in the absence of zoning codes,
"Well, for instance, that house----well, it was built like a townhouse. It was like a housemeant for a street in the city, What kind of a house was that for people of any taste to build out here in the country?"
Minifer's love interest trys to explain how her father and others feel that soon houses being built in the city towards this very allotment, will merge it with the teaming metropolis only further confuse him. On St. Nicholas Place, the two magnate's houses were joined together in 1912, by Dr. Henry Lloyd as a private clinic. By 1927 Dr. Lloyd's Sanitorium was re-established as the interracial Peoples Hospital. Langston Hughes’ mother was a paitent here, as was local photographer Thaddeus Wilkerson, who died at People's Hospital in 1943.
1890: St. Nicholas Place.
The picturesque Queen Anne style John W. Fink house built in 1885 to designs by Richard S. Rosenstock incoperates a terra-cotta griffin on the crest of the roof's jerkin headed gable.
1885: The John W. Fink house from Edgecombe Avenue where stacked slate slabs await being set as sidewalk pavements.
The circus showman famed as James A. Bailey lived here in a magnificent house he built in 1888.
he is said to have chosen what by now was being called Washington Heights because St. Nicholas Avenue was a traditional route for racing and due to the proximity of the newly projected ‘speedway’, a public highway built by taxpayers along the Harlem River, given over as a place where the elite could drag race .
Ca. 1903: The Harlem River Speedway
1909: St. Nicholas Place's double row of vaulting elms.
Ca. 1895: Dr. J. Gardener Smith parked in his sleigh outside 10 St. Nicholas Place.
An example of how strong ties linked Harlem’s German-speaking residents, Nicholas C. and Agnes Benziger’s house at 345 Edgecombe Avenue was devised in 1890-91, by William Schickel. A Swiss native, Mr. Benziger’s family supplied missals, candles, and other ecclesiastical goods for Roman Catholic Churches. All-but astylar externally, replete with stained glass portraits of their children and Swiss-Gothic style furniture, the dining room was also custom designed by Schickel. From around 1914-1940, the Benziger house functioned as the psychiatric ward of Dr. Lloyd's Sanatorium. During the 1940's it was a daycare center attended by Sylvia Waters. The view from St. Nicholas Place illustrates why residents of the Harlem Valley long imagined that people on 'the hill' lived the 'sweet life'.
Like the Disney Castle, integrating iconic elements of the Chateauesque style with aspects of the Romanesque, constructed between 1886-1888, according to plans drawn by architect Samuel Burrage Reed, showman James A. Bailey’s stone mansion occupied five building lots and cost $80,000.
Ca. 1888: Number 10 St. Nicholas Place from West 150th Street.
Ca. 1890: Mrs. James Anthony Bailey on her front porch at 10 St. Nicholas Place.
A stylized sunrise.
In the tower a ship's lantern is suspended from a sunburst
Ca. 1900
2000: Marguerite Marshall and Warren Blake
As a 16-year-old, Marguerite Marshall, who loved the movies, inexplicably, dreamed of helping make people beautiful. Her talented mother danced at the Cotton Club, but she wanted to become a plastic surgeon. Imagine a woman, an African-American woman, becoming a plastic surgeon in the late 1930s!
Marge also used to walk past the extraordinary, 30-room limestone house at 10 St. Nicholas Place, at the corner of 150th Street, built by circus showman James Anthony Bailey. With her Wadleigh High School friends, Nellie and Edith, she'd dream about what it would be like to live there. One day, she impulsively rang the bell and asked the owner, Dr. Franz Koempel, and his wife Bertha, if she could have the right of first refusal if the house was ever sold. Koempel, the third person to own the house, was famous internationally as a pioneering X-ray specialist. A founder of the Steuben Society, he and his wife spent each summer at their villa in Bavaria.
Several years later a ''For Sale'' sign appeared on the Koempel's lawn, and Marge rang the bell again, reminding the owner of her promise. The widowed Bertha Koempel happily conceded that an understanding existed, but she insisted that any acquisition must also include two shingled houses north of hers, which had been acquired years earlier to protect the house's light and air. The asking price was $86,000, just $6,000 more than number 10 had cost to erect in 1888. It was an astonishing amount for most blacks of the period.
Marge, her husband Warren, an early black police officer, and her parents, pooled their resources. ''There was a lot of scraping around and getting it together, but I got the house,'' she later recalled.
Marguerite Marshall Blake lived there from 1951 until 2007, operating a funeral home on the ground floor since 1955.
This was how one of New York's most extraordinary landmarks was saved from total destruction. Subsequently the Blakes were inundated by offers to buy their house, inevitably from whites. Warren felt that these prospective buyers were often motivated, at least in part, by a feeling that their house was "too good, too special for blacks to own."
This magnificent structure, then, is his and Marge's enduring monument. Thanks to them, generations not yet born will be able to enjoy this gift from our past to the future, and the true hero of this story, of course, is the beautiful, kind and ingenious lady, Marguerite Marshall Blake. All of us who knew her were blessed, and, through her foresight, she blesses everyone, forever!
The view from Sugar Hill.
Affordability and insight were what Jie and Martin Spollen brought to the table acquiring number 10. Placing their $1,500,000 bid, they won an ill-treated, but they well realized, salvageable treasure, one unable to be replicated at any cost, but capable with careful planing of restoration. With painstaking devotion they are investing a fortune in time and money to restore what was with the utmost authentic fidelity.
A pair of attached houses, designed to be read as a single imposing villa, number 14 and 16 St. Nicholas Place, built between 1883-83, were designed by William Milne Grinnell
Costing $10,000 each they were erected for developer James Montieth who promptly died. Number 14 was acquired in 1893 by educator and publisher A. Thomas Alexander. For many years number 16 was occupied by spinster Emmeline Reiner, a woman of independent means with property worth $250,000
Starting in 1938, with her husband, educator James Egbert Allen, Dr. Alma Mary Haskins, who was one of only two woman, and the only African-American woman, practicing podiatry in New York City in the mid-twentieth century, lived at number 16. A native of Greenwood, South Carolina, James Allen, who had received degrees from Smith University, City College, and New York University taught in New York City public schools and was a tireless advocate for establishing Black History Week to celebrate African American attainment.
Part of the Koempel estate bought by Marguerite Marshall Blake in 1950, today both houses at 14 and 16 St. Nicholas Place again have a single owner. Much as the deterioration of number 10 helped make it affordable, following a widespread fire at number 14, through the heroic efforts of local historian Lana Turner, longtime resident Francis Redhead was able to affordably purchase 14 and 16 together. It’s no exaggeration to say Mr. Redhead's ongoing restoration efforts have been as extensive and admirable as the Spollen’s.
The Rev. Dr. Maunsell van Rensselaer and Maunsell van Rensselaer , Jr., residences, numbers 22-24 St. Nicholas Place.
Ca. 1895: the Rev. Dr. Maunsell van Rensselaer.
The Rev. Dr. Maunsell van Rensselaer and Maunsell van Rensselaer , Jr., residences, numbers 22-24 St. Nicholas Place. Before their untimely demolition in 1906 , the houses served for six years as a private girls school
Number 401 West 153rd Street was built in the mid 1880's for Frederick Nelson Dubois, principle of a leading wholesale plumbing supplier. The last free-standing private house to survive on the north end of St. Nicholas Place, it was demolished in 1930 to make way for the neo-Gothic style apartment house designed by architect Horace Ginsberg at 66-74 St. Nicholas Place. The notable author, poet, and writer, Langston Hughes would lease a studio apartment hide-away here from 1937 to 1941.
Built in 1894, Clarence True’s houses at 43-57 St. Nicholas Place and 842- 844 St. Nicholas Avenue, are exemplary of the American basement plan, where one enters near the ground level. In place of a straight flight inside to upper floors, a U-shaped stair is placed in the center of the building. This expedient allowed reception rooms, at the front and the back, to extend the full width of the house. Referencing Flemish and Northern European Renaissance sources, with stepped gables, light colored materials and large round corner bays, in plan as well as design these houses are among the most sophisticated ever produced in 19th-century Harlem.
1909: When the photograph immediately above was made Paul Cadmus and his sister Fidelma,who would latter marry her brother’s onetime lover, art impresario and patron Lincoln Kirstein, had escaped a hateful tenement on Amsterdam Avenue at 103 Street, for the comforts of 849 St. Nicholas Avenue. Designed by Janes & Leo, number 849 with 853 had been completed in 1898. Paired windows below pediments at the top storey give the domestic illusion of dormers in a mansard roof.
An important Sugar Hill watering hole, eating place and place of assignation for over 50 years, Troger's Hotel at 92 St. Nicholas Place, was built on land leased from some of the City's wealthiest real estate operators, Robert and Ogden Goelet. The developers, who spent just seventy-five hundred dollars building this resort, were Henry and Frederick Toger, proprietors of Troger's Brothers Liquors on Columbus Avenue. The success of their operation was assured by convenient proximity to both the Polo Grounds' grandstand and the Harlem Speedway. Many a discriminating sportsman who patronized both facilities could often be found taking refreshment here following a game or race. There were even a limited number of private rooms for dinning and sleeping for more intimate meetings.
Continuing under white management a full decade after the environs had become New York's elite African American neighborhood, in the 1930's Troger's became one of two branches of Bowman's Cafe and Grill. Bowman's, in 1958, in turn gave way to the Bankers' Lounge, featuring jazz trios and organ soloist like Gloria Bell or Kenny Burrell's Trio, well into the mid-1960's.
George Martin Huss’ Hooper Memorial Fountain.
A one-time director of the Iron Steamboat Company, John Hooper also served as president of the Colwell Lead Company and the North River Savings Bank, When Hooper died in 1889, he willed the cities of Brooklyn and New York $10,000 to construct two fountains “whereat man and beast can drink.”
Lassoed by young vandals in the 1981, the toppled column was broken in half. Following designation of the 155th Street Viaduct, so responsible for Sugar Hill development in the late 1890's and early 1900's, the bridge and salvaged fountain elements, were carefully restored.
By what accident did the Georgian-revival style Colonial Parkway Apartments at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, familiarly known as ‘409', come to be Sugar Hill’s most sought after address? Designed by the architectural firm Schwartz & Gross, and built for the Candler Holding Co. in 1917, it didn’t open to African-Americans until the late 1920’s. Moderately elegant, home to Giants’ great Miller Huggins, it attracted numerous outstanding black leaders, both because it had previously barred them and because it was the tallest, most elevated building open to blacks. W.E.B Dubois, Walter White, William Stanley Braithwaite, Aaron Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, Jimmie Lunceford, Mercer Ellington, Billie Strayhorne, Jules Bledsoe, Roy Wilkins and journalist Marvel Cook all lived here. It was to Harlem of yesteryear what the Lenox Terrace is today. But in time, as affluent African Americans came to have more options to establish 'suburban Sugar Hills' at places like New Rochelle, Addisleigh Park and Patterson, Sugar Hill declined.
Subject to catastrophic losses in terms of neglect and the careless destruction of an extraordinary built environment, Sugar Hill, slow to be rediscovered and landmarked, ravaged by epidemics of drug abuse and political indifference, endures. Nonetheless, even poised for reinvestment and metamorphosis, terrible, stupid, needless threats persist.
Ellen Baxter, Broadway Housing Communities founder and executive director, calls her new project that destroyed a national landmark, but provides 124 units of affordable housing and a children's museum at 155th Street and Street Nicholas Avenue, "a remarkable development on Sugar Hill," Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the $80.2 million asymmetrical tower designed by British architect David Adjaye offers not only necessary affordable housing but also a, "rich cultural resource that will build on the grand tradition of arts in Sugar Hill."
One cannot possibly argue with either assessment. Certainly in the face of gentrification, more and better affordable housing is needed than ever before. Only, why when presented with some benefit, is Harlem always made to sacrifice some landmark or otherwise to relenquish our cultural legacy? Why is a building so needed that some might happily see it made twice as high, colored black, made to appear unstable and designed in every way to detract from the surrounding city, state and federally designated historic district, rather than imagined in a way that might compliment it? Imposition, dismissal, condescension, and insistence that every choice, be a ‘Sophie’s choice’, or no choice at all, these are all today’s subtler, but no less dire forms of racist, paternalistic, elitism.
It was a handsome subject, photographed for Geoffrey Holder's 1986 book ,"Adam", intimating intimacy, who first suggested to me that the artistic giant might be gay
Geoffrey Lamont Holder, 1930-2014
Circa 1954: Kindred spirits, handsome and highly talented brothers, Geoffrey and Boscoe Holder. Boscoe had been christened Arthur Aldwyn Holder
A figure study painted by Boscoe Holder.
Like John Singer Sargent, Boscoe Holder painted a large number of dynamic male nudes, boasting a deft spontaneity and fluid sensuality. Not exhibited during his lifetime, apparently, they were painted purely for the artist's pleasure.
"I met Boscoe at a party in Port-of-Spain." said a man who encountered Geoffrey Holder's then still charmingly spry older-artist-dancer brother in 1990. "Afterwards, he invited me to his home for drinks, where I met his wife as well. Besides having some of his paintings on display, his house, in an older, mixed-income section of the city, struck me as a treasure trove of memorabilia."
"Boscoe, was pretty openly bisexual. If you met him, you would assume he was gay. We had lunch a few days later, at which he offered to procure for me as a favor whatever I wished in the way of a male Trinidadian...His attitude towards gayness was what I would call “old school”: It was a recreation, a pleasure, but the idea of a committed gay couple seemed an absurdity to him..."
One hardly overlooks the long and productive marriage, the evident enduring love and commitment of Geoffrey Holder and Carmen de Lavallade, the beautiful and gifted dancer and choreographer, or their son Leo Holder. But it is this attitude and taste, for casual, recreational homosexual activity, that I believe Geoffrey Holder shared in common with his older brother and many others
Geoffrey and Carmen Holder
Friday Geoffrey Lamont Holder was laid to rest. Some might imagine that raising the question of his sexuality lacks respect and is immaterial to his greatness. But whatever he was, and all that he was, made him the person we so esteem. To hope to alter any part of his makeup is as futile as attempting to hold back the tide at full moon. Still many people, particularly, of a certain age, contend sexuality is of little consequence today. "Gays march nearly naked on parade!", they say, and "marriage equality is well on its way to become the law of the land."
Perhaps. Two years ago a great pal and his wife of 20 years divorced. Most of his friendships, including our friendship, precluded his revealing the cause of his hurt and loss. But he did confide in his cousin, who revealed what had happened to my friend's mother. She told me.
"I'm not happy," my shocked friend's wife had informed him, out of the blue, apropos of nothing, one night following a delicious dinner. "I want a divorce..." she continued. "But, how long? How long have you felt this way?" my friend pleaded. "For about the past 18 years," his wife replied. "But, that's most of the time we've been together!" my friend answered, starting to weep.
Only once they sold their green shingled house in Berkeley, after my friend moved back to Harlem, did he learn that his ex was a lesbian, who married her girlfriend soon after their breakup.
As for Mr. Holder, whatever he was: Gay, straight, bisexual, larger than life, extraordinary, difficult, a joy; unhappy, he was not!
In his final decade, by which time he was a multi-millionaire, without a trace of irony or even a hint that he recognized how ridiculous his denial might appear to many, my friend Bobby Short, who nearly married, more than once, commented
"I have a living to make! I can't afford to march in the Gay-Pride Parade."
None the less, undoubtedly in part motivated from fear of such changes as much as from malice, on Malcolm X Boulevard, in the heart of Harlem, a church displays an enormous sign as hateful as any message ever offered by the KKK. Surmounted by a lighted cross, it's changed periodically, but routinely denounces President Obama and incites, supposedly Biblical based, violence towards "homos." "Jesus would stone homos..." is one example but, "Obama has released the homo demon on the black man, look out black woman. A white homo may take your man.", is my favorite. Reminiscent of sermons I have listened to exasperated, calling out the "sin" of a "man lying with a man" while giving a pass to far, far more pervasive heterosexual "fornicators", it prompted me, well knowing my community, to think, 'what about white women?'
'DL', down low, undercover same sex activity is, all the same, a constant of black life. With the advent of the internet indeed, all manner of unconventional sexual expression has found an outlet to flourish. Transgendered, Islan Nettles, just 21, was befriended by Paris Wilson on Facebook. Some say they started a relationship, that Wilson had reason to be fully aware of Nettles' status. But it's alleged, that gathered with his friends, across the street from PS A6, a public housing police station on Frederick Douglas Boulevard near West 147th Street, things were different. Confidently, he made a pass at his Facebook friend. Once one of his crew announced Islan was a "faggot", transgendered, Paris Wilson, to save face some say, struck her forcefully. Once, and then again, he continued beating after she had fallen to the ground, leaving Islan unconscious, with one eye swollen shut and her delicate face streaming with rivulets of blood. Rushed to Harlem Hospital, falling into a coma, Islan died the following week.
Initially charged with misdemeanor assault, when another man came forward to say he was the culprit, too drunk to remember what exactly had happened, college bound Wilson was let go. Prosecutors declining thus far, to bring either man before a grand jury, the sordid case remains open.
Islan Nettles, fatally attacked by an embarrassed suitor, August 16, 2013
Thinking of innumerable luminaries over the centuries, Oscar Wilde, Stanford White, Adrian, Carry Grant, Patrick Dennis, Countee Cullen, Lorraine Hasberry, Leonard Bernstein, Audre Lorde, David Hicks, Samuel Delany, Carter Burden, Nick Ashford, John Travolta, and many more, youth today, unencumbered by yesterday's shame and stigma, might ponder, 'Why on earth would someone gay pretend they were not gay, even going to the great lengths of marrying someone straight and having their children?' Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston's singular saga's often give rise to this dogged conundrum. Gore Vidal said it might be due to how once men near 50, troubled thoughts of reproducing oneself become most acute.
Differing doctrines aside, almost everywhere around the globe, gays are despised! Demeaning women and hating gays seems to be something all religions can agree on. However weird or odd or scary Michael Jackson became, irrespective of disfiguring mutilations and seemingly aberrant behavior, by the ruse of maintaining he was straight, Michael continued to be loved. Conversely, the contempt of gays is so potent that questioning if someone regarded as heterosexual, might instead to have been gay, is considered by some a libelous condemnation, an unforgivable slur.
However, question one must, the lives of those suspected of seeking to 'pass' undetected. Believing black is beautiful, and gay is good, there is neither judgement nor denigration intended in this exploration: merely a reclamation by which heroes are acclaimed, and gays are redeemed.
With the gay identity of Langston Hughes and George Washington Carver down-played, a concurrent effort to retroactively "straighten out" august gay icons of longstanding, is gaining intensity.
Langston Hughes
George Washington Carver
Experiences in the military and prison show conclusively, that sexual relations between men do not inherently 'betray' a gay identity. They do however show something more valuable, the humanity of those who are LGBT. We posses no malevolent ability, to either diminish or harm heterosexuals, not to any greater degree than straight women or men at least. This is why same-sex exploits enjoyed by colossal personalities like Josephine Baker, Malcolm X, Chester Himes, Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Pottier are so illuminating. Nowadays though, even the bold James Baldwin's sexuality is often obscured, by those out to manufacture a more palatable type of hero.
The inducement of a family fortune helped to influence many white gays like Carl Van Vechten, Harold Vanderbilt, and Cole Porter to 'settle down'.
But apart from ambiguous beauty-products heiress, A'Lelia Walker, who married three times and adopted a teen-age daughter, but lived longest with a paid female companion in a one-bedroom apartment, such considerations seldom applied to African Americans. In some ways one might explain Harlem poet Countee Cullen's first wedding to Yolande DuBois on Easter Monday in 1928, as the outcome of
the extravagant hopes of his father-in-law and certain other blacks, for the formation of an exemplary dynasty of exalted intellectual accomplishment.
Given her own easy-going personality, as incurious as that of many other young people, it's fairly certain that this was not the objective of his bride. Despite any outsized ambition of William Edward Burkhart DuBois, who edited TheCrisis Magazine of America's foremost civil rights organization, the NAACP, his daughter had merely been interested in romantically 'falling in love' with someone who looked nice, and who was a good dancer.
That was why initially, she'd been more encouraging toward his friend, who would serve as Cullen's best man, Harold Jackman. Widely deemed 'Harlem's handsomest bachelor,' though flattered and amused by Miss DuBois' crush, Jackman was uninterested. This is what made Harlem's 'poet laureate' suddenly so much more appealing.
Until her death in 1917, Cullen had lived with his grandmother, Amanda Porter in Louisville, Kentucky. He then moved with the Reverend Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Asbury Cullen, into the parsonage of Harlem's Salem United Methodist Episcopal Church, and soon adopted their name.
Led to their pews on April 9th by ushers, including Langston Hughes, who almost to a man were exclusively gay --- how the fashionable congregation had whispered, one to the other--- "What do you think, does she know?" Completely discounting the couple's week-end wedding trip, when Cullen embarked days later with his father and handsome Harold for Paris on his Guggenheim fellowship, everyone, including Yolande, had thought the worst--- that this was their honeymoon. But they, Harold and Countee, were only friends. Divorced in record time, when he remarried ten years later, in 1940, Countee was more careful to select a more 'suitable' helpmate. Both Ida Mae Robeson Cullen's brother and her first husband were gay, and hence she had to 'know the score.'
"Lithe, handsome, fun and charismatic, sexually, Jimmie was the most responsive lover I ever had! "When aspiring architect Philip Johnson and cabaret song-stylist Jimmie Daniels conducted assignations in the mid-1930's, they occurred most often in a large Harlem apartment, occupied by a black couple and the wife's white lesbian lover. Their apartment in the building at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street was a cooperative unit owned by distinguished actress Edna Thomas,
immortalized by her interpretation of Lady Macbeth in Orson Wells' stage debut in 1934. Lloyd Thomas, her husband, like his wife had started out working for legendary black-beauty-products millionaire, Madame C. J. Walker.
Olivia Wyndham Spencer, Mrs. Thomas' girlfriend, a recovered cocaine addict, was a member of one of England's most distinguished families. Mrs. Howland Spencer's husband made a career of marrying rich women and was also gay. Only he miscalculated in choosing Olivia Wyndham, a great-great-granddaughter of the last Earl of Egremont. Related to Britain's wealthiest aristocrats, she was herself poor, by New York society standards at least. And she too had blundered, imagining Spencer to be much more affluent as well, a trouble-free 'beard,' able to offer both security and propriety.
Jimmie Daniels and Wallace Thurman shared a room as boarders at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street, in a cooperative unit owned by Edna and Lloyd Thomas. Edna Thomas' white lesbian lover, English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham, who also lived here, is seen with in the picture above, with Edna, at the center. Jimmie is on the far left, while Lloyd sits on the right, with 'It Girl' Blanche Dunn on his lap.
The life-long lesbian lovers were introduced at one of the phenomenal parties of heiress A'Lelia Walker,
by Edna's husband, Lloyd Thomas. Olivia immediately expressed her pronounced attraction and in un-uncertain terms. Taken aback momentarily, Edna's reaction was an aloof iciness. But, calling to apologize, asking if she might come over to say goodbye, Olivia was not rebuffed a second time. No sooner had Edna related that even her, "initial response had not been as indifferent as I'd pretended," than Olivia had aggressively pounced and ravaged her! Married to a man for the third time, Edna confessed how never before that day had she ever experienced an orgasm.
Married to distinguished black research scientist Elmer S. Imes, who taught at Fisk University, novelist Nella Larsen, was a member of the 'sisterhood' headed by Thomas and Wyndham that centered around intimate weekends parties at Minedo Farm, their country place in Connecticut. Winning the Harmon Foundation's bronze medal in 1929, a few years later, accused of plagiarism, Larson was disgraced and abruptly cut ties to all her former friends including Wyndham, Thomas and the Van Vechtens. Divorced, alone and working as a nurse in obscurity, this writer whose work explored the confused social, sexual and racial boundaries of 1920's Homo-Harlem, died
As for Philip Johnson and Jimmie Daniels, whom the architect later termed "the first Mrs. Johnson", gradually they too drifted apart. Johnson maintained, that when they parted, "I was sadder than I'd thought I might be," and that the passionate youth Jimmie had, "probably left me for someone who was better in bed..."
Johnson's inability to protect his black boyfriend from the indignity of fancy restaurants failing to provide service on account Jimmie's color and his admitted failure to consult, consider, or always include him at parties and on trips, seems a more logical reason for their breakup. Replete with a very rich and encouraging lesbian wife, the acclaimed poet, 'Brynher' [nee Winifred Ellerman] Daniels was more fortunate in his choice of his next long-term lover, Kenneth Macpherson, the Scottish poet.
After the Harlem Renaissance, wayward artist and writer, Richard Bruce Nugent , photographed in the 1950s with his wife Grace, took the precaution to marry, so someone could take care of him
Born in Grants Town in 1902, Paul Meeres, like many Bahamians came to the U.S. as a farm wotker. Without formal training, he developed a smooth dancing style that put him on the international entertainment stage. Strikingly handsome, nicknamed "The Brown Valentino," he married Thelma Dorsetta, an immigrant from Jamaica, who became his dance partner. Billed as "Meeres & Meeres", the 'the Negro Astairs', they had a son and daughter, but divorced in 1930. In the 1940's he opened Chez Paul Meeres, a combined theatre and nightclub in Nassau. Beautiful Paul Meeres, Jr., who also became an entertainer, was a gay as his father
In black America, in 1955, nothing was official until it was announced in "Jet Magazine". Attitudes have also changed since then. Today few patrons could be characterized as "ofay" without incident
"I've been happily married, to Carmen, for a thousand years. We have a son. What do you mean by asking me, if I, am gay?", replied Geoffrey Lamont Holder the first time I asked him directly. Earlier queries had been more oblique, more circumspect: 'There is a nude photograph of you in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale, by Carl Van Vechten.' "You must mean my brother, Bosco?", he'd said. 'No, it's you...I'm amazed at how many people involved in Harlem's artistic past were gay!'
What a pity that Geoffrey Holder's completely nude photographs at Yale are no longer available on-line
"What? How do you make the connection between a photograph, and being gay? ...In earlier times, people did not have the hang-ups they do today. People were artists. One appreciated the beauty of bodies. It had nothing to do with who was gay. If you appreciated a fine body, you ask your friend to photograph, or to paint them. A man, or a woman, it was about beauty, it wasn't necessarily about sex. Everything is not always about sex... "
Just beginning research for a book entitled Homo Harlem: A Chronicle of Lesbian and Gay Life in the African American Cultural Capital, 1915-1995, either as a participant, or as a talisman-like role model, I felt confident that Geoffrey Holder had a place in my story. For, brandishing bravura and poise, the un-Cola Man of my youth appearing on TV to sell Seven-Up soda, had shown an entire generation of questioning boys another way to fabulously be a man.
Until I was 24 and came out to myself, I felt sure I'd marry some beautiful girl. My furtive, fumbling, fugitive and few searches for sexual fulfillment were primarily with young women. Even latter, once I knew the score, friends advised, "why yes you're gay, but you'd make such a wonderful father. You're kind and have so much to offer a woman. There are many who would be understanding, you should get married. It will help to protect you"
For the longest time such advice was widely taken as gospel. The person with whom most gays and lesbians wished to establish a marital alliance in the past, invariably was someone of the opposite sex able to offer plausible deni-ability.
Famed as a booster of Harlem and African Americans, Iowa native, critic and novelist Carl Van Vechten, was emphatically gay.
Yet, he married twice with deliberation. His marriage to his first wife, a long-time friend from home, lasted only a few years, while marriage to the petite actress Fania Marinoff endured for a lifetime, from 1914 until Van Vechten died in 1964.
Affairs, fights, and copious drinking, like many involved in old-style 'gay marriages', the Van Vechtens were, in their way, a deeply dependent and devoted couple.
1955
As they preferred cats to infants, the hook for them, seems never to have involved any hopes of offspring. Instead, it was how the 'respectability' of matrimony made inheriting a million-dollar-plus trust fund more secure. These riches seem to have helped sustain their attraction.
None of Holder's depictions of abstracted naked, men that I've come across, are more than passively erotic
1986: A tappering torsoe, photographed by Holder for "Adam"
Mysterious and exotic naratives, none of Van Vechten's nude and semi-nude portrayals of Holder were as revealing or as blatantly salacious as the images he made to titillate and trade with gay friends. Nor are any of Holder's depictions of naked men that I've come across, more than passively erotic.
Fania Marinoff, Carl Van Vechten's long-suffering but devoted actress-wife
Circa 1940: Hugh Laing cavorts with Allen Juante Meadows
As much as Carl Van Vechten loved to make photographs of the famous and promising, Negros and nude portraits and figure studies were his speciality
There never was a more emphatic denial expressed to me as to his sexuality by Geoffrey Holder. Yet, what actually do artistic sensitivity or flamboyant dandism prove alone? Were it not for the casually tossed off comments of certain friends and acquaintances, people who were Holder's contemporaries, other artistic types who knew him or people who did, I might have abandoned my quest. Alvin Ailey, Henry Van Dyke, Freddie Hamilton, Bobby Short, Walter Nicks, Grafton Trew, Marvin Smith; all had their tales to relate. It was important for me to learn at first, not to probe too much, attempting to discover history that validated gays. Lest my wary informants retreat, it was essential to learn restraint and discretion. For these were men who spent a lifetime strategically hiding, or at least compartmentalizing, their true identities behind a public persona. Resolute not to "hurt" anyone with outing, even when dead, finding my interest appealing and suspect at the same time, to "protect a friend', they were easily liable to amend or even to retract a revelation in its entirety! If seeking out history, discovering those who have come before one, is generally daunting for African Americans, for gay people of color, the task is more perilously elusive still.
Although their mother was from Martinique, a French colony, prodigious brothers Boscoe and Geoffrey Holder were born into a middle-class Trinidadian family. That ultimate emblem of Victorian respectability, a piano graced the Holder's parlor. Both Boscoe and Geoffrey, younger than his brother by ten years, played piano and danced. Inasmuch as Boscoe taught himself to paint, as Geoffrey emulated everything Boscoe did, Geoffrey painted too.
To be gay is still taboo in Caribbean counties. Initially Boscoe's inevitable marriage failed to separate the inseparable pair. Inspired by the western elegance espoused by movies, local folk lore, African rhythms, ritual and music also informed the Holder brother's artistic pursuits. At the forefront of a movement that showcased Afrocentric artistic expression, Boscoe, with his wife Sheila and Geoffrey each left home. Going their separate ways they disseminated a sparkling outpouring of joie de vire and theatrical creativity into the warmly welcoming wider world.
Sheila, Mrs. Boscoe Holder, depicted by her husband
One might say that Boscoe Holder's profusion of gay friends from the theatrical sphere, such as Noël Coward and Oliver Messel, was telling. Geoffrey and Carmen, also darlings of the world of theatre and as prominent and stylish fixtures in fashionable society as Amanda and Carter or Wyatt and Gloria, surly had their quotient of gay friends too. Of Messel, the facile designer who created the fairytale-like stage setting for House of Flowers, also known for his fetishistic enthusiasm for Caribbean men, Holder was adamant: "He was a condescending bitch!" More mixed was his regard for fellow dancer Alvin Ailey.
In a way, one might say that Geoffry Holder could afford to be somewhat sanguine and magnanimous towards Ailey because despite his colleague's early and longstanding friendship, since George Washington Carver Junior High School, with Carmen, she had chosen him to marry and make a home and family. Aware of Alvin Ailey's troubled life as a black gay man, his driven pursuit of countless, endless and empty assignations with youth encountered in pinball arcades and "bookstores", one might doubt that he'd ever wished he was in Geoffrey's place, married to Carmen. While it's uncertain that such an alliance would have brought him the calm of mutual reinforcement, the sustenance of shared admiration and love, it's beyond doubt that Alvin too had wished to marry Carmen. Her rejection left him distraught, dejected and suicidal.
De Lavallade was born on March 6, 1931 in Los Angeles, California, to Creole parents from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father, Leo de Lavallade, was a postman and bricklayer. Before her early death Carmen's mother, Grace Grenot de Lavallade, was in ill health. Born between sisters Yvonne and Elaine, it was Carmen's father, and his sister Adele de Lavallade Young, owner of the Hugh Gordon Book Shop, one of the first African American bookstores in LA, who reared her. If Geoffrey had had Boscoe as a model to emulate, immense inspiration was derived by Carmen from her cousin, Janet Collins, who became the first full-time African American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet! Just 14 de Lavallade began ballet training with Melissa Blake, and two years later she won a scholarship to study modern dance with Lester Horton. Joining the Lester Horton Dance Theater de Lavallade became its lead dancer . Besides taking private ballet lessons with Carmelita Maracci, she also studied a variety of dance styles, and took acting lessons with Stella Adler who once lived in the same building where Leo Holder lives on today on Riverside Drive. Carmen won dancing parts in several minor Hollywood movies early in her career. In 1954, Carmen Jones gave her the chance to dance with Alvin on screen and led to their being invited to dance in the Broadway musical House of Flowers by the same choreographer, Herbert Ross. This was how Carmen and Alvin first met fellow cast member Geoffrey Holder.
Determined, tall, talented, persisting, after a four-month courtship Geoffrey Holder wed Carmen de Lavallade, in 1955.
Featured in several exhibitions, Geoffrey Holder is pictured with Museum of the City of New York's Phyllis Magidson, Curator of Costumes and Textiles
Beyond all else, an accomplished couturier, Geoffrey Holder had but one muse, and mostly, one marvelous patron, Carmen!
A good deal more happened after Geoffrey and Carmen married. It's delightfully related in their compelling documentary from 2004, Carmen and Geoffrey.
Their accomplishments have also filled numerous appreciations which quickly followed Geoffrey's passing. Utterly unrelated, it was a piece by a young journalist, Alvin McEwen, called The Erasure of 'Gay' From Black History & the Black Community Must Stop that mostly prompted this blog post. Hidden in the past, gays are also deliberately erased in the present. As most black people know, and all African American gays learn, the most vexing and prevalent form of bigotry at play today, is the passive-aggressive oppression of being dismissed to the point of being ignored completely, as if one did not exist. It's not just the history books, but in the Times Home Section or Style Magazine that this occurs for blacks. Similarly for African Americans who are LGBT, our disappearance is in plain sight. We are everywhere, from church on Sunday, to the football arena on Monday, but officially, we are nowhere. As Mr. McEwen puts it:
As a gay African-American, I've heard the argument about how "you can't compare the gay civil rights movement to the African-American civil rights movement" more times than I care to count. in the black community where LGBT people of color run up against a massive brick wall. There is a pattern of erasure which strips our presence from the majority of black history...
When African-American civic organizations talk about "the state of Black America," we are omitted. We are talked about as examples of how tolerant the black community is becoming...
To some African-American heterosexuals, we are mere sidebars or addenda. We are objects they hurl Biblical scripture at to cover up their own religious shortcomings or soulless reservoirs of salacious gossip holding court in places like beauty parlors...
Morgan Powell, 1973-2014
The crusading activist of Bronx history, culture and landscapes, was found dead in Brooklyn. In a hostile world, confusion and ambivalence about one's identity can prove to be deadly
No matter what, no one ever, nor ever will, ignore a true original, Geoffrey Holder.
Born just after slavery's end, America's first self-made black woman millionaire, Madam C. J. Walker built the finest house inhabited by a 'Negro'. Today it is in jeopardy due to avarice and racism, that dismisses African American history and attainment as unimportant. Symbolic of the depth and breath of America's unrealized offer of possibility, Villa Lewaro is an inspirational monument all patriots must join in preserving and opening to the public as a museum dedicated to faith and determination
Masterful magnate, Madam C. J. Walker, 1867-1919, the hair-care-beauty specialist who built the most spectacular residence ever owned by an African American in 1918: Villa Lewaro! Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building such a showplace. Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the ability and value of African American faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Circa 1908
Circa 1910
Circa 1912
1924: Villa Lewaro, Irvington-0n-Hudson, Walker Company employees, sales agents and beauty culturists' convention outing.
"The sprawling mansion, which served as a gathering place for notable leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, may soon be on the market — but it is not legally protected from demolition..." warns Peter Souleo Wright in the September 8, 2014 New York Daily News
Why is it that a man, just as soon as he gets enough money, builds a house much bigger than he needs? I built a house at Akron many times larger than I have the least use for; I have another house at Miami Beach, which is also much larger than I need. I suppose that before I die I shall buy or build other houses which also will be larger than I need. I do not know why I do it – the houses are only a burden.…all my friends who have acquired wealth have big houses…Even so unostentatious a man as Henry Ford has a much bigger house at Dearborn than he really cares about. I wonder why it is …In a few cases, a big house is built just as an advertisement that one is rich; sometimes a big house is built so great entertainments may be given. But in most cases, and especially with men who have earned their own money, the house is just built and when it is done, no one quite knows why it was started…Henry Ford 1926, Men and Rubber; The Story of Business
There are only a few houses ever built in America that hold such significance that they become the very embodiement of the American Dream. Completed in 1918, Villa Lewaro is such a house. Henry Ford may have been preplexed as to why he had built a big dwelling, but Madam Walker experienced no such confusion. Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building a showplace. For her, Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the value of African American ability, faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Circa 1789: West Front of Mount Vernon, by Edward Savage.
Distinguishing historical substance from symbolism is imperative. Taught that Washigton was incapable of telling a lie, that he valued liberty above all else, the life of slaves at his vast plantation, with meager rations, communal accomodation and twelve hour workdays, reveals a harsher truth.
For those who are un-knowledgeable, a cursory glance mightn't leave much of a lasting impression. For many examining the surface of things, the constituent elements, making an aesthetic evaluation, their final conclusion might be that they'd seen a conventionally 'nice' mansion, in well-kept, but not extensive grounds. They might determine that the house Sarah Breedlove-McWilliams-Davis-Walker built at Irvington, New York, "Villa Lewaro" was, as nice as it is, hardly exceptional.
But from a better-informed vantage point, the Villa Lewaro, named a National Treasure this year by the National Trust, the grandest house ever built by an African American before 1960, is something else again. Howsoever 'modest' it might appear materially, in relation to grandiose abodes built by whites; placed in context, contrasted with the isolated and unequal conditions characteristic of African American life, it is as magical as the Summer Palace of China's dowager empress, as incomparable as the backdrop of the glittering court of the Sun King at Versailles.
1858: Mount Vernon by Ferdinand Richardt
By repeatedly expanding his father's existing one-and-a-half-storey farmhouse, over several decades, Washington created a structure with 11,028 square feet ! Mount Vernon dwarfed most dwellings in late 18th-century Virginia, which typically comprised one to two rooms, ranging in size from roughly 200 to 1200 square feet.
Following George Washington's death, on the eve of a new century in 1799, his beloved Mount Vernon Plantation passed on to a succession of less capable heirs overwhelmed by its costly upkeep. Martha Washington's awareness had caused her to free slaves, otherwise freed by provision of her husband's will, upon her death.
Increasingly Mount Vernon fell into disrepair after a failed attempt by Washington’s great-great nephew John A. Washington to sell it to the United States or the Virginia Commonwealth in 1853.
This prompted Ann Pamela Cunningham to establish the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which began an unprecedented national campaign to purchase Mount Vernon and preserve it as a talisman of American history. This collaborative effort of patriotic and patrician white women from the north and the south alike, formed the nexus of the United State's historic preservation movement.
Every attempt was made to sanitize the memory of our foremost founding father. Acting to transform a bastion of white America's self-entitled wealth-through-oppression, into an icon of liberty, destroying the old slave quarters became the first imperative item of business before Mount Vernon was opened to the public as a shrine.
Building one of the largest houses in Virginia, among the most commodious in the new nation, Washington had hardly sought to outdo the Dukes of Marlborough, whose house was one of the largest and grandiose in England. The Baroque masterpiece boast 175,000 square feet!
As an historian and a preservationist, one learns a good deal about where people stand historically, by looking at where, and how they live. A visit to venerable Addisleigh Park, in Saint Albans, Queens, is a revelation. Billed as the 'suburban Sugar Hill,' in reference to black Harlem's elite address of the 1930's and 1940's, the spic-and-span community offers neat mock-Tudor and Colonial Revival houses surrounded by supremely manicured lawns. Initially met by restrictive deed covenants that prohibited the sale of property to blacks, after 1945 the enclave rapidly became home to a score of celebrities, from Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald, to Jackie Robinson, Count Basie and Joe Louis. A few houses boast double lots. Four or five even had swimming pools and tennis courts. But at best, the biggest houses here had about two-thousand square feet of space for living large.
"Hyde Park", 1895, by McKim, Mead & White
Just as America's founding fathers wasted little time attempting to emulate far richer nobles in England, neither did Madam Walker seek to 'compete' with the splendor of the nearby Frederick William Vanderbilt estate, or the even closer and equally palatial Rockefeller place, at Tarrytown. With fifty rooms comprising 44,000 square feet and two hundred acres, "Hyde Park" was one of the Hudson Valley's most notable showplaces.
Meanwhile, out in Beverly Hills, California, the largest houses of the most celebrated white stars, averaged around ten-thousand square feet. Accessing the extent of success accorded the United State's most acclaimed African Americans, it's useful to keep such observations of dramatic inequality in mind.
Whether with architecture or through prodigious philanthropy to black causes, paying as much attention to projecting as regal an image as any sovereign, Madam Walker utilized a saga as poignant and compelling as Lincoln's trek from a back-woods cabin to the White House. This was how she distinguished her brand from every other similar product on the market. As this ad shows, for Walker, the concept that beauty and success were synonymous was espoused as an alluring doctrine of faith.
Twenty-three years ago, Thursday, August 29, 1991, expertly edited by Yanick Rice Lamb, my article, A Mansion With Room for the Great and Humble, was published in the Home section of the New York Times. "MY great-great-grandmother meant for her four-acre estate to be a showplace for black Americans that would motivate them to realize their own dreams," related A'Lelia Perry Bundles. Then a producer with ABC World News Tonight in Washington, Ms. Bundles was unknown to me. Now retired, as a philanthropist serving on the board of trustees of both Columbia University and the National Archives, my esteemed dear friend is more active and occupied than ever before. Beyond her endeavors to promote age-old Walker family interests, in education at Columbia, or history at the National Archives, it is A'Lelia Bundles veritable crusade to preserve and make known her own legacy, to protect and perpetuate her heritage, that's most commendable.
Lincoln Family log cabin, Sinking Spring Farm, Hodgenville, Kentucky
This is reported to be the place where Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. Seven US presidents were born in log cabins, including Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and James Buchanan. Ironically, Whig contender William Henry Harrison, the son of a Virginia planter, hardly born in a log cabin, nonetheless cynically appropriated this meager type of habitation as a symbol that he was a man of the people. Other candidates followed Harrison's example, making the idea of a log cabin, a background of modest means, a childhood spent overcoming the adversity of hard times, a recurring and classic campaign theme.
A lowly log cabin has been a potent symbol of heroically-humble origins in US literature and politics since the early 19th century.
Renovated and featured in innumerable pieces since 1991, now threatened Villa Lewaro is ever so slowly gaining recognition as a singular monument to the American dream. When my story appeared, even after Stanley Nelson's titanic Walker documentary, Two Dollars and a Dream appeared, this was not so.
Designed by Ventner Woodson Tandy, New York State's second registered black architect after his partner George Washington Foster, the neo-Palladian-style structure was built at Irvington-on-Hudson between 1916 and 1918. Close at hand are other larger historic houses on more ample acreage, that were built for famed whites. Several of these, writer Washington Irving's "Sunnyside", feared robber-baron Jay Gould's "Lyndhurst," and John D. Rockefeller's "Kykuit", are all operated as house museums and opened to the public. 'Why ought not this to be the case at Madam Walker's house?', I mused after my first visit to Villa Lewaro in 1988.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, America's bicentennial anniversary year, Villa Lewaro's then-owners, Ingo and Darlene Appel, greeted me warmly and encouraged my research and advocacy. They had actually started exploring ways to make Madam Walker's house into a museum. As a result they'd engaged with several groups, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Madam C. J. Walker Committee of Westchester County.
"I think the time is right now," they were told by Steve Pruitt. A government relations adviser, he was speaking on behalf of Representative Cardiss Collins of Illinois, who would introduce a bill calling for Federal funds to purchase and safeguard Villa Lewaro. Historian Alex Haley of Roots fame, Oprah Winfrey and many others concurred.
Statesman Frederic Douglass lived in this respectable dwelling with his family from 1878 until his death in 1895. It's hardly a surprise learning that the largest contributor to a fund saving "Cedar Hill", and open it as a museum, an effort analogous to the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, was made by Madam Walker, to the National Association of Colored Women. Today a comparable undertaking is needed to preserve and open Villa Lewaro for public edification
I agreed too with this splendid idea. So I was elated when a new 'Diversity Scholars' fund initiated by the Trust, picked up the tab for my airfare and hotel, enabling me to attend the nation's premiere preservation organization's annual conference at Miami Beach that autumn. This opportunity would give me a chance to ask Richard Moe, the Trust's new director, what he thought about the amorphous and tentative plans to make Madam Walker's house into a museum.
"Cultural Diversity" was the conference's theme. So why had it opened on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of atonement? The seductive local ought to have further given me pause. Why meet at Miami Beach? After local white politicians ignored recently freed Nelson Mandela durring his seven-city tour of America, black civil rights activists instituted a 1,000-day boycott against the local convention and tourism business. African American groups refusing to hold meetings or to book group tours in the region, meant an eventual loss of more than $50 million.
Still I stayed, undeterred, and had my chance to question Mr. Moe. Perfectly pleasant, he answered politely,
"Under my tenure, I intend to lead the trust out of the business of collecting and opening the houses of the rich. We're past that..."
Protests that it might be a fine idea, once the Trust saved and showed at least one rich person's house that had not been built by a white Christian man, were to no avail.
I'm in agreement with the stellar biographer Jean Strouse; no fabricated story can ever match history for drama, the unexpected, or valuable instruction. So I'm still convinced that Richard Moe's response to being cornered and confronted with a proposal that the Trust find some way to acquire Villa Lewaro, was shortsighted, a missed opportunity. For what an inspirational and encouraging tale can be told, examining the house that Madam Walker built.
"Villa Lewaro was", A'Lelia Bundles reiterates, "a symbol of what my great-great-grandmother termed 'the wealth of business possibilities within the race to point to young Negroes what a lone woman can accomplish and to inspire them to do big things.' "
Ms. Bundles's portrait of her ancestor is titled On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker. Published by Scribner's in 2001, it quickly became a national bestseller. How superbly A'Lelia Bundles un-spools the saga. How affectingly it resonates, as part primer, part cautionary tale. What is it that makes it so moving and so timeless? This is a question that's answered easily enough. For all the nuanced specificity of Madam Walker's distinctly American life, an incessant journey seeking truth and meaning, bravely facing defeat and boldly tracking down triumph: her story is universal, too.
Adamantly a 'race woman', Madam Walker was hardly deterred by condescension; neither from whites who disdained her very presence, nor from elitist blacks who felt past poverty and deficient education made her unacceptable. In America, wealth seldom hurts. But Madam Walker's assets exceeded wealth alone. This was why Booker T. Washington, who initially tried to thwart her ambitions as a civil rights activist, had ended by becoming her friend.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Especially impressed by two nearly identical country houses near New York, Tandy adopted their design with only slight modifications. At Villa Lewaro, for instance, he used the simpler Ionic order in place of Composite columns with fluted shafts
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut. Mr. Bedford was president of Corn Products Refining Co. and a director of the Standard Oil Co.
Villa Rosa Terrace, S. Z. Puli residence by Brown & Von Beren, 1914, Woodmont, Conneticut
Italian immigrant Sylvester Zefferino Poli a theater magnate associated with William Fox in the Lowe’s-Poli theater chain, started out sculpting wax figures for sensational and historic displays. Named for his wife, their waterfront estate consisted of the main house, and ten cottages deeded to five children
How slightly Vertner Tandy seems to have bothered to differentiate Villa Lewaro from the two nearby sources of inspiration he found illustraited in architectural journals
Circa 1928: Villa Lewaro, the Irvington, New York 20,000 square feet country house of Madam C. J. Walker, from 1918 to 1919. Walker is believed to be the first African American woman self-made millionaire, through the manufacture and sale of hair care and beauty products, made expressly for blacks.
Circa 1923: Villa Lewaro.
Constructed just after the Walker townhouse, between 1916 and 1918, Madam Walker's country retreat cost an estimated $250,000, a vast fortune at a time when the average wage for a black New Yorker was only $800 yearly. The name Villa Lewaro was coined by a visitor and friend, Enrico Caruso. It was derived from the first two letters of each word in Lelia Walker Robinson's name.
Were one Jewish a century ago, chances are that attempting to move into a neighborhood that was not already substantially Jewish, would meet with resistance. Blacks were more fortunate, in one tiny paticular. For Negros, before the 1940's there was little fear of restrictive deed covenants, that prohibited the sell, or even a future sell, sometimes into perpetuity, to a 'Colored person'. The common supposition was that Negros could not afford to buy property in nice neighborhoods. For all practical purposes, this was all too true.
Unlike most mansions on the Hudson, which sit like castles on the Rhine, Villa Lewaro is best seen from Broadway, the main street of Irvington. A two-storey semicircular portico dominates the street facade.
Circa 1949
In the 1980's the huge trees that first attracted Madam Walker saved the house from a developer who wanted to erect condominiums. A tree ordinance protected the property.
After establishing a foothold in the 'Negro promised land' at Harlem, building a combination town house-beauty college-salon, the Walkes set their sights on a hose in the country. Madam C. J. Walker's bid to live in Irvington-On-Hudson, near Livingstons, Goulds and Rockefellers, was in fact her second try at locating where the action was, in the very midst of the country's most affluent whites. In the New York Times, March 25, 1916, it was announced that Mrs. C. J. Walker, through Samuel A. Singerman, her lawyer, had acquired "Bishop's Court". The price was given as around $40,000. Vertner Tandy filed plans for a house not so different from Villa Lewaro, but missing the graceful semi-elliptical portico. Madame Walker's entre into sacred precincts had commenced. Or had it?
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
2011: Villa Lewaro, the porte cochere. Tandy's triumphal arch-like shelter for protection from the weather when alighting from or entering an automobile, is topped off by a sleeping porch and balcony
Like the would-be buyer, the seller of the "old English design, brick and timber house", set on a plot, 200 X 300 feet, was also black. Most unusual! His house was located at the North East corner of State and North Pine Streets, in an exclusive section of Flushing. Born in Antigua, in 1843, the Right Rev. William B. Derrick had a white Scottish father and a black Caribbean-born mother. According to his Times obituary, in 1913, educated in England, this African, Methodist, Episcopal, Zion prelate's jurisdiction included the West Indies, South America and the Islands Beyond the Seas. For this reason the renowned preacher was much involved outside the US, in setting up churches in Panama for blacks working to dig the canal, for instance. Having rushed back from Britain to enlist in the Civil War, becoming sought after as a king-maker, able to reliably rally Negros to vote for Republicans, he was rather busy at home as well. "Bishop's Court" was his reward for a well-lived, sober life. White residents had certainly not welcomed his arrival around 1896. They had felt powerless indeed to prevent it. Over the years his sedate style of living had caused them to thank providence that it had not been worse. They were however, not about to take the same risk to property and propriety twice. All were determined, the Negro, former wash woman, from the west, was not to be admitted to their community. A reprise almost occurred at Irvington. But this time, Tandy did not produce drawing until after the deed was recorded.
Madam Walker's ambitious mansion was designed by Striver's Row resident,Vertner Woodson Tandy. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Tandy studied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He finished his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he was one of seven founders of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black college fraternity. He was also the first black to pass the military commissioning exam, and eventually became a major in the New York National Guard.
Following his partner George W. Foster, Tandy would become New York’s second black registered architect, and the first black member of the American Institute of Architects. Apart from Madam Walker's two houses, among many alterations to existing buildings, he designed St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. Sadly, among his oeuvre, he only planned about ten additional houses, most of which have been greatly changed or destroyed.
Vertner Tandy died in 1949 at age 64.
Villa Lewaro, which Madame Walker built as a country house, was Tandy's "masterpiece," said Roberta Washington, a Harlem architect, who sits on the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. She discusses his career in depth in her forthcoming history of African American architects who practiced in New York State over the past century. "Yes, his work is derivative. He copied other people. Most designers did and do. But, just look at that novel way he introduced a light well, for the basement kitchen. The big terrace completely obscures the servants' area downstairs, giving them lots of light and air and privacy at the same time. That's good design in my book."
Villa Lewaro's upper terrace conceals the kitchen light well and contains a home gymnasium
Circa 1924: Durring the blaze of a 1920's summer, from Villa Lewaro's palm decked terrace, the Hudson might as well to have flowed into the Mederterainian.
Three terraces step down to the swimming pool. Very few houses had swimming pools as early as Villa Lewaro.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
Set at the center of a hedge-enclosed sunken garden, that swimming pool at the Walker estate originally was lined with black masonry, enabling it to effectively act as a decorative reflecting pool too. Taken in the midst of a festive house party, this photograph shows brightly colored paper lanterns strung down the center of the garden.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
In addition to having a dark interior, the pool boasted a setting resplendent with perennials planted in herbaceous borders in raised beds, retained by bolder walls, that embowered guests with blooms and fragrance
Today the pool's raised borders at Villa Lewaro only have grass
A pergola, with a curving center bay once framing the river view, has been restored. As to the dramatic prospect of shimmering water that the Walkers were so justly proud of , that has long ago vanished behind the dense foliage of untended trees
The Window punched into the side of Villa Lewaro's upper terrace, indicates Madame Walker's gymnasium, while an archway led into the kitchen light well and a service entrance. Surmounted by a colonnaded pergola, the lowest terrace at Villa Lewaro was economically and beautifully constructed from rubble stones excavated on the property. Nearby, Madam Walker's ample garage at the edge of the property, provided extra accomodation for staff outside of the main house's top floor and basment.
The Villa Lewaro garage
2010: Villa Lewaro's great hall-living room
1918: The Living Hall, or living room. Vertner Tandy's trabeated ceiling, as much as Righter & Kolb's custom-designed furniture, combined to give Villa Lewaro an authentic Renaissance atmosphere
Aurora: Apollo in his chariot proceeded by Dawn, after Guido Reni, 1613-1614.
Even as a 19th century copy, this masterful Mannerist painting, reproducing a grand fresco with its vivid dissonant color harmony, never failed to make an impact on Villa Lewaro visitors
Manufactured by Grand Rapids' Berkey & Gay Furniture Co., the walnut center table seen in Villa Lewaro's living room below, was based on 16th-century originals, like this example owned by great architect Stanford White
Skillfully devised by Tandy to facilitate flexibility when entertaining, the reception rooms grouped on the first floor of Villa Lewaro easily flow one into the next. Alternately offering a relatively open combined envelope, or more compartmentalized spaces, it is the ultimate gala party setting
Entry into Villa Lewaro was carefully calculated to best dramatize festivities held here with a maximum sense of pomp and pageantry. From the very instant one came inside everything was designed to express that here was a realm apart. Leaving the entrance hall, two steps down, access into the Villa Lewaro living room was planned so that the arrival of each new guest, could be clearly observed by those assembled. Tandy was at pains to have a marble staircase, with all the splendor this implies. But aware of his client's oopposition to extravagance, making reductions whever possible, in the entrance hall he cut corners for Madam Walker, by providing a machine-forged metal balustrade for the staircase, as opposed to a more expensive one, hand wrought from iron.
Provided a needlework-covered Louis XIV-style rocking chair, Villa Lewaro's welcoming fireside, was immediately adjacent to a pierced grill of the Estey organ's sounding chamber.
The table lamp has a pierced brass Middle Eastern-style shade, glittering with glass jewels and beaded fring. Lighted, it must have added as much ambiance, with its pattern of colored shadows, as the sonorous music
Flower-form Arts and Crafts andirons graced the living room's Renaissance-style hooded mantelpiece, made of 'cast stone.' On the mantle shelf, Booker T. Washington's bust holds pride-of-place with two vases, formed from World War I German shell canisters, made of copper and silver loving cups, which attested to Madam Walker's generous philanthropy.
A bust of educator Booker T. Washington of the type pictured on the Villa Lewaro living room mantelpiece
The eclectic decor of Villa Lewaro was devised by Frank R. Smith, who apparently was employed by Righter & Kolb, the decorators of the Walker town house. Favorably describing two rooms in the "home of Mrs. C. J. Walker, at Tarrytown, N. Y." they further related that, "Besides outlining the decorative scheme, Mr. Smith also supplied all the furniture, some of which he also designed..."
Villa Lewaro's formal reception rooms, which open into one another along a straight line, form a series of contrasting areas. Neo-Renaissance in style, the great hall-living room and the barrel-vaulted dining room originally had furniture custom-made by Brekey & Gay, the Grand Rapids furniture manufacturers. The Louis XV-style music room still retains an Estey player-pipe organ with speaker ducts, which let music be heard throughout the house.
Villa Lewaro's decorator, Frank R. Smith of Righter & Kolb, had previously appointed Walker's Harlem townhouse. As the rendering above shows, his ideas for decorating Villa Lewaro, sometimes were more lavish than Madame Walker was willing to pay for
Beyond formal entertaing spaces, the living room, dining room, library, music room and solarium, thirty additional rooms included accommodations for eight servants and as many guests, a nursery, billiard room, gymnasium and laundry.
As for so many other builders of pleasure domes, it was all over rather quickly. Madam Walker died in 1919. Her daughter found the role of Lady Bountiful somewhat confining. Villa Lewaro was for her a less stimulating environment than Harlem.
But when duty beckoned, the house was the backdrop for a party: Lady Louis Mountbatten, Richard Bruce Nugent, Walker beauty-parlor girls and Pullman porters were all welcomed. In the 1920's A'Lelia Walker also let the house be used as a location for the black silent-movie classic "Secret Sorrow."
Courtesy of Half Pudding, Half Sause
1932: In Great Depression ravaged America, many fine houses besides Villa Lewaro, sold for a song
Even prior to A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy's death in 1931, an effort had been made to 'unload' costly-to-maintain Villa Lewaro. Two much-discussed auctions of its contents were staged. In December of 1930, veteran dealer Benjamin Wise, with his force of black salesmen, conducted the first. It lasted three days. "White Buyers Strip Villa", screamed Harlem's Amsterdam News' headline, expressing something of the loss and heartache ordinary blacks felt, learning the news. A'Lelia's ormolu-mounted grand piano, Persian carpets, a French tapestry, a large spinach jade table lamp, beautifully bound sets of books, from a deluxe bible to the multi-volume memoirs of Casanova----all went under the hammer and were knocked down for a paltry $58,500! In light of prices payed to obtain these precious objects, just a little more than a decade earlier, this indeed represented pennies on the dollar. But, all things considered, this was not such a bad result. Things went to hell in America after the debacle of November, 1929. Art and antique collectors once worth hundreds of millions, men like William Randolph Hearst or Clarence McKay, were forced to dispose of their treasures at department stores, for what really amounted to bargain basement prices, as well. In Newport, the ultra exclusive seaside summer resort, things were no better than at Irvington. "Marble House"was the palatial 'cottage' of Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who as Mrs. Willie K. Vanderbilt had been the first social leader to divorce and remarry without sanction. Her 'cottage' is said to have cost $11,000,000.00 at the start of the 1890's! This is unlikely inasmuch as, well before the crash Mrs. Belmont challenged a property tax assessment based on a nearly $700,000.00 valuation. Indignant, she countered that around $400,000.00 was closer to the true value. Naturally, making this claim, she did not include the sumptuous contents of Marble House. Yet when she sold the four acre property in 1932, the house, lock, stock and barrel went for just a little over $100,000.00.
Even so, at Villa Lewaro, sufficient unsold remnants from six china dinner services, several sets of glassware, and other furnishings remained unsold to form the basis of a collection of Walker heirlooms that bring these figures to life, more vividly than anything that one could write.
Once A'Lelia passed away, Villa Lewaro was bequeathed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which sold it in 1932 for $ 47,000.00 to the Annie E. Poth home for aged members of the Companions of the Forest in America, a fraternal organization. Under their care it remained largely intact for the next 50 years.
The Annie Poth Home was a refuge for the widows and orphans of the Frinds of the Forest Fraternal Society for over fifty years.
1918: The vaulted dining room. Tablets among the ceiling's arabesque include the coupling of what appear to be a pair of same-sex lovers?
Robust cast plaster cornucopia fittingly ornament Villa Lewaro's dining room
An anonymous writer in Good Furniture Magazine, in 1918, praised Villa Lewaro's decor, observing of the dining room: "The arched ceiling is beautifully treated with a design of graceful lines and colors. The walls are without pictures or any ornamentation whatsoever. The furniture is of walnut, designed especially for this particular room. The result is a dinning-room, which unlike other dinning-rooms, is light, unstuffy and beautiful..."
A trumpet-shaped "brilliant cut' glass vase of the type seen on the Villa Lewaro sideboard, in the view above.
Breaking with tradition, this silver flatware once owned by Madam Walker, was engraved with her third husband's initails
Table linen, owned by A'Lelia Walker, 'corectly' bears the monogram, AWR, for A'Lelia Walker Robinson
1904: The East Room at the White House offered inspiration for Villa Lewaro's music room and many other ballrooms, private and public: earning for its designers the new name of "McKim, White & Gold"
Circa1920: The Music Room
Terpsichore
Crimsom silk velvet curtains in Villa Lewaro's music room, were embelished by satin madalions and silk tape articulation. The Queen Ann style davenport was covered in a flowered brocade
After her mother died A'Lelia Walker replaced the music rooms conventional Steinway piano for one with an 'art case' in the Louis XV mode, mounted in ormolu. These gilded ornamental articulations caused her Peck-Hardman & Co. instrument to be named 'the gold piano'. In the 1930 sale it fetched only $450.00
A gilded harp of the type found at Villa Lewaro
Nearly a century after they were installed, cut-glass chandeliers, with rocco ormolu mounts, still sparkle in Villa Lewaro's music room
Circa 1920: Righter & Kolb were so exacting, that in Villa Lewaro's music room even the Victrola phonograph had its cabinet customised. It was painted with pastoral scenes in keeping with the rooms Watteauesque Lunettes and Louis XV sensibility. In 1930 it brought around $46.00
WHAT WAS A NEF?
A nef was an extravagant ship-shaped table ornament centerpiece and container used in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. Quite rarely made of glass, usually they were elaborately fashioned from silver, silver-gilt, or gold and often enameled and jewel-encrusted, Nefs were placed in front of the most important person at table as a mark of their status. When not just used for decoration, it might hold salt, spices, napkins, cutlery or even wine. For this reason some nefs had wheels to allow them to be rolled from one end of the table to the other, but most had legs or stood on pedestals.
Posed, poised and privileged alongside a graceful bureau plat, raffinée A’Lelia Walker, gowned in dark lace, looks every bit the pampered heiress. Most extraordinary among the accoutrements lending this scene such élan, is her repousse silver nef, a fantastic object with billowing sails and a large crew of minute hands, each exquisitely differentiated from the next. Most likely a late 19th-century copy of a late 16th-century example made in Augsburg, even these command $20,000.00 and more nowadays
Emblems of Apollo enriched Villa Lewaro's splendid clock
Circa 1930: A'Lelia Walker sits in a Louis XV-style bergere beside a porcelain kater on a porcelain pedestal. Behind her is a Louis XIV-style clock of great presence. Like the clocks above and below, it was made to seem to be a timepiece in a nebulous of clouds amidst which puti play, resting on a terminal plinth, overlain with gilt bronze arabesque and festoons. Instead, it is a tall case or grandfather's clock, the ormolu-mounted center panel, opening to reveal the pendulum and weights.
Villa Lewaro's grand clock was a copy of the celebrated model made circa 1785 and attributed to Jean-Henri Riesener, now in the Louvre
Neo-classical statuettes, such as this tinted alabaster nymph, graced each corner of Villa Lewaro's music room
Villa Lewaro's $25,000 Estey Pipe organ
As with many others who gain great riches, the Walkers set great store by quality. The best, the brightest, the biggest, ever held great appeal for them. Universally, the millionaire of 100 years ago esteemed the ultimate status symbol of a hone pipe organ. Largest and most complex of musical instruments, organs traditionally had only been found in churches and royal palaces. Then, in the mid-19th century, organs started to be installed in houses of the well-to-do. Certainly the music was soothing, but so too must have been knowledge that home organs cost as much as, and sometimes more than, an ordinary houses!
The Estey Organ Company, founded in 1852, went on to become the largest manufacturer of organs in the nation, with customers besides Madam Walker, including Henry Ford. Automatic player devices provided those who could afford them with a self-playing organ identified an elite among the elite.
The Greek Slave 1848, Parian ware figutine by England's Minton's Pottery works. Parian, Minton's name for 'statuary porcelain', alludes to the white marble from the Greek isle, Paros.
The Greek Slave is a marble in Raby Castle, carved in Florence by American sculptor Hiram Powers in 1844. Ostensibly it is merely a Grecian maiden, enslaved by Turks. But a cross and locket, amid the drapery, make it clear that she is a Christian, and betrothed.
Powers intention was that one see her suffering, as transcendent, raised above outward degradation. Innate purity and force of character bestow on her an uncompromising virtue that cannot be shamed. Many viewers on the eve of civil war, drew parallels between The Greek Slave and African American slaves in the South, with some abolitionists adopting the work, which was widely reproduced in ceramic reductions like Madame Walker's, as symbol. Compared with "the Virginian Slave", it was the subject of a John Greeleaf Whittier poem, inspiring as well a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lucy Stone, stopping to admire the statue broke into tears. For her it was emblematic of male misogyny. Thereafter, Stone included women's rights issues in her speeches
A bust of Beethoven like the one atop Madam Walker's organ console
Circa 1935
1919: A Villa Lewaro bedroom
It's more usual than not, that children of the rich, raised in stately houses, fail to comply with the hope that they, and their children might always live in their childhood home. As James Maher noted in his poetic treatise on American palace builders, The Twilight of Splendor, a reoccurring motivation for building grand, has been the desire to establish a seat where one's well-established family might prosper and flourish for generations. Like countless others, the Walkers were not able to hold onto Villa Lewaro. Yet Madam Walker still initiated a dynasty, ambitious, socially conscious, bright, black and proud. A'Lelia Bundles part in the ensuing line of succession has been varied; filled with recognition and rewards for a groundbreaking career as a TV journalist, and that's quite wonderful. Work for which she will most be remembered is quite different. One rarely grows rich writing history. But doing what A'Lelia has done and continues to do, with unstinting care and craft, one is granted the consolation of immortality!
Receiving such a warm reception with On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, A'Lelia Bundles is continuing as she started. She is in the final stages of rewriting, polishing her manuscript, well beyond the the superficial degree that others might. She is a perfectionist, like Walker women before her, and so will not be satisfied until her dulcet prose shines forth like a diamond.
Once she has finished, we will learn about all sorts of things long the cause of wonder. Was A'Lelia Walker's first husband, John Robinson, the hotel waiter, really the love of her life? Or, notwithstanding three tries tying the knot, was she also gay, like a score of her best friends, like several of her set who also married persons with a different gender than theirs?
We already know, that due to her industry, networking skills and keen instincts, that much of the success of the Walker Company was due to A'Lelia Walker. But far more awaits us, because once A'Lelia Bundles has completed her task, metaphorically, but still most magically, she will take us by the hand to the much changed world and times of her namesake. Guiding us into our recent history , like Dicken's spirit in A Christmas Carol, with but a touch of her gown, we'll be transported. Revealed will be a world familiar and foreign. Most surprisingly, we'll discover, that like our epoch, like our lives, it was hardly all bad, that many things were quite wonderful in fact. More amazing still, going back in time, communing with her people, our people, proud, prepared, purposeful and black, we will discover in them, those who have gone before us, our own wonderful selves.
Circa 1912: Madam C. J. Walker by Addison Scurlock
Like remarkable historians who have come before, whether Stephen Birmingham, who wrote Certain People, David Levering Lewis, the author of When Harlem was in Vogue, or Gerri Major, who penned Black Society, A'Lelia Bundles is engaged in establishing a legacy too.
2013
Ca. 1913: Incomparable A'Lelia Walker
Circa 1919: A'Lelia Walker by Addison Scurlock
1911: Turban with egret aigrette and turquoise jewel by Paul Poiret
Circa 1911: A'Lelia Walker wearing brocade turban with egret aigrette by Paul Poiret. The innovative Paris couturier, who banished corsets, was a friend who A'Lelia Walker entertained.
That late great trailblazing historian from San Francisco, Eric Garber, wrote of A'Lelia's penchant for parties and gay people:
"Because A'Lelia adored the company of lesbians and gay men, her parties had a distinctly gay ambiance. Elegant homosexuals such as Edward Perry, Edna Thomas. Harold Jackman, and Caska Bonds were her closest friends. So were scores of white celebrities..."
Much earlier, novelist Marjorie Worthington remembered:
"We went several times that winter to Madame Allelia [sic] Walker's Thursday "at-homes" on a beautiful street in Harlem known as, Sugar Hill...." [Madame Walker's] lavishly furnished house was a gathering place not only for artists and authors and theatrical stars of her own race, but for celebrities from all over the world. Drinks and food were served, and there was always music, generously performed enthusiastically received."
Madam Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. Madam Walker's initial gala, a luncheon party for nearly 100, blacks and whites, was hosted in honor of the Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War in September of 1918. President wilson, after first objecting, at last allowed blacks to fight in the World War, and Mr, Scott is the closest African Americans have to a cabinet officer. Madame Walker's guests lunched out on the terrace before entering the music room for musical entertainment. J. Rosamond Johnson, who wrote, "Lift Every Voice and Sing", "The African American National Anthem", eminent organist Melville Charlton and other musicians played and sang. It was a lovely afternoon, but not without purpose. Determined that like official entertaining at the White House, that her social gatherings contributed to political action, Madam Walker used this occasion to implore blacks to set aside differences, and support the war-effort. She also asked that Washington take note of black participation in the defence of democracy and outlaw lynching.
The Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War
As for A'Lelia Walker, she was more easy. Many recollections confirm her generous nature, her delight in enjoyment, and in providing pleasure as well. By all accounts, everyone from chorus girls to artists to socialites to visiting royalty would come at least once to enjoy her engaging hospitality. Whether at the Dark Tower, 80 Edgecombe, or Villa Lewaro, wherever she was, though not named 'Laeticia', A'Lelia was the "joy goddess."
They say that whatever one's race, class, condition or sexuality today, that people are, on the whole, rather impatient. If then you are an intrepid exception, and have made it this far: through over one hundred pages, numerous pictures and 8,176 words or so, besides offering my congratulations, I ought perhaps to summarize of my intent. Originalist ideologues, nostalgic for paternalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy notwithstanding, ever-changing America, has not changed enough. Justice delayed is, justice denied. Long ago, any landmark as significant to white history, as Villa Lewaro is to blacks, would have been made a museum.
Still beckoning and golden, the American Dream must not be allowed to become irrelevant. It is still so rich and real and robust, but for fewer and fewer, seems within reach. As America evolves to grow ever more diverse, opportunity and reward, ought to expand and not retract to enrich just some few at the top.
Madam C. J. Walker, her daughter A'Lelia Walker, both strove towards such an empowering and beneficial end. An outstanding relic of their faith in our country, Villa Lewaro, as much as Mount Vernon or Monticello, is a shrine that deserves to be on public view, as a museum dedicated to determination and the humanitarian impulse to help others.
Madam Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. They included not only eminent blacks like the poet William Stanley Braithwaite and the composer and concert singer Harry T. Burleigh, but Walker beauty-shop operators. One guest, Enrico Caruso, coined the villa's name, using two letters from each name of Madam Walker's only child, A'lelia Walker Robinson.
Lloyd and Edna Thomas
Edna was a great actress. A blunder-some miss-identification confuses her with another Edna Thomas, a white contemporary who sang Negro spirituals, as "the Lady from Louisiana". Although Harlem's Edna Thomas possessed a pleasant voice, she never sang professionally and started out as Madam Walker's social secretary. One of her jobs, according to Jimmie Daniels, was to look up words Walker did not understand reading the newspaper. Regretting having only a scant education, Madam Walker exploited any opportunity to enhance her knowledge.
Lloyd Thomas managed their 136th street beauty salon for the Walkers. In 1929, at a party given by A'Lelia, Lloyd introduced Edna to English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham. For the rest of their lives the women were a devoted couple
A manservant for Mrs. and Mrs. Basil Rathbone, Edward Perry studied painting with Winold Reiss, before moving on to acting and stage management. Esteemed as Harlem's Elsa Maxwell, late in life he had a career as a party consultant
1929: Harold Jackman by Richmond Barthe
Designated the "handsomest man in Harlem," London-born Harold Jackman, who had an unknown white English father and a black West Indian mother, was a high school teacher, model, actor, writer, and patron, with a life-long interest theater and in documenting African American cultural life. Gay in most every way, he nonetheless managed to have a daughter, with a white friend, to whom he left half his estate
Circa 1926: Carl Van Vechten. Music critic-novelist-photographer-party goer-host with the most, VanVechten's most important role was as an impresario who orchestrated the acceptable presentation of Afrcan American culture to, an at first wary, white public. His notorious novel Nigger Heaven, drawing heavily on his Harlem escapades, was viewed as a betrayal by some, but not by A'Lelia Walker, who vainly attempted to induce the affluent writer to buy Villa Lewaro. Twice married, but gay, he wrote "A thing of beauty, is a boy forever..."
1927: Spirited off as a young boy to England by an aristocrat who lived on London's Lilac Sweep, Caska Bonds grew to become a music coach, with attractive protegees of uneven talent. A particular friend of A'Lelia's he gained the lease of her apartment when she died. He lived there with a youth named Embry Bonner
Cocaine-addict and Harlem lover Princess Violette Murat, was born Violette Jacqueline Charlotte Ney d'Elchingen. Writer Zora Neal Husrton called her "Princess Muskrat". Fortunately, as she was a lesbian, her husband, Bonaparte Prince Eugene Louis Michel Joachim Napoleon Murat, pre-deceased her by almost 40 years
Julius Lorenzo Cobb Bledsoe was a once-renowned, but now forgotten baritone, the first 'Joe' in "Showboat" and the first African American artist to gain regular employment on Broadway. None the less, finding legitimate operatic roles scare in the States, he concertized to acclaim and profit in Europe. Here he met his well-to-do Dutch lover, sometime-diplomatic cultural attache, Adriain Frederick Huygens
Ivor Novello, a Welsh composer, playwright, matanee and film star became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. Born into a musical family, his operatic-coach-mother Clara Davies, was the teacher of Caska Bonds. Norvello's first big success was as a songwriter was the World War I favorite "Keep the Home Fires Burning"
Geraldyn Hodges Dismond, Harlem's 'Lady Nicotine', a inveterate journalist from Chicago, who in time, ditched her philandering husband, to become Gerri Major of Jet Magazine
The 'Night Hawk', Gerrie's husband, the college football star, World War I hero, Dr. Binga Dismond, a man said to have too much, of everything!
Jimmie Daniels and Wallace Thurman shared a room as boarders at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street, in a cooperative unit owned by Edna and Lloyd Thomas. Edna Thomas' white lesbian lover, English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham, who also lived here, is seen with in the picture above, with Edna, at the center. Jimmie is on the far left, while Lloyd sits on the right, with 'It Girl' Blanche Dunn on his lap.
Masterful magnate, Madame C. J. Walker, 1867-1919, the hair-care-beauty specialist who built the most spectacular residence ever owned by an African American in 1917: Villa Lewaro! Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building such a showplace. Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the ability and value of African American faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Why is it that a man, just as soon as he gets enough money, builds a house much bigger than he needs? I built a house at Akron many times larger than I have the least use for; I have another house at Miami Beach, which is also much larger than I need. I suppose that before I die I shall buy or build other houses which also will be larger than I need. I do not know why I do it – the houses are only a burden.…all my friends who have acquired wealth have big houses…Even so unostentatious a man as Henry Ford has a much bigger house at Dearborn than he really cares about. I wonder why it is …In a few cases, a big house is built just as an advertisement that one is rich; sometimes a big house is built so great entertainments may be given. But in most cases, and especially with men who have earned their own money, the house is just built and when it is done, no one quite knows why it was started…Henry Ford 1926, Men and Rubber; The Story of Business
There are only a few houses ever built in America that hold such significance that they become the very embodiement of the American Dream. Completed in 1918, Villa Lewaro is such a house. Henry Ford may have been preplexed as to why he had built a big dwelling, but Madame Walker experienced no such confusion. Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building a showplace. For her, Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the value of African American ability, faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Circa 1789: West Front of Mount Vernon, by Edward Savage.
Distinguishing historical substance from symbolism is imperative. Taught that Washigton was incapable of telling a lie, that he valued liberty above all else, the life of slaves at his vast plantation, with meager rations, communal accomodation and twelve hour workdays, reveals a harsher truth.
For those who are un-knowledgeable, a cursory glance mightn't leave much of a lasting impression. For many examining the surface of things, the constituent elements, making an aesthetic evaluation, their final conclusion might be that they'd seen a conventionally 'nice' mansion, in well-kept, but not extensive grounds. They might determine that the house Sara Breedlove McWilliams Walker built at Irvington, New York, "Villa Lewaro", as nice as it is, is hardly exceptional.
But from a better-informed vantage point, the Villa Lewaro, named a National Treasure this year by the National Trust, the grandest house ever built by an African American before 1960, is something else again. Howsoever 'modest' it might appear materially, in relation to grandiose abodes built by whites; placed in context, contrasted with the isolated and unequal conditions characteristic of African American life, it is as magical as the Summer Palace of China's dowager empress, as incomparable as the backdrop of the glittering court of the Sun King at Versailles.
1858: Mount Vernon by Ferdinand Richardt
By repeatedly expanding his father's existing one-and-a-half-storey farmhouse, over several decades, Washington created a structure with 11,028 square feet ! Mount Vernon dwarfed most dwellings in late 18th-century Virginia, which typically comprised one to two rooms, ranging in size from roughly 200 to 1200 square feet.
Following George Washington's death, on the eve of a new century in 1799, his beloved Mount Vernon Plantation passed on to a succession of less capable heirs overwhelmed by its costly upkeep. Martha Washington's awareness had caused her to free slaves, otherwise freed by provision of her husband's will, upon her death.
Increasingly Mount Vernon fell into disrepair after a failed attempt by Washington’s great-great nephew John A. Washington to sell it to the United States or the Virginia Commonwealth in 1853.
This prompted Ann Pamela Cunningham to establish the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which began an unprecedented national campaign to purchase Mount Vernon and preserve it as a talisman of American history. This collaborative effort of patriotic and patrician white women from the north and the south alike, formed the nexus of the United State's historic preservation movement.
Every attempt was made to sanitize the memory of our foremost founding father. Acting to transform a bastion of white America's self-entitled wealth-through-oppression, into an icon of liberty, destroying the old slave quarters became the first imperative item of business before Mount Vernon was opened to the public as a shrine.
Building one of the largest houses in Virginia, among the most commodious in the new nation, Washington had hardly sought to outdo the Dukes of Marlborough, whose house was one of the largest and grandiose in England. The Baroque masterpiece boast 175,000 square feet!
Monticello, 1769-1809 by Thomas Jefferson
Introducing the first dome on an American house, counting the cellars, Monticello has around 11,000 square feet of living space.
Ickworth, 1795-1830 designed by Mario Aspurcci, executed by Francis and Joseph Sandy, laocated at Horringer, Burry St. Edmunds. Suffolk, England
Not completed until well after the death of its builder, connoisseur collector Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry and 4th Earl of Bristol, in 1803, Ickworth, with its central rotunda and curving wings, was truly a temple of art. Monticello, by contrast, is not even as large as the servants' quarters here.
As an historian and a preservationist, one learns a good deal about where people stand, by looking at where, and how they live. A visit to historic Addisleigh Park, in Saint Albans, Queens, is a revelation. Billed as the 'suburban Sugar Hill,' in reference to black Harlem's elite address of the 1930's and 1940's, the spic-and-span community offers neat mock-Tudor and Colonial Revival houses surrounded by supremely manicured lawns. Initially met by restrictive deed covenants that prohibited the sale of property to blacks, after 1945 the enclave rapidly became home to a score of celebrities, from Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald, to Jackie Robinson, Count Basie and Joe Louis. A few houses boast double lots. Four or five even had swimming pools and tennis courts. But at best, the biggest houses here had about two-thousand square feet of space for living large.
"Hyde Park", 1895, by McKim, Mead & White
Just as America's founding fathers wasted little time attempting to emulate far richer nobles in England, neither did Madame Walker seek to 'compete' with the splendor of the nearby Frederick William Vanderbilt estate, or the even closer and equally palatial Rockefeller place, at Tarrytown. With fifty rooms comprising 44,000 square feet and two hundred acres, "Hyde Park" was one of the Hudson Valley's most notable showplaces.
Meanwhile, out in Beverly Hills, California, the largest houses of the most celebrated white stars, averaged around ten-thousand square feet. Accessing the extent of success accorded the United State's most acclaimed African Americans, it's useful to keep such observations of dramatic inequality in mind.
Whether with architecture or through prodigious philanthropy to black causes, paying as much attention to projecting as regal an image as any sovereign, Madam Walker utilized a saga as poignant and compelling as Lincoln's trek from a back-woods cabin to the White House. This was how she distinguished her brand from every other similar product on the market. As this ad shows, for Walker, the concept that beauty and success were synonymous was espoused as an alluring doctrine of faith.
Twenty-three years ago, Thursday, August 29, 1991, expertly edited by Yanick Rice Lamb, my article, A Mansion With Room for the Great and Humble, was published in the Home section of the New York Times. "MY great-great-grandmother meant for her four-acre estate to be a showplace for black Americans that would motivate them to realize their own dreams," related A'lelia Perry Bundles. Then a producer with ABC World News Tonight in Washington, Ms. Bundles was unknown to me. Now retired, as a philanthropist serving on the board of trustees of both Columbia University and the National Archives, my esteemed dear friend is more active and occupied than ever before.
Lincoln Family log cabin, Sinking Spring Farm, Hodgenville, Kentucky
This is reported to be the place where Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. Seven US presidents were born in log cabins, including Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and James Buchanan. Ironically, Whig contender William Henry Harrison, the son of a Virginia planter, hardly born in a log cabin, nonetheless cynically appropriated this meager type of habitation as a symbol that he was a man of the people. Other candidates followed Harrison's example, making the idea of a log cabin, a background of modest means, a childhood spent overcoming the adversity of hard times, a recurring and classic campaign theme.
A lowly log cabin has been a potent symbol of heroically-humble origins in US literature and politics since the early 19th century.
Restored and featured in innumerable pieces since 1991, Villa Lewaro is ever so slowly gaining recognition as a singular monument to the American dream. When my story appeared, even after Stanley Nelson's titanic Walker documentary, Two Dollars and a Dream appeared, this was not so.
Designed by Ventner Woodson Tandy, New York State's second registered black architect after his partner George Washinton Foster, the neo-Palladian-style structure was built at Irvington-on-Hudson between 1916 and 1918. Close at hand are other larger historic houses on more ample acreage, that were built for famed whites. Several of these, writer Washington Irving's "Sunnyside", feared robber-baron Jay Gould's "Lyndhurst," and John D. Rockefeller's "Kykuit", are all operated as house museums and opened to the public. 'Why ought not this to be the case at Madame Walker's house?', I mused after my first visit to Villa Lewaro in 1988.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, America's bicentennial anniversary year, Villa Lewaro's then-owners, Ingo and Darlene Appel, greeted me warmly and welcomed my interest. They had actually started exploring ways to make Madame Walker's house into a museum. As a result they'd engaged with several groups, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Madame C. J. Walker Committee of Westchester County.
"I think the time is right now," they were told by Steve Pruitt. A government relations adviser, he was speaking on behalf of Representative Cardiss Collins of Illinois, who would introduce a bill calling for Federal funds to purchase and safeguard Villa Lewaro. Historian Alex Haley of Roots fame, Oprah Winfrey and many others concurred.
Statesman Frederic Douglas lived in this respectable dwelling with his family from 1878 until his death in 1895. It's hardly a surprise learning that the largest contributor to save "Cedar Hill" prior to it being opened to the public, came from Madame Walker
I agreed too with this splendid idea. So I was elated when a new 'Diversity Scholars' fund initiated by the Trust, picked up the tab for my airfare and hotel, enabling me to attend the nation's premiere preservation organization's annual conference at Miami Beach that autumn. This opportunity would give me a chance to ask Richard Moe, the Trust's new director, what he thought about the amorphous and tentative plans to make Madame Walker's house into a museum.
Alonzo Herndon residence, 587 University Pl., NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 1910
A former slave raised in a sharecropping family, after the Civil War Herndon owned and managed a string of barbershops. Investing profits into real estate, becoming the largest black property owner in Atlanta by 1900, Herndon next founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, to become Atlanta's first black millionaire. Maintained as a museum, W. E. B. Dubois praised Herndon’s Georgian Revival house as, ‘the finest residence in America owned by a Negro.’ At the time of this statement, naturally, Villa Lewaro had not yet been built.
"Cultural Diversity" was the conference's theme. So why had it opened on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of atonement? The seductive local ought to have further given me pause. Why meet at Miami Beach? After local white politicians ignored recently freed Nelson Mandela durring his seven-city tour of America, black civil rights activists instituted a 1,000-day boycott against the local convention and tourism business. African American groups refusing to hold meetings or to book group tours in the region, meant an eventual loss of more than $50 million.
Still I stayed, undeterred, and had my chance to question Mr. Moe. Perfectly pleasant, he answered politely,
"Under my tenure, I intend to lead the trust out of the business of collecting and opening the houses of the rich. We're past that..."
Protests that it might be a fine idea, once the Trust saved and showed at least one rich person's house that had not been built by a white Christian man, were to no avail.
Number 1048 Simpson Road, (now Joseph E. Boone Boulevard ), Atlanta, Georgia, erected 1926 by the African American Aiken & Faulkner Construction Co. located on Auburn Avenue: demolished 1962
In 1926, the year he built this house, Theodore "Tiger" Flowers, famed as the "Fighting Georgia Deacon" became the first black boxer to win the world middleweight championship. Less than a year later, cheated out of his title in a rigged bout, in November 1927, at thirty-two, Flowers died. He died in Harlem, undergoing surgery to remove scar tissue above his eye. His magnificent house, featuring a plaster bas relief of a tiger's head above the drawing room door, was demolished in 1962
I'm in agreement with the stellar biographer Jean Strouse; no fabricated story can ever match history for drama, the unexpected, or valuable instruction. So I'm still convinced that Richard Moe's response to being cornered and confronted with a proposal that the Trust find some way to acquire Villa Lewaro, was shortsighted, a missed opportunity. For what an inspirational and encouraging tale can be told, examining the house that Madame Walker built.
Stylishly of its time, even the house architect-to-the-stars, Paul Revere Williams built for himself in Los Angeles, in 1951, fails to approach the opulence of Villa Lewaro
"Villa Lewaro was", A'Lelia Bundles reiterates, "a symbol of what my great-great-grandmother termed 'the wealth of business possibilities within the race to point to young Negroes what a lone woman can accomplish and to inspire them to do big things.' "
Ms. Bundles's portrait of her ancestor is titled On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker. Published by Scribner's in 2001, it quickly became a national bestseller. How superbly A'Lelia Bundles un-spools the saga. How affectingly it resonates, as part primer, part cautionary tale. What is it that makes it so moving and so timeless? This is a question that's answered easily enough. For all the nuanced specificity of Madame Walker's distinctly American life, an incessant journey seeking truth and meaning, bravely facing defeat and boldly tracking down triumph: her story is universal, too.
Adamantly a 'race woman', Madam Walker was hardly deterred by condescension; neither from whites who disdained her very presence, nor from elitist blacks who felt past poverty and deficient education made her unacceptable. In America, wealth seldom hurts. But Madame Walker's assets exceeded wealth alone. This was why Booker T. Washington, who initially tried to thwart her ambitions as a civil rights activist, had ended by becoming her friend.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Especially impressed by two nearly identical country houses near New York, Tandy adopted their design with only slight modifications. At Villa Lewaro, for instance, he used the simpler Ionic order in place of Composite columns with fluted shafts
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut. Mr. Bedford was president of Corn Products Refining Co. and a director of the Standard Oil Co.
Villa Rosa Terrace, S. Z. Puli residence by Brown & Von Beren, 1914, Woodmont, Conneticut
Italian immigrant Sylvester Zefferino Poli a theater magnate associated with William Fox in the Lowe’s-Poli theater chain, started out sculpting wax figures for sensational and historic displays. Named for his wife, their waterfront estate consisted of the main house, and ten cottages deeded to five children
How slightly Vertner Tandy seems to have bothered to differentiate Villa Lewaro from the two nearby sources of inspiration he found illustraited in architectural journals
Circa 1928: Villa Lewaro, the Irvington, New York 20,000 square feet country house of Madam C. J. Walker, from 1918 to 1919. Walker is believed to be the first African American woman self-made millionaire, through the manufacture and sale of hair care and beauty products, made expressly for blacks.
Circa 1923: Villa Lewaro.
Constructed just after the Walker townhouse, between 1916 and 1918, Madam Walker's country retreat cost an estimated $250,000, a vast fortune at a time when the average wage for a black New Yorker was only $800 yearly. The name Villa Lewaro was coined by a visitor and friend, Enrico Caruso. It was derived from the first two letters of each word in Lelia Walker Robinson's name.
Were one Jewish a century ago, chances are that attempting to move into a neighborhood that was not already substantially Jewish, would meet with resistance. Blacks were more fortunate, in one tiny paticular. For Negros, there was little fear of restrictive deed covenants, that prohibited the sell, or even a future sell, sometimes into perpetuity, to a 'Colored person'. The common supposition was that Negros could not afford to buy property in nice neighborhoods. For all practical purposes, this was all too true.
Unlike most mansions on the Hudson, which sit like castles on the Rhine, Villa Lewaro is best seen from Broadway, the main street of Irvington. A two-storey semicircular portico dominates the street facade.
Circa 1949
In the 1980's the huge trees that first attracted Mme. Walker saved the house from a developer who wanted to erect condominiums. A tree ordinance protected the property.
The Villa Lewaro mansion Vertner Tandy designed for Madame Walker in exclusive Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, started to be restored in the 1980s by Ingo Appel. In the following decade this comendable undertaking was completed by Harold Doley, shown here with his wife Alma and their son. A native of New Orleans, Mr. Doley was the first black to buy an individual seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
After establishing a foothold in the 'Negro promised land' at Harlem, building a combination town house-beauty college-salon, the Walkes set their sights on a hose in the country. Madame C. J. Walker's bid to live in Irvington-On-Hudson, near Livingstons, Goulds and Rockefellers, was in fact her second try at locating where the action was, in the very midst of the country's most affluent whites. In the New York Times, March 25, 1916, it was announced that Mrs. C. J. Walker, through Samuel A. Singerman, her lawyer, had acquired "Bishop's Court". The price was given as around $40,000. Vertner Tandy filed plans for a house not so different from Villa Lewaro, but missing the graceful semi-elliptical portico. Madame Walker's entre into sacred precincts had commenced. Or had it?
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
2011: Villa Lewaro, the porte cochere. Tandy's triumphal arch-like shelter for protection from the weather when alighting from or entering an automobile, is topped off by a sleeping porch and balcony
Like the would-be buyer, the seller of the "old English design, brick and timber house", set on a plot, 200 X 300 feet, was also black. Most unusual! His house was located at the North East corner of State and North Pine Streets, in an exclusive section of Flushing. Born in Antigua, in 1843, the Right Rev. William B. Derrick had a white Scottish father and a black Caribbean-born mother. According to his Times obituary, in 1913, educated in England, this African, Methodist, Episcopal, Zion prelate's jurisdiction included the West Indies, South America and the Islands Beyond the Seas. For this reason the renowned preacher was much involved outside the US, in setting up churches in Panama for blacks working to dig the canal, for instance. Having rushed back from Britain to enlist in the Civil War, becoming sought after as a king-maker, able to reliably rally Negros to vote for Republicans, he was rather busy at home as well. "Bishop's Court" was his reward for a well-lived, sober life. White residents had certainly not welcomed his arrival around 1896. They had felt powerless indeed to prevent it. Over the years his sedate style of living had caused them to thank providence that it had not been worse. They were however, not about to take the same risk to property and propriety twice. All were determined, the Negro, former wash woman, from the west, was not to be admitted to their community. A reprise almost occurred at Irvington. But this time, Tandy did not produce drawing until after the deed was recorded.
Madame Walker's ambitious mansion was designed by Striver's Row resident,Vertner Woodson Tandy. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Tandy studied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He finished his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he was one of seven founders of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black college fraternity. He was also the first black to pass the military commissioning exam, and eventually became a major in the New York National Guard.
Following his partner George W. Foster, Tandy would become New York’s second black registered architect, and the first black member of the American Institute of Architects. Apart from Madame Walker's two houses, among many alterations to existing buildings, he designed St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. Sadly, among his oeuvre, he only planned about ten additional houses, most of which have been greatly changed or destroyed.
Vertner Tandy died in 1949 at age 64.
Villa Lewaro, which Madame Walker built as a country house, was Tandy's "masterpiece," said Roberta Washington, a Harlem architect, who discusses his career in depth in her forthcoming history of African American architects who practiced in New York State over the past century. "Yes, his work is derivative. He copied other people. Most designers did and do. But, just look at that novel way he introduced a light well, for the basement kitchen. The big terrace completely obscures the servants' area downstairs, giving them lots of light and air and privacy at the same time. That's good design in my book."
Circa 1924: Durring the blaze of a 1920's summer, from Villa Lewaro's palm decked terrace, the Hudson might as well to have flowed into the Mederterainian.
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
From Villa Lewaro's garden elevation, where an elevator bulkhead seems to have been added to the roof-line, three terraces step down to the swimming pool. Very few houses had swimming pools as early as Villa Lewaro.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
Set at the center of a hedge-enclosed sunken garden, that swimming pool at the Walker estate originally was lined with black masonry, enabling it to effectively act as a decorative reflecting pool too. Taken in the midst of a festive house party, this photograph shows brightly colored paper lanterns strung down the center of the garden.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
In addition to having a dark interior, the pool boasted a setting resplendent with perennials planted in herbaceous borders in raised beds, retained by bolder walls, that embowered guests with blooms and fragrance
Today the pool's raised borders at Villa Lewaro only have grass
A pergola, with a curving center bay once framing the river view, has been restored. As to the dramatic prospect of shimmering water that the Walkers were so justly proud of , that has long ago vanished behind the dense foliage of untended trees
The Window punched into the side of Villa Lewaro's upper terrace, indicates Madame Walker's gymnasium, while an archway led into the kitchen light well and a service entrance. Surmounted by a colonnaded pergola, the lowest terrace at Villa Lewaro was economically and beautifully constructed from rubble stones excavated on the property. Nearby, Madame Walker's ample garage at the edge of the property, provided extra accomodation for staff outside of the main house's top floor and basment.
Manufactured by Grand Rapids' Berkey & Gay Furniture Co., the center table seen in Villa Lewaro's living room below, was based on 16th-century originals, like this example owned by great architect Stanford White
1918: The Living Hall, or living room. Vertner Tandy's trabeated ceiling, as much as Righter & Kolb's custom-designed furniture, combined to give Villa Lewaro an authentic Renaissance atmosphere
Aurora: Apollo in his chariot proceeded by Dawn, after Guido Reni, 1613-1614.
Even as a 19th century copy, this masterful Mannerist painting, reproducing a grand fresco with its vivid disonant color harmony, never failed to make an impact on Villa Lewaro visitors
Skillfully devised by Tandy to facilitate flexibility when entertaining, the reception rooms grouped on the first floor of Villa Lewaro easily flow one into the next. Alternately offering a relatively open combined envelope, or more compartmentalized spaces, it is the ultimate gala party setting
Entry into Villa Lewaro was carefully orchestrated to best dramatize festivities held here with a maximum sense of pomp and pageantry. From the very instant one came inside everything was calculated to express that here was a realm apart. Leaving the entrance hall, two steps down, access into the Villa Lewaro living room was planned so that the arrival of each new guest, could be clearly observed by those assembled. Tandy was at pains to have a marble staircase, with all the splendor this implies. But aware of his client's oopposition to extravagance, making reductions whever possible, he cut corners for Madame Walker, by providing a machine-forged metal balustrade, as opposed to a more expensive one, hand wrought from iron.
Provided a needlework-covered Louis XIV-style rocking chair, Villa Lewaro's welcoming fireside, was immediately adjacent to a pierced grill of the Estey organ's sounding chamber. The table lamp has a pierced brass Middle Eastern-style shade, glittering with glass jewels and beaded fring. Lighted, it must have added as much ambiance, with its pattern of colored shadows, as the sonorous music
Flower-form Arts and Crafts andirons gracing the living room's Renaissance-style hooded mantelpiece, made of 'cast stone.' On the mantle shelf, Booker T. Washington's bust holds pride-of-place with two vases, formed from World War I German shell canisters, made of copper and silver loving cups, which attested to Madame Walker's generous philanthropy.
A bust of educator Booker T. Washington of the type pictured on the Villa Lewaro living room mantelpiece
The eclectic decor of Villa Lewaro was devised by Frank R. Smith, who apearently was employed by Righter & Kolb, the decorators of the Walker town house. The formal reception rooms, which open into one another along a straight line, form a series of contrasting areas. Neo-Renaissance in style, the great hall-living room and the barrel-vaulted dining room originally had furniture custom-made by Brekey & Gay. The Louis XV-style music room still retains an Estey player-pipe organ with speaker ducts, which let music be heard throughout the house.
Villa Lewaro's decorator, Frank R. Smith of Righter & Kolb, had previously appointed Walker's Harlem townhouse. As the rendering above shows, his ideas for decorating Villa Lewaro, sometimes were more lavish than Madame Walker was willing to pay for
Beyond formal entertaing spaces, the living room, dining room, library, music room and solarium, thirty additional rooms included accommodations for eight servants and as many guests, a nursery, billiard room, gymnasium and laundry.
As for so many other builders of pleasure domes, it was all over rather quickly. Madame Walker died in 1919. Her daughter found the role of Lady Bountiful somewhat confining. Villa Lewaro was for her a less stimulating environment than Harlem.
But when duty beckoned, the house was the backdrop for a party: Lady Mountbatten, Richard Bruce Nugent, Walker beauty-parlor girls and Pullman porters were all welcomed. In the 1920's A'Lelia Walker also let the house be used as a location for the black silent-movie classic "Secret Sorrow."
Even prior to A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy's death in 1931, an effort had been made to 'unload' costly-to-maintain Villa Lewaro. Two much-discussed auctions of its contents were staged. In December of 1930, veteran dealer Benjamin Wise, with his force of black salesmen, conducted the first. It lasted three days. "White Buyers Strip Villa", screamed Harlem's Amsterdam New, newspaper, expressing something of the loss and heartache ordinary blacks felt, learning the news. A'Lelia's ormolu-mounted grand piano, Persian carpets, a French tapestry, a large spinach jade table lamp, beautifully bound sets of books, from a deluxe bible to the multi-volume memoirs of Casanova----all went under the hammer and were knocked down for a paltry $58,500! In light of prices payed to obtain these precious objects, just a little more than a decade earlier, this indeed represented pennies on the dollar. But, all things considered, this was not such a bad result. Things went to hell in America after the debacle of November, 1929. Art and antique collectors once worth hundreds of millions, men like William Randolph Hearst or Clarence McKay, were forced to dispose of their treasures at department stores, for what really amounted to bargain basement prices, as well. In Newport, the ultra exclusive seaside summer resort, things were no better than at Irvington. "Marble House"was the palatial 'cottage' of Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who as Mrs. Willie K. Vanderbilt had been the first social leader to divorce and remarry without sanction. Her 'cottage' is said to have cost $11,000,000.00 at the start of the 1890's! This is unlikely inasmuch as, well before the crash Mrs. Belmont challenged a property tax assessment based on a nearly $700,000.00 valuation. Indignant, she countered that around $400,000.00 was closer to the true value. Naturally, making this claim, she did not include the sumptuous contents of Marble House. Yet when she sold the four acre property in 1932, the house, lock, stock and barrel went for just a little over $100,000.00.
Courtesy of Half Pudding, Half Sause
1932
Even so, at Villa Lewaro, sufficient unsold remnants from six china dinner service, several sets of glassware, and other furnishings remained unsold to form the basis of a collection of Walker heirlooms that bring these figures to life, more vividly than anything that one could write.
Once A'Lelia passed away, Villa Lewaro was bequeathed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which sold it in 1932 to the Annie E. Poth home for aged members of the Companions of the Forest in America, a fraternal organization. Under their care it remained largely intact for the next 50 years.
The Annie Poth Home was a refuge for the widows and orphans of the Frinds of the Forest Fraternal Society for over fifty years.
1918: The vaulted dining room. Tablets among the ceiling's arabesque include the coupling of what appear to be a pair of same-sex lovers?
Robust cast plaster cornucopia fittingly ornament Villa Lewaro's dining room
A trumpet-shaped "brilliant cut' glass vase of the type seen on the Villa Lewaro sideboard, in the view above.
Breaking with tradition, this silver flatware once owned by Madame Walker, was engraved with her second husband's initails
Table linen, owned by A'Lelia Walker, 'corectly' bears the monogram, AWR, for A'Lelia Walker Robinson
1904: The East Room at the White House offered inspiration for Villa Lewaro's music room and many other ballrooms, private and public: earning for its designers the new name of "McKim, White & Gold"
Circa1920: The Music Room
Terpsichore
After her mother died A'Lelia Walker replaced the music rooms conventional Steinway piano for one with an 'art case' in the Louis XV mode, mounted in ormolu. These gilded ornamental articulations caused her Peck-Hardman & Co. instrument to be named 'the gold piano'. In the 1930 sale it fetched only $450.00
A gilded harp of the type found at Villa Lewaro
Circa 1920: Righter & Kolb were so exacting, that in Villa Lewaro's music room even the Victrola phonograph had its cabinet customised. It was painted with pastoral scenes in keeping with the rooms Watteauesque Lunettes and Louis XV sensibility. In 1930 it brought around $46.00
WHAT WAS A NEF?
A nef was an extravagant ship-shaped table ornament centerpiece and container used in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. Quite rarely made of glass, usually they were elaborately fashioned from silver, silver-gilt, or gold and often enameled and jewel-encrusted, Nefs were placed in front of the most important person at table as a mark of their status. When not just used for decoration, it might hold salt, spices, napkins, cutlery or even wine. For this reason some nefs had wheels to allow them to be rolled from one end of the table to the other, but most had legs or stood on pedestals.
Posed, poised and privileged alongside a graceful bureau plat, raffinée A’Lelia Walker, gowned in dark lace, looks every bit the pampered heiress. Most extraordinary among the accoutrements lending this scene such élan, is her repousse silver nef, a fantastic object with billowing sails and a large crew of minute hands, each exquisitely differentiated from the next. Most likely a late 19th-century copy of a late 16th-century example made in Augsburg, even these command $20,000.00 and more nowadays
Circa 1930: A'Lelia Walker sits in a Louis XV-style bergere beside a porcelain kater on a porcelain pedestal. Behind her is a Louis XIV-style clock of great presence. Like the clocks above and below, it was made to seem to be a timepiece in a nebulous of clouds amidst which puti play, resting on a terminal plinth, overlain with gilt bronze arabesque and festoons. Instead, it is a tall case or grandfather's clock, the ormolu-mounted center panel, opening to reveal the pendulum and weights.
Villa Lewaro's grand clock was a copy of the celebrated model made circa 1785 and attributed to Jean-Henri Riesener, now in the Louvre
Villa Lewaro's $25,000 Estey Pipe organ
As with many others who gain great riches, the Walkers set great store by quality. The best, the brightest, the biggest, ever held great appeal for them. Universally, the millionaire of 100 years ago esteemed the ultimate status symbol of a hone pipe organ. Largest and most complex of musical instruments, organs traditionally had only been found in churches and royal palaces. Then, in the mid-19th century, organs started to be installed in houses of the well-to-do. Certainly the music was soothing, but so too must have been knowledge that home organs cost as much as, and sometimes more than, an ordinary houses!
The Estey Organ Company, founded in 1852, went on to become the largest manufacturer of organs in the nation, with customers besides Madame Walker, including Henry Ford. Automatic player devices provided those who could afford them with a self-playing organ identified an elite among the elite.
The Greek Slave 1848, Parian ware figutine by England's Minton's Pottery works. Parian, Minton's name for 'statuary porcelain', alludes to the white marble from the Greek isle, Paros.
The Greek Slave is a marble in Raby Castle, carved in Florence by American sculptor Hiram Powers in 1844. Ostensibly it is merely a Grecian maiden, enslaved by Turks. But a cross and locket, amid the drapery, make it clear that she is a Christian, and betrothed.
Powers intention was that one see her suffering, as transcendent, raised above outward degradation. Innate purity and force of character bestow on her an uncompromising virtue that cannot be shamed. Many viewers on the eve of civil war, drew parallels between The Greek Slave and African American slaves in the South, with some abolitionists adopting the work, which was widely reproduced in ceramic reductions like Madame Walker's, as symbol. Compared with "the Virginian Slave", it was the subject of a John Greeleaf Whittier poem, inspiring as well a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lucy Stone, stopping to admire the statue broke into tears. For her it was emblematic of male misogyny. Thereafter, Stone included women's rights issues in her speeches.
A bust of Beethoven like the one atop Madame Walker's organ console
Circa 1935
1919: A Villa Lewaro bedroom
Madame Walker initiated a dynasty, ambitious, socially conscious, bright, black and proud. A'Lelia Bundles part in the ensuing line of succession has been varied; filled with recognition and rewards for a groundbreaking career as a TV journalist, and that's quite wonderful. Work for which she will most be remembered is quite different. One rarely grows rich writing history. But doing what A'Lelia has done and continues to do, with unstinting care and craft, one is granted the consolation of immortality!
Receiving such a warm reception with On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker, A'Lelia Bundles is continuing as she started. She is in the final stages of rewriting, polishing her manuscript, well beyond the the superficial degree that others might. She is a perfectionist, like Walker women before her, and so will not be satisfied until her dulcet prose shines forth like a diamond.
Once she has finished, we will learn about all sorts of things long the cause of wonder. Was A'Lelia Walker's first husband, John Robinson, the hotel waiter, really the love of her life? Or, notwithstanding three tries tying the knot, was she also gay, like a score of her best friends, like several of her set who also married persons with a different gender than theirs?
We already know, that due to her industry, networking skills and keen instincts, that much of the success of the Walker Company was due to A'Lelia Walker. But far more awaits us, because once A'Lelia Bundles has completed her task, metaphorically, but still most magically, she will take us by the hand to the much changed world and times of her namesake. Guiding us into our recent history , like Dicken's spirit in A Christmas Carol, with but a touch of her gown, we'll be transported. Revealed will be a world familiar and foreign. Most surprisingly, we'll discover, that like our epoch, like our lives, it was hardly all bad, that many things were quite wonderful in fact. More amazing still, going back in time, communing with her people, our people, proud, prepared, purposeful and black, we will discover in them, those who have gone before us, our own wonderful selves.
Circa 1912: Madame C. J. Walker by Addison Scurlock
Like remarkable historians who have come before, whether Stephen Birmingham, who wrote Certain People, David Levering Lewis, the author of When Harlem was in Vogue, or Gerrie Major, who penned Black Society, A'Lelia Bundles is engaged in establishing a legacy too.
2013
Ca. 1913: Incomparable A'Lelia Walker
Circa 1919: A'Lelia Walker by Addison Scurlock
1911: Turban with Egret aigrette and turquoise jewel by Paul Poiret
Circa 1911: A'Lelia Walker wearing brocade turban with egret aigrette by Paul Poiret. The innovative Paris couturier, who banished corsets, was a friend who A'Lelia Walker entertained.
That late great trailblazing historian from San Francisco, Eric Garber, wrote of A'Lelia's penchant for parties and gay people:
"Because A'Lelia adored the company of lesbians and gay men, her parties had a distinctly gay ambiance. Elegant homosexuals such as Edward Perry, Edna Thomas. Harold Jackman, and Caska Bonds were her closest friends. So were scores of white celebrities..."
Much earlier, novelist Marjorie Worthington remembered:
"We went several times that winter to Madame Allelia [sic] Walker's Thursday "at-homes" on a beautiful street in Harlem known as, Sugar Hill...." [Madame Walker's] lavishly furnished house was a gathering place not only for artists and authors and theatrical stars of her own race, but for celebrities from all over the world. Drinks and food were served, and there was always music, generously performed enthusiastically received."
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. Madame Walker's initial gala, a luncheon party for nearly 100, blacks and whites, was hosted in honor of the Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War in September of 1918. President wilson, after first objecting, at last allowed blacks to fight in the World War, and Mr, Scott is the closest African Americans have to a cabinet officer. Madame Walker's guests lunched out on the terrace before entering the music room for musical entertainment. J. Rosamond Johnson, who wrote, "Lift Every Voice and Sing", "The African American National Anthem", eminent organist Melville Charlton and other musicians played and sang. It was a lovely afternoon, but not without purpose. Determined that like official entertaining at the White House, that her social gatherings contributed to political action, Madame Walker used this occasion to implore blacks to set aside differences, and support the war-effort. She also asked that Washington take note of black participation in the defence of democracy and outlaw lynching.
The Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War
As for A'Lelia Walker, she was more easy. Many recollections confirm her generous nature, her delight in enjoyment, and in providing pleasure as well. By all accounts, everyone from chorus girls to artists to socialites to visiting royalty would come at least once to enjoy her engaging hospitality. Whether at the Dark Tower, 80 Edgecombe, or Villa Lewaro, wherever she was, though not named 'Laeticia', A'Lelia was the "joy goddess."
They say that whatever one's race, class, condition or sexuality today, that people are, on the whole, rather impatient. If then you are an intrepid exception, and have made it this far: through over one hundred pages, numerous pictures and 12,275 words or so, besides offering my congratulations, I ought perhaps to summarize of my intent. Originalist ideologues, nostalgic for paternalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy notwithstanding, ever-changing America, has not changed enough. Justice delayed is, justice denied.
Still beckoning and golden, the American Dream must not be allowed to become irrelevant. It is still so rich and real and robust, but for fewer and fewer, seems within reach. As America evolves to grow ever more diverse, opportunity and reward, ought to expand and not retract to enrich just some at the top.
Madame C. J. Walker, her daughter A'Lelia Walker, both strove towards such an empowering and beneficial end. An outstanding relic of their faith in our country, Villa Lewaro, as much as Mount Vernon or Monticello, is a shrine that deserves to be on public view, as a museum dedicated to determination and the humanitarian impulse to help others.
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. They included not only eminent blacks like the poet William Stanley Braithwaite and the composer and concert singer Harry T. Burleigh, but Walker beauty-shop operators. One guest, Enrico Caruso, coined the villa's name, using two letters from each name of Mme. Walker's only child, A'lelia Walker Robinson.
Lloyd and Edna Thomas
Edna was a great actress. She started out as Madame Walker's social secretary. One of her jobs was to look up words Walker did not understand reading the newspaper. Regretting having only a scant education, in this way she could learn and expand her vocabulary.
Lloyd Thomas managed their 136th street beauty salon for the Walkers. In 1929, at a party given by A'Lelia, Lloyd introduced Edna to English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham. For the rest of their lives the women were a devoted couple
A manservant for Mrs. and Mrs. Basil Rathbone, Edward Perry studied painting with Winold Reiss, before moving on to acting and stage management. Esteemed as Harlem's Elsa Maxwell, late in life he had a career as a party consultant
1929: Harold Jackman by Richmond Barthe
Designated the "handsomest man in Harlem," London-born Harold Jackman, who had an unknown white English father and a black West Indian mother, was a high school teacher, model, actor, writer, and patron, with a life-long interest theater and in documenting African American cultural life. Gay in most every way, he nonetheless managed to have a daughter, with a white friend, to whom he left half his estate
Spirited off as a young boy to England by an aristocrat who lived on London's Lilac Sweep, Bonds grew to become a music coach, with attractive protegees of uneven talent. A particular friend of A'Lelia's he gained the lease of her apartment when she died. He lived there with a youth named Embry Bonner
Cocaine-addict and Harlem lover Princess Violette Murat, was born Violette Jacqueline Charlotte Ney d'Elchingen. Writer Zora Neal Husrton called her "Princess Muskrat". Fortunately, as she was a lesbian, her husband, Bonaparte Prince Eugene Louis Michel Joachim Napoleon Murat, pre-deceased her by almost 40 years
Julius Lorenzo Cobb Bledsoe was a once-renowned, but now forgotten baritone, the first 'Joe' in "Showboat" and the first African American artist to gain regular employment on Broadway. None the less, finding legitimate operatic roles scare in the States, he concertized to acclaim and profit in Europe. Here he met his well-to-do Dutch lover, sometime-diplomatic cultural attache, Adriain Frederick Huygens
Ivor Novello, a Welsh composer, playwright, matanee and film star became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. Born into a musical family, his operatic-coach-mother Clara Davies, was the teacher of Caska Bonds. Norvello's first big success was as a songwriter was the World War I favorite "Keep the Home Fires Burning"
Geraldyn Hodges Dismond, Harlem's 'Lady Nicotine', a inveterate journalist from Chicago, who in time, ditched her philandering husband, to become Gerrie Major of Jet Magazine
The 'Night Hawk', Gerrie's husband, the college football star, World War I hero, Dr. Binga Dismond, a man said to have too much, of everything!
Jimmy Daniels and Wallace Thurman shared a room as boarders at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street, in a cooperative unit owned by Edna and Lloyd Thomas. Edna Thomas' white lesbian lover, English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham, who also lived here, is seen with in the picture above, with Edna, at the center. Jimmy is on the far left, while Lloyd sits on the right, with 'It Girl' Blanche Dunn on his lap.
Masterful magnate, Madame C. J. Walker, the hair-care-beauty specialist who built the most spectacular residence ever owned by an African American in 1917: Villa Lewaro! Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building such a showplace. Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the ability and value of African American faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Circa 1908
Circa 1910
Circa 1912
Near her life's end, Madame C. J. Walker averrrd that African Americans were a race that " has watered your soil with its tears and enriched your soil with its blood". She made an impassioned plea that lynching be outlawed, stating :
"I am asking that this government enact a law that will make mob violence and lynching a federal crime, so that our women will not be hanged from trees in Georgia while they give birth to their babes and that our sons, and our fathers, and our brothers may not be chained to the stake in Tennessee and made human torches of, and parts of their bodies dismembered and taken away as souvenirs, and their heads severed from their charred bodies and thrown into the midst of our august bodies while they are in convention assembled."
Racism, branding America's misbegotten black citizens as lazy, criminal and hedonistic, indifferent and willfully ignorant, is the height of irony. For what group, doing all the tasks no one else would do, has worked harder, or longer towards amassing our country's great wealth? Who has better undertaken and mastered all we pursue, with greater brio and originality? Which servants ever more faithfully enabled a sybaritic lifestyle for more exacting masters with discerning tastes for luxury?
Straight out of bondage some former slaves became doctors, teachers, artists and inventors. Others continued in essential, more menial tasks. Tilling the soil, refining ore, digging ditches, loading cargoes, cooking, nursing, cleaning---everything--- everywhere: We did that. Were we ever well treated or properly paid?
Today, still singled out, we disproportionately pay fines for minor infractions, and in this way and others continue to play a significant role economically. Brilliantly batting, bouncing, driving, slicing, and catching balls, blacks are the unsurpassed gladiators of today's circus. The plaintive songs of black youth, desperate to be loved and admired, exuding bravado and sensuality, wistfully expressing a yearning to be fabulous, to be free, are our national sound track. Yet who, among us, has benefited to the degree of recording studio or ball team owners?
Nothing is as unbearably frightening as blackness. So the controlling surveillance of black people, keeps employed mostly white forces of police and prison guards. From New Orleans to Detroit and beyond, blacks inhabit and give value to substandard, otherwise valueless housing. Then comes the time, when our tax dollars contribute to policies that subsidise gentrification and our dispatch. There is no more dependable TV audience than African Americans. Blacks also prodigiously consume quantities of unhealthily food and drink. Hindered, hobbled, held back, kept perpetually poor and uneducated, all we do makes others rich.
Yet for all we have done, for all we do, unrelentingly we are our nation's scapegoat. If blacks do not quite absolve the ineptitude of the man behind the curtain, reliably, African Americans are a wonderful distraction. Much as in Hitler's Germany, when Jews were systematically persecuted and denied participation in public life, ever-present ridicule and debasement in the media, literature, art, and texts, successfully served to dehumanize African Americas. Blacks were demonized to an extent that made oppression and unjustly punitive sanction accepted, as the distasteful, for some, but essential means of maintaining public order, as indeed, the means of preserving the norms of civilization.
Nowadays we face a subtler, more insidious sort of prejudice. But as the Doll Test shows, to be black in America, is to be dismissed as stupid, ugly and scary, is to be despised. My friend Adam Gopnik asserts further, that even in so enlightened a place as New York City, most comfortably-off, "Middle Class people are willing to dispense with a certain amount of civil liberty, in order to feel safe..."
In the past, political leaders such as William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and academicians like Alaine Locke, helped to stage-manage the "Negro Renaissance". A skillful propaganda campaign of the 1920's, featuring African American cultural accomplishment via dancers, painters, actors, singers, writers and musicians, it was meant to show that blacks merited equality too. 'Race women,' like Madam C. J. Walker and her daughter A'Lelia, who dubbed as the Joy Goddess of Harlem, became a great personality of this period, also worked and lived to affirm the worthiness of African Americans.
Because such efforts sadly remain necessary for black well-being and fulfilment, for black survival, it's fortunate that young intellectuals, film makers and others are at work now to challenge black defamation.
Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, is Thomas Allen Harris’s extraordinary new documentary. Produced in collaboration with pioneering photography historian Debora Willis, it is a unique examination of the way black photographers selected and represented their subjects in a way that let them use cameras as a powerful weapon to fight back against alienating stereotypes.
Thomas Allen Harris’s documentary, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, is a compelling examination of the way black photographers effected social change with prideful images
Blackbird, a new feature film made by Harlem's Patrik-Ian Polk, similarly explores how hate and alienation, particularly when internalized, can be terribly destructive. Polk's timely drama centers on a talented teenage singer troubled by adolescent conflict.
Even in a hip spot like Harlem, messages of intolerance and contempt for difference thrive. Uncontested they endanger our children, poisoning the psyche of kids who haven't even discovered who they are, with fear and self -loathing. Worse, they feed the insecurity of some and lead to harm, like the senseless murder of lovely Islan Nettles last year, that took place in broad daylight, in front of a police station.
His faith, family, and friends all dictate that he adhere to a conventional identity acceptable in the sleepy Southern Baptist hamlet where he lives. Like the rest of us, he has to learn to accept and love himself. Turmoil only comes to an end once he stops allowing others to determine who that is.
Begiling and beautiful newcomer Julian Walker, starring in Blackbird with Isaiah Washington and Mo'Nique, manifest the full diversity that enriches America.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time...James Baldwin 1963
May 25, 1911: Laura Nelson and her 15-year-old son L.D. Nelson were lynched in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. In their day, they were Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
Eager to have lynching outlawed, just prior to her death, Madame C. J. Walker pledged $5,000, then the cost of a Cadillac touring car, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's anti-lynching fund. The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites being lynched between 1882 and 1968
Ever-present danger of degradation, humiliation and physical harm, has long constrained the black condition. Much as in Hitler's Germany, when Jews and others were systematically persecuted and denied participation in public life, ridicule and debasement; in the media, literature, art and texts, successfully served to dehumanize African Americas to an extent that made oppression and unjust punishment, accepted as the distasteful, to some, but essential means of maintaining public order, and indeed, the norms of civilization.
A century ago Madame Walker and others faced a world in which black advancment was threatening to many. African American aspiration and assimilation were caricatured as unknowing impudence.
Today, some contend that racism has evolved, that social strife is based merely on class instead of the color of one's skin. However, as always, with a majority of African Americans experiencing disparate and inferior outcomes compared to whites, class-based biases are a distracting distinction, without difference. Too many examples of discrimination and ill-treatment toward blacks, irrespective of their education, income or attainment, exist to suggest that even now, class trumps race. Indeed, much as with charter schools, where the chosen few are better educated at the expense of the most poorly prepared-many, black success is in fact, often transformed into an indictment. Based on the evidence of the few who beat the odds, those who fail, are frequently condemned as indolent.
1902: AidaOvweton Walker's anthem of upward mobility was savagely parodied as, "A Colored Declaration of Blue Blood"
As exemplified by Madame C. J Walker, or the trendsetting Broadway artist, Aida Overton Walker, (no relation), who preformed before white socialites, British royalty and aristocrats as well as large and appreciative black audiences, Negro High Society, has always constituted a meritocracy. Ancestry per-se, apart from white ancestry, was never accorded the same importance attached to education and enterprise.
Why is it that a man, just as soon as he gets enough money, builds a house much bigger than he needs? I built a house at Akron many times larger than I have the least use for; I have another house at Miami Beach, which is also much larger than I need. I suppose that before I die I shall buy or build other houses which also will be larger than I need. I do not know why I do it – the houses are only a burden.…all my friends who have acquired wealth have big houses…Even so unostentatious a man as Henry Ford has a much bigger house at Dearborn than he really cares about. I wonder why it is …In a few cases, a big house is built just as an advertisement that one is rich; sometimes a big house is built so great entertainments may be given. But in most cases, and especially with men who have earned their own money, the house is just built and when it is done, no one quite knows why it was started…Henry Ford 1926, Men and Rubber; The Story of Business
One can usually get a pretty good result approaching history as one might an over-sized portrait by Pearlstein or a pointillist painting by Seurat. Only finding the proper perspective does apparent chaos coalesce into discernible order. This is how two observations, from different eras, written by two quite different men, converge to perfectly explain a most improbable house.
Circa 1789: West Front of Mount Vernon, by Edward Savage.
Distinguishing historical substance from symbolism is imperative. Taught that Washigton was incapable of telling a lie, that he valued liberty above all else, the life of slaves at his vast plantation, with meager rations, communal accomodation and twelve hour workdays, reveals a harsher truth.
For those who are un-knowledgeable, a cursory glance mightn't leave much of a lasting impression. For many examining the surface of things, the constituent elements, making an aesthetic evaluation, their final conclusion might be that they'd seen a conventionally 'nice' mansion, in well-kept, but not extensive grounds. They might determine that the house Sara Breedlove McWilliams Walker built at Irvington, New York, "Villa Lewaro", as nice as it is, is hardly exceptional.
But from a better-informed vantage point, the Villa Lewaro, named a National Treasure this year by the National Trust, the grandest house ever built by an African American before 1960, is something else again. Howsoever 'modest' it might appear materially, in relation to grandiose abodes built by whites; placed in context, contrasted with the isolated and unequal conditions characteristic of African American life, it is as magical as the Summer Palace of China's dowager empress, as incomparable as the court of the Sun King at Versailles.
1858: Mount Vernon by Ferdinand Richardt
By repeatedly expanding his father's existing one-and-a-half-storey farmhouse, over several decades, Washington created a structure with 11,028 square feet ! Mount Vernon dwarfed most dwellings in late 18th-century Virginia, which typically comprised one to two rooms, ranging in size from roughly 200 to 1200 square feet.
Following George Washington's death, on the eve of a new century in 1799, his beloved Mount Vernon Plantation passed on to a succession of less capable heirs overwhelmed by its costly upkeep. Martha Washington's awareness had caused her to free slaves, otherwise freed by provision of her husband's will, upon her death.
Increasingly Mount Vernon fell into disrepair after a failed attempt by Washington’s great-great nephew John A. Washington to sell it to the United States or the Virginia Commonwealth in 1853.
This prompted Ann Pamela Cunningham to establish the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which began an unprecedented national campaign to purchase Mount Vernon and preserve it as a talisman of American history. This collaborative effort of patriotic and patrician white women from the north and the south alike, formed the nexus of the United State's historic preservation movement.
Every attempt was made to sanitize the memory of our foremost founding father. Acting to transform a bastion of white America's self-entitled wealth-through-oppression, into an icon of liberty, destroying the old slave quarters became the first imperative item of business before Mount Vernon was opened to the public as a shrine.
Building one of the largest houses in Virginia, among the most commodious in the new nation, Washington had hardly sought to outdo the Dukes of Marlborough, whose house was one of the largest and grandiose in England. The Baroque masterpiece boast 175,000 square feet!
Monticello, 1769-1809 by Thomas Jefferson
Introducing the first dome on an American house, counting the cellars, Monticello has around 11,000 square feet of living space.
Ickworth, 1795-1830 designed by Mario Aspurcci, executed by Francis and Joseph Sandy, laocated at Horringer, Burry St. Edmunds. Suffolk, England
Not completed until well after the death of its builder, connoisseur collector Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry and 4th Earl of Bristol, in 1803, Ickworth, with its central rotunda and curving wings, was truly a temple of art. Monticello, by contrast, is not even as large as the servants' quarters here.
As an historian and a preservationist, one learns a good deal about where people stand, by looking at where, and how they live. A visit to historic Addisleigh Park, in Saint Albans, Queens, is a revelation. Billed as the 'suburban Sugar Hill,' in reference to black Harlem's elite address of the 1930's and 1940's, the spic-and-span community offers neat mock-Tudor and Colonial Revival houses surrounded by supremely manicured lawns. Initially met by restrictive deed covenants that prohibited the sale of property to blacks, after 1945 the enclave rapidly became home to a score of celebrities, from Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald, to Jackie Robinson, Count Basie and Joe Louis. A few houses boast double lots. Four or five even had swimming pools and tennis courts. But at best, the biggest houses here had about two-thousand square feet of space for living large.
"Hyde Park", 1895, by McKim, Mead & White
Just as America's founding fathers wasted little time attempting to emulate far richer nobles in England, neither did Madame Walker seek to 'compete' with the splendor of the nearby Frederick William Vanderbilt estate, or the even closer and equally palatial Rockefeller place, at Tarrytown. With fifty rooms comprising 44,000 square feet and two hundred acres, "Hyde Park" was one of the Hudson Valley's most notable showplaces.
Meanwhile, out in Beverly Hills, California, the largest houses of the most celebrated white stars, averaged around ten-thousand square feet. Accessing the extent of success accorded the United State's most acclaimed African Americans, it's useful to keep such observations of dramatic inequality in mind.
Despised and rejected enough, assailed by sorrows and grief, a little more than a century ago, Madame C. J. Walker surly appreciated the notion of "black rage". But as with some other subjects of outstanding success stories, she determined early on to subdue and submerge fury, translating any inner anger into a passion to succeed.
Whether with architecture or through prodigious philanthropy to black causes, paying as much attention to projecting as regal an image as any sovereign, Madam Walker utilized a saga as poignant and compelling as Lincoln's trek from a back-woods cabin to the White House. This was how she distinguished her brand from every other similar product on the market. As this ad shows, for Walker, the concept that beauty and success were synonymous was espoused as an alluring doctrine of faith.
Twenty-three years ago, Thursday, August 29, 1991, expertly edited by Yanick Rice Lamb, my article, A Mansion With Room for the Great and Humble, was published in the Home section of the New York Times. "MY great-great-grandmother meant for her four-acre estate to be a showplace for black Americans that would motivate them to realize their own dreams," related A'lelia Perry Bundles. Then a producer with ABC World News Tonight in Washington, Ms. Bundles was unknown to me. Now retired, as a philanthropist serving on the board of trustees of both Columbia University and the National Archives, my esteemed dear friend is more active and occupied than ever before.
Lincoln Family log cabin, Sinking Spring Farm, Hodgenville, Kentucky
This is reported to be the place where Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. Seven US presidents were born in log cabins, including Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and James Buchanan. Ironically, Whig contender William Henry Harrison, the son of a Virginia planter, hardly born in a log cabin, nonetheless cynically appropriated this meager type of habitation as a symbol that he was a man of the people. Other candidates followed Harrison's example, making the idea of a log cabin, a background of modest means, a childhood spent overcoming the adversity of hard times, a recurring and classic campaign theme.
Restored and featured in innumerable pieces since 1991, Villa Lewaro is ever so slowly gaining recognition as a singular monument to the American dream. When my story appeared, even after Stanley Nelson's titanic Walker documentary, Two Dollars and a Dream appeared, this was not so.
Designed by Ventner Woodson Tandy, New York State's second registered black architect after his partner George Washinton Foster, the neo-Palladian-style structure was built at Irvington-on-Hudson between 1916 and 1918. Close at hand are other larger historic houses on more ample acreage, that were built for famed whites. Several of these, writer Washington Irving's "Sunnyside", feared robber-baron Jay Gould's "Lyndhurst," and John D. Rockefeller's "Kykuit", are all operated as house museums and opened to the public. 'Why ought not this to be the case at Madame Walker's house?', I mused after my first visit to Villa Lewaro in 1988.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, America's bicentennial anniversary year, Villa Lewaro's then-owners, Ingo and Darlene Appel, greeted me warmly and welcomed my interest. They had actually started exploring ways to make Madame Walker's house into a museum. As a result they'd engaged with several groups, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Madame C. J. Walker Committee of Westchester County.
A lowly log cabin has been a potent symbol of heroically-humble origins in US literature and politics since the early 19th century.
"I think the time is right now," they were told by Steve Pruitt. A government relations adviser, he was speaking on behalf of Representative Cardiss Collins of Illinois, who would introduce a bill calling for Federal funds to purchase and safeguard Villa Lewaro. Historian Alex Haley of Roots fame, Oprah Winfrey and many others concurred.
Statesman Frederic Douglas lived in this respectable dwelling with his family from 1878 until his death in 1895. It's hardly a surprise learning that the largest contributor to save "Cedar Hill" prior to it being opened to the public, came from Madame Walker
I agreed too with this splendid idea. So I was elated when a new 'Diversity Scholars' fund initiated by the Trust, picked up the tab for my airfare and hotel, enabling me to attend the nation's premiere preservation organization's annual conference at Miami Beach that autumn. This opportunity would give me a chance to ask Richard Moe, the Trust's new director, what he thought about the amorphous and tentative plans to make Madame Walker's house into a museum.
Alonzo Herndon residence, 587 University Pl., NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 1910
A former slave raised in a sharecropping family, after the Civil War Herndon owned and managed a string of barbershops. Investing profits into real estate, becoming the largest black property owner in Atlanta by 1900, Herndon next founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, to become Atlanta's first black millionaire. Maintained as a museum, W. E. B. Dubois praised Herndon’s Georgian Revival house as, ‘the finest residence in America owned by a Negro.’ At the time of this statement, naturally, Villa Lewaro had not yet been built.
"Cultural Diversity" was the conference's theme. So why had it opened on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of atonement? The seductive local ought to have further given me pause. Why meet at Miami Beach? After local white politicians ignored recently freed Nelson Mandela durring his seven-city tour of America, black civil rights activists instituted a 1,000-day boycott against the local convention and tourism business. African American groups refusing to hold meetings or to book group tours in the region, meant an eventual loss of more than $50 million.
Still I stayed, undeterred, and had my chance to question Mr. Moe. Perfectly pleasant, he answered politely,
"Under my tenure, I intend to lead the trust out of the business of collecting and opening the houses of the rich. We're past that..."
Protests that it might be a fine idea, once the Trust saved and showed at least one rich person's house that had not been built by a white Christian man, were to no avail.
Number 1048 Simpson Road, (now Joseph E. Boone Boulevard ), Atlanta, Georgia, erected 1926 by the African American Aiken & Faulkner Construction Co. located on Auburn Avenue: demolished 1962
In 1926, the year he built this house, Theodore "Tiger" Flowers, famed as the "Fighting Georgia Deacon" became the first black boxer to win the world middleweight championship. Less than a year later, cheated out of his title in a rigged bout, in November 1927, at thirty-two, Flowers died. He died in Harlem, undergoing surgery to remove scar tissue above his eye. His magnificent house, featuring a plaster bas relief of a tiger's head above the drawing room door, was demolished in 1962
I'm in agreement with the stellar biographer Jean Strouse; no fabricated story can ever match history for drama, the unexpected, or valuable instruction. So I'm still convinced that Richard Moe's response to being cornered and confronted with a proposal that the Trust find some way to acquire Villa Lewaro, was shortsighted, a missed opportunity. For what an inspirational and encouraging tale can be told, examining the house that Madame Walker built.
Stylishly of its time, even the house architect-to-the-stars, Paul Revere Williams built for himself in Los Angeles, in 1951, fails to approach the opulence of Villa Lewaro
"Villa Lewaro was", A'Lelia Bundles says, "a symbol of what my great-great-grandmother termed 'the wealth of business possibilities within the race to point to young Negroes what a lone woman can accomplish and to inspire them to do big things.' "
Ms. Bundles's portrait of her ancestor is titled On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker. Published by Scribner's in 2001, it quickly became a national bestseller. How superbly A'Lelia Bundles un-spools the saga. How affectingly it resonates, as part primer, part cautionary tale. What is it that makes it so moving and so timeless? This is a question that's answered easily enough. For all the nuanced specificity of Madame Walker's distinctly American life, an incessant journey seeking truth and meaning, bravely facing defeat and boldly tracking down triumph: her story is universal, too.
Adamantly a 'race woman', Madam Walker was hardly deterred by condescension; neither from whites who disdained her very presence, nor from elitist blacks who felt past poverty and deficient education made her unacceptable. In America, wealth seldom hurts. But Madame Walker's assets exceeded wealth alone. This was why Booker T. Washington, who initially tried to thwart her ambitions as a civil rights activist, had ended by becoming her friend.
Supporting the burgeoning National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's agenda of empowerment, eager to benefit from the growing circulation of Du Bois' The Crisis, Walker signed on as one of the magazine's earliest advertisers, advising potential customers in a half-page ad: "Your hair will not be beautiful unless it is healthy."
In 1917, following yet another unwarranted assault of blacks by whites, this time in East St. Louis, Walker and James Weldon Johnson were in a small delegation sent to the White House, pleading with President Woodrow Wilson to make lynching a federal crime.
"We should protest until the American sense of justice is so aroused that such affairs as the East St. Louis riot be forever impossible,"
Walker said.
On July 28, heeding Walker's exhortation, the N.A.A.C.P. staged a "Silent Protest" parade in New York that attracted 8,000 participants marching in silence to the staccato tattoo of drums up Fifth Avenue, arm-in-arm, dressed in white, they did then, what people in Freguson, Missouri are still doing today.
The protest was organized by the Rev. Dr. Hutchens Chew Bishop; the rector of St. Philip's Episcopal Church. In the same year the NAACP was founded, St. Philip's vestry, made up of some of the city's most distinguished African American residents, had sold their church building on West 25th Street.
By 1911 they completed a new Neo-Gothic-style church, at 214 West 134th Street, also designed by architect Vertner Woodson Tandy, in partnership with Cooper Union-trained, George Washington Foster the first African American architect lisenced in New York State . At the same time, eager to participate in the creation of a black Mecca at Harlem, St. Philip's acquired ten six-storey new-law tenement buildings at
107-145 West 135th Street. Costing $640,000, these apartments where filled with white occupants, who were evicted to make way for blacks. This action was envisioned as an investment that would generously endow the 'nation's richest colored church' for generations to come. By far the transaction was the most extensive, involving black capital, up until that date. Currently valued at 20 times their appraisal in 1910, these structures now belong to the Rose Smart Growth Investment Fund, which plans to make them both environmentally friendly and affordable.
Confined to her bed due to failing health, on May 5, 1919, a critically-ill Madame Walker sent word to the NAACP's Anti-Lynching Conference at Carnegie Hall:
She would pledge $5,000 to the group's efforts to combat mob violence. This largest pledge the Association had ever received created a sensation. Madame Walker's announcement electrified 2,500 assembled delegates, inspiring over the course of the convention, primarily from black delegates, $4,400 in additional pledges. Three weeks later, on May 25, says her great-great-granddaughter and biographer A'Lelia Bundles, Walker died at her imposing estate at Irvington-on-Hudson, Villa Lewaro.
Reading of her earlier travels as a sales person, to Cuba, the Caribbean, and in Central America, one marvels at Madame Walker's stamina. Attempting to follow her cross-country progress from Mississippi to St. Louis, to Denver, to Pittsburgh, before settling and building her factory in Indianapolis, Indiana, all in the space of less than a decade, is downright exhausting. Walker's Vegetable Shampoo, Wonderful Hair Grower, Temple Grower, Glossine and a prepairation called Tan-Off, the inevitable skin bleach, were produced at the Mme. C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company factory in Indianapolis. In response to orders cases were shipped for distribution by a wide network of sales agents and beauticians. The arrangement worked wonderfully for Madame Walker. Reportedly, she was happy living in Indianapolis as well. Why then, did she leave?
How adroit, for Vertner Tandy, Madame C. J. Walker and her daughter, A'Lelia Walker Robinson, to do just what whites would have maintained they were incapable of. Employing what a century ago was regarded as the epitome of "good taste", exercising disciplined restraint, they used Charlston's renowned Nathaniel Russell house and Boston buildings built from the 1790's through the early 1800's as the model for their hybrid Walker townhouse-salon, that combined home and business long before it was ever considered at Bergdorf-Goodman or Elizabeth Arden.
Ambition and opportunity were half of what had moved her. Her only child, Lelia was the other part of the equation. The woman who became famous as A'Lelia Walker always came first where her mother was concerned. Frequently she was cross about her extravagance, yet, repeatedly, Madame Walker indulged her child. She was also ambitious for Lelia, for whom she desired to provide all that she had missed, including Paris hats, travel abroad and an education. That rarest of rarities, a Negro heiress, her mother was right to fear that some would attempt to take advantage of her daughter. However, her daughter also made Madame Walker proud. Neither possessing the requisite fragility, fair skin, or delicate features to be regarded as a beauty in her day, tall and statuesquely handsome Lelia always made an impressive, even a striking appearance. Moreover, true intelligence and common sense underlay Lelia's impulsiveness and occasional self-indulgence. Always, not unlike Sportin Life in Porgey n' Bess, the bright lights and good times of the big city beckoned alluringly to Madame Walker's child. In 1913 she had bade her mother to relocate with her to the new Negro 'promised land' of Harlem, a quarter with as many dance halls, cabarets and salons as churches, hundreds! The women attending church and bars mightn't be the same women, but Lelia pointed out, that all hundred thousand wanted to get their hair done before they went there.
So off to Harlem they ventured. According to historian Christopher Gray, in 1913 and 1915 Madam Walker bought two old-style brownstones at 108 and 110 West 136th Street. In 1915 she filed plans to completely rebuild the two houses as one and give them a new front, in the same way that many midtown and East Side rowhouses were being reconstructed
Window in blind arch at the Nathaniel Russell house
On the second floor, the main level of Madame Walker's residence. drawings show a double-size drawing room stretching the full width of the building. Three "chambres" occupied the remainder of the second floor. A billiard room and other additional bedrooms were found on the third floor.
When the Walkers next decided to build a country house, neighbors were horrified, first seeing 'the dressed up Negresses with their comically aloof airs in a chauffeur-driven automobile' pull up. But her white lawyer had secured the deed for Villa Lewaro's acreage, fair and square!
Ultimately, devising a combination residence-spa-beauty salon-school for the Walkers, Vertner Tandy took his cue from the townhouse of Percy Rivington Pyne, II, Esquire. Bowing to the Federal style prevailing during the early republic, it is a picture of WASP decorum and rectitude. Planned by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1911, it stands on the north-west corner of Park Avenue, at 68th Street, serving as the Americas Society.
Madam C. J. Walker's business acumen was prodigious. Living large, projecting as fabulous an image and aura as she could afford, she appreciated that this was a shrewd advertising strategy. Her distinguished 108-110 West 136th Street beauty salon-residence was designed by black architect Vertner Woodson Tandy.
By combining her home and business in two converted brownstone houses, made into a single building, Tandy maximized the grandeur of both.
Madame C. J. Walker's residence, numbers 108-110 West 136th Street, with the Walker chauffeur-driven Lincoln touring car.
Once A'Lelia Walker moved to a one-bedroom apartment at 80 Edgecombe Avenue, she transformed her mother's grand abode into a deluxe catering hall, the storied Dark Tower, where the best parties were always the ones she gave.
The Reception Room of the Walker Beauty Parlor, College and Spa.
Two photographs staged to show styling, care and wig making techniques in the Walker'sLelia Beauty College manual.
In reality, the Walker's clients were groomed and styled in private, curtained booths. While awaiting an appointment, one could take tea or play a hand of cards.
Drawing room, Madame C. J. Walker residence
For bedrooms and other lesser interiors, architect Vertner Tandy economically retained the configuration and old-fashioned Victorian woodwork original to the two 1890's row houses combined to form the Walker townhouse-beauty salon. However, for this space and other formal reception rooms, every component was newly built.
A grand piano, an 18th-century French tapestry fragment and an allegorical statuette were among the elegant elements of decorators, Righter & Kolb's chic decor.
Madame Walker and her daughter so admired this depiction of Terpsichore, the muse of dance and chorus, that it was moved and given place of honor in Villa Lewaro's white and gold music room
Equipped with a Chickering piano, a phonograph and serviceable, comfortable tufted-leather seat-furniture, including a platform rocking chair, the Walker's living room was meant for relaxation.
Retaining Victorian mahogany wood work, complimented by richly colored walls, the Walker living room also prominently displayed a tapestry depicting a battle scene from African history
A'Lelia Walker's 136th Street bedroom
Although the old original mantelpiece and architraves were kept here, Righter & Kolb, much like Stanford White at the Ogden Mills' estate, made them 'modern', with cream colored paint, matching the painted Louis XVI-style furniture
A bust of educator Booker T. Washington of the type pictured in A'Lelia Walker's 136th Street bedroom, later moved to the Villa Lewaro living room mantelpiece
Initially disdainful of Madame Walker, as he and many were, of all women seeking political influence, Washington's rebuffs provoked Walker's equivalent of Sojourner Truth's Ain't I A Woman? speech. Learning in this way of Walker's wealth and charity, the most notable black man in America soon conceded that Madame Walker was surly the nation's foremost black woman.
Walker's retort on being discouraged from addressing the National Negro Business League Convention, over which Washington presided in 1912, might to have been etitled "And, Am I Not an Unqualified Success!?" It went in part,
“I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations….I have built my own factory on my own ground...”
1928: The Dark Tower, by James Vanderzee
Already living at her 80 Edgecombe Avenue apartment by the mid-1920's, to better utilize the living space at 110 West 136th Street, A'Lelia Walker rented several rooms for private social and civic events, calling this enterprise, "The Walker Studio". At a dinner featuring spaghetti, for which she was acclaimed, Walker announced to assembled artists, who included Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurmon, and Richard Bruce Nugent, that she would inaugurate a gathering place for them, a club-tea shop. It was to be called the "Dark Tower", in reference to Countee Cullen's evocative poem. In due course a local sign painter emblazoned the drawing room walls with the Cullen poem, as well as Hughes' "The Weary Blues". Unfortunately, although a popular venue for parties hosted by the well-off, Harlem artists could neither afford the rent, nor, according to Nugent, even the price of refreshments.
Skyscraper bookcase, by Paul T. Frankl, first produced in 1924
A Viennese furniture designer and maker, an architect, painter, and writer, one of Walker's numerous acquaintances from Greenwich Village parties, Frankl contributed to the Dark Tower's decorative scheme. Both a variant of his well-known bookcase and the gold-stenciled light shade, represent his smart handiwork.
1926: A'Lelia Walker is shown in a cassock's uniform she purchased at Wanamaker's in New York, for a costume party at Webster Hall
Number 80 Edgecombe Avenue
Her mother ill, soon to die, A'Leia Walker had been about to remarry in 1919. She planned to move to a corner house she'd acquired for her new husband, Dr. Willey Wilson, at 138th Street on Strivers' Row. Even subsequent to her third failed marriage, A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy instead lived here, in a one bedroom walk-up apartment with her friend, driver and companion, Mayme White
Even Madame Walker's heiress daughter was adversely impacted by the Great Crash in 1929. Forthwith, 108-110 was leased to the city, for a much needed Harlem health clinic. A year later, it was sold outright. By 1947, the one-time home to the rollicking Dark Tower, was no more. It was replaced by a public library branch, ironically, named for A'Lelia Walker's friend, poet Countee Cullen.
How much, one dares to wonder, might it take to restore, on the outside, Vertner Tandy's elegant architecture of such rare refinement?
The trek from Reconstruction, to the dawning of the "The New Negro" and the "Negro Renaissance," had been one long sojourn, from far away. One sometimes wonders, having been treated as bestial, or as child-like property, just how did former slaves and their young, learn to live and think and thrive in the world; to be human again, like our ancestors? Most of all one is filled with wonderment, that so many who started as field hands, accomplished so much.
Sara Breedlove, born December 23, 1867, to sharecroppers, Owen and Minerva Breedlove, had a youth filled with hardship. Her girlhood home, a ramshackle cabin at Delta, Louisiana, lay just across the Mississippi from the bustling port of Vicksburg. Her parents and siblings were slaves on Madison Parish Plantation owned by Robert W. Burney. Alone among them, her parents, sister and five brothers, Sara was born 'free'. Orphaned at the age of six, her sister and her sister's husband, Willie Powell, had taken her in. At age fourteen, she married a much older Moses McWilliams, a move motivated in part, out of eagerness to escape the cruelty of her wicked brother-in-law. Her daughter Lelia McWilliams (A'Lelia Walker) was born three years later. Only twenty, Mrs. McWilliams' husband died, prompting a move to St. Louis where three of her brothers lived, working as barbers. What limitations women endured. Black women, like black gay men, constituted a 'double negative.' The Widow McWilliams' brothers were barbers, but she could only manage to obtain employment as a lowly washer woman. Yet it was in this capacity, as a laundress, that she was exposed to luxury at an early age: her arduous work took her inside some of the South's most stately houses.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Mr. Bedford was president of Corn Products Refining Co. and a director of the Standard Oil Co.
Long after her escape from poverty, Madame Walker enthralled audiences with her recollections of perseverance and faith. She would recall how she had asked herself while laboring over a washtub: "What are you going to do when your back gets stiff and you are old? Who is going to look after your little girl?"
She said the answer came in a dream in which a secret hair-conditioning formula was revealed to her. This had all occurred with the World's Fair as a backdrop, circa 1905. Not long after she became a sales agent, offering products on commission for African American hair care entrepreneur Annie Malone, she also remarried. Charles Joseph Walker was a Denver newspaper advertising salesman.
Walker wasted no time in persuading his wife to go into business for herself. Paralleling Helena Rubinstein, as Madam C. J. Walker, she trained other women, working for her, to become "beauty culturists" and as she had done, and to master the art of selling. Traveling throughout the southern and eastern United States with her husband, Madame Walker rapidly expanded her business. Once Walker became complacent and self-satisfied, his wife reluctantly left him behind.
Retaining the name her hard work had made into a brand, Madame Walker was inspired by the model of the National Association of Colored Women, to organize her sales agents into local and state clubs. By 1917 she convened her first annual conference of the Madam Walker Beauty Culturists in Philadelphia.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Especially impressed by two nearly identical country houses near New York, Tandy adopted their design with only slight modifications. At Villa Lewaro, for instance, he used the simpler Ionic order in place of Composite columns with fluted shafts
Already providing black women with something difficult to imagine, interesting work with good pay, that allowed creativity, and an alternative to the limited options of nursing, prostitution, teaching or domestic service, she now gave more. Prizes were awarded, but not only to the women who had sold the most products and brought in the most new sales agents. Those who had contributed the most to charity and to their communities, were rewarded as well.
Walker's business instincts were brilliant: she realized that black women, while welcoming a way to adapt their hair to the prevailing fashion, were nevertheless proud of their racial identity. She always advertised her hair straightener as a "hair grower." Through Walker College, she offered opportunities that not only increased company profits but trained hundreds of women to take control of their destinies.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Villa Rosa Terrace, S. Z. Puli residence by Brown & Von Beren, 1914, Woodmont, Conneticut
Italian immigrant Sylvester Zefferino Poli a theater magnate associated with William Fox in the Lowe’s-Poli theater chain, started out sculpting wax figures for sensational and historic displays. Named for his wife, their waterfront estate consisted of the main house, and ten cottages deeded to five children
How slightly Vertner Tandy seems to have bothered to differentiate Villa Lewaro from the two nearby sources of inspiration he found illustraited in architectural journals
Circa 1928: Villa Lewaro, the Irvington, New York 20,000 square feet country house of Madam C. J. Walker, from 1918 to 1919. Walker is believed to be the first African American woman self-made millionaire, through the manufacture and sale of hair care and beauty products, made expressly for blacks.
Circa 1923: Villa Lewaro.
Constructed just after the Walker townhouse, between 1916 and 1918, Madam Walker's country retreat cost an estimated $250,000, a vast fortune at a time when the average wage for a black New Yorker was only $800 yearly. The name Villa Lewaro was coined by a visitor and friend, Enrico Caruso. It was derived from the first two letters of each word in Lelia Walker Robinson's name.
Were one Jewish a century ago, chances are that attempting to move into a neighborhood that was not already substantially Jewish, would meet with resistance. Blacks were more fortunate, in one tiny paticular. For Negros, there was little fear of restrictive deed covenants, that prohibited the sell, or even a future sell, sometimes into perpetuity, to a Colored person. The common supposition was that Negros could not afford to buy property in nice neighborhoods. For all practical purposes, this was all too true.
Unlike most mansions on the Hudson, which sit like castles on the Rhine, Villa Lewaro is best seen from Broadway, the main street of Irvington. A two-storey semicircular portico dominates the street facade.
Circa 1949
In the 1980's the huge trees that first attracted Mme. Walker saved the house from a developer who wanted to erect condominiums. A tree ordinance protected the property.
The Villa Lewaro mansion Vertner Tandy designed for Madame Walker in exclusive Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, started to be restored in the 1980s by Ingo Appel. In the following decade this comendable undertaking was completed by Harold Doley, shown here with his wife Alma and their son. A native of New Orleans, Mr. Doley was the first black to buy an individual seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
Madame C. J. Walker's bid to live in Irvington-On-Hudson, near Livingstons, Goulds and Rockefellers, was in fact her second try at locating where the action was, in the very midst of the country's most affluent whites. In the New York Times, March 25, 1916, it was announced that Mrs. C. J. Walker, through Samuel A. Singerman, her lawyer, had acquired "Bishop's Court". The price was given as around $40,000. Vertner Tandy filed plans for a house not so different from Villa Lewaro, but missing the graceful semi-elliptical portico. Madame Walker's entre into sacred precincts had commenced. Or had it?
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
2011: Villa Lewaro, the porte cochere. Tandy's triumphal arch-like shelter for protection from the weather when alighting from or entering an automobile, is topped off by a sleeping porch and balcony
Like the would-be buyer, the seller of the "old English design, brick and timber house", set on a plot, 200 X 300 feet, was also black. Most unusual! His house was located at the North East corner of State and North Pine Streets, in an exclusive section of Flushing. Born in Antigua, in 1843, the Right Rev. William B. Derrick had a white Scottish father and a black Caribbean-born mother. According to his Times obituary, in 1913, educated in England, this African, Methodist, Episcopal, Zion prelate's jurisdiction included the West Indies, South America and the Islands Beyond the Seas. For this reason the renowned preacher was much involved outside the US, in setting up churches in Panama for blacks working to dig the canal, for instance. Having rushed back from Britain to enlist in the Civil War, becoming sought after as a king-maker, able to reliably rally Negros to vote for Republicans, he was rather busy at home as well. "Bishop's Court" was his reward for a well-lived, sober life. White residents had certainly not welcomed his arrival around 1896. They had felt powerless indeed to prevent it. Over the years his sedate style of living had caused them to thank providence that it had not been worse. They were however, not about to take the same risk to property and propriety twice. All were determined, the Negro, former wash woman, from the west, was not to be admitted to their community. A reprise almost occurred at Irvington. But this time, Tandy did not produce drawing until after the deed was recorded.
Madame Walker's ambitious mansion was designed by Striver's Row resident,Vertner Woodson Tandy. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Tandy studied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He finished his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he was one of seven founders of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black college fraternity. He was also the first black to pass the military commissioning exam, and eventually became a major in the New York National Guard.
Following his partner George W. Foster, Tandy would become New York’s second black registered architect, and the first black member of the American Institute of Architects. Apart from Madame Walker's two houses, among many alterations to existing buildings, he designed St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. Sadly, among his oeuvre, he only planned about ten additional houses, most of which have been greatly changed or destroyed.
Vertner Tandy died in 1949 at age 64.
Villa Lewaro, which Madame Walker built as a country house, was Tandy's "masterpiece," said Roberta Washington, a Harlem architect, who discusses his career in depth in her forthcoming history of African American architects who practiced in New York State over the past century. "Yes, his work is derivative. He copied other people. Most designers did and do. But, just look at that novel way he introduced a light well, for the basement kitchen. The big terrace completely obscures the servants' area downstairs, giving them lots of light and air and privacy at the same time. That's good design in my book."
Circa 1924: Durring the blaze of a 1920's summer, from Villa Lewaro's palm decked terrace, the Hudson might as well to have flowed into the Mederterainian.
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
From Villa Lewaro's garden elevation, where an elevator bulkhead seems to have been added to the roof-line, three terraces step down to the swimming pool. Very few houses had swimming pools as early as Villa Lewaro.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
Set at the center of a hedge-enclosed sunken garden, that swimming pool at the Walker estate originally was lined with black masonry, enabling it to effectively act as a decorative reflecting pool too. Taken in the midst of a festive house party, this photograph shows brightly colored paper lanterns strung down the center of the garden.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
In addition to having a dark interior, the pool boasted a setting resplendent with perennials planted in herbaceous borders in raised beds, retained by bolder walls, that embowered guests with blooms and fragrance
Today the pool's raised borders at Villa Lewaro only have grass
A pergola, with a curving center bay once framing the river view, has been restored. As to the dramatic prospect of shimmering water that the Walkers were so justly proud of , that has long ago vanished behind the dense foliage of untended trees
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
The Window punched into the side of Villa Lewaro's upper terrace, indicates Madame Walker's gymnasium, while the archway leads into the kitchen light well and a service entrance.
Surmounted by a colonnaded pergola, the lowest terrace at Villa Lewaro was economically and beautifully constructed from rubble stones excavated on the property.
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Bol
Madame Walker's ample garage at the edge of the property, provided extra accomodation for staff outside of the main house's top floor and basment.
1918: The Living Hall, or living room. Vertner Tandy's trabeated ceiling, as much as Righter & Kolb's custom-designed furniture, combined to give Villa Lewaro an authentic Renaissance atmosphere
Aurora: Apollo in his chariot proceeded by Dawn, after Guido Reni, 1613-1614.
Even as a 19th century copy, this masterful Mannerist painting, reproducing a grand fresco with its vivid disonant color harmony, never failed to make an impact on Villa Lewaro visitors
Skillfully devised by Tandy to facilitate flexibility when entertaining, the reception rooms grouped on the first floor of Villa Lewaro easily flow one into the next. Alternately offering a relatively open combined envelope, or more compartmentalized spaces, it is the ultimate gala party setting
Manufactured by Grand Rapids' Berkey & Gay Furniture Co., the center table in Villa Lewaro's living room was based on 16th-century originals, like this example owned by great architect Stanford White
Two steps down, entry into the living room from the entrance hall was planned so that the arrival of each new guest joining a group, could be clearly observed.
At pains to have a marble staircase, with all the splendor this implies, Tandy cut corners for Madame Walker, by providing a machine-forged metal balustrade, as opposed to a more expensive one, hand wrought from iron
Provided a needlework-covered Louis XIV-style rocking chair, Villa Lewaro's welcoming fireside, was immediately adjacent to a pierced grill of the Estey organ's sounding chamber. The table lamp has a pierced brass Middle Eastern-style shade, glittering with glass jewels and beaded fring. Lighted, it must have added as much ambiance, with its pattern of colored shadows, as the sonorous music
Flower-form Arts and Crafts andirons gracing the living room's Renaissance-style hooded mantelpiece, made of 'cast stone.' On the mantle shelf, Booker T. Washington's bust holds pride-of-place with two vases, formed from World War I German shell canisters, made of copper and silver loving cups, which attested to Madame Walker's generous philanthropy.
The eclectic decor of Villa Lewaro was devised by Frank R. Smith, who apearently was employed by Righter & Kolb. The formal reception rooms, which open into one another along a straight line, form a series of contrasting areas. Neo-Renaissance in style, the great hall-living room and the barrel-vaulted dining room originally had furniture custom-made by Brekey & Gay. The Louis XV-style music room still retains an Estey player-pipe organ with speaker ducts, which let music be heard throughout the house.
Villa Lewaro's decorator, Frank R. Smith of Righter & Kolb, had previously appointed Walker's Harlem townhouse. As the rendering above shows, his ideas for decorating Villa Lewaro, sometimes were more lavish than Madame Walker was willing to pay for
Thirty other rooms included accommodations for eight servants and as many guests, a nursery, billiard room, gymnasium and laundry.
As for so many other builders of pleasure domes, it was all over rather quickly. Madame Walker died in 1919. Her daughter found the role of Lady Bountiful somewhat confining. Villa Lewaro was for her a less stimulating environment than Harlem.
But when duty beckoned, the house was the backdrop for a party: Lady Mountbatten, Richard Bruce Nugent, Walker beauty-parlor girls and Pullman porters were all welcomed. In the 1920's A'Lelia Walker also let the house be used as a location for the black silent-movie classic "Secret Sorrow."
Even prior to A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy's death in 1931, an effort had been made to 'unload' costly-to-maintain Villa Lewaro. Two much-discussed auctions of its contents were staged. In December of 1930, veteran dealer Benjamin Wise, with his force of black salesmen, conducted the first. It lasted three days. "White Buyers Strip Villa", screamed Harlem's Amsterdam New, newspaper, expressing something of the loss and heartache ordinary blacks felt, learning the news. A'Lelia's ormolu-mounted grand piano, Persian carpets, a French tapestry, a large spinach jade table lamp, beautifully bound sets of books, from a deluxe bible to the multi-volume memoirs of Casanova----all went under the hammer and were knocked down for a paltry $58,500! In light of prices payed to obtain these precious objects, just a little more than a decade earlier, this indeed represented pennies on the dollar. But, all things considered, this was not such a bad result. Things went to hell in America after the debacle of November, 1929. Art and antique collectors once worth hundreds of millions, men like William Randolph Hearst or Clarence McKay, were forced to dispose of their treasures at department stores, for what really amounted to bargain basement prices, as well. In Newport, the ultra exclusive seaside summer resort, things were no better than at Irvington. "Marble House"was the palatial 'cottage' of Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who as Mrs. Willie K. Vanderbilt had been the first social leader to divorce and remarry without sanction. Her 'cottage' is said to have cost $11,000,000.00 at the start of the 1890's! This is unlikely inasmuch as, well before the crash Mrs. Belmont challenged a property tax assessment based on a nearly $700,000.00 valuation. Indignant, she countered that around $400,000.00 was closer to the true value. Naturally, making this claim, she did not include the sumptuous contents of Marble House. Yet when she sold the four acre property in 1932, the house, lock, stock and barrel went for just a little over $100,000.00.
Courtesy of Half Pudding, Half Sause
1932
Even so, at Villa Lewaro, sufficient unsold remnants from six china dinner service, several sets of glassware, and other furnishings remained unsold to form the basis of a collection of Walker heirlooms that bring these figures to life, more vividly than anything that one could write.
Once A'Lelia passed away, Villa Lewaro was bequeathed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which sold it in 1932 to the Annie E. Poth home for aged members of the Companions of the Forest in America, a fraternal organization. Under their care it remained largely intact for the next 50 years.
The Annie Poth Home was a refuge for the widows and orphans of the Frinds of the Forest Fraternal Society for over fifty years.
Villa Lewaro, the living room in recent years
1918: The vaulted dining room. Tablets among the ceiling's arabesque include the coupling of what appear to be a pair of same-sex lovers?
A trumpet-shaped "brilliant cut' glass vase of the type seen on the Villa Lewaro sideboard, in the view above.
Breaking with tradition, this silver flatware once owned by Madame Walker, was engraved with her second husband's initails
Table linen, owned by A'Lelia Walker, 'corectly' bears the monogram, AWR, for A'Lelia Walker Robinson
Robust cast plaster cornucopia fittingly ornament Villa Lewaro's dining room
Villa Lewaro, dinning room in recent years
Villa Lewaro, the library
1904: The East Room at the White House offerd inspiration for Villa Lewaro's music room and many other ballrooms, private and publi: earning for its designers the new name of "McKim, White & Gold"
Circa1920: The Music Room
After her mother died A'Lelia Walker replaced the music rooms conventional Steinway piano for one with an 'art case' in the Louis XV mode, mounted in ormolu. These gilded ornamental articulations caused her Peck-Hardman & Co. instrument to be named 'the gold piano'. In the 1930 sale it fetched only $450.00
A gilded harp of the type found at Villa Lewaro
Circa 1920: Righter & Kolb were so exacting, that in Villa Lewaro's music room even the Victrola phonograph had its cabinet customised. It was painted with pastoral scenes in keeping with the rooms Watteauesque Lunettes and Louis XV sensibility. In 1930 it brought around $46.00
WHAT WAS A NEF?
A nef was an extravagant ship-shaped table ornament centerpiece and container used in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. Quite rarely made of glass, usually they were elaborately fashioned from silver, silver-gilt, or gold and often enameled and jewel-encrusted, Nefs were placed in front of the most important person at table as a mark of their status. When not just used for decoration, it might hold salt, spices, napkins, cutlery or even wine. For this reason some nefs had wheels to allow them to be rolled from one end of the table to the other, but most had legs or stood on pedestals.
Posed, poised and privileged alongside a graceful bureau plat, raffinée A’Lelia Walker, gowned in dark lace, looks every bit the pampered heiress. Most extraordinary among the accoutrements lending this scene such élan, is her repousse silver nef, a fantastic object with billowing sails and a large crew of minute hands, each exquisitely differentiated from the next. Most likely a late 19th-century copy of a late 16th-century example made in Augsburg, even these command $20,000.00 and more nowadays
Circa 1930: A'Lelia Walker sits in a Louis XV-style bergere beside a porcelain kater on a porcelain pedestal. Behind her is a Louis XIV-style clock of great presence. Like the clocks above and below, it was made to seem to be a timepiece in a nebulous of clouds amidst which puti play, resting on a terminal plinth, overlain with gilt bronze arabesque and festoons. Instead, it is a tall case or grandfather's clock, the ormolu-mounted center panel, opening to reveal the pendulum and weights.
Villa Lewaro's grand clock was a copy of the celebrated model made circa 1785 and attributed to Jean-Henri Riesener, now in the Louvre
Villa Lewaro's $25,000 Estey Pipe organ
As with many others who gain great riches, the Walkers set great store by quality. The best, the brightest, the biggest, ever held great appeal for them. Universally, the millionaire of 100 years ago esteemed the ultimate status symbol of a hone pipe organ. Largest and most complex of musical instruments, organs traditionally had only been found in churches and royal palaces. Then, in the mid-19th century, organs started to be installed in houses of the well-to-do. Certainly the music was soothing, but so too must have been knowledge that home organs cost as much as, and sometimes more than, an ordinary houses!
The Estey Organ Company, founded in 1852, went on to become the largest manufacturer of organs in the nation, with customers besides Madame Walker, including Henry Ford. Automatic player devices provided those who could afford them with a self-playing organ identified an elite among the elite.
The Greek Slave 1848, Parian ware figutine by England's Minton's Pottery works. Parian, Minton's name for 'statuary porcelain', alludes to the white marble from the Greek isle, Paros.
The Greek Slave is a marble in Raby Castle, carved in Florence by American sculptor Hiram Powers in 1844. Ostensibly it is merely a Grecian maiden, enslaved by Turks. But a cross and locket, amid the drapery, make it clear that she is a Christian, and betrothed. Powers intention was that one see her suffering, as transcendent, raised above outward degradation. Innate purity and force of character bestow on her an uncompromising virtue that cannot be shamed. Many viewers on the eve of civil war, drew parallels between The Greek Slave and African American slaves in the South, with some abolitionists adopting the work, which was widely reproduced in ceramic reductions like Madame Walker's, as symbol. Compared with "the Virginian Slave", it was the subject of a John Greeleaf Whittier poem, inspiring as well a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lucy Stone, stopping to admire the statue broke into tears. For her it was emblematic of male misogyny. Thereafter, Stone included women's rights issues in her speeches.
A bust of Beethoven like the one atop Madame Walker's organ console
Circa 1935
2012
1995
From the music room, through the door into the Villa Lewaro solarium, can be glimpsed stained glass windows added to make the demilune space into a chapel
Circa 1935
1919: A Villa Lewaro bedroom
Villa Lewaro's master bedroom today
Madame Walker initiated a dynasty, ambitious, socially conscious, bright, black and proud. A'Lelia Bundles part in the ensuing line of succession has been varied; filled with recognition and rewards for a groundbreaking career as a TV journalist, and that's quite wonderful. Work for which she will most be remembered is quite different. One rarely grows rich writing history. But doing what A'Lelia has done and continues to do, with unstinting care and craft, one is granted the consolation of immortality!
Receiving such a warm reception with On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker, A'Lelia Bundles is continuing as she started. She is in the final stages of rewriting, polishing her manuscript, well beyond the the superficial degree that others might. She is a perfectionist, like Walker women before her, and so will not be satisfied until her dulcet prose shines forth like a diamond.
Once she has finished, we will learn about all sorts of things long the cause of wonder. Was A'Lelia Walker's first husband, John Robinson, the hotel waiter, really the love of her life? Or, notwithstanding three tries tying the knot, was she also gay, like a score of her best friends, like several of her set who also married persons with a different gender than theirs?
We already know, that due to her industry, networking skills and keen instincts, that much of the success of the Walker Company was due to A'Lelia Walker. But far more awaits us, because once A'Lelia Bundles has completed her task, metaphorically, but still most magically, she will take us by the hand to the much changed world and times of her namesake. Guiding us into our recent history , like Dicken's spirit in A Christmas Carol, with but a touch of her gown, we'll be transported. Revealed will be a world familiar and foreign. Most surprisingly, we'll discover, that like our epoch, like our lives, it was hardly all bad, that many things were quite wonderful in fact. More amazing still, going back in time, communing with her people, our people, proud, prepared, purposeful and black, we will discover in them, those who have gone before us, our own wonderful selves.
Circa 1912: Madame C. J. Walker by Addison Scurlock
Like remarkable historians who have come before, whether Stephen Birmingham, who wrote Certain People, David Levering Lewis, the author of When Harlem was in Vogue, or Gerrie Major, who penned Black Society, A'Lelia Bundles is engaged in establishing a legacy too.
2013
It is all like the birthday party a minor royal prince staged for his beloved daughter and only child, a century or so ago.The widespread gardens where the event was celebrated were strewn with an endless, but tangled length of silken ribbon. The beginning was placed in the girl's expectant hand and she followed it, until she came upon a pile of rose petals. Hidden at the bottom she discovered a diamond ring. Uphill and down, the ribbon continued. Intermittently it led to new hiding spots, each revealing its bijoux; from necklace to bracelets, from rubies, to emeralds, the connection continued, with each new discovery, more precious than the last.
After A'Lelia Bundles, perhaps Nichelle Gainer is our most recent precious prize? For her wonderful blog posts have already let us know just how marvelous her soon-to-be delivered book, Vintage Black Glamour is certain to be.
Ca. 1913: Incomparable A'Lelia Walker
Circa 1919: A'Lelia Walker by Addison Scurlock
1911: Turban with Egret aigrette and turquoise jewel by Paul Poiret
Circa 1911: A'Lelia Walker wearing brocade turban with egret aigrette by Paul Poiret. The innovative Paris couturier, who banished corsets, was a friend who A'Lelia Walker entertained.
That late great trailblazing historian from San Francisco, Eric Garber, wrote of A'Lelia's penchant for parties and gay people:
"Because A'Lelia adored the company of lesbians and gay men, her parties had a distinctly gay ambiance. Elegant homosexuals such as Edward Perry, Edna Thomas. Harold Jackman, and Caska Bonds were her closest friends. So were scores of white celebrities..."
Much earlier, novelist Marjorie Worthington remembered:
"We went several times that winter to Madame Allelia [sic] Walker's Thursday "at-homes" on a beautiful street in Harlem known as, Sugar Hill...." [Madame Walker's] lavishly furnished house was a gathering place not only for artists and authors and theatrical stars of her own race, but for celebrities from all over the world. Drinks and food were served, and there was always music, generously performed enthusiastically received."
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. Madame Walker's initial gala, a luncheon party for nearly 100, blacks and whites, was hosted in honor of the Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War in September of 1918. President wilson, after first objecting, at last allowed blacks to fight in the World War, and Mr, Scott is the closest African Americans have to a cabinet officer. Madame Walker's guests lunched out on the terrace before entering the music room for musical entertainment. J. Rosamond Johnson, who wrote, "Lift Every Voice and Sing", "The African American National Anthem", eminent organist Melville Charlton and other musicians played and sang. It was a lovely afternoon, but not without purpose. Determined that like official entertaining at the White House, that her social gatherings contributed to political action, Madame Walker used this occasion to implore blacks to set aside differences, and support the war-effort. She also asked that Washington take note of black participation in the defence of democracy and outlaw lynching.
The Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War
As for A'Lelia Walker, she was more easy. Many recollections confirm her generous nature, her delight in enjoyment, and in providing pleasure as well. By all accounts, everyone from chorus girls to artists to socialites to visiting royalty would come at least once to enjoy her engaging hospitality. Whether at the Dark Tower, 80 Edgecombe, or Villa Lewaro, wherever she was, though not named 'Laeticia', A'Lelia was the "joy goddess."
They say that whatever one's race, class, condition or sexuality today, that people are, on the whole, rather impatient. If then you are an intrepid exception, and have made it this far: through over one hundred pages, numerous pictures and 12,275 words or so, besides offering my congratulations, I ought perhaps to summarize of my intent. Originalist ideologues, nostalgic for paternalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy notwithstanding, ever-changing America, has not changed enough. Justice delayed is, justice denied.
Still beckoning and golden, the American Dream must not be allowed to become irrelevant. It is still so rich and real and robust, but for fewer and fewer, seems within reach. As America evolves to grow ever more diverse, opportunity and reward, ought to expand and not retract to enrich just some at the top.
Madame C. J. Walker, her daughter A'Lelia Walker, both strove towards such an empowering and beneficial end. An outstanding relic of their faith in our country, Villa Lewaro, as much as Mount Vernon or Monticello, is a shrine that deserves to be on public view, as a museum dedicated to determination and the humanitarian impulse to help others.
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. They included not only eminent blacks like the poet William Stanley Braithwaite and the composer and concert singer Harry T. Burleigh, but Walker beauty-shop operators. One guest, Enrico Caruso, coined the villa's name, using two letters from each name of Mme. Walker's only child, A'lelia Walker Robinson.
Lloyd and Edna Thomas
Edna was a great actress. She started out as Madame Walker's social secretary. One of her jobs was to look up words Walker did not understand reading the newspaper. Regretting having only a scant education, in this way she could learn and expand her vocabulary.
Lloyd Thomas managed their 136th street beauty salon for the Walkers. In 1929, at a party given by A'Lelia, Lloyd introduced Edna to English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham. For the rest of their lives the women were a devoted couple
A manservant for Mrs. and Mrs. Basil Rathbone, Edward Perry studied painting with Winold Reiss, before moving on to acting and stage management. Esteemed as Harlem's Elsa Maxwell, late in life he had a career as a party consultant
1929: Harold Jackman by Richmond Barthe
Designated the "handsomest man in Harlem," London-born Harold Jackman, who had an unknown white English father and a black West Indian mother, was a high school teacher, model, actor, writer, and patron, with a life-long interest theater and in documenting African American cultural life. Gay in most every way, he nonetheless managed to have a daughter, with a white friend, to whom he left half his estate
Spirited off as a young boy to England by an aristocrat who lived on London's Lilac Sweep, Bonds grew to become a music coach, with attractive protegees of uneven talent. A particular friend of A'Lelia's he gained the lease of her apartment when she died. He lived there with a youth named Embry Bonner
Cocaine-addict and Harlem lover Princess Violette Murat, was born Violette Jacqueline Charlotte Ney d'Elchingen. Writer Zora Neal Husrton called her "Princess Muskrat". Fortunately, as she was a lesbian, her husband, Bonaparte Prince Eugene Louis Michel Joachim Napoleon Murat, pre-deceased her by almost 40 years
Julius Lorenzo Cobb Bledsoe was a once-renowned, but now forgotten baritone, the first 'Joe' in "Showboat" and the first African American artist to gain regular employment on Broadway. None the less, finding legitimate operatic roles scare in the States, he concertized to acclaim and profit in Europe. Here he met his well-to-do Dutch lover, sometime-diplomatic cultural attache, Adriain Frederick Huygens
Ivor Novello, a Welsh composer, playwright, matanee and film star became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. Born into a musical family, his operatic-coach-mother Clara Davies, was the teacher of Caska Bonds. Norvello's first big success was as a songwriter was the World War I favorite "Keep the Home Fires Burning"
Geraldyn Hodges Dismond, Harlem's 'Lady Nicotine', a inveterate journalist from Chicago, who in time, ditched her philandering husband, to become Gerrie Major of Jet Magazine
The 'Night Hawk', Gerrie's husband, the college football star, World War I hero, Dr. Binga Dismond, a man said to have too much, of everything!
Jimmy Daniels and Wallace Thurman shared a room as boarders at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street, in a cooperative unit owned by Edna and Lloyd Thomas. Edna Thomas' white lesbian lover, English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham, who also lived here, is seen with in the picture above, with Edna, at the center. Jimmy is on the far left, while Lloyd sits on the right, with 'It Girl' Blanche Dunn on his lap.
Despite all the dramatic alterations that ensued after 1904, Harbor Hill was essentially completed by 1902. Thereafter, for Katherine Mackay, a good deal of the rich person’s favorite pastime, building, had begun to loose its initial appeal. True enough, even after Stanford White’s murder, she had still had the pleasure of terrorizing, with demands and rebuffs, others who took up the business of completing Trinity Church, Roslyn, a lovely and lovingly planned monument to her parents memory. However, this was not enough to fill her days of leisure. Where for some, the duties of motherhood might have occupied the void, Katherine required far more. More even than an unending round of shopping trips, fittings, bridge games, lunch dates, parties, yacht cruises, golf games, coaching or race meets, horse shows, interviews, or tea-time nursery visits, were required to occupy her boundless energy and creative outlook.
1924
What’s remarkable then, are all the unexpected places, persons and new experiences, her combination of curiosity, an ambition to make a difference and the “old ennui,” attract Katherine Mackay to them. The media adored her and she was always careful that most of her fine exploits be chronicled. So in looking back, she cast such a wide shadow, that one can never quite guess with certainty, just where she might show up.
Not long after Stanford White’s death, for instance, accompanying her pal Consuelo, Katherine had come face-to-face, with his murderer, mad Harry K. Thaw, at the notorious Tombs! The duchess, it was explained, had a message from his sister, the former Alice Cornelia Thaw, who was now the Countess of Yarmouth, another American heiress who’d married an aristocrat. More importantly, prison reform was an interest of hers. Katherine claimed merely to be supporting her friend, but she too had shown an interest in improving living conditions, for inmates.
Capernaum synagogue, another monument that ended in ruins.
Favorably positioned, close to New York, might Harbor Hill to have been rescued, repurposed and saved, successfully serving as a regional art museum, as a resort, a spa, a school or a catering hall? For many, the answer to such a question, pitting crude commerce and an exquisitely realized and irreplaceable architectural expression of distinctive beauty, the answer must be: Yes! For those, this is, one trusts, a multi-layered cautionary tale, And it is one, hardly discounting commerciall expedience, but rather instead, giving consideration to every kind of cost and loss at stake
Just as today, a century ago the success of ‘good causes,’ often depended on the charitable largess of affluent patrons parading piety and concern at festive public benefits. To give Booker T. Washington a good start toward collecting the $1,800,000 he wanted to endow Tuskegee Institute, Mark Twain, Joseph H. Choate, Robert C. Ogden, and Dr. Washington himself, organized a gathering at Carnegie Hall. It was billed as a "silver jubilee," since Tuskegee Institute was founded, in 1881. There were impassioned speeches by Secretary of War Taft, President Eliot of Harvard, Bishop Galloway, and Andrew Carnegie.
Naturally Katherine Mackay was there too. For society had turned out in full force, or at least, a certain segment of high society. Women in brilliant gowns, resplendent with jewels, and men in evening dress filled the boxes. Despite the object of the meeting, to get money from the posh audience with which to combat racist subjugation through instruction and training, an atmosphere of hilarity and lightheartedness prevailed. Notwithstanding the ‘Negro’ octet that sang between the speeches, somber melodies and revival songs, the mere presence of Mark Twain, as much as his wry remarks had prompted and sustained great gaiety.
Besides Mrs. Clarence H. Mackay, occupants of the boxes included Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Mrs. Henry H. Rogers, J. G. Phelps Stokes, Isaac N. Seligman, Carl Schurz, Mrs. W. H. Schieffelin, Mrs. William Jay Schieffelin, Mrs. Joseph H. Choate, Mrs. Henry Villard, Nicholas Murray Butler, Mrs. Cleveland H. Dodge, Mrs. Felix M. Warburg, Mrs. R. Fulton Cutting, Mrs. Collis P. Huntington, Mrs. Robert B. Minturn, Mrs. Jacob H. Schiff, Mrs. Paul M. Warburg, and Mrs. Arthur Curtis James.
This was one of those pioneer efforts that had brought together a diverse group of artists and socially prominent Jews, Catholics and the White Anglo Saxon Protestant elite. It is well worth noting these worthies, inasmuch as, many, would join Katherine latter, in an enterprise equally controversial.
1913: On top of being the focus of a raging scandal, how Katherine must have minded being shown in a hat from four seasons ago!
She explained how after at first having been staunchly opposed, she had only come to the cause of extending the franchise to women, by incremental degrees. If hosting a Harbor Hill picnic for school children and their parents had helped win election to the Roslyn School Board in 1905, attempting, even unsuccessfully, to eliminate corporal punishment, had gained her popularity among school boys who covered fences far and wide with the scrawl, “Mrs. Mackay is alright!” Tea for teachers, at her commodious estate, redecoration, at her own expense, of the teacher’s room, which, coincidentally, was where the school board met, had also found favor. Katherine was alas, unable to get a second school built, but indeed, in time, one was erected on a portion of Harbor Hill acreage that Clarence Mackay would present to the village. More importantly, coming into contact with working women, helping to make executive decisions that improved people’s lives, led Katherine Mackay, little by little, to see the wisdom of other women, other wives and mothers, being given more opportunity to shape public policy. Even then she was reticent, feeling that women should focus their attention on local concerns, leaving national politics to men. So, though it was Katherine Mackay’s activism as a suffragette that first involved Mrs. Belmont and her daughter in the cause, on this matter, they had stood in firm disagreement.
Circa 1908
These three, Alva Belmont, her daughter, Consuelo, Duchess o Marlborough and Katherine, were always goading each other to venture further than they might have otherwise dared to go. In time, Katherine was won over by Mrs. Belmont's side, due to Counselo's gift for tactfulness. ‘But of course women had a rightful place participating in national politics too,’ Katherine came to decide. But as to the violently unbecoming, confrontational tactics of Emily Pankhurst and other radical English suffragettes, these she abjured completely.
Progressing from being among metropolitan New York’s first women school board members, to a full-fledged champion for women’s rights, unanimously Katherine Mackay was elected President of the Equal Franchise Society, that she helped to set up in 1908. Ably assisting Katherine, who in addition to being mother to two daughters and a son by this time, was still very much the active socialite, was one, Ethel Gross. What an unlikely candidate for Katherine Mackay’s secretary and assistant many thought she was. Decisively, the encounter had helped her to grow and to mature. Born Etelke Gross into an acculturated, middle-class, Hungarian Jewish family in 1886, Miss Gross immigrated to the United States at the age of five with her mother. Settling in New York's Lower East side, inhabiting the "typical, dark and airless dumbbell tenement," she left school in 1898 at the age of twelve, starting work as a counselor to younger children at Christadora House. Recently established, the East Village settlement meant to help assimilate the city’s foreign-born masses, had a Christian-affiliation. As private secretary to Katherine Mackay, Gross was enmeshed in all aspects of this organization targeting the rich, from helping to draft appeals, to marching in suffrage parades. Katherine established an office for the Equal Franchise Society in rooms at the Metropolitan Life Tower. At 505 Fifth Avenue, nearby, was Mrs. Belmont’s ’sister group, the Political Equality League.
1909: "Only what is real endures"
Whenever society super star, Katherine Duer Mackay had spoken out on the need for “women of all classes to work for civic improvement through the agency of the ballot box,” more than a decade before the 19th Amendment was ratified in August 1920, she’d been quite eloquent. Her persuasive, approach, presuming male generosity even gallantry, was not so different from the flattering guise she had sometimes taken in order to cajole Stanford White. So it comes as something of a shock, learning, just how strident, imperious and insensitive, she could still be. Was it her youth, her privilege or self-righteousness, that caused her to momentarily abandon discretion and charm in such a way as to belie her skill as a perceptive political maneuver-er? Absolutely, her first serious public misstep toward the road for disillusionment, in addition to exhibiting uncharacteristic gracelessness, betrayed as well a central conflict that was to destroy the very marriage that had been made to fulfill her destiny.
Off and on, between 1905 and 1910, Clarence and Katherine had made their city residence for autumn and witer, the leased Theodore A. Havemeyer house at 244 Madison Avenue. This was the house in which their son John William Mackay would be born in 1907
Evidently, assisted perhaps by Stanford White, the Mackays made certain enhancements to their rented city house. Banked with palms and lilies for a party the entrance features wall sconces and a sedan chair of the same kind White provided for William Whitney.
On March 31, 1908 Katherine hosted a Sufferage lunch party that included such important matrons as Mrs. Alexander, Mrs. Aldrich, Mrs. J. J. Astor, Mrs. Belmont, Mrs. Blatch, Mrs. Corbin, Mrs. Catt, Mrs. Fabbri, Mrs. Goelet, Mrs. George Gould, Miss Ida Husted Harper, Mrs. Irvin, Mrs. Reginald de Koven, Mrs. Lydig, Mrs. Maynard. Miss Anne Morgan, Mrs. Miller, Duchess of Marlborough, Mrs. Nathan, Mrs. Pulitzer. Mrs. Speyer, Miss Tarbell, Mrs. Wm. K. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Winthrop.
The beginning of the end of Mrs. Clarence Hungerford Mackay’s reign as queen of Harbor Hill, ironically, came about as a consequence of her role as a philanthropist. She’d been advocate and the lady bountiful both, reforming education as a lady school board member. So when a young woman had had to seek funds for a new Brooklyn parochial school, the much publicized generosity of Katherine Mackay immediately sprung to mind. Perhaps, ‘Mrs. Mackay might like to contribute?’ shed thought. She was hardly prepared then, for the brusque reply she received from Saratoga:
Circa 1913: Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont
Miss B. A. McNamara:
Madame---Yours of the 15th has been forwarded to me here. In reply I wish to tell you that I absolutely disapprove of parochial schools of the Romanist faith, and consider them a grave menace to our country. Needless to say, I am not a Romanist, and will not help you.
Yours Truly, Katherine Mackay
The priest at St. John’s Catholic Church that was building the school, was taken aback as well. But all too aware of how he might utilize the grand Mrs. Mackay’s abrupt letter, to draw attention and funds to his project, he quickly recovered his composure and sprung to write a snappy response. He’d then saw to it, that both letters, were published in the New York Times. His read in part:
August 17
.…that you absolutely disapprove of parochial schools of the Romanist faith, and that you consider them a grave menace to our country, simply reveals a condition of mind. The opinion is characteristic. In the schools you dislike so much, we teach our children the ordinary courtesies of life. As an example, we would tell them the use of the word “Romanist” betrays bad form, and that nice. intelligent people would not be guilty of such a blunder.
Faithfully Yours, ROBERT H. DUHIGG Rector St John’s.
Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, in the New York Times, February 5, 1908, asserted that a good husband was a woman’s best assurance of happiness and that: “I think too well of women to imagine that they can benefit from mixing in the mire of politics… Any woman of brains, I will not say beauty, but of charm and attractiveness, can draw what she needs from most men…” , But thanks to the efforts of Katherine Mackay and Mrs. Belmont, in the New York Times of January 16, 1910 she would concede , how she’d ‘been won over to the cause of votes for women…’
What an affront this episode must have seemed to many, not least, to Katherine’s friends who were Roman Catholic. It could hardly to have failed to outrage her husband and his devout mother as well. Hence, there were hints quietly raised early on in the Mackays' marriage, that all was not well, that mutual enchantment was fading. But for a long time no such disharmony was broached publicly, as the ‘golden couple’, sailed on, seemingly, from triumph, to triumph.
That Clarence Mackay, a leading businessman often embroiled in the rough and tumble, of labor relations, had reservations about granting the franchise to women without reservation, is made clear by the letter excerpted below . It was addressed by Katherine to a fellow suffragist, the crusading writer and lecturer, Harriet Eaton Stanton Blatch, daughter of pioneering women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton:
FEB 27 4:30 PM 1908
T. Miss Anne Fitzhugh Miller, The Stratford 11 East 32nd St.
ONLY WHAT IS REAL ENDURES don't return. Harbor Hill Roslyn Long Island
My dear Mrs. Blatch:
Your wire has just come, and I am delighted that you will accept my invitation for luncheon Friday, but instead of lunching at Delmonico's, my husband wishes us to come down to his office, &lunch with him. Colonel Harry will be there too. My husband is anxious to meet you, & to listen to you, and I want you to convert him from his present attitudes of partial suffrage for Educational & Philanthropic officers only.--Col. Harry believes in suffrage, & seems ready to help the cause, & as you know he runs several magazines, & has a clever political instinct, he is a valuable co-operator.---Surely it will be worth while to interest these two men, & to explain what kind of a campaign you plan for the coming year and that is why I am so glad you will take this opportunity…
With friendly greetings,
Sincerely yrs,
Katherine Mackay Sunday evening.
Katherine and the Duchess of Marlborough
Was Clarence Mackay ever fully won over as society leader and famous wag Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish was? He was to the extent of accompanying his wife to high profile events like the Woman’s Suffrage Banquet, but, he must have been preoccupied. For, just age thirty-four, in 1908, his life was at risk. Clarence Mackay had been diagnosed with cancer. He survived only due to the renowned skill of his surgeon, a personal friend, Doctor Joseph Blake. Dr. Blake was a frequent house guest at Harbor Hill. How had he and Mackay originally met, one wonders? His meeting with Katherine at a suffragists’ meeting is documented. So, did she introduce Clarence to the man who saved his life, but ‘stole’ his wife?
Circa 1910
Circa 1913
In appearance, Dr. Blake, if anything, looked like a slightly older version of Clarie, raising the question, what was it about him, exerting such great appeal?
If nothing else, Katherine Mackay’s foray into literature, proved one thing. Incurably, helplessly, hopelessly, she was a romantic to her fingertips. Deep in Harbor Hill’s woods, she maintained a rustic cottage retreat, called, her ‘Hameau’. This referenced Marie Antoinette’s Hameau de la Reine. This was a farm, with the most elegant interiors imaginable behind the camouflage of a peasant hamlet, built in the park of the Château de Versailles according to designs by Gabrielle. For once Katherine’s fantasy was more straight-forward than her ultimate role model’s. Harbor Hill’s Hameau, was just a cabin, in a glade. Katherine’s “Gabrielle. A Dream from the Treasures Contained in the Letters if Abelard and Heloise, published in the venerable North American Review, in 1903, was similarly direct. As the title predicts, it is a full-blown romantic swoon, suitably delivered in lofty language, from cover to cover. Nothing if not consistent, this applied equally to “Stone of Destiny,” which Harper & Brothers brought out the following year.
'Blake Lodge', Katherine and Joseph Blacke's summer house at Bar Harbor was a far cry from Harbor Hill
A famous healer of his fellow beings, the visionary who conceived of the comprehensive Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, Dr. Blake projected a different sort dynamism from Clarie’s more convention sportsman-connoisseur. Moreover, for someone of Katherine’s temperament, a disillusioned believer in ‘true love’ and ’destiny,’ there can have been few things so attractive as, a well-respected prosperous man, willingly risking all he had, courting society’s condemnation, for the sake of, the woman he loved.
Circa 1915: Mrs. Joseph Augustus Blake by Boldini
Soon enough reports surfaced to the effect, that, the aggrieved Mrs. Joseph Augustus Blake, the mother of three, would file for divorce and sue Katherine Mackay for alienating her husband’s affections. She would seek damages for $1-million, comparable to someone seeking a billion dollar judgment today! To those in-the-know signs of an impending divorce between the Mackays had been evident for some time. Katherine’s having renounced her rights to her most glorious wedding gift of Harbor Hill, which was placed in trust for her young son, was telling, people said. So was her hasty resignation from the school board and the leadership of the Equal Franchise Society,
Circa 1917: John William, Clarence, Ellin and Katherine Mackay
Today, many upper class people might happily invite a gay couple for the weekend and coyly provide them adjoining rooms. By now, divorce was dealt with in this spirit. Among the very richest set of people, if divorce had not yet become a kind of raffish new fashion, thanks largely to Mrs. Belmont’s example, it was gaining ever greater acceptance. Certainly, divorce and ostracism, were no longer synonymous. Katherine and Claire had discussed the idea early and often evidently, but the requirement under New York law, of a ‘guilty’ party, made an unofficial separation, with their lives largely led independently, more sensible. What changed things was the discovery of no-fault divorce, obtainable in France even were one not French. Unexpected, Clarence Mackay’s cancer, and Dr. Blake’s seduction both sped up the an inevitable parting. Events poisoned the dissolution of the Mackays’ marriage as well.
A century ago, in September of 1913 Katherine Mackay divorced her husband in Paris. With the start of the World War in August Blake operated a hospital to care for French soldiers. Katherine toiled dutifully by his side as a nurse. In November, 1914, one day after his divorce was finalized, Katherine and Dr. Blake, took a break from sugary and without fanfare, were married. Inexplicably, the first Mrs. Blake had called off her court case threatening Katherine. However, after her divorce decree had been granted, her ex-husband’s remarriage imminent, she told a reporter, she hoped that, ’the ex-Mrs. Mackay would know all the unhappiness she deserved…’
Built in 1904, number 3 East Seventy fifth Street was designed by C. P. H. Gilbert for John Duncan, the importer of Lea & Perrin's Worcestershire Sauce. Soon after April, in 1920 negotiations were finalized to sell the house for $750,000 to Clarence Hungerford Mackay. The master of Harbor Hill would maintain this as his city house until his death seventeen years latter
The Blakes, who lived on quietly in Paris during war, afterward settled Upstate and at Bar Harbor. They had three daughters and a son. Professionally, Dr. Blake seems to have suffered little consequence from either leaving his wife and children, or from ‘taking’ the wife of a friend and patient. For Katherine Blake societal assessment was harsher. Branded a mother who had selfishly ’abandoned’ her children and husband, she was shunned by many who had once so sought her company and approbation.
In some ways, it seems that the parting curse the first Mrs. Blake, had intoned against the second, had come to pass. What pathos there was in Katherine Mackay having also contracted cancer. With the same skill and care that he’d administered to ‘cure’ Clarence Mackay, Blake tended to the woman they had both loved. Sadly, even so, Katherine Blake was to loose an eye to cancer. But as a consolation, she soon learned that her remaining sight had grown even more acute. As a consequence it had not taken very much time for her to realize that her husband and her young nurse, had embarked on a torrid love affair. Divorced from the esteemed Dr. Blake in 1929, a chastened Katherine carried on as elegantly as ever. The good doctor had remarried–for a third time–almost immediately.
1924: The golden agr of Harbor Hill
Despite her new life and family for years Katherine Blake endured a kind of exile, separated from Harbor Hill. In her place her combative former mother-in-law presided over a domain that had been decreed for her. That was for the sake of public notice. Discretely, not behind the scenes, but always, almost. properly chaperoned, Clarence Mackay, had a mistress. He refused to even broach the idea of remarrying after the divorce. In the eyes of the church, marriage was insoluble and his wife yet lived. So entreating the Prince of Wales in 1924 and Lucky Charles Lindbergh in 1927, his mistress was present and many were aware of the status she held, but officially, it was Mother Mackay, called mammy by her family, who was the hostess of grandiose Harbor Hill.
How typical that society should have viewed Clarence Mackay as injured and abandoned, embracing him even as he carried on openly with his paramour. Katherine by contrast, was cast by many as a gold-digging adventurous from the first, who deserting her home, was justly suffering the consequences. In many houses, she was no longer received. Bolstering her throughout this ordeal was her daughter Ellin Mackay, in the middle among the offspring from her first marriage. Blond, beautiful, and impetuous like her mother, Ellin also shared Katherine’s gift as a writer. First in the family to reestablish contact with her mother, though loyally avoiding her new spouse, their relationship deepened once Ellin found she had a champion when she fell deeply in love with a man almost everyone else thought was all wrong.
'Happy House', was what John and Gwen Mackay named their estate adjoining Harbor Hill. A rambling dwelling, it was based on sixteenth century prototypes in England’s Cotswold’s and was designed by John W. Cross, of Cross & Cross. In 1957 the J.W. Mackays would leave this wedding present house, for historic 'Matinecock Farm' in Lattingtown.
It was not altogether a chance to do combat with her ex-husband that had made Katherine Blake back her daughter up. It was not even because through her varied suffrage activities, Katherine had come to know a greater diversity of people, and established greater ties of intimacy than he had. No, when Ellin Mackay found herself in love with Irving Berlin, the composer, a Russian immigrant and a Jew, when she threw down a gauntlet to her father and her class, taking her first subway ride to marry him at City Hall on January 4, 1926, her mother had given her blessing. Why? For sure it was not only because Ellin acted against her father’s expressed wishes, but because, it had all happened before, with everything turning out fine!
Though also Jewish and an immigrant, educated in Frankfurt, Germany, a partner of his family's banking house, Lazard Speyer-Ellissen, James Speyer had not been born poor. This usually propitious particular however, had made little difference when it came to his audaciously presuming to marry one of New York’s WASP elite. “A man who has been in love with me for some months wants to marry me. Please give me your advice….I should like to accept him…but you see he is a Jew….” the would-be bride had pleaded.
Anna Case (1888–1984) of Clinton, New Jersey would become Clarence Mackay's second wife. She was a lyric soprano who sang with the Metropolitan Opera and as a concert soloist. Encountering her at musical events from time to time, taken with her beauty and the quality of her voice, around 1916, Mackay engaged her to perform at a musical he held at home. She so pleased him, that he had sent a railroad carload load of flowers to her at her next Carnegie Hall recital, enclosing a small diamond band with an enamel bluebird in the center, emblematic of the happiness he felt in her company.
This sad speech, we are told by that dazzling chronicler of Gilded Age high life, Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, was made contritely to, THE Mrs. Astor, by a widow, Ellin Dyneley Prince Lowery. The year she implored that she not be outcast for the affront of marrying a Jew, was 1897! According to Mrs. Lehr, this was the first alliance between a Jew and a member of society. Its moment, notwithstanding an earlier infiltration made by the Belmont family, Mrs. Lehr makes most plain, reflecting on a consensus of opinion among her set, at the close of the nineteenth century. Certain of Mrs. Lehr‘s colorful descriptions and designations are indicative as well, of biases persisting in 1935:
A Jew! Such a marriage would violate one of the fundamental principles of the Four Hundred’s code. While half the ancient families of Europe had allied themselves with the race of Israel, while the English aristocracy following the lead of Edward VII, not only tolerated but held out welcoming arms to its swarthy sons and daughters, American society had withstood the invasion….
“Who is he?” THE Mrs. Astor had inquired solicitously. “James Speyer,” Mrs. Lowery replied. “I want to marry him, but I can‘t if it means losing all my friends…” At length, THE Mrs. Astor had put her fretting friend out of her misery. She was assured that everyone had such fondness for her, that they must do whatever it took to keep her close to them.
With Katherine Blake's death in 1930, Clarence Mackay and Anna Case were married at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Roslyn, New York the following year. Clarence regarded his new wife, as a woman who had stood by him without complaint, forsaking the spectacular sort of collection of gems, which propriety had previously prohibited him from giving her. So notwithstanding recent monumental financial losses, his wedding gift, was a remarkable necklace of emeralds and diamonds, beautifully set in platinum. Its Colombia emerald pendant, weighing 167.97 carats, is the largest cut emerald in America. The necklace it adorns was designed by Boucheron. At her death, in 1984, Anna Case Mackay bequeathed this magnificent jewel to the Smithsonian Institution.
As Lilly Bart learned and the perspective Mrs. Skeffington appreciated from the start, it was indeed well that THE Mrs. Astor should extend her ‘acceptance’. To begin, her friend was already past fifty, Speyer, in addition to being quite rich, was eleven years younger. Secondly, this friend of THE Mrs. Astor's, had been left so badly-off with her first husbands death, that she had taken a decidedly un-lady-like step. Putting baking skills to good use, with a similarly hard-up friend, she opened a group of popular tea shops. Since her fashionable friends had not failed her then, she’d been a success.
First connected with the Paris and London branches of his family’s firm, James Speyer had come to New York to start a bank that was all his own. In addition, he was one of the founders of the Provident Loan Society, a trustee of the Teachers' College at Columbia University, to which he presented the Speyer School and also a trustee of the Museum of the City of New York. Perhaps his most lucrative pursuit was acting as financial agent for the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington. Only Speyer’s pro-German sentiments during the Great War, meaning his London office had had to close, diminished his bank’s preeminence. With a new world conflict, in 1939, the York branch of Speyer & Co. shut down. Even so, what an eventful life, filled with purpose, the Speyer’s had managed to make together.
1937: Reduced, in financial terms, by catastrophic losses suffered during the Great Depression, to but a shadow of his former self, Clarence Mackay still managed to retain Harbor Hill and a few of the art works he prized most. When his cancer reoccurred, Anna Mackay provided essential care and support that helped to sustain him. With the necessity of giving up Harbor Hill imminent, his death in 1938, might be looked on as somewhat merciful
Katherine Blake knew all about Mrs. Speyer’s saga, about the fine Horace Trumbauer designed Fifth Avenue house her Jewish husband had built for her. Besides a town house, he gave her ‘Waldheim’, their peaceful country place on the Hudson. By marrying Speyer, a once genteel but poor nonentity, in a stroke had gained houses, cars, jewels and position, becoming a contender in New York City, both socially and in terms of a remarkable philanthropic contribution. It took some time, but the example caught on.
Ellin Prince was a first cousin of Katherine Blake’s mother. In fact, as an orphan, she’d been raised with her mother, the family of Katherine’s grandfather William C. Travers. Katherine’s two aunts had married John Hecksher and Walter Gay, the painter of interiors. Katherine considered Mrs. Speyer to be like an aunt as well. And so, she had realized that if Ellin Speyer’s married life could be happy, that Ellin Mackay’s, with the most successful popular song writer in America, just might be too.
19o6: Ellin Mackay
Ellin Mackay would remained married to Irving Berlin until her death in 1988. Described as a loving couple, they had three daughters: Mary Ellin Barrett, Linda Emmett, and Elizabeth Peters. An only son, Irving Berlin, Jr. died in infancy, on Christmas day, in 1928. This had been only a short span after the death of his great-grandmother, Louise Hungerford Mackay. The old lady’s dying wish had been that her son Clarie and his daughter might reconcile. And, after three years of pretending that his middle child was dead, the loss of this grandson was to effect, just that.
Just what sort of man was Clarence H. Mackay anyway? Reunited after much mutual enmity, suddenly sharing in joyful celebration, as their son married, Clarie and Katherine reconnected. But, what had it meant, this reunion of former adversaries? According to their granddaughter, Mary Ellin Barrett, in her captivating history, Irving Berlin, A daughter’s Memoir, from this moment, Clarie had begun to call on his now visibly ill former wife, but to what purpose?
1928: Still in the wilderness, the Berlins visit the Atlantic City boardwalk
Can it be true? could any person who had once really loved someone, become so thoroughly, terribly cruel, merely in order to exact some measure of revenge? Did Clarence Mackay really one day come along bearing a little box? From it, had he actually taken a jeweled ring? Smiling, had he knowingly slipped it onto Katherine’s trembling shrunken finger? Mrs. Barrett maintains that, as if in fulfillment of her dying grandmother’s fondest daydreaming, that indeed, he had.
Proud Katherine, had responded with a gift of her own. She forswore the faith of her parents and ancestors. She took instruction from a priest and became a "Romanist"!
What a gesture, but what did Clarence feel about this capitulation? Forever, Katherine ended what Mrs. Barrett contends had caused their greatest conflict. But from his actions, it is difficult to determine what Clarence Mackay thought about her relenting. Katherine, daily ebbing in and out of consciousness, during brief intervals awake, waiting, watching, repetitiously had inquired, 'Where's Clarie?' “ Before too long, we’ll be back on easy street, back in the castle on the hill. We’ll have a wonderful life again,” she’d told the young daughters she'd borne Dr. Blake wistfully speaking of the house she’d created with her first husband. “Where's Clarie?” she’d asked, one last time before dying. Abruptly, without word, he had gone away. But Ellin's comforting response, betrayed not even the slightest hint that anything was amiss, 'He’s preparing your room at Harbor Hill...’
Had Clarence Mackay only meant to be compassionate as well, extending a foolish dream to a dying woman he once had loved, a woman who was just fifty years old, a woman her daughter Ellin summed up after her passing with the tender but frank observation,
How much she had of beauty and brilliance and glamour...How lovable she was and how much courage she had and how little wisdom...
Katherine Blake's Aunt Ellin Speyer, whose happiness after marrying a Jew, made her realize that Ellin Mackay might be happy too, marrying Irving Berlin
Ellin and James Speyer with guest at 'Waldheim', second from the left and on the far right
Saying her Mackay offspring had been well provided for with trust established by their grandfather John William Mackay, Katherine Blake left the entirety of her gross estate, $817, 658.00, in trust for her three daughters and son by Dr. Joseph Agustus Blake.
Katherine Blake's final home in New York at 12 East Eighty-seventh Street was designed by brothers George and Edward Blum of the partice, Blum & Blum
Owning books worth $29,233.00 and silverware valued at $4,397.00, the most important individual object among her possessions, was an Aubusson tapestry. Woven from silk and wool, bearing royal French coat of arms, it was appraised at $1,500.00. At the time of her death the tapestry was hanging in the penthouse apartment with a roof garden at 12 East Eighty-seventh Street, that Katherine leased for ten years in 1929. In better days, it hung over the staircase at Harbor Hill.
Could she have faced it had she lived and Clarence Mackay had been disposed to getting back together? Might she have laughed heartily at the sardonic financial collapse dictating Harbor Hill's doom, followed by recurrent cancer, spelling Clarie's demise? Perhaps, but one can never know for sure.
Is it true? Do those victimized by bigotry and discrimination, always seek some group or groups, more vulnerable, to oppress in return? Certainly, rather than confront the Protestant elite that had demeaned him and his family, Clarence Mackay had determined to join them instead. Far from decrying their narrow outlook, on the whole he had embraced all their prejudices and even their notions of innate superiority. No Jews’ names appeared on the guests lists of his lavish entertainments. As a greater consequence of prevailing anti-Semitism, it’s said that notwithstanding serving on boards with fellow art and opera lovers, Julius Bache and Otto Khan, that Clarence Mackay had refused to ever do any business with Jews. Even when it had meant undermining his company’s interests, for Clarence Mackay religious scruples had precluded dealing with descendants of the killers of Christ.
Selling the Postal Telegraph Company his father started and he caused to flourish, Clarence Mackay had reached the zenith of his career. Richard Guy Wilson says that he was aware of impending ‘trouble’ with the marketplace, that this was why he’d sold out to Sothnes Behn Brothers, the parent firm of International Telephone and Telegraph Company, in 1928. The terms seemed favorable enough. Mackay was to chair the merged companies’ United States’ division. He received payment totaling nearly $300-million! Why had he taken this payment in stock? Undoubtedly, where Mackay was concerned, the issue was a matter of exerting control. Ironically then, it’s not hard to understand, that when in the next few years, ITT’s share price plummeted, from $149.00, in 1928, to just $3.45, in 1937, Clarence Mackay was ruined.
1928: Irving Berlin with his daughter Mary Ellin
1932: The Berlins with their daughters, Mary Ellin and Linda. Linda had been named for their friend, Mrs. Cole Porter
1930: Mrs. Irving Berlin photographed by Cecil Beaton
With the ‘Bank Holiday’ in 1932, Clarence Mackay sold some of his most notable artworks, armor and tapestries. At Harbor Hill expenses were slashed and the staff was cut back, with salaries reduced for any workers who stayed on. Yet still, by 1933 Harbor Hill had still had to be closed. The Mackays moved into the house of the long-serving estate superintendent near Glen on Cove Road. Katherine and Clarie had lived here as newlyweds anxiously awaiting completion of their new house. Mr. Hechler and his family in turn, moved into the former tennis pro's house.
Come June, 1935, Mackay’s personal financial condition improved somewhat. He and his wife were able to resume residence at Harbor Hill, albeit with a staff reduced still further. That the situation was still dire, was shown in July 1935. That was when the Postal Telegraph Company filed for bankruptcy.
Clarence Mackay left his beloved beautiful country estate for the last time on November 8, 1938. Four days later he died, age sixty-four at his imposing city house across Fifth Avenue from Central Park, 3 East 75th Street. The funeral, conducted at St. Patrick's Cathedral, was Clarence Mackay’s final ceremonious pageant.
By now, with one hundred acres adjoining the harbor front sold-off in 1932, Harbor Hill’s acreage was already diminished. By the agreement made between his parents, it had been held in trust for John W. Mackay. Well enough provided for by the provision of other trusts he enjoyed an upper class existence with frequent travel, a New York apartment, a county house and servants.
Starting in 1932 Irving and Ellin Berlin took a duplex penthouse in the fourteen-storey cooperative apartment building designed by Emery Roth in 1929 at 130 East End Avenue. At the edge of Carl Schurz Park and Gracie Square it looked out over Hell Gate along the East River.
Moving by 1940, Irving Berlin fifty-one-years old, a Russian immigrant who had left public school after completing the eighth grade was on top of the world. Ellin Berlin, his lovely wife was thirty-one. Their daughters: Mary Ellin Berlin, was thirteen, Linda L. Berlin was eight and Elizabeth J. Berlin just three. Living in a sedate house at 129 East Seventy-eighth Street, rented for $335.00, they were all looked after by a large household of helpers. If they no longer employed a butler. As they had at East End Avenue, they were still amply attended to.
Jenet Tennant forty-eight, was the English child nurse. Nellie Willis forty-one, was Ellin’s English lady’s maid. The parlor maid, who answered the door, served and meals and cleaned the drawing room, was Florence Phisholin, a thirty-one year old Canadian. Jessie Taylor, forty-eight was English and presided over the kitchen, assisted by twenty-two year old Rose Fore from Ireland who was kitchen maid.
Russian painter Savely Sorie's portrait of a demure twenty-year old Ellin gases out over he elegantly subdued drawing room with its midnight-blue carpet
A lamp formed from a rose-quartz Chinese incense burner
The river view
Irving Berlin's double-height library upstairs was at times the family living room in addition to being the studio in which he composed from a specially devised transposing, upright piano
Eighteen feet of knowledge including Havelock Ellis, on the top shelf
Number 17 Beekman Place, the quintessence of urban elegance
By 1946 the Berlins and there three daughters moved into a dignified Georgian Revival house. Number 17 Beekman Place, had been designed by Fredrick Sterner and built for James V. Forrestal, a Wall Street banker, in 1932. For this drawing room the carpet is cream-colored, Louis XVI fauteuils are recovered in blue damask and Katherine Blake's Boldini portrait is center stage. The small oil study nearby is by Ellin Berlin's uncle, Walter Gay
The Berlin's inviting dining room with an inherited Sèvres porcelain garniture and Coromandel lacquer screens.
Happily living here for the remainder of their lives, 17 Beekman Place was the scene for many memorable events. In 1948 this was where their daughter Mary Ellin was married to Mr. Dennis Sheedy Burden. A seemingly impeccable WASP socialite, whom her grandfather would no doubt to have commended, Burden was, as everyone had tried telling her, 'all wrong'. Both a Christian clergyman and a Rabbi gave their blessings, but to no avail. After just one year of married life, Marry Ellin had come to agree with everyone else. Happily, sometimes there are second chances
One-hundred-and-two years old when he died, Irving Berlin's former home is now known as Luxembourg House, home to the Permanent Mission of Luxembourg to the UN, the Consulate General of Luxembourg and the Luxembourg Tourist Office. In our time, such houses have become no more viable as private residences, than Harbor Hill
Particularly gracious, was the caring way Ellin Berlin looked out for her half-brother and sisters. In 1933, she led her Mackay siblings in hosting a joint debutante dance for the two eldest. The Time storey read:
The Misses Katherine and Joan Blake, daughters of Dr. Joseph A. Blake and the late Mrs. Duer Blake, were introduced to society last night at a large supper dance in the Crystal Room of the Ritz-Carlton, given jointly by Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth O'Brien, Mr. and Mrs. Irving Berlin and Mr. and Mrs. John W. Mackay.
1934: Joan Blake wasted little time fefore wedding Henry H. Harjes, in what the Times described as a; "Colorful Ceremony in Church of Heavenly Rest Unites Prominent Families." Alas, Mrs. Harjes' divorce was not long in the offing
Ellin Berlin was especially clever in the way she updated her mother's jewels
This emreald on a diamond chain sold not long ago in Hong Kong for over $2-million
1953: Ellin Berlin bedecked in emeralds and diamonds her father had given to her mother as her husband and daughter Mary Ellin Berlin look on
Diamond clips from Cartier given to Ellin Berlin by her husband in 1944
Ellin Mackay Berlin writing about her grandmother, Louise Mackay, produced Silver Platter, an engrossing work, published in 1957. This was her third novel published by Doubleday. The others were Land I Have Chosen, and Lace Curtain. A later novel, The Best of Families, that appeared in 1970, was autobigraphical as the others had been.
Mary Ellin Barrett is eldest of the Berlins’ three daughters. Emulating the example of her mother, she is the author of three novels, American Beauty, An Accident Of Love and Castle Ugly.
Prodigious and affecting story telling is a perennial gift that seems to have been passed from mother to daughter, starting with Katherine Mackay. They are a veritable dynasty of writers. Each is never better, than when telling their tale and making it ours
After the very top treasures from Clarence H. Mackay’s storied collection were left to his family, with others sold to museums and still high flying collectors like Samuel Kress, much still had remained to be dispersed. Rather ingloriously, in the company however, of another magnate-collector laid low, William Randolph Hearst, a trove consisting of four thousand objects, furnishings, armor, porcelain, tapestries, linens and more was, dispensed, starting in 1941, at the Gimbel Brothers Department Store. Via so humble a venue, sores were enabled to purchase their piece of history quite often at bargain basement prices.
As his finances worsened Clarence Mackay sold this masterful work by Mantegna, Adoration of the Shepherds, from 1495-1505, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Neither Clarence Mackay‘s son, nor many others had been in any position to maintain a property like Harbor Hill, one requiring a mint of money and a phalanxes of retainers. Indeed Clarence's vastly depleted estate valued at close to $3-million, had been left to young Mackay’s stepmother. Lacking the means to keep Harbor Hill, in 1940 John William Mackay leased fifty acres to the US Army Air Corps for what later became known as the Roslyn Air Force Station. Poorly attended to, his father’s house and the other estate buildings gradually fell forlornly into disrepair. In a spectacular explosion, the house was demolished with dynamite in 1947. Harbor Hill was then acquired by a developer. The community of modest speculative houses built on Harbor Hill in the late 1950s and early 1960s is known as Country Estates.
Retained by his widow, Anna Case Mackay, this lovely bust was a bequest to the Metropolitan Museum, in memory of her husband Clarence H. Mackay. Depicting a noble lady, its believed to be by Mino da Fiesole? Mino di Giovanni ? An Italian, of Papiano or Montemignaio 1429–1484 Florence
Among the most cherished objects in Mackay's collection, was this celebrated painted terracotta bust of Lorenzo de' Medici, made in Florence at close of the 15th, or at the start of the 16th century, probably after a model by Andrea del Verrocchio and Orsino Benintendi. Today it is owned by the National Gallery in Washington where the more vibrant original colors have been restored
Vainly seeking to purchase this superlate suit of parade armor made for Henry II of France around 1555, following designs by Etienne Delaune. even whilst selling-off lesser treasures, Mackay had aquired if anyway. An ubrivaled example, although it might have been prudent to, he never let it go
Both in aesthetic terms and in regard to their poetical narrative, many of Mackay's tapestries, such as this example from the Fifteenth century, showing scenes from the Trojan War, were unsurpassed.
Hector is watched putting his armor on, while Andromache on her knees, with her two children, her mother Hecuba, and her ladies, tries to persuade him not to go to battle
Clarence Mackay and all his children are now gone. Anna Case, his second wife, was the former Metropolitan Opera soprano who had sung the role of Sophie, in the first American production of Strauss's ''Der Rosenkavalier'', in 1913. In 1984, Mrs. Mackay died after a long illness in her apartment in the Stanhope Hotel in Manhattan. In sharp contrast with Katherine Blake’s half century or her husband’s sixty-four year life’s-span, she was ninety-five-years old.
Circa 1930
Circa 1941
Following the loss of over one hundred acres along New York Sound
Favorably positioned, close to New York, might Harbor Hill to have been rescued, re-purposed and saved, successfully serving as a regional art museum, as a resort, a spa, a school or a catering hall? For many, the answer to such a question, pitting crude commerce and an exquisitely realized and irreplaceable architectural expression of distinctive beauty, the answer must be: ‘Yes!’ For those, this has been, one trusts, a multi-layered cautionary tale, And it is one, hardly discounting commercial expedience, but rather instead, considers every kind of cost and loss at stake.
Clarence Mackay’s father habitually had given his mother orchids. This was an epoch when a regular workman earned a dollar per day. American Beauty Roses also commanded a dollar. But a single exotic, flamboyantly showy orchid cost five dollars: nearly an entire weekly wage, as much as dinner for two with champagne at the Plaza. Charmingly imitating his father, by showing his wife and the world how he felt with expensive orchids, Clarence Mackay was well matched by Katherine Duer. During their courtship, when he wagered he could give her more orchids than she could wear, he’d lost. Becomingly, after pining bunches to her waist and bodice, she ornamented her hat with the remainder. By the time she married, Katherine Mackay adopted the orchid as her personal talisman.
With an 80,000-square foot interior, Harbor Hill ended up costing $830,000.00. This figure is exclusive of the remarkable art collection, painstakingly gathered to fill it, like important and historic gem stones, meticulously gathered and matched, to fill an exquisite new platinum setting by Cartier. Contemplating and accessing the lost value of a 1900 dollar however, is rather complicated. To multiply by one hundred is often useful. A skilled laborer, working on the construction of Harbor Hill, eared $2.00 per day, unskilled, $1.00. Were they earning the equivalent of $100-$200.00 per day? No. Did a dollar have the purchasing power of $100.00 then, at the grocery store? No again. It seems reasonable, to imagine that one could reproduce a house like Harbor Hill today, for $ 83-million. But, the $5.00 or so the finest a la Carte dinner at Sherry’s Restaurant cost, that seems preposterous now, at $500.00? Perhaps, a nice wine is included?
1902
1924
Why, one might wonder, was this great house ever built? The answer to this question has to do with the ambition and self-image of the patrons who commissioned and oversaw its painstaking execution. An exceptional dwelling, Harbor Hill, is a place some have called, "Heartbreak House". From completion, to destruction, it lasted just forty-five years!
Like others before, and since, they captured the public's imagination. Gertrude and Harry Whitney, Nancy and Charles Gibson, Linda and Cole Porter, Constance and Kirk Askew, Ernesta and Samuel Barlow, Eleanore and Archibald Brown, Amanda and Carter Burden, Katherine and Clarence Mackay. They were their epoch's golden couple.
Clarence Hungerford Mackay, Esquire, (1874-1938), was a gentleman-sportsman-farmer-philanthropist-captain-of-industry-connoisseur. He surely saw his beautiful wife as a thoroughbred. Her children, his children, would be thoroughbreds too. Katherine Alexander Duer, (1880-1930), was allied to the city’s oldest and most prominent families. As a spirited girl, she’d been a darling of the ‘best society.’ As his wife, he would crown her, queen of New York. He would give her the world and build a castle befitting of her loveliness, a palace worthy of the wealth and wisdom that made him invincible. He envisioned Harbor Hill as a dynastic seat, one which, thanks to Stanford White’s genius and his careful supervision, would be as stately as any historic pile in far-off England, or in France. By distinction, Harbor Hill, in addition to a superb setting and the requisite collection of priceless treasures, was to be outfitted with every technological marvel, every provision for convenience and comfort, conceivable.
It would be passed on to Mackays, generation after generation. And, in the fullness of time, matured, mellowed, further refined, burnished ever more brightly, to a wonderfully satisfying glow, its fame would shine down through the ages. As Clarence Mackay pictured his house, for centuries to come, from Harbor Hill would emanate a portion of the Mackay family’s lustrous stature for all the world to admire.
Exposed to the elite, to thoroughbreds, aristocrats and blue-bloods, all his life, despite great affluence and a fine education, Mackay had always just missed fully belonging to the ‘best society.’ For her part, his wife, by birth, was fully a creature of that world. But she’d also been painfully aware of the limitations imposed upon her, for lack of great means, to fully enjoy all her world afforded.
So if Clarence Mackay had intended for Harbor Hill to be a show place on a summit, a castle where she would be a queen, while he benignly ruled, Katherine Mackay was in perfect accord with such a vision.
1904: In her bid to join the Roslyn School Board, Katherine Mackay entertained 500 local children and their parents at a fete that became an annual event for a time
Why then, one wonders, did she not covert, and become a Roman Catholic? At the time of her engagement it was much talked about in the papers. There were suggestions that she was taking instruction, from a Jesuit priest, that her embrace by ‘the church,’ was imminent. Conversely, well aware that the Episcopal faith, was the religion of English-speaking aristocrats everywhere, why had Clarence Mackay insisted on rearing their children as Catholics? Certainly, for his father, religion had never been any imperative whatever. But his mother on the other hand, French heritage made the Catholic church more central to her. Having survived crushing poverty, distress and want, in large part through the sustenance and comfort availed of a God-focused life, she’d endeavored to make Catholicism important to her children too. As for the younger Mackay’s faith, in the long run, as events would reveal, to them, orthodoxy was more symbolic and affiliation more flexible, than any youthful adamancy might have indicated.
Clarence Mackay, was the second son of John William Mackay, one of the four men, famous as the Bonanza Kings, who struck it rich with the discovery of an expansive and remarkably pure vein of silver and gold ore. It was known as the Comstock Lode. Joining forces with James Gordon Bennett, John Mackay parlayed his windfall into the Commercial Cable and Postal Telegraph Company, laid cables across the Atlantic, and broke the Western union monopoly, to amass still more millions!
This was how his son had become a box-holder, patron and chairman of the Metropolitan Opera, a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Philharmonic. A decorated layman of the Roman Catholic Church, Mackay used every advantage at his command, to make himself into a full-length portrait of the prefect gentleman.
With a wedding gift of six hundred rolling acres from his father to Katherine, joining various Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Morgans, and others with names synonymous with ‘many millions,’ the Mackays proceeded to build. The idea of their group was to transform the sleepy farming community round about Roslyn, in Nassau County, into a realm of privilege and pleasure for their rarefied class, not so different from parts of Sussex. Their headquarters would be the Piping Rock Country Club, although many provided sports facilities on their properties, graced with houses and gardens based on villas, Colonial neo-Palladian houses, chateaux and manors, exceeding the offerings of any club. Among all their grand houses, it was readily acknowledged that Harbor Hill was unsurpassed for luxury. Of all the fine places from this period, along the north shore of Long Island’s ‘Gold Coast,’ Harbor Hill was held by many to be the most opulent and beautiful. Sadly, this coterie which built landed estates meant to endure through the ages, enjoyed but the briefest optimistic season before their gilded dream came crashing down around them.
If costly clipped bay trees, requiring wintering in a cold green house, were widely employed as a status symbol, orange trees like these were only found at the most palatal places
Who today is comparable? The young, lovely and impulsive Gloria Vanderbilt comes to mind, so does Stephanie Seymour, Paris Hilton and even Kim Kardashian. She was so very young, so very rich, so resolute, to have what she wanted, how she wanted it, when she wanted it. Katherine Mackay had posted over one hundred, mostly commanding, letters to Stanford White, to make sure, that he knew what she wanted too. Clarence Mackay, with fewer, more tactful memoranda sent to both of the principal collaborators with whom he created Harbor Hill, White and Katherine, kept things in check.
What sort of dwelling would the Mackay castle on a hill be? Katherine was adamant on the subject: “a very severe house…based on Louis XIV and Henri II precedents…” It fell to Clarence to alternately agree to all sorts of alluring extras, seductively suggested by Stanford White, only to then demur, complaining, once he had grasped just how much the game trophies proposed for the billiard room, or a sunken bath, carved from a single block of marble, would cost. In repeated missives he was at pains to remind White about money being a serious consideration, once even going so far as to remonstrate with White, ‘ I will tell you right here that I would not think of paying such an absurd price as 100,000 francs for any mantelpiece, unless I had the income of a Rockefeller or a Carnegie!..’ Of course, in a way, he did have such an income! To be sure, in fairness, only after his father's death, in 1902, was a stupendous income his absolutely. But, before then, his close relationship with his parents was such, that he had had access to all the Mackay money, as much as if it had already been his. That this availability was not at first official, allowed Mackay to play a kind of game. Nor did it help that he was well aware of Whites insolvency.
September 4, 1904: Katherine Mackay leaving Harbor Hill to arrange for the fair she staged there, for the benefit of the Nassau Hospital
Few houses Stanford White designed are as straightforward, so seemingly conventional as this, his last house. Some are quick to dismiss Harbor Hill as a result of the derivative nature of its facade from the specific source of Masions-Lafitte. What such un-analytical critics fail to perceive is how much in adaptation, White has refined, manipulated and otherwise striven to 'improve' his model. He has admirably transformed something grandiloquent and overblown, not suitable at all, as a setting for the family and social life of early twentieth century inhabitants, into a gracious residence. In stripping away extraneous ornament and elements meant merely to overawe, he left what's essential to evoke the famous chateau, minus its burdensome excesses decreed by courtly convention and etiquette. Today of course, someone seeking to do likewise, as adeptly, would be reduced to adapting Harbor Hill's water tower, on just ten acres as a country retreat. None the less, what White accomplished, was to transfigure Mansart's work in such a way as to made it like New York neo-Renaissance style towers admired by Corbusier: "better", more functional, taunt and disciplined, than the original.
Misleadingly the date "1902", does not refer to the disposition of Harbor Hill, but only to the time it was deemed "complete."The cause of tremendous confusion, this is a revised floor-plan, made for the publication of Mckim, Mead & White's monograph, in 1915. The large room in the south-west pavilion, with three windows, on both the south and the west, was, from 1902, to about 1905, the library, Harbor Hill's French oak paneled-principal living room. Transformation of this space into the"stone room", a salon that served exclusively as a space for entertaining, required that the billiard room, be made into a new, more intimate library. By 1925, thanks to Joseph Duveen finding a nearly complete French gothic room, the new library was redone, a third time and rechristened, the "gothic room". Twenty years earlier, the billiard room had been relocated, in the casino.
None of the dramatic mystery, with which Sir Edwin Lutyens invigorates his erstwhile conventional houses, with the unexpected, is present. Instead, one entered-into a broad long gallery, twenty feet-high and one hundred feet long, that acted as the entrance hall.
1904
Harbor Hill's interiors, conceived by the Mackays and White, working together, were realized by three different well established firms of decorators. A. H. Davenport & Co., with showrooms in Boston and New York, had worked with Stanford White since his start in the office of Henry Hobson Richardson. Due to exacting skill shown over a long association, they participated in many Mckim, Mead & White projects, including the White House 'restoration'. In 1914, the firm merge with Irving & Casson, continuing in business until 1974.
Beginning his salutary career working for Herter Brothers, not surprisingly William Baumgarten, in establishing his own firm, continued to be patronized by the bon ton.
Jules Allard et Fils, a flourishing concern in Paris since Louis Philippe‘s reign, was another supplier of “complete furnishing, decorations, cabinetry, sculpture, seats, tapestry and drapes.” Jules Allard’s son Fernand Allard maintained the company until 1919. Allard’s collaboration with ’showplace’ builder Richard Morris Hunt, starting in 1880, led to his phenomenal success in America. It was following Hunt’s advice that Allard opened an office in New York, where the demand for aristocratic surroundings from the decorator of the Emperor of France, knew no bounds. Coordinated by White, his decorators and an army of subcontractors, miraculously formulated a harmonious result.
Lengthy, lofty, utterly impersonal when newly completed, Harbor Hill's entrance suggested the elegantly arid anonymity of some rather smart, public accommodation, like the Ritz. Some enthusiasts of great houses from the period of of Harbor Hill, find fault with most of its interiors for this reason, characterizing its rooms as "unappealing, with a heavy Edwardian grand hotel..." cast.
1927
It's instructive then to examine both the long gallery-entrance hall and Harbor Hill's other interiors, over the course of the house's evolution. From the start, no matter how complete, nor even how handsome some room might be, as my post strives to show, all rooms and their details were subject to the whims of the Mackays' and repeated alteration. In the case of the entrance hall, what a difference and warming effect, the introduction of shining armor, colorful banners and richly detailed tapestries made.
1930
Mediated only by a columnar screen, Harbor Hill's impressive great hall occupied most of the center of the house. No more so than the staircase, with parapets of luxuriantly scrolling, pierced arabesque, derived from seventeenth century English examples at Sudbury Hall and Cassiobury Park, does either room reference solely “Louis XIV and Henri II precedents…” Each space instead was articulated by pilasters, corresponding to the composite columns of two screens. Leading at either end into the great hall, they de-marked the entrance hall and front door and the passage separating the library and dining room, with a 'back door' exit onto the south terrace. Their capitals, were hung with pendant garlands, a feature not unknown in the seventeenth century, but in 1900, by far, more associated with Louis Seize mode, the revival of which, was coming to the forefront of architectural fashion.
1930
By means of vivid word pictures, photographs and numerous drawings, White effectively bewitched the Mackays into making of their house and its enormous great hall, thirty-eight feet high, forty-eight feet wide and eighty feet long, far more than even they had dared imagine. The rendering below, replete with antique choir stalls, silken heraldic banners and an array of armor, indicates what he had had in mind. It shows the same sort of historicist and highly atmospheric, but eclectic flair for which White was famous. It was a personal style that Incorporated many fashion status symbols of the time, lion, tiger and polar bear rugs, potted palms, antique furniture, lustrous textiles and flowers and ornaments in profusion. Concurrently, for the Mackay's Roslyn neighbor and friend, William Collins Whitney, at his palatal Fifth Avenue house, White was completing rooms that epitomized his style. The Mackays knew the Whitney project well and frequently referenced it, hoping for something similarly fine.
Certainly Clarence Mackay, who, the legendary art dealer, Joseph Duveen, helped to further infect with the collecting bug, was susceptible to inducement, to build better than he'd set out to. The merchant of masterpieces who became baron Duveen of Milbank, wrote of their mutually beneficial association,
Visiting Clarence Mackay at his manor, Harbor Hill, in Roslyn, soon after making his acquaintance, my gaze took in certain tapestries on the walls. Those tapestries, my dear Mr. Mackay, are very good, but they are not good enough for you. I can't bear you to have them in your chateau. I'll buy them from you, as I have a customer they're good enough for. I'll pay you thirty-five thousand dollars for them...
His host, agreed, without hesitation. Duveen's check arrived promptly the next day as Mackay incredulously shipped off the tapestries, for which he had only paid a fraction of what the dealer offered.
Duveen in fact, had had no client awaiting the hangings. They went directly into storage in the vast basement of his showroom. Yet through this sound investment, Mackay had been ensnared, to became one of Duveen's best customers. Moreover, in cultivating Mackay's taste, Duveen was able to help him to elevate his house, a house as good as the John S, Phipps' place at Westbury, to the stratispheric aesthetic level of Mrs. Gardner's Fenway Court.
Stanford White's compelling illustration of his intentions for Harbor Hill's great hall, amply justified his assurances to Clarence Mackay, that he would be getting a house which, with the exception of Hunt's Biltmore, was without peer
One might easily imagine that the four, Four Season Arras tapestries in the following pictures, are the ones Joseph Duveen disparaged? Acquired in Paris for his clients by White, identified as of Gobelin manufacture, the early eighteenth century allegorical works had come from the collection of the Princesse de Sagan. Enhancing the provenance, attribution and manufacture of artwork and objet de vertu, was nothing unusual for high-end purveyors like White and Duveen. In all events, Clarence Mackay having zeroed in on making the great hall the focal point of the interior of his home, led to change. He sought to give it greater cohesion and continuity, telling his architect in 1902, 'My heart is wrapped up in making a success of that hall...' This meant, tapestries appropriate to the ballroom the great hall seems to have started out as, were moved.
1902
'Summer'. Removing the Season tapestries into the salon, which made it better accord to the first state room at Blenheim Palace, also made the hall more purely an expression of fused medieval and Renaissance tastes. This might be seen as a promotion as it were, but eventually, the Arras tapestries were relegated to Katherine's boudoir, before being sold. The two smaller panels from the set, Summer and Autumn, ended up in Akron Ohio, at the estate of rubber baron, F. A. Seiberling, Stan Hywet Hall.
1902
Harbor Hill's prized pierced and repousse brass Venetian lantern. Soon enough, the time would come for its banishment
The great hall's gallery, above the entrance hall, acted as the second floor's cross corridor. Pierced strap-work, reminiscent of a purdah screen, helped to supply light into room
Designation of Harbor Hill's hall as a showcase for fifteenth through the seventeenth century armor, also called for removal of the entryways' green Connemara columns with white marble bases and capitals. What trouble and discord they had caused. Angelo Fucigna, the stone mason, in the end was unable to supply either monoliths, or the perfectly matching shafts specified. Yet foolishly, he had installed them anyway, leading to rejection, and, for him at least, ruinous litigation. Piccirilli Brothers did the job properly. But the changed direction of the hall meant that their columns too were removed, replaced by Davenport & Co., with fluted oak pillars that matched the pilasters they had also made.
1902
Viewed between the lost columns, the front door's 'cantonniers' or valances, were made from the fruit and flower festooned top and side borders of a 17th century Flemish tapestry. One of two, by 1914, they had made their way from in the great hall at Harbor Hill, to the Stan Hywet Hall's music room in Akron, Ohio
Stan Hywet Hall, Akron, Ohio, the residence of rubber baron Frank A. Seiberling, showing the music room stage, framed by a 'cantonnier' from Harbor Hill. A large house with sixty-five rooms comprising nearly 50,000 square feet, Stan Hywet, as the photograph indicates, lacks Harbor Hill's more monumental scale
Following White's unexpected death in 1906 and Katherine Mackay's equally abrupt 1914 flight to Paris to her husband's friend and doctor, the Harbor Hill hall grew ever more elaborate and filled furniture and armor. Always, in the hall as well as the rest of the house, there was a process of the weeding out of the indifferent and upgrading at work. In this way, a formerly much esteemed Venetian lantern, Davenport lounge chairs, floridly carved rosewood Chinese stools, used as plant stands and other unremarkable accumulations were displaced by arms and armament, paintings, sculpture and furniture of the highest order.
1908
Circa 1915
A rare Levantine shield that once helped to form a trophy of arms in Harbor Hill's great Hall
Circa 1925
Circa 1925
Circa 1930: Harbor Hill's hall chimney-piece, composed from sixteenth century elements
Mackay would gather together the world's finest private armor collection
Finally, just as White would have wished Clarence Mackay, whom he had helped to tutor, was acclaimed as a major connoisseur. His collection of superb Medieval tapestries, was as celebrated as his armory, praised by visitors as diverse as Edward, Prince of Wales and the great art critic and friend of Stanford White, Royal Cortissoz. In the December 1929 issue of the International Studio, the critic's tribute was fulsome"
I cannot forbear glancing at the character of Harbor Hill as a whole. Across the threshold one steps into a corridor that runs almost the length of the house. Traversing it the visitor finds himself in a vast hall or chamber of lordly dimensions, with a ceiling more than thirty feet high. Gothic tapestries enrich the walls. Against them are ranged some of the most famous suits of armor in the world... Vast shadowy and splendid, the whole room breathes of history, as it does of consummate art and craftsmanship. Color is everywhere, in the rosy glow of the Chaumot tapestries, in those faintly moving banners, and in scattered incidents of ruby velvet. And the marvelous thing is the manner in which the myriad objects here assembled from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance all "pull together," making one superb effect and creating one harmonious atmosphere. It is the atmosphere of beauty. It was an axiom of Stanford White's that the work of any period would go with the work of any other period---if both were of superlative quality. Mr. Mackay has worked on the same conviction, maintaining the high standard which validates it... This Collector has not only specialized in architecture, painting, sculpture, tapestry and furniture but has specialized in so fusing them as to produce a collection in itself a work of art..."
1927: Miss Katherine O'Brien in the Great Hall at Harbor Hill, Sir John Lavery ( 1856-1941). The sitter was the Mackay's granddaughter
With a 'backdoor', opening onto the south terrace, the passage between the library-'stone room' room and the dining room, faced the hall, to which it was an extension. For a time, it obviously acted as an auxiliary sitting room. As such, it was comfortably furnished by Katherine, with easy chairs, tables laden with new books and magazines, glass lamps, with pictorial paper shades and potted ferns. Assisted by Joe Duveen, so adept in locating more loot, Clarence Makay soon made it back into a formal space. It proved ideal for the display of his outstanding parade armor and stuffed steeds dressed in the proper trapping of the tournament .
January 28, 1906: The New York Times
Circa 1925: Harbor Hill's south passage
A German knight's Maximilian Armor, made in 1525 and seen at the feft, in the passageway photograph above
To begin with, the salon at Harbor Hill was an almost perfunctory Allard & Sons rendition of Louis Quinze taste. There was no great glistening central chandelier, no pile carpet on the basket-weave parquetry floor. The only memorable feature in fact, was the life-size, full-length portrait of an eighteen-year Katherine, painted by Edmund Cartran. Desire for authentic, pristine, important French furniture has not yet been prompted in 1902, so Allards reproductions will do.
1902: Harbor Hill's salon
Clarence Mackay’s eighteen-year old fiancée was painted by Edmund Cartran holding an orchid in her hand. Still others ornamented the corsage of her white satin dress and more still, a cascading coiffure. In short order, Mrs. Clarence Mackay, a socialite-celebrity, due to wealth, beauty, literary ambitions, philanthropy, her work on the local school board and for the suffragist's cause, came to write in purple ink, on pink, lavender and orchid-colored letter paper. In building Harbor Hill, she’d employed her favored mauve thoroughly, in the color scheme of her suite of rooms upstairs, while here, in the salon, the bright white walls were softened with mauve lines
Had discontent with the notion of a largely 'gilt-free', pristinely white, salon, occurred once the Mackays saw the state rooms at Blenheim Palace, that Allard probably had had a hand in redecorating?
1904: Blenheim Palace, the first state room
Redecorated with other 'show rooms' by the ninth duke of Marlborough immediately following his marriage to Katherine Mackay's friend, Consuelo Vanderbilt, Blenheim's first state room probably inspired the introduction of a carpet and tapestries in the salon at Harbor Hill.
January 28, 1906: The New York Times , Harbor Hill's salon
Was the decision to move and then sell their Four Season tapestries, based on the Mackays purchasing a finer set, four silk and wool panels of Gobelins manufactory, made between 1770 and 1773? With a narrative the exploits Don Quixote, based on the highly popular romance novel by Miguel de Cervantes, the designs were derived from paintings by Charles-Antoine Coypel.
Sancho’s Feast on the Isle of Barataria from The Story of Don Quixote series, 1770–72, woven at the Gobelins Tapestry Manufactory now owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, it had come from the collection of Clarence Mackay. This tapestry and three related hangings, perhaps hung in Harbor Hill's salon.
Frustraitingly, the ability to only find two images of this room, seperated by just four years, makes it difficult to say how it changed. It's facinating to considor the changes that occured over those few early years. Were they indicative of any subsequent rethinking, the salon might have come to look dramatically different. The tapestry above, like the chair below, could not have easily been in other rooms at Harbor Hill. Unfortunately however, they would have suited the townhouse he acquired at number three East 75th Street quite well.
One of a set of six exceptional Louis XV fauteils with tapestry covers that were owned by Clarence Mackay. Today in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, they were a bequest of Mackay's friend Forsythe Wicks
In the era prior air-conditioning, an important provision for any country house, be it cottage or summer palace, was a shaded porch, piazza or terrace. At Harbor Hill, naturally, one might enjoy all three. Because the 'glass piazza' had double-pane wondows, in addition to serving as a summer living room, it also acted as a lush winter garden, filled with palms, ferns and blooming plants, including prized orchids.
Having moved to New York, the innovative Valencian architect and builder, Rafael Guastavino, was granted a US patented for his “Tile Arch System” for making structural vaults, in 1885. Such ceilings were capable of supporting a load much greater than ordinary wooden joists. Using interlocking terracotta tiles, laid in a herringbone pattern, with layers of mortar, they’d been appropriated from traditional Roman building. The system formed taunt, resilient, fire-proof, thin and light-weight ceilings that White’s firm exploited often to form unobstructed spaces.
Used in the casino, for the plunge and other rooms, Guastavino vaults were extensively employed in Harbor Hill’s service wing as well, for pantries, the two servant’s halls and most notably, for the gleaming kitchen. The only application in the ‘show’ part of the house, was in the ‘glass piazza, where the tiles formed a shallow saucer dome that seemed weightless.
In 1902 an attraction of the Mackay's glass piazza was a ping pong table. That year the fast-paced past time had taken the nation by storm. However, after November of 1904, the conservatory-like 'glass piazza,' gained a far more unusual item of interest. Traveling in style, in his client-friend's private railway car, White and Clarence Mackay had visited the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis. When too red-blooded club-men attend a world's fair together, one has no idea just what is liable to strike their fancy. For Mackay and perhaps for White too, it was a brazen whore, beautifully made up and bedecked with a quantity of gold colored barbaric jewelry, including a necklace of tiger's claws.
January 28, 1906: The New York Times
"Cornith" portraying a priestess of Venus, a ritual prostitute, is a late work of the painter and sculptor Jean-Leon Gerome. Whether depicting the first Thanksgiving, a victor in the Roman arena, Christian martyrs or orientalists scenes of fantasy, his oeuvre was academically researched and polished, sensual and imbued with theatrical bravura. White had known the artist, who'd just died. He owned at least two of Gerome's history paintings. The son of a goldsmith, Gerome had only taken up sculpture after turning fifty. After a while, causing great controversy, using wax bases pigments, in the manner of the ancient Greeks, he began tinting his marble figures. Hence the popular title the 'Tinted Venus.' Done in several variations, much regarded as the artist’s “Most spectacular testament,” it was also his last creation.
November 1, 1908: New York Tribune
One of several variations, this version of French painter and sculptor Jean-Leon Gerome's 'Cornith,' is owned by the Getty Museum. But lacking a jewel-mounted bracelet, it is not likely to be the sane one Clarence Mackay brought home from the 1904 World's Fair.
Famous for helping clients to disavow their youthful folly, had Duveen been able to banish Mackay's Gerome? All things considered, as focal point of the conservatory, it must have been disconcerting for many much as the portrait of his wife, Stephanie Seymour, that Peter Brant commissioned. More than anything, one wonders, what did Katherine think?
By the late 1920's Harbor Hill's west portico was enclosed by glass to provide still more space for entertaining
On the first floor, the large room occupying Harbor Hill's south-west pavilion, had three windows, on both the south and the west sides. This in part, it what makes it possible, to positively assign it, in a house where change was not infrequent. From 1902, to about 1905, as accords with the drawing below, dated 1899, this was the library, Harbor Hill's principal living room, paneled in French oak, outlined in old gilt. Its woodwork, chimney-piece, curtains, wall hangings, carpet and furniture, were supplied by Allard and Sons.
They are magnificent books. The breath and depth of new research undertaken by Wayne Craven with his, Stanford White: Decorator in Opulence and Dealer in Antiques, published by the Columbia University Press, in 2005 and Professor Richard Guy Wilson's more recent offering, Harbor Hill: Portrait of a House, produced by the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, through the auspices of the Norton Press, in 2008, is absolutely prodigious. Quite little of what I relate here would have been possible without the great help and many clues to the history of Harbor Hill both contain. I have not had the advantage of personally plowing through the hundreds and hundreds of letters, invoices, drawings, news clippings and other varied materials related to this history.
Even doing research from journals, photographs and newspapers on-line, together with consulting their work, as well as Elizabeth and Sam White's, Paul Baker's and Mosette Broderick's, has been daunting. How, might one order, organize and keep un-jumbled, so much information and a host of imperative dates? Invariably, almost unavoidably, despite all one's fine plans, writing a book, on gets something, not quite entirely right. Mr. Craven and Professor Wilson have, as regards Harbor Hill's short-lived, original library.
1902: Harbor Hill's original library. This image is from a Mckim, Mead & White office album owned by the New York Historical Society. Wayne Craven contended; "The library at Harbor Hill was located on the first floor, directly behind the main hall, although for unknown reasons it does not appear in the plans."
Reading this, made perfect sense, as no illustrations showing a room with book shelves appears in the 1915 monograph. The photo above however was used in articles published to announce Harbor Hill's completion. They include one from the New York Herald on Sunday, August 10, 1902 and "The Founding Of An American Estate" in the August 16, 1902 issue of Town and Country magazine. The 'stone room,' is nowhere to be seen, but, perhaps the library could have been behind the hall. Where would the service wing's stores and offices have been located though, if that had been so? It's the laws of physics make this explanation impossible
Their error is easily understood. Given the state of records concerning White's firm, located in three different institutions, given the changeable nature of the Mackays, one can hardly see how it came about. Indeed the discovery that something was amiss, only occurred due to their worthy efforts. Foremost, the culprits are Katherine and Clarence Mackay.
Professor Richard Guy Wilson, like Wayne Craven, shows no illustration of Harbor Hill's libraries, one and two in his book, only the billiard room. He's definite enough about the billiard room metamorphosing into the library, but discusses the library-'stone room,' as a contest between the strong wills of Katherine and Clarence. In his telling of the saga of this room, Clarence Mackay wins, but it seems that events unfolded differently
It is very difficult to believe indeed, that a pair who so often complained about escalating costs, the disruption of changes and the inconvenience of construction, could have done it. There was their fine library, complete, comfortable, homey and welcoming, outfitted in strict accordance with the the express, detailed, wishes of Mrs. Mackay and after just two years, it was completely redone!
What had been her directives? With much the same vehemence shown in determining the style and form of her house, she had decreed a Louis Quatorze style library. Just a few of Katherine's requirements included a high wainscot, of carved French oak, highlighted with gold. Green silk covered the walls above the wainscoting. It was to be a velours, woven with alternating velvet and satin stripes. The chimney breast was also paneled in oak, but the modillion bracketed cove at the top of the walls, that appears to be oak, was not. Just as the marble cove of the dining room at marble house, was not marble, here a trompe l'oeil painted finish skillfully imitated oak. Allard's estimates of 1899 outline many of these particulars, shown in the photographs that follow:
We will hang the walls with green stripe velours as per sample submitted, we will manufacture and put up window draperies, as per design submitted, using same velours as for walls... We agree to furnish and put up eight electric brackets---Louis XIV, Two ceiling fixtures as per design submitted...
1902: Harbor Hill's gemütlich library
There are the gilded bronze light brackets, shaded and recalling an hotel. In a house with few chandeliers of any kind, not surprisingly, the ceiling fixtures seem to have been eliminated. Indeed, all about the room, along with pairs of shaded candlesticks, glass kerosene lamps with pictorial paper shades are found. Used latter in the passage between this room and the dining room, which Katherine furnished as a sitting room, they'd been electrified, although rather than drilling the glass cords dangled from the sockets. Of little intrinsic value, might these lamps have belonged to Katherine's mother, who had died so soon after her marriage?
Very like the drawing room mantel of her girlhood friend, Cornelia Martin, who became the Countess of Craven, the red veined marble Louis XIV style mantelpiece had been much discussed. It was not to have a shelf, on this Katherine was most definite.
The fireside in Harbor Hill's original library
A portrait of the founder of Harbor Hill's sybaritic feast, Clarence Mackay's father, John William Mackay. had a prominent place of honor above the library's shelf-less mantelpiece. The ornate gilded frame was carved by an Allard craftsman
1902: The velvet draped writing table
Was it nostalgia that caused candles and kerosene lamps to be used in Harbor Hill's first library?
A wedding gift often given by grand friends, not rich or intimate enough to give jewels, was gold; objects such as gold vases, like the two unmatched beakers on this bureau plat. One can just glimpse as well, a leg of the tiger skin hearth rug
Confusing as hell, but understandable, was the tendency of those involved in transforming the 'private' Harbor Hill library in a 'public' space, meant for display and entertaining, to persist in referring to it as the. 'library', well after every book had been removed. Till now, this has tricked every scholar examining the house. Both the billiard room and the new 'stone room' had antique stone mantelpieces. Wilson, in speaking of the billiard room's alterations, tells how: "Robert Fisher's carvers modified the original, antique mantle and placed on it a bust of Voltaire copied by Piccirilli Brothers from Jean-Antoine Houdon's famous portrait." This did all occur of course, only, not in the billiard room, but the 'stone room.'
It is difficult to picture the 'stone room's' bust of Voltaire, surmounted by a painting of John William Mackay, as Professor Wilson and Wayne Craven outline discussing the evolution of Harbor Hill's library
Voltaire, by Jean Antonine Houdon
Although other work, in anticipation of the elimination of Harbor Hill's original library might have already started, the over-mantle design drawing shown above, with other plans for the 'stone room,' are dated 1904, two years after the house was officially completed
January 28, 1906: The New York Times: Harbor Hill's 'stone room,' first appears in the press
Both Craven and Wilson when speaking of tapestries and an order that "no color" be introduce into "my library," instead should have been discussing the 'stone room'. "I will not have tapestry anywhere but in the library...hung on the windows as I said and i wish it hung this week," Katherine stressed, meaning, the former library that was becoming the 'stone room'. Clarence Mackay himself clears things up, writing to White: "I wish some time you would take a run down to Harbor Hill in your automobile and see how that new room is progressing. It is a very important piece of work, and I should be very much obliged if you would..." The "new room" mentioned, is not the new library, progressing in the former billiard room, but the new 'stone room', made from the former library.
As instructed by Katherine Mackay tapestry hangings framed the 'stone room' openings
One intrusion of color into the 'stone room', was provided by a second portrait of Katherine Mackay.
One of the qualities of Katherine Mackay which perennially drew praise, was her originality. Her costume for the fancy dress ball of James Hazen Hyde, was no exception. Called the ball of the century, in January of 1905, it caused a maelstrom of controversy, such was its extravagance. Katherine Mackay’s costume however prompted delight in all, even Stanford White.
At a great fete meant to evoke the charm an ancien régime court at Versailles, Katherine assured distinction by portraying Adrienne Lecouvreur, the famous actress of the eighteenth century. Only, she did not powder her hair and wear a ruffled gown, as others did. Instead, she was Adrienne in her great role of the mythical Greek queen, Phedre from Racine’s play.
1906: Katherine Mackay as "Phedre", by John W. Alexander
Her dress was of silver cloth studded with turquoises, with a silver tunic and skirt. From her shoulders fell a long train of silver cloth. It was carried by two young black page boys in costumes of pink brocade with sandals. She wore a tiara of turquoises and pearls, a necklace of the same jewels and carried a crystal scepter in her hand. Her little pages followed her everywhere throughout the evening. But they do not appear in her portrait by John W. Alexander, commemorating a night of social triumph. Stanford White designed a Renaissance style frame for this work destined for the ’stone room’.
Stanford White designed a Renaissance style frame for John W. Alexander's portrait
1908
Circa 1920: The 'stone room' has a chandelier as well as tapestry at the door
Rhapsodizing about Harbor Hill and its sumptuously appointed great hall, art critic Royal Cortissoz had not neglected the 'stone room', by now dubbed the Renaissance room, writing:
The same glamour envelopes the stately Renaissance room in which most of the pictures are housed.
Among the most cherished objects in Mackay's collection, was this celebrated painted terracotta bust of Lorenzo de' Medici, made in Florence at close of the 15th, or at the start of the 16th century, probably after a model by Andrea del Verrocchio and Orsino Benintendi. Today owned by the National Gallery, in the photograph found below, de Medici has displaced the reproduction bust of Voltaire
Circa 1924: Purchased in 1920 for a staggering $40,000.00 Clarence Mackay's Mannerist chest, discussed below, can be seen in the image above, positioned to the left of Renaissance room's door
Being cheated is perhaps the worst fear of the rich. Fashioned by some brilliant but unknown French workshop in about 1580, this monumental, intricately decorated cabinet had cost Mackay $40,000.00. Some questioned its authenticity and he was desperate to know for sure. Finally, on the advice of a leading expert, Mackay returned it to Duveen. The dealer was furious, but abided by a policy that today only exist at luxury retailers like Bergdorf Goodman, a dissatisfied customer, may return anything, at any time, for a credit equal to an item's purchase price. Mackay's rejection made the mannerist masterpiece impossible to sell. The Getty Museum got it on most reasonable terms. Their research however determined that, while it does indeed include late-19th-century additions, on the whole, the cabinet that was sent back, is quite genuine.
A Mannerist French cabinet, made circa 1580 from Walnut, oak, paint, brass, and iron; with a linen-and-silk lining
Velvet hangings, velvet sofas and easy chairs, oak wainscoting and a trabeated ceiling all contributed to making a bastion of masculinity. But what really imparted a a sense that this was an exclusively male preserve where the ranks of elk and stag hunting trophies that encircled one with with unblinking stares. A leaping fire, old brandy and cigars are all that's left to start the tall tales and braggadocio flowing and Clarence Mackay and Stanford White have provided for each.
1902: Harbor Hill's original billiard room
Transformation of the library, into the"stone room", a salon that served exclusively as a space for entertaining, had required that the billiard room, be made into a new, more intimate library. These first adjustments had been rather restrained. The ceiling, with molded plaster panels between oak beams was retained. So were the curtains, wainscot and velvet wall hangings. The Times photograph from 1906 shows how initially at least, even the hanging light fixture over the billiard table with four fringed pleated silk shades, was kept, to light the central library table. The costly hunting trophies, whereby which the room gained much of its character also stayed in place at first.
January 28, 1906: The New York Times
Bigger interventions were in store. The billiard room's Italian Renaissance chimney piece moved to the dining room, while the silver sconces around that room's walls, came here. The panoply of stuffed heads vanished, recalled by but four elk sculls. A portrait of daughter Kay and some majestic Louis XV seat furniture rounded things out.
Circa 1920
By 1915, the dining room's silver sconces moved to the library
What mantelpiece was used here, the dining room's antique mantle, the old library's Louis XIV style example? Over the course of events incremental change saw the reuse of a two tiered table from the first library here.
A two tiered Allard table from the first library
CIRCA 1906: Clarence Mackay with his daughters, Ellin and Katherine in Harbor Hill's second library which had formerly served as the billiard room. He is seated in a reused billiard room chair. Behind him atop the hastily improvised glazed bookcases, are the mantle clock and candelabra originally in thr dining room, To the right is a two-tiered table that Allard had supplied for the first library.
By 1925, thanks to Joseph Duveen coming upon an available and nearly complete French gothic room, from a church in Burgundy, the new library was redone a third time. The introduction of Duveen's Medieval salvage required that the library by rechristened, the "gothic room". Twenty years earlier, the billiard room had been relocated, in the casino.
There is, for example, a little gem of a room at the end of the corridor aforesaid, a Gothic room with ancient boiserie and stained glass, and a renowned group of marble pleurants sending the imagination straight back to the heroic tombs of Phillippe le Hardi and Jean sans Ouer at Dijon, in the heart of the old Burgundian tradition. It is a distinctly individualized key. But it is, in its beauty, akin to... the Sassetti, some more armor and divers other treasures, one is conscious of the unity to which I have referred, of an organized purpose seeking the perfection in the specific object and in the grand alliance of all the objects together. Exacting taste tells in every detail of arrangement, even to the placement of a bowl of yellow roses before just the sculpture that invites its presence.
Circa 1926: The Gothic room
1927: Tea Time in the Gothic Room at Harbor Hill, Sir John Lavery ( 1856-1941). Clarence Mackay, his son John William Mackay, and his mother, Louise, Mrs. John William Mackay take tea. Long a noted society leader in London and Paris, in 1920 Mrs. Mackay moved back to the US. Living with her son, at Harbor Hill, Palm Beach and on East 75th Street, she acted as his hostess and as a chaperon for her grandchildren
The flamboyant door into the Gothic room from the entrance hall
Like the billiard room as originally built, architecturally, Harbor Hill’s dining room was hardly striking. The molded plaster ceiling and oak wainscot made the room seem vaguely Elizabethan. Otherwise, an antique continental marble mantelpiece, that was exchanged soon enough, dominated the enormous space. Dinner for forty, was not uncommon. Size gave the dining room versatility. Two round tables of twenty-five were used for dinner in 1907, one of several, over the years, where the Duchess of Marlborough was guest of honor. The centers of the glistening white damask cloths displayed masses of roses and orchids, partly enveloped maiden hair fern and bathed in soft light from shaded candles. Six delectable courses, expertly prepared by the Mackay’s French chef, were passed by the butler assisted by nine footmen.
1902
Contemplating such an occasion, let’s turn the clock back, to 1904-1929. Step through the front door of Harbor Hill, follow the elegantly liveried butler. He’s leading to the west terrace, before the fountain where four allegorical bronze equestrian figures represent ever flowing rivers, the Rhine, Seine, Volga and Mississippi. Or perhaps we’re being taken to the ‘stone room’, to sit beside the fire? In any case, once there, we’ll meet the family and be given an aperitif. After a little while it’s time to link arms and with our hosts and fellow guests, enter the glowing dining room. Here, at last, we will fully experience the consummation of Harbor Hill and all such places.
1904
Why had the charming Mrs. Clarence Hungerford Mackay been so impatient. Demanding that a chateau materialize, she’d insisted that it ought appear overnight and be perfect. Partly, she was motivated by the example of her friend Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough’s mother. A dynamo of intelligence, determination and ambition, Alva Erskine Smith was born in Mobil. She’d been as focused acting to escape the genteel poverty of her girlhood as Katherine was to escape her far less dire situation. Marrying a Vanderbilt, then divorcing him, forcing her daughter Consuelo into a loveless match with one of England’s premier nobles, Alva Vanderbilt had next established an important president. Marring a second rich husband, Oliver Belmont, she managed something no one had believed to be possible. In the process of remarrying, though divorced, she’d ably managed to maintain her lofty position as a social force.
After 1920, when Clarence Mackay's mother moved to Harbor Hill to act as his hostess, she brought with her the famed Mackay, Tiffany & Co. silver. Her husband had sent a half-ton of ore from his own mine for it. Awarded a prize when exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878, the dinner and desert service for 24, comprised, 250 pieces. It included as well hollowware and centerpieces. Flower-encrusted with thistles, shamrocks, and blossoms native to American, the unique creation took two years and 200 craftsmen to complete
In between, and afterward as well, to assert her position as Mrs. Vanderbilt and then as Mrs. Belmont, she had entertained. In Fifth Avenue’s first house worthy of any claim of being comparable to the finest residences of London or Paris, in Newport at lavish “Marble House”, she hosted dinners, dances, teas and luncheon parties. The thing each entertainment she gave shared, was the attention she paid to detail. No cost was spared. Her meals were more delicious, beautifully presented and indeed in every way, better than anyone else’s. So was the orchestra chosen for a dance, the flowers selected for a lunch table.
1927
One of a serries of 'grotesque' late seventeenth century Beauvais tapestries, 'The Offerings of Bacchus' that formed an apropos decoration for Harbor Hill's dining room
Katherine had observed how after coming to New York unknown, that Alva Smith had fashioned for herself, a station of invincibility. Marshaling the Vanderbilt fortune entreating, she identified and created an important role for herself, as a leading hostess. With Mrs. Belmont and her mother-in-law as role models, Katherine Mackay was anxious to start having guest in the impressive setting of Harbor Hill, and in doing so, to create a well-lived life of her own.
A properly laid dinner table of the sort that persisted at Harbor Hill until the end
If no one has any concern for the deprived or desperate childhoods of some, is there really any hope for America?
For the vast majority of white Americans the amount of wealth they might reasonably expect to accumulate over a lifetime still greatly outstrips the expectations of most people of color. Since 1963, when many could reasonably contemplate a well-paying job with only a high school education, increasingly numerous whites have become like so many blacks: underutilized at low-wage, dead-end jobs or worse, unemployed.
1790: Print after a painting of George Washington and his family by Edward Savage. Billy Lee, shown standing behind Martha Washington, was the long-time valet to Washington. He was the sole slave of Washington’s to be
immediately freed upon his death because of his services throughout the American Revolutionary War. The remainder were to be gain freedom after their mistress's death. Wisely Martha Washington set them free immediately.
To enumerate every ill remaining unchanged since the historic March On Washington half a century ago remains a pretty sobering exercise. As noted already, some situations like the high incidence of Americans living in poverty, seemingly, have gotten much worse since Dr. Martin Luther King lamented, “The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
During the War of 1812, when British troops set the Capital ablaze, First Lady Dolly Madison saved Gilbert Stuart’s famed portrait of George Washington with the help of a trusted house slave. Paul Jennings, 1799 – 1874, served as valet to President James Madison. Purchasing his freedom in 1845 Jennings published the first White House memoir by a staff member, in 1865, “A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison”.
Living in Washington, D.C. from 1837, Jennings was assisted in his struggle to be made whole by Senator Daniel Webster . In the 1850's, Jennings traveled to Virginia, seeking his children, who had grown up on a plantation neighboring the Madison’s Montpelier with his late wife Fanny. With the commencement of the Civil War their three sons gallantly joined the Union cause.
It's easy to understand how many have come to despair of ever experiencing 'a more perfect union', since fifty long years after the march, and a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, so much remains to be done to achieve ever elusive equality. Yet a great deal has changed, with many highly significant improvements accomplished since Dr. King delivered his soul-stirring 'I Have a Dream speech'. King’s eloquence thrilled an expectant throng of hundreds of thousands demonstrating for justice and jobs on the Washington mall. It’s been wonderful too, to see scores of folks return to the Capital to relive and renew an exultant moment of impactful activism.
1871: State dinner
1872: Members of the domestic staff during the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes
But today, anyone wishing to fittingly commemorate the march, need not journey all the way to Washington. Far more conveniently, those seeking to easily understand just how much has transpired to allow us to hope on and to fight on for the United States' redemption, need only sojourn as far as the closest movie theater. Across the nation,
