Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


This year, on June 26, will be the 100th anniversary of the murder of the noted neighborhood architect/ playboy by the gambler/millionaire Pittsburgh steel and railroad heir, in revenge for the seduction of the latter’s wife four years earlier, when she was 16, an artists’ model and Floradora showgirl.

This is a real neighborhood story - the seduction took place in White’s bachelor studio in the Giralda Tower of the 2nd Madison Square Garden that the architect designed in 1880 - young Evelyn may even have been the model for sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens’s (1848-1907) Diana, on top of the Garden tower, now displayed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The murder itself also took place on the roof of the Garden, during the premiere of Mam’zelleChampagne, a musical revue, while the chorus sang I Could Love A Million Girls (quell symbolism). The forgettable show lasted for 60 performances, due to the notoriety.

The Garden building was razed in 1925, with MSG moving to 50th & 8th Ave, subsequently to the top of Penn Station at33rd Street. The 51 Madison site at 26th Street in 1928 became the New York Life Insurance Company’s headquarters, the famous golden tower atop the six-story Cass Gilbert-designed building, a neighborhood landmark (so designated in 1975). The site has an interesting earlier history – it was the passenger railhead of the New York & Harlem Railroad, which in 1871 moved to Grand Central, and the building became P. T. Barnum’s Monster Geological and Classical Hippodrome, then Gilmore’s Garden, venue of bicycle races that would rival in popularity today’s automobile events.

More local references. White, member of the McKim, Meade and White architectural firm, was the designer of the original Pennsylvania Station, the marble Washington Square Arch (1880), as well as the Century Club on East 16th Street and the reconstruction of the Players Club on Gramercy Park (both landmarked). He and Mrs. White had their city apartment at 122 East 23rd Street.

At the 1st Thaw trial in 1907, following what was dubbed Crime of the Century by the Hearst press, Evelyn testified that she was seduced with a doctored drink while visiting White, who had a red velvet rope swing in his studio, for the entertainment of his women visitors. Thaw’s defense was insanity, and the jury was hung. The 2nd trial a year later sent Thaw to the Matawan asylum in New Jersey, from which he walked away in 1913, fled to Canada, and was acquitted, in a new trial. He returned, spent more time in funny farms, attempted suicides and wrote The Traitor in 1926, a book in which he denounced White for his many seductions. The bizarre-acting Thaw got involved in more fracases, and died of a heart attack in Miami in 1947, at the age of 76. .

Evelyn Nesbit (1885-1967), an exceptionally beauty, as an atists’ model and actress was the financial mainstay, from an early age, of a genteel family left destitute with the death of the breadwinner. She was known to many from 1903 postcards, showing her on a polar bear skin rug and as a Beauty and the Beast, and Charles Dana Gibson painted her. Her life floundered after the trial – Thaw and she divorced 1915, without a promised settlement (he disputed the parentage of her son, Russell William Thaw, 1910-84, a decorated WWII pilot), and had a long love affair with John Barrymore, whom she would not marry. Her career involved silent movies, vaudeville, café dancing and club management. Eventually she did marry her dance partner Jack Clifford (1880-1956), separated and divorced, and was the technical advisor in a 1955 film of her life, The Girl On the Red Velvet Swing, starring Joan Collins. Nesbitt was also portrayed in the 1981 film version of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, by actress Elizabeth McGovern. Nesbitt’s 1934 book Prodigal Days, The Untold Story, claims that Harry Thaw's shooting of White was premeditated, and had been planned over a period of some time. Late in life she stated that her only true love had been White, who knew her as a child, and may have paid for her education in a New Jersey private academy.

What prompted Harry Thaw to commit the irrational action? The White/Thaw/Nesbit mystery has been the subject of a score of examinations, biographies, fictional works, broadcast media productions, two movies and poems, starting with Benjamin Atwell’s The Great Harry Thaw Case, Or A Woman’s sacrifice in 1917, a perishable 297-page work of few surviving copies, reputedly commissioned by the family to influence the 2nd trial. There was also a PBS American Experience TV show, just days ago, that prompted me to revisit my resources on the neighborhood legend, a subject on which I last wrote some 10 years ago.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis



The real estate value boom did not bypass our neighborhood, we too have seen the numbers rise dramatically since the March 2000 stock market collapse, particularly in the many coop buildings. Checking neighborhood apartment values is a favorite Sunday paper reading activity, rivaling the crossword puzzle (cannot speak for Sudoku, a puzzle for those who don’t want to test their memories but like to keep the brain active).

The Internet smarties have developed several web sites for those among us who want to capitalize on NYC property value boosts - baby boomers ready to trade towards retirement homes, people who should like to get out of New York; we had a flurry of this flight after 9/11/2001, with cityites flocking to my favorite upstate area. Looking into these resources reveals astounding riches if information and also misdirection, a fascinating game for the curious.

A good source is www.propertyshark.com. Entering my coop building’s address revealed a treasure trove – alternate addresses, school district, Community Board District data, square feet of the building, number of units. Photographs of the building that could be enlarged and manipulated on screen, practically permitting peeping into one’s bedroom windows. Clicking on an on-line offering of info about political contributions brought on a site named Fundrace 2004, showing the dollars my neighbors, up and down the street, contributed to DNC and RNC, to Kerry and Bush, all small sums, private insights that we individuals should be spared. I feel embarrassed to tell you about it, but there’s a purpose - if anyone wants to start a campaign about the privacy of donations of a few hundred bucks, count me in. But I digress.

Domania.com, owned by LendingTree, LLC, offers to get the value of your property for you, if you sign up, no charge. I did not, with this, nor with any of the other web sites that want personal data; there are enough real estate and mortgage refinance spams coming my way, as is.

A new site, just starting its beta distribution (that’s computerese for test version) is www.zillow.com, an enterprise started by Richard Barton, the founder of Expedia, the Internet travel agency, the grandparent of the several on-line flight bookers who are now placing for 80% of travel reservations, while 40% of travel agents have closed shop since 1994 – not my data, this per Financial Times. Expedia was spun off Microsoft in 1999, sold to IAC (former US Interactive, run by Barry Diller, owner of LendingTree, Ask Jeeves, Ticketmaster, CitySearch) in 2003, spun off again in 2005. Zillow claims to have records on 60 million homes nationwide, collected from county property offices, including gas sales and changed assessments. Enter the address you are interested in, and the system will find records of comparable properties in the neighborhood. Additionally, an area photograph will show your block and partial views of surrounding ones, with intriguing dollar values of sales superimposed over the buildings – apparently mixing house and apartment sales. A compass permits you to move the map around. As to the comparables, my entry conjured up a sales history that had no applicability, and the value shown was less than half of the ones applicable to my neighborhood. But the information was fascinating, and some day Zillow may get it right – or maybe not. Matthew Haines of PropertyShark contends that each property is unique and a computer program cannot calculate values accurately. However, we all know that comparable sales constitute a major factor in mortgage lenders’ valuation decisions. So, it should at least provide a major piece of information in buyers’ reviews of affordable areas, or potential sellers’ decision-making processes. Barton claims he can offer one piece of information that other sites lack – he has data about whether a building needs a new roof.

Zillow is competing with Domania, as a well as HomeGard, HouseValues and
Realtor.com, the web site listing for sale houses, owned by the National Association of Realtors. Despite the impressive credentials, a sampling of its 2 million listings, using my criteria of a typical local price in an out-of-town area familiar to us brought invalid information.

Best reliable sources of home and apartment values can be the multiple listings services (MLX) set up by brokers throughout the US, but the usefulness of the data depends on the area. In certain towns in Florida you the outsider can get a free listing of all residential properties for sale within an area of one or a few blocks, with descriptions, prices and pretty near complete addresses (mostly not including the apartment numbers). The brokers feel quite protected from any sneaky attempts of private sales of listed and advertised homes. In East Midtown the Internet search of MLX and Manhattan brings on Homeline, the consumer side of a multiple listings service, offering to produce for you addresses of rental apartments in, say, the Gramercy area, no broker fees involved, from an inventory of 6,000 Manhattan listings. I passed, once more unwilling to provide a full range of my personal identity data. Sorry, gang.

Wally Dobelis thanks the Financial Times.

LOOKING FORWARD by Wally Dobelis


We have used our Southern winter getaways from the cold s and sniffles of New York to tone up the bodies, lose some weight and gather up some stamina for the coming year of strains and stresses of city life. Our main method for tune-ups has been walking, at a somewhat aerobic rate for my age group, three miles per hour. In fact, an hour a day, early enough not to be melted down by the hot sun has been our daily routine. We have a small group, up to half a dozen souls, enough to keep one or two conversations going while walking a circular half-mile route in a town park, with time out for stops when catching sight of any unusual birds, such as the green-bodied black headed screeching parakeets that flock to feed on the unripe green berries in a cherrylike tree.

Feeling strong and ready for a straight plunge into health, I jumped into the daily walk routine practically right off the airplane. A few stretches, a slow startup to get into gear were needed, but it worked, and I was briskly switching from one to two to three miles a day without interruption, under the pretext that in my day of life time is precious and must not be wasted.

This was fine with my younger walking companions, but over the next two weeks I became disturbed by a little nagging pain in my left hip that was growing, to the point that I would excuse myself after two miles and get in the car to fetch a copy of the New York Times, while my co-walkers finished the route.

Not good, and a visit to the local orthopedist was indicated. A physical therapist who had helped my family over the years for rotator cuff and knee problems brought me up to date – our old good doctor had retired, but there were two new ones. The office of the first, when called had no date available for two weeks; the second gave me an appointment the next day, albeit with a physician’s assistant.

This was fortunate – the physician’s assistant, also a high school football coach, had dealt with what he called “Fourth of July exercisers,” and their injuries for years, his office had knee and hip models and explicit color posters of all joints and bones. My x-ray showed minimal hipbone deterioration, not guilty, but his questioning and palpation pinpointed sacro-ileitis, an inflammation of the area where the hip joins the spine, as the problem area. My explanation that the pain grew with lengthening and speeding up of my stride clinched the diagnosis. I was right there with the men and particularly ladies who come for vacations and join the gyms such as the popular Curves for rapid tone-up of the bodies and loss of weight. Seeing the established local clientele joyfully go through a series of exercises using weight and walk/step machines, they tend go too fast too early, sometimes coming back more than once a day, despite the advice of the watchful coaches. Some of the zealous ones can end up with bursitis and tendon problems. In the workaday T&V Country, where we do not try to squeeze maximum exercise in a short vacation, these injuries are less prone to happen.

What to do? My coach prescribed Celebrex, an arthritis medication, and ordered the walking reduced, substituting swimming and bicycling as no-impact exercises. I should also put an icy compress on the back area after the exertions. That was fine, and the pains disappeared, except on days when sustained walking was needed. No icing, though. On a return follow-up visit my coach reinforced the advice about icing, reminding me that baseball pitchers, even after pitching practice, put ice compresses on their arms, and ordered me to get some support walking shoes such as New Balance.

Not too happy, I checked with a family friend, retired physician and another walking enthusiast, who reminded me of RICE, the acronym of cures for injuries: rest, ice, compression and elevation. He prompted me to look into COX-2 or cyclooxygenase, the pain enzyme that makes contact with cell-building arachadonic acid in the body, forming pro-inflammatory prostaglandins, and can be medicated with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) such as Celebrex. Those are the tech terms. The NSAIDs have side effects, and one, Vioxx, has been recently taken out of use and the maker, Merck, has been sued.

One way or another, the results have been happy. I’m off the NSAID, my new shoes fit tightly, and after a while the sacro-iliac pains stopped. I am walking again a couple of miles a day, somewhat more slowly, keeping my back straight and no longer wobbling from side to side.

Please note that this is a cautionary tale of personal experience and not medical advice, and I am offering it to my neighbors whom I previously tried to hector into walking as a cure-all exercise. Moderation in all efforts, and consider alternatives, but do not stop moving.

Wally Dobelis thanks Dr. Miro Petani and offers congratulations to Sylvia Friedman, our new Assemblyperson.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

One of the neighborhood treasures is the Third Street Music School Settlement, at 11th Street and 2nd Avenue. Since Sputnik, the Soviet space effort in 1960s scared the American public about the Soviets’ technology advances into emphasizing mathematics and science studies in schools, at the cost of abandoning music and arts, community music and art schools have become most valuable resources. “Third Street” is one of New York’s oldest, harking back to the late 19th century settlement movement, and one of the most active in the modern environment, providing not only private music instruction but also supplemental musical education in public schools. And we also have their 30 free concerts a year, the School’s instructors’ gift to the community.

In the 19th century, the prevailing British social thinking that the poor are responsible for their own plight was challenged in London by some aristocratic progressive thinkers and do-gooders, such as Arnold Toynbee and Edward Denison. Influenced by the social reformer John Ruskin (“Unto This Last”), they moved into the East London slums, to assist the poor in raising themselves above their station. Both men died in the unsanitary conditions, but the idea took hold, and a social settlement, Toynbee Hall, rose in 1884. It provided a center where the laborers and the college-educated could join in addressing social issues.

Stanton Coit, an American who worked in Toynbee Hall, established the first American counterpart, the Neighborhood Guild, in the Lower East Side in 1886, servicing poor immigrants. The idea spread to US women’s colleges, and three years later their graduates, inspired by Jacob Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives,” built a College Settlement for women in NYC. Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago followed, and Lillian Wald’s Visiting Nurses Station, later Henry Street Settlement, in NYC, was founded in 1993.

Settlement houses organized educational classes, clubs, provided health services and public baths, fought for tenement reform laws, child labor laws and workers’ rights. The idea of art and music for immigrants’ children came later, first at Hull House in 1893. Now, enter Emilie Allison Wagner, the founder of the music school settlement movement, a minister’s daughter from New Bedford, MA who graduated in 1894 from what is presently Goucher College in Baltimore, and moved to New York, with the novel idea of teaching music to immigrants’ children, inspired by Sir Walter Besants’s “All Sorts and Conditions of Men.” She began teaching violin and piano in the basement of Old Mariners’ Temple at Chatham Square, sometimes sending children home to wash before lessons. In 1895 she became a resident at the College Settlement, 95 Rivington Street, in its basement of its Cooking School, three years later moving to the top floor at 96 Rivington, charging 5 cents for piano practice. Wagner was paid $552/yr, from the Association’s membership dues, teaching also at the nearby University Settlement. Both Associations merged music schools in 1901, at 31 Rivington, paid for by 40 members ($25/yr) and 27 associate members ($5 and up). Otto H. Kahn, patron of the Met Opera, gave $100/yr.

To give bright students an incentive, they were engaged as practice-teachers, paid 3 cents for a 15-minute beginner lesson, 8 ½ cents for 12-minute advanced lesson. Pianos could be rented for $5/month, the renter charging others 4 ½ cents/hr for practice. First student concert, soloists and string orchestra, at Mendelssohn Hall on 11 March 1904, was well reviewed in the NY Times. The school grew, and President Helen Mansfield raised $14,000 and convinced the Board to expand the school, now named Music School Settlement, to two brownstones at 53-55 East Third Street, near 1st Ave, its home until 1974, with three residents and expanding, the salaries growing to $3,489 in 1910. The name became The Society of the Third Street Music School Settlement in 1950.

The house was abuzz day and night, a resident nurse was eventually provided by the Henry Street Settlement, legal advice was provided when the kids’ families had problems. Friends and trustees donated furniture, toys, barrels of apples, blankets, concert tickets to the New York Philharmonic, the Kresel Quartet, pianist Mieczyslaw Horoszowski and Joseph Lhevine; violins, pianos, music stands, scores, all duly recorded in the Annual Report. Fritz Kreisler, Ignaz Paderewski and Eugene Isaye gave benefit concerts for the school.

The settlement houses were a mighty force in advocating social reform and moving bureaucracy in establishing parks, health services, public baths and summer camps for poor youths. The settlement houses offered clubs, libraries, banks, classes and schools, material forces in creating the city, the society and the social environment, as we know it today. Third Street had a newspaper, a summer camp in Newfoundland, NJ, outgrown in 1926, and a moving force in its head resident and librarian, Cara Stafford Kibbe, 1910-52. Its alumni included directors David Mannes and Julius Rudel. Emilie Wagner had left in 1907, to start a national movement.

We now fast forward through some tumultuous years of transformation and expansion, of arrival of professional teachers, of musical theories (Orff and Kodaly), use of video, student performances on WNYC, the Rock program, the Latin influence, the return of the Classical music, to the move to 235 East 11th Street, away from what had become a Hell’s Angels neighborhood (Marylou Francis’s recollection). The school has become an indispensable part of our lives, More to come.

Wally Dobelis kisses the hand of Mary Jo Pagano, chair of the Chamber Music Program at Third Street, whose doctoral thesis at the Manhattan School of Music provided the backbone of this survey article. This story does not imply a loss of affection for our beloved Interschool Orchestras and the Peoples Concerts at Washington Irving High School.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


Four times since 2000 the NYC Parks and Recreation Dept. has attempted to convert the bathroom structure in the Stuyvesant Square Park East to an outdoors café. The last request for a Proposal or Renovation, from David Langlieb of the Revenue Division of the NYCDP&R, was referred by the Parks & Landmarks Committee of Community Board #6 to the full Board, with a recommendation to deny, as being against the regulations and the local residents’ wishes. This recommendation was unanimously backed by the Board, which does not mean that the Parks Department will not invite potential concessionaires to bid.

The park is landmarked, being part of the Stuyvesant Square Historic District, meaning that any modifications need approval of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Department has not sought such approval, although in 2004, their third effort, at least they acknowledged the regulations, and specified, in a revised RFP, that the accepted vendor will have to seek approval for building and landscape modifications from the Arts Commission and the LPC.The Stuyvesant Park community has for years tried to stem any encroachments on this relic of old New York, an 1836 gift to the neighborhood by Petrus Gerardus Stuyvesant, great-great grandson of the peg-legged Governor General. Even then, it took NYS Governor Hamilton Fish, a Stuyvesant in-law, until 1848 to persuade the city to allocate funds for fencing in and maintaining this green refuge for local inhabitants, displacing the pigs and squatters who had taken possession of the neglected property.The Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association (SPNA), established in the 1970s for the purpose of protecting and maintaining its heritage, had been active, along with other concerned citizens and NYC officials, in securing ISTEA (Intermodal surface Transportation Efficiency Act, pronounced as ice tea) funds for recasting of the West Park’s half of its unique free-standing fences, starting in 1989. The name of Rex Wassermann, a landscape architect of the Parks and Recreation Department who put a huge personal effort into the renovation, is remembered and revered by the local activists. The East Park’s fence, alas, still needs funding, although partial funds are held for it by the Borough President’s office. Two million dollars plus will be needed, due to inflation. If you care, have ideas, and/or access to the moneyed classes, join in. SPNA membership; dues are low, inquire at POBox 1320, Cooper Station, 10276.SPNA does raise several thousand dollars every year for maintenance of the park and its gardens, to support the meager Department of Parks funds, and to aid other neighborhood activist institutions around the park. It has also paid some $50,000 into an endowment fund to maintain the statue of its famous inhabitant, Antonin Dvorak. The monies were raised jointly with the Dvorak American Heritage Association. The composer lived at 327 East 17th Street (now the Beth Israel’s Maplethorpe facility), while working at the National Conservatory of Music (now the site of Washington Irving High School) in 1892-95. The New World Symphony was composed here. Go look at the Dvorak statue, by Ivan Mestrovic, our neighborhood’s pride, equivalent to a Rodin or Picasso - and don’t forget the Stuyvesant statue by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1936) looking southwards to check out his estates, from the West Park.The Stuyvesant Square activists feel that the Parks Department is once more encroaching, with inappropriate changes, to alter a historic landmark. It is an effort of commercialization, in direct contravention of the restrictive deed given to the city by the Stuyvesant family, specifying that this should be a “sitting park.” “ Passive” and “contemplative” are some of the terms used in discoursing the park’s purposes. There have been earlier attempts to convert and commercialize the park that have been successfully defeated in court. In 1936 Commissioner Robert Moses installed a children’s playground facility, the noise of which disturbed the neighborhood, particularly the sick in the hospitals. It was defeated, and the playground had to vacate. In anger Moses paved over the East Park area with cobblestones, dubbed “Moses’s revenge” by some of the local history fans.The support for the residents’ protest comes from various sources. There have been, over the years, letters from the Historic Districts Council, Community Board Six, State Senator Thomas K. Duane, ex-State Assemblyman Steven Sanders and City Councilwoman Margarita Lopez, and former Borough President C. Virginia Fields. This is not just political reach-out for the constituents; a lot of people feel that a peaceful undisturbed oasis in the big city should be left alone. Wally Dobelis thanks Jack Taylor of the SPNA.