Chapter 1.
Leonard Jerome might be known to you.
He certainly should be, grandfather as he was to one of the most famous men in history. And had but one of the many winds of his life shifted ever so slightly, his name would likely have tripped off nearly every tongue on earth or, conversely, it might have simply fallen like a chewing gum wrapper into a NYC gutter.
Jerome lived large and on the margins. He had swagger. One week's lost fortune he'd make up the next month. By the age of 40, he'd played Wall Street like a concert pianist, was its uncontested King, and through speculation and investment, he amassed a fortune that catapulted him to the top of New York Society.
He was a frequent partner with Cornelius Vanderbilt, and anyone wise enough to invest in transportation in the mid-19th Century found themselves in the lap of luxury. He was an avid sportsman and along with August Belmont, Sr., brought thoroughbred horse racing to New York City in what would come the third prong of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes. He went on frequent expeditions out west. With Buffalo Bill Cody.
But beyond all that, Leonard Jerome set the stage for the show of opulence that would dazzle the world over during the next 40 years in the period Mark Twain labeled The Gilded Age.
His contemporaries of similar wealth were living in second and third hand homes in Manhattan or Brooklyn. Others, like the Vanderbilts and Astors eventually built their own, but all of this generation, the first and second of this money, were reticent in display, opting for stately brownstones whose exteriors extolled something almost like thrift. Not so, Mr. Jerome.
At the corner of 26th Street and Madison Avenue, across the street from fashionable Madison Square Park, a frothy French confection began rising from several lots in 1859. It would take the entire Civil War to finish this monumental Beaux-Arts mansion, but even before it was finished, the young Jerome Family had moved in, Leonard running out those bleak nights in 1863 to defend the New York Times Building during the Draft Riots.
The home was most recognizable as perhaps the first in America to adopt the rage of all of Second Empire Paris, the sensual striking mansard roof at the sixth floor. Here it was capped with cast iron grille work and set off by heavily articulated dormers, singlets and triplets, with merry finials. The floor beneath was a row of ox-eye windows. Off the Madison Avenue flank of the home were two sets of cast iron and limestoned balconies, elegantly shadowed by awnings. Rising from the base of the building were two stories of rusticated lime as well, and an impressive portico was supported by four massive columns and topped with another balustraded balcony.
Above that, the brick work and terra-cotta began, contrasted by limestone flashing around the two-story windows with pediments and half-shells, pilasters rising through three stories and giving the wide building its length as well. Copied any number of times afterwards, but not for another dozen years at least, the time it took to digest this splendor and even attempt to replicate it, let alone surpass it. This was the largest home in NYC in its day, and with a $200,000 price tag, the most lavish.
The interiors boasted a white and gold ballroom with two fountains, one for champagne, one for cologne. The breakfast room sat seventy. The lot that separated the home from the stables was filled with the family theater, a theatre that sat 650. And the stables were designed with the same materials and he sumptuous design of the main building. Except the windows. The stables featured stained glass windows. Oh, and another ballroom sat above .
Mr. Jerome might have been better remembered had women had more of a voice in the 19th Century. He and his wife, Clara, were daughtered four times, and the three that survived into adulthood all married into the British aristocracy.
Chapter 2.
One of them flew very very high.
Leonard Jerome had nine brothers. He loved brawling. He loved yachting. He loved hunting. And, he loved opera. So much so that he joined the founding of the Academy of Music, the premier opera venue in New York City in its day, host to a number of important opera debuts in America including Rigoletto, La Traviata, Carmen, and Aida, and the center of social life for estalished New York City elite. (It was the noveaux riches, locked out of the Academy, who formed the rival and enduring Metropolitan Opera.) He named his second daughter for the soprano who took America by storm in 1850, the Swedish Nightengale Jenny Lind.
Jennie Jerome was born in Brooklyn, but grew up in the mansion on Madison Square. It was her own musical ear that made her shine among her sisters first. Her talent at the piano may very well have led her to a concert career. As unthinkable as that was for a woman at the time, the proposition came from her tutor, Stephen Heller, Hungarian composer and friend of Chopin.
Known even in later years to Queen Alexandra, Edward VII's wife, who nonetheless adored Jennie for her wit and good company. They were fast friends throughout their lives. In 1873, Jennie was invited to the Royal Regatta on the Isle of Wight.
There she met Lord Randolph Churchill and three days later they were engaged. They might have been married sooner had not the settlement of her dowry taken so long to negotiate, and the arrival of the little surprise not quite eight months after the marriage was attributed to a fall. The couple named him Winston.
Leonard Jerome was Winston Churchill's grandfather.
And Jennie Jerome went on to captivate all of Europe. Winston and his brother John rarely got to see their mother, but this was typical of the time and that class. It did not diminish her in their eyes in the least. Quite the opposite, Winston once wrote, "She shone forl the evening star." Her beauty, panther-like some said, was known internationally and she had affairs with princes, artists, and Herbert von Bismarck,, son of the German Chancellor.
She wrote plays and was befriended by the greatest actress of the day, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who went on record defending her honor. Speaking of the predominantly loveless marriages of the upper class, business arrangements made to multiply wealth and secure titles, Mrs. Campell once said it mattered not where and to whom people made love, "so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses."
Jennie married twice more, to a man 28 days older than Winston and a man six years younger. Her son was delighted, always starry was she in his eyes. She spent her time involved with the War Relief Fund, corralling her formidable connections in aid to the suffering and refugees of the Boer War and World War I. She founded and edited a magazine. She furthered the careers of all her lovers.
She had a tattoo of a snake coiled around her wrist, the only woman of her status known to have one ever.
Her liveliness, her wit, her glamour and legendary beauty lived on until it didn't in 1921 when the light left her eye. And the Brooklyn girl who lived in the mansion on Madison Square was laid to rest next to her first husband in the largest country home in the UK, the only one not a royal residence allowed to use the descriptive here: Blenheim Palace.
Chapter 3.
Lady Luck came calling
And put a lien on the King of Wall Street at the end of the 1860s. Leonard Jerome's string of affairs became public and forced his wife Clara to grab the girls and head for Paris. And the Panic of 1869 had nearly turned his highly leveraged portfolio to dust.
Jerome moved out of the spectacular home and mess of his making and the "Clubhouse Years" began. The Union League, formed out of loyalty to the Union cause, rented for a while first, for $18,000 a month. Rooms were rearranged into public dining halls, meeting rooms, and small apartments for overnight stays. And look closely, a seventh floor was surreptitiously added, barely visible as a row of windows above the original ornate ones in the mansard.
It was here that members founded The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I just came across their original mandate and it is the perfectly succinct answer to why does The Met exist, and more personally, why do I love it: To establish and maintain in said City, a Museum and Library of Art, of encouraging and developing the Study of the Fine Arts, and the application of Art to manufacture and natural life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and to that end of furnishing popular instruction and recreations.
The Union League moved uptown, following the migration of wealth northward. The University Club moved in for a time as their new digs on Fifth Avenue were being constructed. And finally, in 1899, The largely political Manhattan Club took residence.
Despite reworking at the hands of America's greatest architects and craftsmen, McKim, Meade & White. La Farge, Saint-Gaudens among them, despite the roll call of America's political and financial titans who wandered those halls, Grant, Arthur, both Roosevelts, Hoover, Rockefeller, Morgan, Olmstead, the mansion was doomed. Club membership throughout NYC waned as the decades yielded to one another and by the 1960s, the Manhattan Club was facing bankruptcy.
Photographs from this period reflect the deterioration.
Covered in soot, the limestone faded into darkness, the portico was gone, the cast iron masterpiece of the three-story balcony, gone and not replaced, the ornate finials, urns, and balustrades that had collapsed were never repaired, and water damaged threatened the entire structure.
And yet: It was landmarked!
The brand new Landmark and Preservation Commission, after 18 months of hearings, managed one of the first NYC landmarkings here, but the distinction of the outcome is little cause for celebration: It remains one of the only landmarked buildings ever to be demolished. After no savior came forward to purchase the property and save it, say the way Joseph Papp did with the similarly endangered Astor Library for his Public Theatre, the once glittering mansion, first of its kind in America, was lost to us all except for the few photos that were ever taken.
The building that rose on the former Jerome lots in 1974 and stands today is the Emory Roth and Sons designed, 23-story New York Merchandise Mart.
Inside are 85 showrooms for the tableware, decorations and gift industries. With its brown aluminum and smoky glass, it remains fully rooted in the mid-1970s. It is not a bad building at all. In fact, its scale and its proportions make it an exquisite example of the International Style which I admire when done well, as it is here.
But it predicts a direction Madison Square never went, that of similar glass and steel office towers replacing the fin-de-siecle masterpieces in stone that still dominate the plaza, the New York Life Insurance Building, the Metropolitan Life Clocktower and North Buildings, the Flatiron, and the oft-overlooked gem, the Appellate Division Courthouse that once sat in Mr. Jerome's backyard and seen at the foot of the Mart in the last photograph. As such, the Mart stands isolated, ignored by its neighbors in the sky, and a bit of a pariah in a neighborhood enjoying a renaissance of style.
Our landmark laws are stronger now. For now. And for that I am glad. But even to walk into the Merchandise Mart still gives me a thrill, to think some air there still lingers from the lungs of those luminaries that people these three parts. My eyes sparkle at the thought.
Thanks for coming along.
