A Tale of Two Pandemics

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Part One. Dateline: February 15. On this day in 1888 a blizzard befell New York City. Within hours 50 inches blanketed everything under the clouds in high winds that whipped the freshly fallen snow into to 40-foot drifts. The statue of Roscoe Conklin in Madison Square would have been covered had it been there, but it wasn’t yet as a blizzard— this one, as it happens—hadn’t yet killed the beloved Senator. Ellis Island was not yet processing immigrants like the tens of thousands of impoverished Irish fleeing from the decades of ruin wrought by the potato famine. That day the Irish were processed at Battery Park. Among their ranks was one Hannah Sullivan, who also befell New York that day. Hannah had to be pried from the ship the weather was so frightful. By the time of the last pandemic, Hannah had married John O'Leary and had 12:, TWELVE children, including second to the youngest of the dozen, Mary. Mary Agnes who married John Francis, was widowed,moved to Hoboken, NJ with her two children, a girl, Rosemary, and a boy John Dandy, formally John Daniel, oh, and he's me da: John Daniel Plunkett. Snow and pandemic. If my great grandmother with 12 children in tow could weather both, surely I can, her marrow running deep. 

Part Two. Two towns south of Hoboken, Bayonne, New Jersey sits at the southern tip of the peninsula formed when an ancient mountian chain that ran through the supercontinent Pangea began to split and fill with surrounding sea waters. Born were the churning warlike Atlantic, swallower of Titans, the mighty Hudson, the very Dutch-sounding Arthur Kill and Kill van Kull, streams that fueled vast lands of meadows punctuated by the schist I showed you in Central Park, the same found in Morocco where our nearby neighbors landed. These forces echo through the 200 million subsequent years, during the time of the first Jurrasic Park. (Speaking of films, Bayonne hosted the towering presence of Tom Cruise for weeks during location filming of War of the Worlds and in the 21st-century alone the following films used Bayonne as a backdrop: A Beautiful Mind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Wrestler, and Far from Heaven.) Like its eponymous ville soeur, this ‘city of the Bays’ enjoyed a spell as an elegant resort, its lovely golf clubhouse recalling that gentler chapter, perched as it remains to this day atop its solitary hill. But that would end. John D. was coming to town. John D. Rockefeller, that is, who parlayed a few oil derricks into a kingdom. The greasy soot of kerosene was the bane of ths American housewife. A notorious spendthrift, Rockefeller cracked petroleum into increasingly cleaner grades, largely to light lamps but used the dirtier bits as well and luckily, all two seconds before the automobile was invented. The stage for the entire 20th Century was set, and the staging ground were those grounds embraced by the kills, our highways a hundred years ago. a Standard Oil town. And immigrants flocked for the jobs in the refineries and the ones on Bayonne’s docks. That was the heady optimism in the air the day Sergeant Michael Reilly, described here in some fit of journalistic indiscretion, took the comely and significantly younger Mary Clancy as his second wife. Pictured is Michael Reilly in his official portrait as Chief of Police of Bayonne’s Police Department, the buttons on his dress blues having rightly found their way to the possession of my cousin Dan who just retired after a distinguished career as a sergeant with the NYPD, including his final assignment with our crackerjack antiterrorist unit the Atlas Squad. Dan and I are among the couple dozen of Michael’s great grandchildren. And whenever I look at this photograph I see the eyes of his daughter, Margaret, my grandmother, and my mother, whose eyes I havent laid mine upon since the Pandemic began. But Michael Reilly would understand. Chief of Police in Bayonne, NJ from 1915-1921, he saw the city through the worst of that pandemic, and was known for paying particular attention to the health of his frontline workers, his essential workers, his police officers. What I wish I had beyond tbe Reilly eyes, the hallmark of all the lookers on that side: Floating out there somewhere is a photograph of him inspecting his officers as he did every morning, and despite noisy protestations, making sure their masks were covering their noses!

What's in a name

In 1908, the beautifully-rendered three-window-wide Beaux-Arts 'Bownette Apartment Building' opened up on the north side of West 81st Street, across from the American Museum of Natural History. It's façade is a joy, leading up to a Second-Empire pitched slate roof with copper flashing and a row of petite dormer windows.

In 1935, the planetarium at the museum was named for Charles Hayden, a banker who funded the completion of the structure. Three years later, the Bownette was renamed for him and Hayden House was christened. 

Then, in 2000, the Hayden Planetarium was demolished to make room for the largest glass box ever constructed and housing the newly named Rose Center for Space and Earth. 

Today, Hayden House is still whimsically pretty, but stares all day at its lovely reflection in a glass box that replaced its namesake.

Fitting thanks for Elizabeth Berger

One of the most scarred spots on the island of Manhattan, beaten up by its history, sitting on landfill with very little to remind us it was once the city’s Millionaire’s Row, the area’s Golden Age circa 1790-1840, it plunged into the degradation of poverty, the exploitation of tenements rife with gambling, prostitution, and misery. Chopped up and crisscrossed twice by the elevated trains that preceded the subway system, then indeed dug out underneath itself by no less than four subway lines, scraped of any sense developmentally by the unsightly, insanely overwrought entrance and exit ramps of Robert Moses’ ugliest accomplishment the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and then nearly blown to smithereens by the attacks on the nearby World Trade Center, it had been my least favorite part of Manhattan, a patch of land so mismanaged I’d seen absolutely no potential to reclaim it usefully let alone aesthetically. 

But there are far better imaginations than mine. 

This little patch of land one must traverse to get from the Rector Street Subway Station to Battery Park is now a bit of a meadow, dotted with wildflowers arranged amid undulating paths of fieldstone and circled with a most elegant hip-high wrought iron fence. Named for the woman who devoted her life to the humane development of Manhattan’s more challenging  neighborhoods, Elizabeth Berger Plaza sits high on my list of the things I can’t wait to show you.

The DeLamar House

 

The Polish Mission to the United Nations was built as a home for the most mysterious of Wall Street's Men of Mystery. Even Joseph Raphael DeLamar's closest acquaintances report never really knowing him. The more formal age notwithstanding, no one called him friend.  DeLamar was born in Amsterdam in 1842 and fatherless at four. So at 12 he ran away from home, stowed away on a ship and was off like few other famous fabled stowaways. Discovered aboard, he was indentured to the cook for seven years, a slave who worked his way up to cook to master to captain.  

He bought a ship, then, a fleet, scouring coasts for shipwrecks and plunder, gold, marble, jewels. A harrowing thirty-six hours trapped underwater in wreckage led him to buy a fleet of river boats reaching into the depths of the African continent, twice as dangerous but closer to the surface. He took a class in metallurgy, and by the end of that twist in his attention, owned mountains in Idaho and Colorado (he was the very first senator Idaho sent to Washington) and had cornered markets in Silver, nickel, copper, and gold. He was on boards of almost every major metal corporation, survived any number of horrifying physical encounters with death, surfed with both agility and luck the treacherous wild west of the 19th Century American economy, but it was his heart done him in...

He married the great beauty of the day, Nellie Sands, thirty-seven years his junior of course, but to compensate, threw the world at her feet, showered her with every conceivable luxury on earth, whisked her off to Paris while he built her palace on Madison Avenue, you say you'd like one in Cairo, too? Coming right up. He raised their daughter Alice like a fairytale princess. While vacationing in Rome with his little family, DeLamar was called back to Paris to attend to some business and waiting for the Mrs. DeLamar a whole packet of love letters, not from the Mr. DeLamar. Cuckolded, this mountain of a man, the side of St. Helens blowing out sideways comes to mind. His anguish I believe is why no one ever gets close to him again. He grabs Alice, gains full custody, and lives out his life rattling around in the enormous, resplendent, Taj of a building, full of everything and nothing. Right here. On Madison Avenue. Millions walk by. And almost nobody knows. 

Wanna go in?