The buyer has signed the contract for our apartment, and our
family will soon become one more set of ghosts to inhabit the spaces of 129-131
Fifth Avenue. Within two weeks of it
being on the market, our place had over 50 visits and 11 offers. We accepted that of a young single woman, a
lawyer, who "loved it immediately" and is already planning to redo
the kitchen (a wise first decision). She
will soon own a wonderful apartment in a wonderful building, a modest gem of
Manhattan history.
The address of the original site that later launched our
building was 4 East 20th Street, and the first known ghost in that space belonged
to Teddy Roosevelt's uncle, Silas Weir Roosevelt, who, with three of his brothers
-- Teddy's father, Robert, and James -- owned homes on the south side of 20th
Street between Fifth and Park. They were
all sons of Cornelius Roosevelt, one of the founders of Chemical Bank (now
Chase) and the fifth richest man in New York City. (Teddy himself was born a
block and a half from our building, and his birthplace was reconstructed and
memorialized in the mid-20th century as an appealing little museum.)
Silas, the owner of our space, was a Commissioner of the
Public Schools and a lawyer. He had a
wife and children and seemed to be well liked by his peers. He was also an amateur poet, whose verses,
although conventionally Victorian, showed a warm and sensitive nature. Sadly, Silas only lived to be 47, dying in
1870, I assume in some dark room on our mutual site, after what was described
as a protracted, painful, and "tedious" illness.
Since the late 1860s, the neighborhood around the
Roosevelts' homes had been transforming into Ladies Mile, the hot Manhattan
shopping center of its time. In 1870, the year Silas died, Lord & Taylor
claimed the corner of Broadway and 20
th with a five story cast iron
building and one of the earliest steam elevators. Two years later, Teddy's father, unhappy with
the commercialization of the area, particularly at his doorstep, and perhaps
affected by his brother's death, moved uptown. The other brothers deserted 20
th
Street soon afterward. However, although the family didn't want to live there
any more, they were not opposed to taking financial advantage of the new
environment.
In the late 1870s, the Roosevelt estate converted James
Roosevelt's former home at 6 East 20
th and Silas' at 4 East 20
th
street for commercial use.
The latter building
(and, as a reminder, our future site) became the location for the New York
Exchange for Women's Work.
T
his organization, founded to provide Civil War widows a living by selling on
consignment "almost everything that is useful or beautiful that can be
devised by the quick ingenuity of a woman's brain, from the darning of a
stocking to the adornment of a plaque" lasted an unlikely 125 years.
(The
Exchange only stayed on 20
th Street for a few years, however; it moved
to Madison Avenue, where it continued to sell consigned hand-made items until
high rents and a dearth of knitters forced its closure in 2003.)
In 1890, the Roosevelt estate replaced James' old house with
a leased extension to Lord and Taylor's store.
Then 10 years later, in 1900, they unsentimentally knocked Silas' house
down and replaced it with the Beaux Art structure that I know and love today. This became a further addition to the ever-expanding
Lord and Taylor and was linked to a building at 129 Fifth, allowing the store to
stretch down 20th Street and gain a Fifth Avenue entrance and
address.
Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, Lord
and Taylor moved uptown, along with most of the other large department stores
that had flourished between Fifth and Sixth. The splendid spaces of those "commercial
palaces", as they had been described, were subsequently humbled with small
industries and dusty wholesale showrooms, although with the basic bones of the
structures preserved and ready for their 21st century resurrections.
Our small Beaux Art wing of the Lord and Taylor palace,
which faces 20
th Street, spent most of the twentieth century as a
humdrum place for glass dealers and importers. At some point, it was severed
from its long departed Lord and Taylor master by a parking lot.
This half of 129-131 Fifth has been described
as "framed by piers, with the [neo -Greco] façade divided into three bays
by slender columns resting on high bases and topped by imposts decorated with
stylized paterae [which I Googled and found were ancient Roman shallow libation
bowls].
These support lintels are decorated
with incised ornament and simple projecting cornices.
At the second and third story levels spandrel
panels are set beneath the windows; those on the second story are ornamented by
recessed panels but have lost their sill moldings, those on the third story are
decorated by raised panels."
In 1979, 129-131 Fifth was converted to a coop, and in 1989,
we purchased our apartment on that third floor. At the time, Michael and I were
merging two families, and the previous owner had cleverly duplexed and designed
the place so that we could squeeze our five kids, if needed, into its 1300
square feet. When we moved in, Willie, my younger son, was six and our other
four kids, Geoff and Jill (mine) and Sarah and Jeremy (Michael's) were either
19 or 20. Geoff, Jill, and Sarah
generally used the apartment as a way station, but Jeremy and Will lived there
for the duration. Our daughters moved
west, but for years, every Friday, Geoff, his wife Kim, and their three sons
came in from Queens for family chaos night. The walls of those rooms were warmed
by the art of my family and friends. I cooked for and we celebrated in the
large downstairs living area our wedding, our tenth anniversary, dozens of
holidays, and countless insignificant events that served as excuses to feed
people we were fond of. Michael and I built businesses there, crouching in
corners over our computers. These are the ghosts -- people, things, and events
-- that are now drifting randomly within the newly painted walls and spruced up
floors. Leaving this apartment and
walking out the door of that building for the last time will be very hard.
Leaving the neighborhood, however, will not be. History does not repeat itself but sometimes it
seems that events may resonate over time in certain spaces, re-emerging in
similar forms later on. A version of
Ladies Mile has now erupted like some plant that lay dormant for 100 years, emerging
as a giant invasive weed, sending out its sprawling tendrils to produce
high-priced toxic franchises across Broadway and Fifth Avenue, smothering out
the native stores and attracting homogenous squeaking consumers, chewing and
bagging up goods and spewing back cash. (Too overwrought?)
Like Teddy
Roosevelt's pragmatic family, we are both escaping this new commercialized
version of our neighborhood and unsentimentally taking advantage of its
opportunities, selling our apartment at a price way above the one we bought
at. So we'll build a new home in Hudson,
where noisy birds replace noisy girls and scary dark woods replace scary dark
streets.
And maybe Silas' ghost even influenced
our decision to move here, whispering his modest Victorian verses to us while
we slept in the spaces where he spent is last sad years and where we spent are
latest happy ones:
"For the Hudson runs like molten gold
His purple hills between;
And the hazy distance lies unrolled,
A fringe of sliver sheen,
Till earth and the horizon blend
In the faint hue of even,
As if the curse were at an end,
And the world mixed with heaven."
And of course, James Roosevelt's ghost may also be
whispering from the house next door: "It's time to sell."
We skip the awful games along the runway, with the hanging
corpses of large unattainable panda bears and stuffed Looney Toon characters
and where small children aim semi-automatics at cute metal animal heads. 
After lunch we head for our main objective. This year, the Columbia State Fair has a special
focus. The mechanical marvels we seek
out now are not ungainly talking metal farmers but shiny green John Deere tractors,
which growl about heavy lifting, snow plowing, and the transformation of our
land. It is not clear yet whether we'll
need a Mama tractor in the 2 series or a smaller version. We'll have to pay an excavator to rough out a
road and the building site in order to determine the horsepower we'll need. But before we head home, today I sit happily in the clam shell of
a 2032, and poke at the handles, envisioning the fields of wildflowers and
native trees and fat shiny blue-ribbon winning vegetables that our property
will produce with the help of our steel-clad pal. 