Joining the Roosevelt Ghosts of 129-131 Fifth

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 20^th 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-20^th 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.  This 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 20^th Street and gain a Fifth Avenue entrance and address.

Shortly after the turn of the 20^th 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 21^st 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."