Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  She felt on somewhat familiar idealistic ground. The Kindergarten Association’s work was akin to that of the University Settlement House, but much more specific in its attention to the mental and physical development of the youngest residents of the Lower East Side. Froebel preached that a menu of thoughtfully designed games, songs, blocks, balls and handicrafts would help develop minds, bodies and spirits. The emphasis on play represented a distinct departure from the curriculum of discipline and book-learning for young children in the early twentieth century. Each kindergarten came blessed with a collection of beechwood cubes, cylinders and spheres that distinguished the Froebel method and were thus known as the “Froebel gifts.”

  The founders of the New York Kindergarten Association were independent thinkers and rebels, headed up by the reformer-poet Richard Watson Guilder. They moved ahead with such zeal that within four years they had not only opened kindergartens in needy neighborhoods, but persuaded the city to open four in the public schools. From those beginnings, the modern notion of a kindergarten in every school was born.

  Edith also ran a sewing school at St. George’s Church on Stuyvesant Square, another venture that was far less innocuous than it sounds. The program enrolled struggling female immigrants as they attempted to find a trade. Few jobs were open to women, but that of a seamstress was a reliable one. As waves of needy refugees flowed through Ellis Island to settle in the tenements of lower Manhattan, few from the upper classes assisted them directly. Edith did.

  The spirit was willing, but the flesh became increasingly weak. Beginning only a few years after their marriage, a series of vaguely labeled maladies afflicted the vibrant young woman whom Sargent painted brimming with health and life. From today’s medical perspective, it’s clear that Edith’s health problems had an underlying cause of chronic hypertension. Her blood pressure was often high, the source, it would seem, of her preternaturally rosy complexion. As far back as March 1903, Newton warned off his brother Anson from a visit, writing that Edith had “not been very well and it will probably be two or three weeks before she will feel like leaving home.”

  Newton cared for his wife after her spiking blood pressure drove her to various rest cures at an assortment of sanitariums popular with well-to-do New Yorkers, most regularly Dr. Foord’s, in Kerhonkson, New York. Newton insisted on following her, to stay with her and care for her during her sanitarium treatments, which tended toward grueling applications of extreme cold or heat.

  The thousand-acre Kerhonksen site boasted the official name of Nonkanawha, an Algonquin term meaning “by the side of the stream,” but among Newton and Edith’s set the health mecca was usually referred to simply as Foord’s.

  Dr. Andrew Green Foord counted himself a follower of Silas Weir Mitchell, the American physician who devised his “rest cure” at the end of the nineteenth century. Mitchell’s rather eccentric regimen included total inactivity, copious servings of butter and electrical stimulation over the entire surface of the skin. Foord’s didn’t buy into every Mitchell prescription, but passivity was an important part of the program at the sanitarium, along with plenty of fresh air and healthy food. Little Helen remained in Manhattan, under the care of Susanna and her nannies.

  But the approaches of specialists sometimes served only to speed Edith’s decline. Medicine at that time was largely based on guesswork. Money always attracted quacks. One medical expert prescribed a visit to Santa Barbara, where he instructed Edith to stretch out motionless for days at a time in the California sun. Her flawlessly pale skin burned severely and her symptoms worsened. The couple returned to New York, to another round of “cures,” which cured nothing.

  In the background loomed the diagnosis that had its roots in the Victorian age and still held sway: hysteria. “Women’s problems” were a preoccupation of the medical establishment of the day. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” details the paternalistic inanities of the same Mitchell-based rest cure that had been tried out on Edith at Foord’s. Even though her problems were firmly based in a physical ailment (as were Gilman’s, whose postpartum depression was left undiagnosed), several specialists seemed to believe the trouble might be all in Edith’s mind.

  The specter of a “leakage,” or “cerebral event,” which today we would term a stroke, stalked Edith continually. The Minturn family was marked for early death. Edith’s father had suffered a final fatal stroke at age fifty-three. Bob, always lively and upbeat, the eldest of the Minturn children, struggled with heart problems and would be fifty-five when he died. Edith’s beloved sister May would be gone at fifty-four, also of a stroke. From her increasingly frail present, forty-two-year-old Edith could only look forward with trepidation to what the next years might bring.

  AS COMPLICATED AS it would become, the initial plans for the Iconography could be called simple, straightforward and seemingly easy to accomplish. On that winter evening in 1908, Newton and Edith communed with the Saint-Mémin at the home of R.T.A. Halsey. Shortly thereafter, Stokes contracted an illness (“a para-typhoid attack, followed by phlebitis”) that kept him housebound for six months. The period of rest was no good at all for Newton’s architecture practice with Howells, as his doctor forbade him from going to his office. But as a sickly child and periodic invalid for his whole life, Newton knew well how to use the boon of bed rest.

  Feverish, headachy, lethargic, he was nonetheless able to focus and work. Perhaps that “work” should have quotes around it, for the labor he chose was one of love. Propped up in an overheated room off Gramercy Park, he began to consider the larger possibilities in collecting New York views and maps.

  That term “views” was peculiar to the world of fine prints and collecting. It simply meant a landscape, a cityscape, a specific locale rendered in such a way as to establish some shred of historical veracity. Views were invaluable pictorial records, snapshots before there was photography, the only way for anyone to know how this or that perspective might have looked at this or that point in time. The Saint-Mémin was a classic view. The Scottish explorer David Livingstone produced views of Victoria Falls, and Heinrich Barth, a German adventurer, of Timbuktu. Views installed windows on the past. Through a glass darkly, yes, but a view nonetheless.

  Maps may also be seen as views, symbolic, visual, reductive. The urge to chart our surroundings ran parallel to the development of civilization. There are maps of the sky on the cave walls at Lascaux. A three-by-three-inch shard of clay tablet from twenty-five hundred years ago outlines a river valley in Babylonia, a first fragment in what would become, as travel, printing and exploration progressed, a torrent of topographical representations.

  The physical look of maps changed over the centuries. They began as didactic documents, representations that conformed to the preconceived world views of the cartographer. The Babylonian tablet celebrated as the world’s first map, for example, portrayed a circular world surrounded by water, in keeping with the society’s religious beliefs. Coloring conventions (blue for water, green for land, etc.) descend from medieval origins.

  The age of sail brought mapmaking a new sense of urgency. To a sea captain negotiating reefs and shoals, it mattered less whether a map aligned with accepted religious cosmology, and more that it represented a specific geographical reality. Italian sailing charts created in the thirteenth century featured such recognizable elements as the central compass wind-rose and grids of squared lines. When copperplate engraving superseded the woodcut, mapmaking exploded. With European expansionism in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cartography became an indispensable handmaiden of empire.

  In the early twentieth century, at the time when Newton started assembling the Iconography, rare and graphically sumptuous examples of cartography from the age of sail were beginning to come onto the market, available not only to princes and kings but to the private collector. Even before the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, Newton had been browsing the map dealers, and prided himself on his finds: “I we
ll remember my first purchase—a fine copy of a Nicholas Visscher map, brought from Richmond in 1892, and I now reflect with sorrow upon the many neglected opportunities of the following years.”

  Newton prized maps of New World exploration, especially those that demonstrated Europe’s slow grasp of the outlines of what would become Manhattan Island. A flipbook made of these maps would progress from shapelessness to sharpness, from an amoeba-like protuberance of shoreline to an indistinct fingerling of land to a compressed and vaguely delineated island, to arrive at some approximation of the irregular, north-south oriented, handled-war-club shape of Manhattan that we recognize today.

  Newton’s correspondence shows June 1909 to be a seismic divide between his old life and the new. He put out calls for specific documents that he wanted to reproduce. He was intent on seeing what was out there in terms of both maps and views—Italian portulan charts, say, or anything similar to the Saint-Mémin view of lower Manhattan that had so captivated him.

  In 1909, Newton turned forty-two. His previous hobbyhorses (cameras, motorcycles, yachts) started to seem poor stuff, the patents and Japanese automata that before offered him satisfaction, or at least amusement. His earnest commitment to tenement reform became less and less central to his life, because he began to disagree with the increasingly restrictive initiatives of his colleagues on the Tenement House Commission. Dimensions of rooms, the number of windows required of landlords—such technical minutiae provided plenty of material to fight over. He wearied of the fight and gradually left the field to others. He would still build tenements shaped by his own ideas of reform. But public policy endeavors required labored consensus. On the good ship Iconography, he stood alone at the helm.

  Newton placed himself on the mailing list for several auctioneers, dealers who he knew trafficked in Americana, but he had no plans to put the materials to any use. “My own collection,” he wrote to a dealer in August 1908, “is a very modest one, nor will it ever be large, my ambition being to collect only what is really good from an historical or artistic point of view.”

  Soon, though, he began to pepper collectors with requests to get their holdings copied for inclusion in some sort of printed work. The project was not yet a book, not officially, anyway. In September, Newton wrote to Edward E. Ayer, a well-known collector whose fortune had come from supplying lumber to railroads. “I am compiling a pictorial record of Manhattan Island from the earliest times up to the present day,” Newton stated, “illustrated by photogravure reproductions from important maps, plans and views in public and private collections here and abroad.”

  Newton cast a wide net. He placed a newspaper ad: “Old Prints Wanted/New York . . . Plans and Views Prior to 1840,” with contact information for his architecture office at 100 William Street.

  More productive than any advertisement were his contacts among his upper-class peers. Most had accrued their fortunes by the beginning of the century, and some had embraced the gentlemanly hobby of collecting Americana with a vengeance, filling their walnut-shelved libraries with vintage books, maps and correspondence. Many items that in a few decades would be deemed priceless could, in the opening years of the century, be procured with only a modest investment. These men opened their portfolios to Newton, and helped him sleuth out materials in other personal collections.

  No one could say no to Newton Stokes. The successful builder John D. Crimmins, for example, famous among the cognoscenti for garnering the autographs of each of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, freely offered items, for purposes of replication only, from what the New York Times called his “cozy little museum of historic interest.” Curators such as those at the New-York Historical Society also encouraged Newton to inspect and reproduce its prints of Old New York.

  Newton’s appetite proved voracious but, from the start, discriminating. He would scold many dealers the way he did one London auctioneer whose offerings he considered less than choice: “I am a collector of important early New York maps, plans and views,” he stated, italics his. He was interested in the best. He wanted originals, from the period when Manhattan was New York, and when New-York was still written with a hyphen.

  The project jelled. Instead of assembling a “pictorial record,” Newton’s appeals now regularly referred to “my book,” or my “little book on Old New York.” The book even had the title under which it would go out into the world, The Iconography of Manhattan Island. He first conceived the six-volume behemoth as a modest single tome. His eureka moment before the Saint-Mémin provided the impetus, but could not prefigure the expansive scale of the project.

  As sometimes happens with books, devising a title lent the work momentum. An attack of phlebitis troubled Newton, but could not consign him to bed. He had too much to do. It was not that he stopped bringing home objets that caught his fancy—a letter shows him shipping a carved stone fireplace from Bath in August 1910, for example, and a rare sundial for a Christmas present in 1911—but his voracious approach to purchasing maps and prints proved all out of proportion with his previous habits. He now had a legitimizing focus for his collecting activities. He coveted prints, but he also needed them for his book.

  He still maintained an interest in other ventures. Speculative real estate opportunities continued to be a central occupation. The family firm Phelps Stokes Estates, as well as satellite entities such as Wyllis Company and the Haynes Company, held properties throughout Manhattan, with a concentration on the Upper East Side. The companies bought and sold apartment buildings, built them from scratch and in a few cases managed rental properties. Real estate represented the enormously lucrative basis of the family fortune, estimated at some $40 million at the beginning of the twentieth century (around a billion dollars today). Newton held residential buildings at, among other addresses, 921 Park Avenue, 101 East 91st Street, 37 Madison Avenue, 310 Lexington Avenue, 80th and Park Avenue, East 75th Street, East 96th Street and upper Fifth Avenue.

  Even though he had broken with the Tenement House Commission, Newton remained committed to affordable housing. One serious effort at tenement design would be the Dudley Homes, completed in 1910, at 339–349 East 32nd Street, and funded by his aunt Olivia, in memory of sister Caroline, who died in 1909. Cut loose from the politics of the Tenement Commission, Newton went it alone, accepting $20,000 apiece from each of his aunts to fund construction of this low-income housing.

  He designed the Dudley complex with a conviction that rents must be reduced “even at the sacrifice of some space and convenience in apartments.” His partner in the venture, the City and Suburban Homes Company, sought to establish weekly rent at $1.10, but Newton thought a dollar per week more appropriate. Still, he maintained his commitment to ample light and air, with individual apartments that were two rooms deep, surrounding a square center court.

  But his growing collection and its future publication in a book held him as did nothing else. In June 1911, Newton and Edith set sail for Europe, returning to Paris for the first time since 1898. The couple landed in an apartment conveniently kept fresh and available by Edith’s mother, through the services of an on-call bonne à tout faire, just in case any member of the family stopped by the city.

  Though they would not know it at the time, the summer sojourn in Paris represented something of a high-water mark in their lives, their relationship, certainly their physical health. They were back in their honeymoon landscape, last trod upon when they were the fresh, vibrant newlyweds of the Sargent painting. And in that magical realm, they engaged in perhaps the most delightful activity of all, treasure hunting.

  So what if their quarry—prints and views on the order of the Saint-Mémin—represented a somewhat obscure corner of the world of art? In a few decades the faded sheets and dusty books that they had for pennies would go for thousands. Lack of popular appeal only meant that bargains were still available.

  In the life of every obsession exists an ecstatic moment at its inception, before it turns manic, when the pleasure upon which the fut
ure addiction is based is pure and unadulterated. This Paris trip represented that for Newton, a time when his interest in New Yorkiana could still be seen as innocent.

  At age forty-four, Edith’s prettiness had filled out into a more mature look, regal in its self-assurance. A hint of the matron had stolen into her features. She resembled Susanna more and more, even as she displayed the fashions of the day, the by-then-classic leg-of-mutton sleeves, ruffled fronts, tight corsets, high-necked collars and lacy accessories at the wrist and throat.

  The girl of the Sargent painting could not remain timelessly young, but had instead matured into a striking, graceful woman. Despite her pounding blood pressure, she looked good, strong, full, handsome. If anything, the shade of illness lurking behind her self-confident mien made her even more beautiful, as a pinch of salt can bring out sweetness.

  Her husband managed to appear increasingly severe with each passing year. He had tended toward the dandy in his youth, and now that translated into a form of fastidiousness about his appearance. Newton remained capable of exchanging a dozen letters with a tailor over a single piece of apparel. He slicked his black hair down and parted it in the middle. He insisted on keeping a Mephistophelean beard.

  And then the idyll came to its end. The Paris trip had to be cut short after only a few weeks when Newton developed “tuberculosis of the joint,” in this case of the right shoulder. An international team of doctors pronounced that his only hope was to proceed to a certain hospital in the Pyrenees. There, a French specialist treated such cases by directing the sun’s rays on the injury through a weak lens.