Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  The actual publishing of the book would be handled by Dodd, Mead and Company. Persistent, even pestering requests for maps and prints came to dominate Newton’s correspondence. He took the step of appointing Harry Stevens, a London dealer in antiquities, to seek out material on his behalf. He hired a young woman named Helen Young, a student of history who had just earned her Ph.D. at Yale, to be the first of what would eventually be a small army of highly educated assistants who would help bring the ever-burgeoning Iconography into being. And he hired an exquisitely talented restorer named H. A. Hammond Smith to improve certain views before having them photogravured.

  Hammond Smith lived on West 10th Street, where he kept a private gallery of vintage American portraits, Old Masters and early English and Dutch prints. He did the bulk of the restoring and repair work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was famous in the world of collectors both for his craftsmanship and for the secret restorative processes he had discovered while browsing the studios of Italy.

  In his stiff, nineteenth-century prose style, Newton laid out an open-ended, plenary plan for the collection:

  The Iconography of Manhattan Island represents the result of a two-fold purpose: to collect, to condense, and to arrange systematically and in just proportion, within the confines of a single work, the facts and incidents which are of the greatest consequence and interest in the history of New York City, with special reference to its topographical features and to the physical development of the island; and to illustrate this material by the best reproductions obtainable of important and interesting contemporary maps, plans, views, and documents; in other words, to produce a book dealing with the physical rather than with the personal side of the city’s history, which shall be at the same time useful and interesting to the student of history, the antiquarian, the collector, and the general public. [Preface, Iconography, volume 1]

  Despite such grand ambitions, when Newton began the book’s scope was moderate: seventy-five to one hundred plates, with a few lines of text to place each one in context. The work would go to press without ado, Newton informed the contributors he was soliciting. “Almost all the material is now in hand,” he declared in a letter to one buyer. He consulted with Halsey, who was in the middle of cataloging two hundred pieces of Americana that he would contribute to the Metropolitan Museum.

  Halsey provided a not overly optimistic opinion of the Book’s prospects. The market, he informed Newton, would not absorb an edition of 150 copies of a book of New York views and prints. A run of that size would probably cost around $16,000, an exorbitant sum even for men of Halsey and Newton’s class. Nor was the time frame realistic: “I must say I marvel at your energy in attempting this work in such a short time,” Halsey wrote, “as it would have taken me five years at least to prepare the manuscript.”

  It was Halsey, however, who had suggested that Newton put himself in the hands of Walter Gillis to supervise the printing. Gillis possessed “the best taste of any man in book-making” and had printed all of Halsey’s books. Gillis, a scrupulous craftsman who also had the reputation of being an artistic character, had since 1869 run his own press with his brother Frank, producing illustrated art books on such topics as classical bronzes and Mexican majolica. He served as a typographical adviser to Doubleday, Page and Company and was a founding member of the Grolier Club, which devoted itself to promoting the book arts. He was, avowed Halsey, “a gentleman in every sense of the word.”

  Even with Gillis taking charge of the technical end of things, Newton soon acknowledged to Halsey that the notes to accompany the prints were in a “rather chaotic” condition. Completing the book by the winter of 1909 was in doubt.

  Certain sacrifices became necessary. Newton confided in a friend that he now had “no time for yachting.” This represented a remarkably abrupt change for someone who, from his first days on Staten Island, had always boated and had only recently commissioned a new vessel of his own. He resigned as a member of the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, a mainstay of community life in Greenwich. It was a withdrawal with repercussions for Edith, for whom the club was a central social outlet. The free time Newton had before spent on the water, as well the domestic hours devoted to his wife and daughter, now found another purpose.

  In masterminding the Iconography, Newton insisted on collecting works produced by old-fashioned printmaking techniques. All views, all maps must have been made by the human hand, not photographed. Incongruously, though, Newton insisted on producing the Iconography’s art with up-to-date photographic printing processes, without which the crisp values he required would not be possible.

  His preference for the old over the new in graphics was one he shared with the Society of Iconophiles, a group he was invited to join while at work on the Iconography. The society took as its mandate the preservation of those graphic arts that were slipping away before the tide of modernism: etching, dry point, steel engraving and other forms of intaglio printmaking. The group regularly commissioned engravings from fine artists and printed no more than one hundred copies of each, sixty of which were reserved for members. As did Newton in his Iconography, the Society of Iconophiles eschewed photography with a vengeance.

  ***

  NEWTON PENETRATED EVER deeper into the realm of New Yorkiana. That autumn of 1911, he managed a spectacular coup, rescuing a priceless artifact not from flames but from dust and deterioration.

  His interest in documenting the history of Central Park in the pages of the Iconography led him to the basement of the New York Parks Department. There he unearthed historical gold: the original competition drawing of Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, completed in 1858, in accordance with which Central Park had been laid out. What Newton discovered was a veritable Dead Sea Scroll of Old New York, eight feet long and three feet wide, covered with stipple points designating vegetation, rock outcroppings, footpaths and carriageways.

  The Greensward Plan laid out the designers’ strategy for the park’s 843 acres. In all but a few cases, the park was executed just as Olmsted and Vaux had envisioned in the Greensward (no conservatory, ultimately, and no formal flower garden). Not just a topographical tool, the drawing was a work of art. Though long considered lost, here it was in Newton’s grasp, a climactic discovery that would crown any antiquarian’s life.

  He could imagine nothing sweeter. He was immediately sent reeling into the New York of his childhood. Edith’s family members were at the forefront of the creation of Central Park. A family friend, Calvin Vaux had taught him how to row on the park’s lake when he was a boy. Newton had relished the attractions of Central Park for his whole life.

  The Greensward document seemed to have been left to rot among sundry other forgotten rolls of parchment in the old powder vault of the former armory that now served as the Parks Department’s headquarters. Who were the fools that had discarded it? Didn’t anyone else in the world apart from Newton Stokes realize what it was? Here lay communal memory, here lay the past incarnate, here lay the green heart of Manhattan.

  Perhaps the most important fact was not its discarding, nor the rediscovery that allowed Newton to bring it to the public in the Iconography. The Greensward Plan represented ammunition, pure and potent, to use against the continual efforts to water down and usurp Olmsted and Vaux’s original artistic vision. Central Park was a three-and-a-half-million-square-foot work of art. No one suggested touching up a Titian, but interlopers had tried to intrude on what Newton considered sacred space. Proposals had been floated for stadiums, athletic fields, airplane landing strips. Finding and publicizing the original plan was a way of fending off all that nonsense.

  Newton wanted to have the plan photogravured, but in its present form it could not be unrolled and pressed flat—the document would fall to pieces. Clearly, something had to be done. He wrote to George MacAneny, the borough president of Manhattan. It was an extremely polite letter, one that took pains to compliment various city employees: the Engineer of Street Openings, the Map Clerk and the Park Custodian
, all of whom had helped him in his quest for the grail.

  “As this is the most important document in the possession of the Parks Department,” Stokes wrote MacAneny, “it should be put into the best possible order and carefully preserved.” The total cost of the project might be $250 to $300, of which Newton offered to kick in $100. Of course, reproduction of the Greensward Plan in the Iconography was a given.

  Newton reached out to Olmsted’s son, making a case for the preservation of the drawing, which “was in a seemingly hopeless condition as it had been pasted down on heavy paper and rolled so that the whole surface was covered with thousands of cracks.” Frederick Junior immediately offered the Olmsted family imprimatur for the project.

  MacAneny, overwhelmed by Newton’s onslaught, eventually agreed to the whole program. Typically, the persnickety Newton would involve himself in all aspects of the plan’s salvage, down to the selection of the frame (mahogany with a broad gilt edging), basing the “totally accurate” choice on an old picture casing he owned from the period the park plan was made.

  In the aftermath of the rediscovery coup, Newton’s feelings for Central Park might have tended slightly toward the proprietary. He would attempt to secure permission for his sister Ethel, Mrs. John Sherman Hoyt, to erect a model farm, strictly for educational purposes, on park property at 72nd Street, opposite the Museum of Natural History.

  Ethel proposed a Central Park farm that would feature, in the description of Newton, “a little Cow House, the two small Chicken Houses and the little Piggery,” with a farmer’s cottage and a stable, all on a couple of acres. The farm buildings would feature large windows through which the curious public could inspect the curious livestock. For which civic improvement Ethel would contribute $5,000.

  When Newton floated the proposal, writing to various park officials and playing it up as “the kind of farm that a young married Couple with small means might hope to develop and make profitable,” he met with receptive responses. But then the Times got wind of the idea. The paper lambasted it in an editorial in June (“a site in Central Park is quite out of the question”). After which, as Newton ruefully advised his sister, her play farm in the park was dead in the water.

  IT WAS AN age of hubris, with the gigantic, doomed Titanic on the blocks in a Belfast shipyard, ready to be launched a year later. That an early-morning fire in the New York state capitol—what the newspapers called a “total inferno”—had erupted at all stunned the citizens of Albany. Local confidence in the building’s impregnability was such that the government had never sought to insure the structure. By four A.M., crowds huddled around the west tower to drink in the drama. Floating sheets of book paper wafted over the onlookers’ heads like dirty snowflakes.

  In the middle of the night on March 29, 1911, Newton was awakened by a phone call from one of the trustees of the New York Public Library. The trustees requested that Newton serve as the institution’s emissary in the developing crisis. Within the hour, he was on the night train to Albany. The capitol housed the State Library of New York, which held a trove of maps, views and documents that represented, for Newton Stokes, a wellspring from which he could draw his life’s work.

  The night train meant a trip of a good three hours. Once in Albany, Newton started for the scene of the fire with trepidation. Not only did the downtown Albany air reek of smoke, but the odor was oddly, unnervingly familiar, with a hint of caramel, like the trash paper he burned in the grate at home. It smelled, in fact, of Newton’s worst fear: the stench of documents going up in flames. The weather had turned bitterly cold. Newton could not imagine what he could possibly do here, how a New York architect and an amateur antiquarian might contribute. But he dutifully marched onward.

  He reached the hulk of the capitol. Its west tower still billowed clouds of black smoke, its windows gaped broken and empty, and the wall of its second story was stained with soot. The red-tile cupola on the roof appeared stove in, as though some enormous hand had taken a hammer to it.

  Firefighters had only barely wrested control over the conflagration. When Newton arrived, he heard spectators describe a monstrous finger of fire that had just shot out of a third-story window and extended halfway across the street. Everyone knew that the third floor held the library and its irreplaceable archives. But Newton had palpable, firsthand knowledge. Not two weeks before, on a research trip to the building, he had seen and touched many of the collection’s gems himself. Now he felt the warmth of the fire on his face. There would be only one way to discover whether any of the priceless, unduplicated records remained intact.

  He would have to go in.

  At eight A.M., Governor John A. Dix arrived on the scene. Desperate to get inside, Newton minimized the danger. Speaking as an architect, he told the governor he was confident there would be little risk in entering the library and attempting to effect some salvage. He had done a quick calculation, he said, and knew that the weight of the floors above would not send them crashing down on the heads of fire department personnel.

  The governor surveyed the shell of the tower, stone wreckage piled around its base. Then he asked if Newton would direct the rescue effort. Dix must have been under the impression, Newton later surmised, that if the New York Public Library had sent him, he must have some special experience in salvaging books and manuscripts.

  From a floor plan of the building, Stokes had seen that it would be possible to gain entry only through the burned floor of the room above the archives. The third floor itself had suffered so much damage as to be virtually impassable. As he and several firefighters ascended the great western staircase, with its ornate, stone-filigree-topped columns and its broad marble steps, Newton had to pick his way through the smoke, blackened debris and pools of water. The crew reached the fourth floor, let themselves down through the ceiling to a main corridor and broke through an intact panel of the library door.

  Newton made his way through the jagged portal. As he did, the draft of air coming in from the hall fanned the smoldering debris to life. Chairs and desks had already been consumed, but flames still licked up the sides of the bookcases and the spines of books. The floor held four feet of wreckage. Most volumes had been destroyed. Icicles hung from what was once a peaceful overhead mural of clouds floating against an azure sky.

  The library, as a repository of paper, contained a vast amount of the stuff, stacks and stacks of manuscript materials and thousands upon thousands of old, parched books. Enough to render the history of Old New York into a cinder.

  For two days, Newton labored in tandem with the institution’s chief librarians. The trio worked while holding umbrellas over their heads, tossing useless debris out the blasted windows as they went. Many volumes were too scorched to touch. Others had frozen stiff.

  Albany firefighters commandeered clothes baskets from a public laundry across the street from the capitol, and pairs of them shuttled over the most important materials so that water-soaked leaves could be hung to dry over clotheslines. At one point, Newton stumbled upon what seemed to be a large, wet sponge lying on the floor. Arnold Van Laer, one of the librarians, seized it, wrung out the water and spread it flat on a table. The two men recognized the priceless, original vellum charter of Wall Street’s Trinity Church, ruined beyond repair.

  All told, it would cost $4 million to restore the capitol’s west wing. The entire fourth story, with its dome skylight and supporting concave walls, would have to be rebuilt. The library suffered disproportionately. Some of the collection’s riches managed to survive. A set of twenty-three volumes of documents relating to the War of 1812, for example, could go back on the shelf of the new, fireproof archives. A metal safe had protected the irreplaceable wampum belts of the Iroquois Confederacy, as well as the papers found in the boots of the British spymaster John André after a conference with the traitor Benedict Arnold at West Point.

  But only about a fourth of the library’s holdings emerged intact from the flames. Forever gone were most of the Dutch land records of New
Amsterdam from 1630 to 1674, in nearly two dozen large volumes, which Van Laer had only the year before been tasked with translating. Contemporary estimates totaled the damage at 450,000 books, 270,000 manuscripts and an entire card catalog of nearly one million entries.

  “Isn’t the loss of the State archives terrible to contemplate?” Newton wrote to P. Lee Phillips, the librarian in charge of the division of maps and charts at the Library of Congress, soon after he returned to his smoke-free home in New York. The question came from the gut, posed as it was only days after the fire, when no one, not even a man who had entered the inferno, could yet ascertain the true scope of the damage.

  BY SPRING 1911, a modest hundred-print volume, the “little book” of Stokes’s first imaginings, had swelled into a pair of heavyweight tomes, neither of them ready to go to press. There was simply too much source material out there, it seemed, to put the manuscript to bed. The jewels in the Iconography’s crown included such rarities as the Allard View, a version of which had been acquired by Newton from the print peddler early on, and less prized curios such as “The Collect, with Fitch’s Steamboat,” from 1846 (the Collect Pond was in lower Manhattan), and an image of an 1854 fire engine. And the list of plates continued to burgeon.

  Superb artwork, but also, as Hamlet had it, words, words, words. In a development that tipped the whole scale of the project, it became clear to Newton that each of his treasured images required attendant copy that was more extensive than the typical art book’s brief caption alongside each plate. He had hit upon a structure that would feature not only pictures but text, and lots of it. “Historical summaries” must precede each group of plates, and then, following each image, specific information would highlight its provenance. The information necessary to gloss every print required painstaking legwork.