Turk’s Head was the last hurrah of Howells & Stokes. The firm had designed skyscrapers and office buildings in New York, Seattle and San Francisco. It was on track to become a leading architectural office of the day. But the Iconography derailed all that. With his partner often on the West Coast, Newton spent less and less time in the Howells & Stokes office at 100 William Street.
It didn’t matter. Newton had found new quarters for the real work of his life, situated in one of the most magnificent buildings in New York City. In October 1912, Newton’s friend John Shaw Billings, director of the Central Research Library, at Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets, saw fit to bestow a temporary working space on the iconographer. On the hushed and barely visited second floor (the Main Reading Room had recently opened on the third), along a hallway with access limited primarily to staff, a rectangular inner sanctum dubbed Study D was given over to Newton’s exclusive use. It was as if a baseball fan were given a room of his own in Yankee Stadium.
The public library had opened about a year before. The new Beaux-Arts edifice, designed by what was then a little-known architectural firm named Carrère & Hastings, stood on the site of a prominent landmark of Old New York, the Croton Distributing Reservoir, also known as the Murray Hill Reservoir, a gigantic, above-ground, Egyptian-style basin, on the parapets of which New Yorkers were fond of strolling in fine weather. No longer in use, the reservoir’s granite walls were dismantled by five hundred workers over two years of demolition before the construction of the library could begin.
Built wholly of marble (twenty thousand blocks of it), the magnificent building represented the height of the Beaux-Arts style, with grand sweeps of stone and ornate embellishments, imposing hallways and ethereal vaulted arches. Seven floors of book stacks reached down into subterranean Manhattan.
The library boasted more than a million volumes, the result of the merging of two major collections, the Astor Lenox libraries. Patrons submitted call slips and waited for their books in the two-block-long centerpiece of the structure, the Main Reading Room, lined with leather-bound reference works, lit by massive chandeliers and lofty arched windows, filled with dozens of work tables of golden oak and topped by a soaring ceiling adorned with puffy pink clouds against a well of blue. “A good Booke is the precious life-blood of a master spirit,” ran the words of John Milton in gilt above the reading room’s door.
Within these sacred precincts the Iconography found a home. Study D contained a collection of large, sturdy desk-tables. Staffers cleared the one nearest the door for Newton’s customary appearance between four and six in the afternoon, when he arrived to check progress and review correspondence. Eventually the library offered Victor Paltsits the rather Arthurian-sounding job of Keeper of Manuscripts, a position Newton had lobbied hard for him to secure.
The library offered Newton a home in another sense, too. While awaiting the elusive climax of publication, he felt an urgent need to share the contents of the Iconography. He was desperate to mount something real, something consequential. He appealed to John Billings to sponsor an exhibit of his Old New York material in the print room on the new library’s third floor. Newton would supply the text for the captions.
The show ran throughout the summer of 1912, the first of three such exhibits highlighting the Stokes collection. Now people could witness just what Mr. Newton Stokes had been up to for the previous feverish years. Newton lauded the show that he himself had organized as “the most important Loan Exhibition ever held of New York views and plans.” A prideful description, to be sure, but nonetheless an accurate one, and the culmination of years of effort. He could conceivably have left the Iconography project there, with the public library exhibit, and counted himself successful.
But the groaning boards of Study D beckoned. The maps, views and documents continued to pile up. He could not, would not, quit. Finally, Edith issued an ultimatum.
IN PART BECAUSE of the adventure of the Castello Plan, by the fall of 1912 there were two hundred images in the queue, and no volumes yet in print. Research proved more painstaking and time-consuming than anyone had expected. The number of original plates to engrave grew as the adjoining text lengthened and as Newton discovered more and more priceless treasures.
Edith attempted what today would be called an intervention. “I have promised to my wife to complete all research work, and indeed so far as possible all work in connection with The Iconography, during the present year,” Newton wrote to his head researcher Paltsits. “She feels that I ought to put a definite limit to this work, which has for more than three years not only absorbed all of my spare time to the practical exclusion of all social activities and recreation . . . [but] is besides involving greater expense than I can afford. As I quite agree with these sentiments, I mean to try my best to carry out my promise.”
Newton resembled a man standing above a sinkhole, feeling the ground shifting underneath him, pumping his legs as fast as he can but gaining no foothold. At one point we hear him state in a note to a colleague that he could not spend more than $3,000 on the completion of the writing. That figure, though, was soon overshot when another subject needed researching, another staffer needed a paycheck. He was familiar with the truism that a boat is a hole into which you throw cash. Now the Book was proving to be a similar money-suck.
The physical weight of each volume filled him with anxiety. He wrote to Walter Gillis, his printer, in December 1913, urging him to contact English papermakers to find “an even thinner paper for the text,” with the idea of using the paper already purchased for the plates only. The problem would worsen with the second volume. Gillis assured Stokes the tome would, at 910 pages, “make an impossible book,” a problem that would hardly be fixed by reducing the weight of the paper and rendering the type magnifying-glass tiny.
With his plan revised and expanded to fit into three volumes instead of two, Newton urged Paltsits to complete his writing. “We must manage, somehow, to carry out this programme, as I cannot afford to let this book interfere with my professional and other work more than one more year.”
WHEN EUROPE BECAME engulfed in the First World War, the conflict came doubly home to Edith. Her relatives in England were swept up, of course, but so were the Bicknells, Helen’s English birth family. Edith saw the sons of her friends march off, and for once blessed herself for not giving birth to a male child. (“The time not to become a parent,” wrote E. B. White, “is eighteen years before a war.”) Ten-year-old Helen was only dimly aware of the senseless slaughter occurring across the Atlantic.
But Edith received regular bulletins—as many as could thread their way through the U-boat traffic—from the British “cousins,” the Quicks from Ashburton-Somerset and the Sinclairs from Scotland. Her father’s sisters had married into aristocratic families. “My wife has seven cousins in the English Army,” Newton noted in a letter dated December 20, 1916. “So far as we know, up to the present time, not one of them has been seriously injured.” Her favorite cousin, Charles, with whom she and her sisters had spent time in Paris as young women, could now be facing the prospect of brutal trench warfare.
Edith distracted herself from war news with the day-to-day operations of High-Low. The 175-acre estate at Khakum Wood had grown beyond a hobby farm into a full-fledged agricultural enterprise, with outbuildings including a hay barn, a cow barn, a gardener’s cottage, a farmer’s cottage and a horse-and-carriage house.
A favorite haunt was the precisely planted precinct abutting the main house, which Newton described as an “Old World walled garden.” On the mornings when Edith felt too poorly to take up her housekeeping duties, she walked along the garden’s formal stone balustrades, a figure in pristine white passing among blooms of red, white and yellow. She often wore white, and the unlikely, full mutton-leg sleeves of her prime still held on, but her dress would have a slimmer, more tailored outline, after the fashion of the day.
We have the testimony of Newton’s letters to indicate how often illness pressed
in upon his wife. “The doctor feels that it is best that my wife should go to the Adirondacks for a couple of weeks before settling down to housekeeping in Greenwich,” he wrote to their pastor in June 1917. Newton’s mother Helen wondered during the same period if her sickly daughter-in-law should stay with her at Brick House “to give Edith more rest.” The malaise resolved itself into a life-threatening bout of pneumonia. But Edith was nothing if not stoic, and between bouts of ill health would resume her usual active schedule.
Newton had burrowed so deep into work on the Iconography that his war anxiety rose chiefly over the impact the hostilities in Europe might have on the Book. The first volume appeared, at last, in 1915. That was a relief, and produced in Newton a sweet pang of pride. But the war created problems with both shipping and collecting material. Paper that was intended to go to Wieder in Amsterdam couldn’t get there. The spigot of the past abruptly shut down amid the violence of the present.
“I presume that these hot days are inclining your thoughts longingly to Europe,” Newton wrote to Robert Hone, a friend who was helping him locate a print. “There is no satisfactory substitute for a trip abroad, is there? I wonder how long it will be before travelling there will be possible. I presume it will be many, many years before it is again the pleasant hunting ground it used to be.”
With the entry of the United States into the war in 1917, matters got a little more personal. For the first time in eight years, Newton detached himself from the Iconography in order to commute to Washington, D.C., and offer his services to the government. He would have to leave Edith for days at a time to do so, but he felt it was critical to make the contribution. First he contacted Otto Eidlitz at the Council of Defense, volunteering for duty with the proposed war housing: “I should be proud to become a dollar-a-year man.”
Eidlitz, a prominent New York builder whose family firm had been responsible for the Metropolitan Opera, the stock exchange and various Astor estates, knew of Newton’s abilities, having served with him on the Tenement House Commission of 1900. He brought Newton on board under the mind-crunching title of Manager of the Preliminary Investigation Division of the Bureau of Industrial Housing and Transportation in the Department of Labor. Newton duly announced to his staff that the Iconography’s ongoing publication effort for the foreseeable future—hitherto a desperate race against time—would be indefinitely stalled. Sacrifices had to be made for the war to end all wars.
His experience in Washington reminded him what adult life outside a library study felt like. In his case, he constituted a cog in a vast collaborative enterprise, one devoted to creating tracts of homes for shipbuilders and their families. He struck up a friendship with a woman on the Department of Labor’s staff, Harlean James, to whom he later mailed chatty, nostalgic missives. In the many hundreds of letters from Newton Stokes that have been preserved over time, none have quite the same tone as these, leading to the question of just how intense their relationship was and to what extent it impacted the man’s relationship with his wife. James would go on to become something of a powerhouse in the field of land use planning, advocating for state parks as the leader of various organizations and as a prolific author.
The strain of holding a rigorous job and commuting a lengthy distance to it, as well as abandoning the Iconography as it appeared on the verge of completion—and, perhaps, the possible liaison with James—ultimately proved too much. After eight months, an exhausted Newton resigned from the war effort. He retreated to Foord’s sanitarium.
Edith was already there, driven by an unexpected cloud that had descended upon the idyllic Khakum Wood estate in the summer of 1918. A young married man “of bad character and reputation in Greenwich,” according to Newton, attacked and raped the twenty-one-year-old niece of his “nearest neighbor and friend, who also happens to be my chauffeur.” As if that weren’t horrendous enough, the girl was a deaf-mute with, in Newton’s words, “the mind of a child eight years old.”
With Newton busy in Washington, the responsibility of protecting the neighbors’ interests fell to Edith. After court proceedings in the matter, the defendant was found guilty, but political suasion was evident and he was punished with just one year’s imprisonment and a fine of $100. Then the sentence was commuted entirely. Edith found the whole episode excruciatingly stressful. She wished as always to do the right thing, but found it impossible to accomplish within the framework of the local justice system. Finally, in mid-August, she reached her breaking point. She fled for Foord’s “to recover from the shock and strain occasioned by this case and by the proceedings.”
Thirteen-year-old Helen stayed in Manhattan with her grandmother and other family members. The convalescence at Foord’s was supposed to be a short one, but it stretched on for months. Newton wrote to Harlean James, to apologize for his absence from Washington and the war. “I miss the work and the company very much, and sometimes I feel like a slacker, but I suppose it can’t be helped.” If one seeks to mark a starting point for what would prove a decade-long decline of Edith and Newton Stokes, this period at Foord’s would be a place to look. Illnesses became more frequent. Edith’s bout of pneumonia, precipitated by “working too hard this winter,” triggered a weight loss of twenty pounds. Then a “bad cough” afflicted her in 1920, so severe that Newton took her off to Bermuda by steamer for a month.
Illnesses, and a continual draining away of the couple’s wealth. Perhaps, in part, the great Stokes fortune had become something of a sham. When Anson passed away in 1913 and his will was filed for probate, all of New York was astonished to learn that instead of the $20 million predicted, the scion left less than $1 million, which after payment of debts and bequests to charities left roughly $58,000 to each of his nine children. His hereditary assets would thus not save Newton. Now, for tax purposes, he declared mammoth losses on the Iconography, to the tune of $204,412 in a single year, 1926, the equivalent of $2.5 million today. He had largely abandoned his lucrative architectural practice. Market losses devastated his stock portfolio. Income and estate taxes, newly instituted, took a bite out of what fortune he had left. He lost money in his real estate speculation, designing fancy co-op buildings that found few tenants after the boom years faded following World War I. He had overextended his reach and discovered himself deep in devalued Manhattan property. He invested money in Greenwich waterfront lots, and lost there too. In the last decades of his life, according to his own estimation, Newton’s net worth declined precipitously, from $1.75 million to less than $50,000.
THE FIRST, 473-PAGE volume of the Iconography appeared in 1915. It contained seventy-nine plates that depicted four periods between 1524 and 1811. The text comprised detailed descriptions of each work. Historical summaries of the four periods ran from thirty to one hundred pages. The oversized pages measured 22 by 29 inches.
Subsequent volumes would only be more bloated. In 1916 the second volume appeared, all 504 pages of it. Volume Two ended up not a continuation of One, as planned, but a book wholly devoted to cartography. The subject had increasingly seized the imagination of Stokes since he embarked on the Iconography. Volume Two had the wondrous Castello Plan at the forefront, along with the lengthy exposition about it, but also reams of additional maps and charts. Given an especially prominent place were documents that revealed the insularity of Manhattan Island.
After Volume Two’s cartographic intermission, the third volume picked up where Volume One left off. At 349 pages, Three contained plates and summaries up to 1909, plus a supplementary list of prints, drawings and maps.
Included, too, was the incredibly intricate Landmark Map, “prepared under the author’s supervision by Jennie F. and Clinton H. Macarthy.” Devoting a full forty pages to identifying more than ten thousand monuments, mills, banks, gardens, schools, parks and other landmarks of Manhattan past and present, the Landmark Map marked the legendary buttonwood tree on Wall Street under which the city’s early stockbrokers made trades, as well as the sites of sixty-six ferry landings. The Landmark M
ap used as its basis a plan of the island that had been issued by the city in 1891, here printed with color details and larded with microscopic type.
With Volume Three’s release, it was clear that Stokes had created a beautiful monster, one produced in part by his disinclination to limit the images or the text of the Iconography in any way. Every expense seemed necessary, every element was deemed vital. Newton even commissioned a photographer to go aloft in a hot-air balloon to capture a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan (one of the very few photographs in these pages). With his staff, Newton embarked upon the strange task of documenting a negative quality, generating a list of important maps, plans and views that had been mentioned by early writers or advertised in newspapers but that had at some point vanished. Neither Paltsits nor Hotchkiss nor any of the rest could put the brakes on their research.
Eventually, the true, crushing weight of the project revealed itself. There would be three more volumes after the third, a trio of catch-all tomes that would finish off the Iconography, if not Stokes himself, once and for all. The organizational schema was beginning to break down. The last three volumes became parking lots for material that could find no organic home. What had started as an orderly march had become a rout.
There were diamonds in the rough. The Chronology, a lovingly detailed account of the island’s daily events and occurrences, would become, for some historians, reason enough for the Iconography’s existence. The Index rendered the whole six-volume set navigable, if not comprehensible.
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