Tangled Trees

 

Introducing Mr. Primrose Avenue

George Primrose, promotional card, 1880s

 

In my hometown of Mount Vernon, New York, Primrose Avenue ran less than a mile between two main streets. Yet to a child, it seemed to go on forever, uphill and down dale. 

Since we walked and biked everywhere until we got our drivers licenses, the streetscape etched itself into our youth.  

Passing by, day after day, trudging or whizzing along, one couldn’t help noticing the graffiti on a traffic box, the unruly shrubs that overran a particular corner, and the tree roots pushing up sidewalk slates. 

I don’t remember seeing primroses but surely they had bloomed 90 years earlier . . . small vibrant flowers scattered beneath the trees that shaded Mount Vernon’s undeveloped tracts.

Of course that’s why the street was called Primrose Avenue. And the grassy triangle where the terrain dipped was Primrose Park.   

But the time has come to make a correction. The name has nothing to do with flowers. 

George H. Primrose, an entertainer who made his fortune as a Blackface minstrel, arrived in Mount Vernon around 1885. Before long, he built a “showplace mansion” for himself, his wife Emma, his brother Albert, and a terrier named Baby.

 

Primrose Avenue, circa 1900

In 1959, an old-timer watched from across the street as the big house was razed to make room for a parking lot.

He recalled Primrose as an “end man,” the comic who stands at the end of a row of performers at a Blackface minstrel show. The end man banters with the master of ceremonies, whose serious manner contrasts with the insulting racial stereotypes that the audience finds uproarious.      

Primrose, his role central to the show, continually refined his act. He was alert to “modern trends in minstrelsy,” according to a newspaper report.

Despite the demolition of his mansion, Primrose left an imprint on Mount Vernon. While he toured widely, he found time to buy land on the north side of the city where he built speculative homes with turrets, broad lawns, and wraparound porches. They still stand.

Scientific American published
special editions on architecture and building.
(1893)

By now no one recalls Primrose’s many appearances at the local Proctor’s Theater, which opened in 1914. How delightful to stroll along the promenades and enjoy climate control that was “cool and comfortable as an ocean breeze.”

  

Black minstrelsy became an American fixture during the 1830s, launched by Thomas D. Rice, who conceived the character of "Jim Crow,” a plantation slave.  

Before each show, white actors darkened their skin with shoe polish or burnt cork and dressed in outlandish costumes. They performed as duos or in troupes that drew crowds through the Antebellum Era, the Civil War, and into the 1920s.   

White audiences howled with laughter at skits, songs, and monologues that ridiculed Black life and culture. When vaudeville became popular in the late nineteenth century, Blackface performers also appeared on the bill. These variety shows catered to working-class whites, but racist entertainment also showed up in high and mighty places.

Poster for Primrose & Dockstader,
1880s

During the Theodore Roosevelt administration (1901-1909), the White House welcomed Mary L. Leech, a singer of “coon songs” including “You’se Just a Little Nigger, Still You’se Mine All Mine.”  

George H. Primrose, a Canadian born in 1852, came on the scene in Buffalo as a circus performer. In 1871, he turned to Blackface.

For much of his career, Primrose toured with William H. West. Their troupe, Primrose & West, celebrated its 25^th anniversary at Madison Square Garden in 1896. Mount Vernon residents must have been excited that one section of prime seats was set aside for them. 

 

During the show, Primrose & West pleased the old-timers with a clog dance from their early days and plenty of Blackface acts.

Just a few months later, the U.S. Supreme Court would establish the “separate but equal” doctrine in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

Racism was continuing at a nice clip.

As an up-and-coming city, Mount Vernon naturally would want to be in the vanguard, so it’s not surprising that a Blackface minstrel got to be the namesake of an avenue and park. 

George H. Primrose
(1852-1919)

https://www.throughthehourglass.com

Riccadonna

 

Riccadonna Restaurant
newspaper sketch, 1890s

The snappy young men bounded up the brownstone steps, opera stars trailed their gloved hands on the iron balustrade, and a few sightseers stood shyly at the door.

Close by, a bronze statue of a nude woman wobbled on her stand. Soon, she would be auctioned alongside pianos, looking glasses, tropical plants—the entire contents of the building, not to mention a three-year lease.

It happened without warning, just as anyone’s livelihood may suddenly be destroyed.

During dinner on August 1, 1897, a sheriff appeared at the restaurant, interrupted service, and ushered everyone outside. Then he announced that the proprietor, Abele Riccadonna, owed $1,000 to a partner in an import company that supplied the restaurant with macaroni and olive oil.

The next morning, standing at the curb, Riccadonna greeted a newspaper reporter: Ah! ¡Come va, caro amico mio!

The former owner stood amid the restaurant’s furnishings, newly arranged on the sidewalk and street. Gesturing toward the portrait of Garibaldi, the Bohemian glass dishes, and piles of linen to be sold that day, he declared, “I will begin all over again.”  

 

***

 

The Riccadonna restaurant and hotel had inhabited 42 Union Square since 1880. Its menu was sublime, le tout New-York declared: spaghetti, lobster, and fritto misto washed down with Chianti or Barolo.

 

Riccadonna menu

Oh! to have a “big time” in the opulent dining room, where crystal and candlelight sparkled and laughter and several languages flew through the air. From crowded vestibules and hallways, hopeful patrons watched and waited for a table.

Oh! to sit in the bay window overlooking springtime in Union Square, Chopin’s Polonaise in F-Sharp Minor floating down from the conservatory above. A visitor enthused:

 

The first blush of the rising breakfast that tints your reverie is radishes. They melt imperceptibly into sardines. There is no jar in the glowing glory of the gustation. It unfolds noiselessly and slowly: opalescent flushes of veal cutlet deepen into filet; orient omelette spreads over the scene, bringing with it a pristine sense of Parmesan cheese, and gathering color and force, the full breakfast breaks at last in salad and coffee.    

 

Born in Milan in 1848, Abele Riccadonna left Italy in his late teens and settled in Paris, where he worked as an apprentice and subsequently opened a restaurant on the Right Bank. He flourished until 1871 when the Paris Commune—a revolutionary government that controlled Paris for two months—scared him away.  

 

Abele Riccadonna, 1890s

Abele traveled to Havana and ran a restaurant there until yellow fever surged and chased him to America. He arrived in New York in 1873.

In the years after the Civil War, Italian, French, German, and Hungarian immigrants introduced a new style of restaurant service to Americans. Table d’hôte, also known as prix-fixe, was a European innovation.   

In eighteenth-century New York City, table d’hôte restaurants began as modest affairs, usually occupying the basement or front room of a house where the chef and his or her family lived upstairs.

Abele Riccadonna opened two restaurants in the West Village. Around 1880, feeling confident, he moved uptown to Union Square. Nearby, the Academy of Music—largely an opera house—attracted wealthy New Yorkers, diplomats, producers, and performers. They became his clientele.    

Regulars included the opera stars Adelina Patti, Diego de Vivo, Luigi Ravelli, and Pasquale Brignoli. The renowned actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse both dined regularly at Riccadonna.    

In 1894, on top of the world, he married Frances Reynolds, 25 years his junior, a daughter of Scottish immigrants. She and Abele named their daughter Adelina in honor of Patti.  

Three years later, the sheriff arrived and turned the Riccadonnas’ lives inside out.  

Rumors zipped around town: Abele was a drunkard and a gambler. He’d run out of money and couldn’t pay his debts.

It is true that the restaurateur had gone broke and owed money to a lot of people. That was because of his boundless generosity. The man adored artists and impresarios and would do anything for them.

If an artist was down and out, “Ric” would say, “Come! Eat at my table until you have work. You may pay when able. Come!” 

When “Ric” was down and out, no one came to his aid. “The ingratitude of his numerous pensioners cut the Italian to the soul,” wrote a reporter.  

There’s something odd about the story of Abele Riccadonna. What emboldened the sheriff to storm into a prestigious New York institution and shut it down? How did he arrange to auction off everything in less than 24 hours?

I think Abele may have been touched by the Black Hand, the Mano Nera. This society of extortionists, an extension of the Sicilian Mafia, rose to power in the United States during the late nineteenth century.

The tragedy of the Black Hand was that so many Italian immigrants were forced to reckon with it, even the most impoverished stonemason. No matter how little one earned, the Black Hand would seize a few coins. The men were scary—brimming with threats and violence. Demands often arrived in the form of a letter bearing an imprint like a skull and crossbones.

Abele Riccadonna would have been a good target. In order to keep his restaurant running, he relied on a tangled network of laborers, entertainers, and suppliers of food and décor. In 1897, New York City’s Police Department devoted few resources to combat the Black Hand and some cops were compromised or looked the other way.

Yet Abele did begin again. He opened a new Riccadonna on West 27^th Street and it was there, in 1902, that he died “in harness,” according to a newspaper headline, in rooms above the restaurant.

His nephew Angelo took over.

 

Riccadonna advertisement, 1900

In 1906, Angelo shook off a Black Hand demand that he fire a flutist who performed at Riccadonna. Although the police department announced it would redouble its efforts to wipe out the organization, Angelo decided to leave Manhattan for Brooklyn.

Between Coney Island, Steeplechase Park, and the race course, the Brooklyn Shore could hardly keep up with its own popularity. Angelo opened the Hotel Riccadonna in Brighton Beach. He invested heavily in the property, including the installation of cold storage, which received a lot of publicity in trade journals.

After several incarnations, the Hotel Riccadonna closed for good in 1927.         

If you're passing through Union Square around twilight, you might catch sight of Abele Riccadonna hurrying by. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2024/12/riccadonna.html

Tuberculosis

 

Montefiore Hospital's Country Home Sanitarium,
early twentieth century

A father and son, both stricken with tuberculosis, died 30 years apart.

Their cases were ruinous, and little could be done to save either man.

Sure, there were advances in treatment between 1905, when Jacob Olechowsky died, and 1935, when Bernard Olcott died. Yet the most reliable treatment remained rest and fresh air until the introduction of the antibiotic streptomycin after World War II.

In Bedford, N.Y., where Jacob convalesced at the Montefiore Country Home Sanitarium, and in Asheville, N.C., where Bernard was a patient at the Oteen V.A. Hospital, both men carried sputum jars and submitted daily to temperature and weight checks. 

Jacob lived to be 39 and Bernard, 38.

When Sarah—widow and mother—rode a bus south to visit her son at the V.A. hospital, passengers scolded her for offering her seat to a pregnant Black woman.

That was the story Sarah told upon returning home to her daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law. It was the early 1930s, the bottom of the Depression, as they sat at the kitchen table in their small apartment in New York City.  

I doubt that Sarah reported on her son. Her heart was a lock box, and she shared little. One of her secrets may have been that Bernard was not Jacob’s son. Jacob had left Russia and sailed on the ship Dania, from Hamburg to Ellis Island in 1895. Bernard was born two years later.

However, many immigrants fibbed about their ages on passenger manifests and naturalization papers.

When so much is obscured, how can one know the truth?

We know that Jews who fled the Pale of Settlement were not permitted to travel through Germany unless they had booked passage on a German ship from a German port.

In 1902 Sarah and her two children made the arduous trip through Austria and Switzerland and into Belgium to reach Rotterdam, where they boarded the Statendam.

Arriving in New York, they were met by Jacob and went to live at the farm in Queens where he worked. He already showed signs of TB and transmitted the disease to his seven-year-old daughter, Rose, as well as five-year old Bernard.*

After two or three years, Jacob became so sick that Sarah could not manage. She made her way through the complicated city, seeking social services.

She must have been quite desperate although certainly not alone in her plight. Public health was in crisis and tuberculosis the deadliest disease among Eastern European immigrants, exacerbated by small, crowded tenements and sweatshops.

Bedford Hills, N.Y. train station, 1900s.
Tuberculosis patients disembarked here and rode in a carriage
up a hill to the sanitarium. 

By the late nineteenth century, wealthy German Jews had established hospitals in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities. Now, Sarah hustled to get Jacob to Montefiore Hospital’s Country Home Sanitarium in Bedford, N.Y.

First, he was examined and diagnosed. He returned for various tests and a review of his “civic merits.” Finally, he boarded a train to Bedford where he was met at the station and driven to the sanitarium. Fed and bathed, he met with caseworkers to figure out a plan. I’m sure they all spoke in Yiddish.

Forty miles north of the city, the sanitarium had opened in 1897. Perched on a hill, it accommodated 170 early-stage patients who could look out the big windows at trees, sky, and sunlight. Many would become well enough to return home.

Recent picture of the Bedford, N.Y. train station

There also was room for 50 men with advanced tuberculosis, known as “incurables.” Jacob counted among them, I believe, because he appears to have died within a year after he arrived.  

With help from charities, Sarah placed her children in an orphans’ asylum until she could get back on her feet. A fine seamstress, she carried her sewing machine on her back and worked in the garment district.

By 1915, Sarah had retrieved her children, and they lived in Brooklyn. Rose, a high school graduate, was a bookkeeper and Sarah an operator in a coat factory. This data, typical of the time and place, repeats itself row by row in the urban census.

Unsurprisingly, Bernard enlisted in the army. It was a way out. He traveled to the Mexican border where General Pershing was in fruitless pursuit of the revolutionary, Pancho Villa.

I like to imagine Bernard leaving New York and going west by train. Desperate to assimilate, he had changed the family name to Olcoff. Now he could smoke and joke and become a man, having been reared in a household churning with female anxiety. 

During World War I, Bernard served in the Aisne-Marne, Saint-Mihiel, and Meuse-Argonne campaigns in western France. He worked in the engineer corps, building and blowing up roads and bridges. He didn’t see combat but was gassed and came home to the U.S. without a future.

It was 1920. 

The Army sent him to Tuscon where a sanitarium had grown from three to 86 buildings. The men lived in open-air cottages, hoping to recuperate. 

Bernard Olcott, Arizona, 1920s

In the early 1930s, betting on mountain air, the doctors moved Bernard to Asheville, N.C. He died there at Oteen, the government’s largest hospital devoted to treatment of TB.

Bernard smoked a pipe and liked to catch butterflies and mount them under glass.

I believe he was fixated on acculturation. He made sure that Olechowsky eventually became Olcott. 

 

Oteen Veterans Hospital, 1920s
(National Library of Medicine)

 

*It is possible that Jacob acquired TB on the farm, drinking unpasteurized milk or working with infected cows.

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2024/10/tuberculosis.html

The Bird Man Comes to Mount Vernon, N.Y.

 

Otto Standke, 1920s

In March of 1888, Otto Standke made his entrance at the family farm in eastern Missouri, the sixth of seven children.

They all grew up in a white cottage surrounded by eighty acres of orchards and vineyards. The family’s great sorrow was that their father lost his hand and part of an arm in a terrible accident. Thereafter he relied on his wife to manage the farm work.

Caroline and William Standke were German immigrants who arrived in the U.S. around 1870. They met and married in Ohio—secretly, to avoid a “charivari”—and rode off in a spring wagon to start their life together in Missouri.*

Among their children, a few married and others moved to Atlanta, Toledo, and Little Rock. Otto stayed nearby. 

He was interested in new mechanical devices, such as the gramophone, and games like puzzles and magic tricks. A natural salesman, he got a job behind the counter at the Montgomery Ward store in Kansas City.

On the side, Otto made money in landscaping and raising chickens. He was also busy inventing machines and securing patents, he said, although there is no record that he ever received a patent.

During the 1930s he moved to Great Bend in central Kansas, where he soon became superintendent of parks with special responsibility for maintaining the grounds of the Barton County Courthouse.

There was a curse on this courthouse.  

Through the summer and into late fall, Otto raked, mowed, and trimmed to perfection. And every morning the lawn, benches, shrubs, statues, bandshell, and playground were coated in the white droppings of starlings.

 

"Super Glossy Starling" from
The New Natural History by Richard Lydekker
(1901)

It was an infestation. As dusk approached each afternoon, thousands of starlings swooped into town, flew to the square, and roosted in the trees until dawn. 

When the dirty, noisy birds first arrived in 1924, Great Bend vowed to get rid of them. Over the years, nothing worked.

But now that World War II had been won and the atomic age begun, Otto stepped forward with a secret plan.

And sure enough, Otto rid Great Bend of its starlings. He worked at night and no one knew exactly how he did it. “It’s a military secret,” he told reporters just before Wichita hired him to evict the starlings that roosted on its department stores.

By this time, Otto carried his equipment in a large double-locked metal box and dubbed himself “the world famed only successful starling chaser.” Moving on from Wichita, he banished the starlings from the federal building in Indianapolis. Louisville and Youngstown also requested his help.

Then, in 1958, he was called east.

Mount Vernon, N.Y., a 30-minute train ride north of New York City, had been plagued by starlings and grackles since 1924. But its problem was not confined to a few buildings or a park; the birds roosted citywide, although they did have a few favorite neighborhoods.

“Active warfare” is how Mayor William D. McQueston described battling the birds, estimated at 10,000 annually, during the late 1920s. The New York Times reported:

 

Last year policemen were placed on duty armed with riot guns with which they peppered the trees sheltering the birds. The fire department was called upon to use the high pressure system and sweep the trees free from the nests, and roman candles were used, the fiery balls temporarily scaring the birds from their nests.

Mount Vernon policemen shooting
at grackles, 1950s.

One of the streets most affected by the infestations was home to a man born in Mount Vernon in 1920. Dr. Perlman of Commonwealth Avenue probably remembered the starlings and grackles from his childhood. 

He must have read about Otto Standke in the newspaper and wrote to Mayor Joseph Vaccarella, urging him to hire the birdman. The mayor agreed. 

By now it was August 1959 and Mount Vernon’s trees cast deep, indispensable shade, rustling with birds or an imminent thunderstorm.

Soon Otto arrived. Wearing a red plaid cap and chomping on a stogie, he climbed out of a cab with his suitcase and mysterious metal box. He ran up the steps to the Hotel Hartley. He was a brisk 71 years old.

 

Hotel Hartley in better days. 

The next day, greeted by the mayor, the health commissioner, and the public works commissioner, Otto signed a five-page $4,000 contract that stipulated staggered payments based on results.

He started at twilight on Commonwealth Avenue.

Surrounded by children in pajamas and adults carrying umbrellas, Otto had no choice but to reveal what he carried in his box: two metal flappers six inches wide and two feet long and a shiny metal chime, also two feet long, which he wore around his neck.

He put the flappers on his hands and set forth, clapping and clanging. Everyone followed along talking and laughing. After a while, the birds flew away.

Alas, things didn’t work out for Mount Vernon and Otto. The city gave him a week to get rid of all the birds. After six twilight treatments, they were as profuse as ever. And Otto complained that only starlings, not grackles, responded to his equipment.

Both parties agreed to revise the contract and more treatments ensued. Two weeks later, the birds remained in Mount Vernon along with Otto, who spent his time arguing with city officials and conducting telephone interviews with reporters. 

EFFORT TO RID CITY OF BIRDS TOTAL FAILURE ran the headline in the Mount Vernon Daily Argus.

In mid-September, after the mayor announced that the city would not honor the contract, Otto departed. He had new jobs, he said, in Philadelphia and Cleveland.

Still hoping to get paid, Otto sent a few friendly postcards to Mount Vernon officials. That’s how they learned that ABC television producers had proposed to fly Otto out to Hollywood.

“If Otto had not come to Mount Vernon and got all that publicity about his little box and its mysterious contents,” a city commissioner remarked, “he probably never would’ve made television.”

Now let’s see. It can’t be just because he was a Kansas man!

Perhaps it’s because of his promises and bluster, his craving for importance.

Somehow Otto had the whiff of the Wizard of Oz.

 

 

 

 

*A charivari is a mock serenade to celebrate a wedding.

 

Through the Hourglass: The Bird Man Comes to Mount Vernon, N.Y.

 

Cards

 

This photograph appeared in 1914 in the journal American Photography. It startled me. 

The picture jumped out from pages of shadowy portraits and idyllic landscapes, largely the work of the Pictorialist photographers, whose images were painterly and softly blurred.

The Pictorialists insisted that photographs were far more than proof of existence; they could be artistic, too. Indeed, Pictorialism became a popular aesthetic movement around the turn of the twentieth century.    

Obviously, this particular photograph, “Playing Casino,” is not of the style. 

Initially, I thought it was amusing: two slightly scary-looking children posed in a commercial studio in Buffalo, N.Y. 

But the hard-to-read notation, "New England Convention," suggests it was intended to disturb the viewer.    

The New England Convention of Methodist Men took place in Boston in November 1914. It drew thousands of Methodists from all over the country. The program addressed missionary work, Prohibition, industrialism, and immigration in New England.

"Playing Casino" must have been used to illustrate the social corruption of young children, perhaps in an exhibition, at the Methodist convention. Its inclusion in American Photography is puzzling. Someone must have snuck it in. 

A typical Pictorialist photograph

 

 

https://throughthehourglass.com/2024/08/cards.html

July Night