During the 1960s, we lived in a Tudor house on a corner lot, built in 1917. Ivy crept up the stone chimney and twirled around an iron lantern at the front door.
The street it faced felt dim and mysterious yet wide and bright. A straight, quiet street with overarching sycamores and a slate sidewalk of many hues.
Sidewalks lilted up the sunny side of the street and darkly down the other, shaded in part by a granite precipice on which two homes perched.
The massing of slate, brick, and stone beneath tall trees was like a piano chord played by a child who holds the “sustain” pedal for as long as possible.
And Forster Avenue has, more or less, sustained itself.
The exception is a few houses that are falling apart, including the Tudor house on the corner where the windows are broken, the iron lantern has disappeared, and the weeds are as a high as an elephant’s eye.
I’m not optimistic.
But the Manhattan lawyer Frederick Prentiss Forster sure was optimistic when he came bounding out of Manhattan to make a mint in Mount Vernon, N.Y.
Frederick Forster did not actually attend law school but he was a Harvard graduate, class of 1873, who made his way to New York City where he boomed in the real estate business.
You don’t need to visit the municipal archives to examine the rolled-up maps that crackle with time. Every day the newspapers published Forster’s voluminous transactions in fine print, and now it’s all digitized.
Forster moved from firm to firm, sometimes working with his older brother George, brokering deals largely on the Upper West Side. There, on West 84th Street, he commissioned a five-story brick mansion for his family.
During the late 1880s, he had some business in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in southern Westchester County. Something about the place grabbed him. Ev'rythin' was up to date in Mount Vernon: newspapers, funeral homes, even a department store. The city fathers had just laid the cornerstone for a hospital.
And they had already made a grave mistake—the decision to lower the train tracks that passed through the commercial district. Italian immigrant laborers performed the back-breaking work. In effect, the railroad cut segregated the city and still does today.
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| Digging the railroad cut in Mount Vernon, N.Y., 1894 (Westchester County Historical Society) |
“Developer” wasn’t a term yet, but Mount Vernon's real estate men had been busy since the Civil War ended. Now, as the 19th century wound down, the descendants of 17th-century landowners were ready to let go.
It wasn’t Forster’s style to show up one day like a stranger in town. He found three associates: Richard M. Winfield, a newcomer to Mount Vernon, and John H. Murphy and Edwin Lucas, who had spent most of their lives in the city.
Was there a glint of the Wild West? Pocket watches and checkered vests. Nary a gun in sight, although they were girded with purchase agreements and leaky pens.
Not to mention that Lucas was once charged with assault in the third degree when he punched out a restaurant keeper.
Walking the dirt roads on the north side of the city, the four men eyed family estates, farmland, and even a golf club, which they eventually assembled into one parcel. The Forster Tract would encompass 75 acres.
The Tudor house on the corner lot rose years later, after Frederick Forster fled New York in disgrace.
Even today, more than a century later, certain Mount Vernon foreclosure notices refer to the Forster Tract, Map No. 1603, filed in the county's Register's Office on March 19, 1906. It looks like one has already been served on the house I love.
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| Map with the Forster Tract marked, 1920s |
To be continued.
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