The Houses Lewis Bowman Left Behind: A Mount Vernon Story

Mount Vernon home designed by Lewis Bowman in 1917.
He and his family lived there until 1920. 

 

Bowman was born in 1890 in New York City. His family soon moved to a “Foursquare” on Franklin Avenue in Mount Vernon, N.Y., a fast-growing suburb.

“Foursquare”—because the clapboard house was boxy with a porch and a dormer, a rising architectural style that rejected ornate Victorianism. 

“Bowman”—because some people who live in the houses he designed more than 100 years ago have the habit of announcing: “it’s a Bowman!” as one might exclaim, “it’s a Picasso!” These homes are clustered in southern Westchester County, about 30 minutes by train from Grand Central Terminal.

Quite a few of the best-known, grandest houses that Bowman designed are located along Elm Rock Road in Bronxville, N.Y. They belong to very proud residents of a village that considers itself close to perfection, right next door to Mount Vernon. 

Yet Charles Lewis Bowman, who graduated from Cornell University in 1912 with a B.A. and an M.A. in architecture, left an equally consequential imprint in his hometown.

 

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While studying at Cornell, Lewis Bowman (he dropped “Charles”) worked summers at the renowned architecture firm, McKim, Mead & White. The prestige did him no harm, of course, but he said it was like working in a factory.

Therefore in 1912 he returned to Mount Vernon, moved in with his parents,  and joined the Milligan Company.

House designed by Lewis Bowman for the Milligan Company, 1917.

Lewis Bowman's drawings for the house pictured above.

Andrew W. Milligan had made a fortune in metals before turning his attention to home construction in 1906. His trajectory resembled that of Andrew Carnegie and other capitalists who rode the wave of modern industry. Milligan sold many a battleship and cruiser to the U.S. Navy during its sweeping nineteenth-century rehabilitation. 

Now 50 years old, Milligan rented an office on First Street overlooking the railroad cut and joined forces with Walter King Cooley, a hometown real estate broker who had planned to become a physician but changed his mind.

“I consider the outlook bright!” Cooley proclaimed to anyone who asked about Mount Vernon’s prospects.  

Walter King Cooley
Who's Who in Westchester (1925)

Indeed, most American suburbanites looked forward to a charmed future.

Milligan and Cooley planned to build up-to-date homes on small plots in a variety of architectural styles. Alas, Milligan died unexpectedly in 1907. Cooley continued the construction business, which was quite successful. Subsequently, he reorganized the company and established Gramatan Homes, Inc.*

Lewis Bowman was just 21 when Cooley offered him the position of chief architect.  

This decision transformed the new company.

Young Lewis Bowman in his studio
(Bronxville History Center)

 

The young man proved to be extraordinarily versatile. He created dozens of Colonials, Tudors, and English cottages that went up quickly during the boom years surrounding World War I.

I believe there are far more than have been identified. Clues appear in trade journals wherein Bowman’s designs were lauded. Occasionally, he published an article and sat for an interview. One can only hope that greater access to Bowman’s plans and properties will come someday, when the City of Mount Vernon decides to run a professional Building Department.

Bowman disliked modernism, insisting that he could not imagine swapping stone, brick, slate, and other classic building materials for steel.

Yet he embraced modern conveniences: attached garages, heated garages, the best furnaces and boilers, closets with shoe shelves, sinks flanked by porcelain drain boards, and so forth.

The houses that Bowman built in Mount Vernon fall largely within a slice of the Forster Tract (see previous post), a multi-acre property assembled by developers in the 1890s.  

Bowman designed this house for an investor's daughter. It is located on Frederick Place,
 Mount Vernon, N.Y. 

In 1917, Bowman decided to build his own house on a double lot in the Forster Tract. He had married Eleanor Holwick of Canton, Ohio in 1913, and their daughter, Jean, came along just as the house reached completion. Perched on a rocky corner, it incorporated features that would distinguish his later work.

House designed by Bowman, 1920, Mount Vernon, N.Y.

One wonders when Bowman began longing to be on his own. As the twenties progressed, he surely saw the possibilities. In the meantime, an unusual adventure awaited the Gramatan Homes gentlemen.

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/

 

*The company took its name from an Indian sachem who conferred land to white settlers, the area now encompassed by Eastchester, around 1700. The story has never been documented fully.    

 

   

 

 

  

 

   

 

 

 

 

Late Afternoon

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/01/late-afternoon.html

The Forster Tract: A Mount Vernon Story

 

Corner of Forster & Primrose Avenues, around 1900

Around 1890, when the lawyer Frederick P. Forster shifted his gaze from Manhattan to Mount Vernon, N.Y., the burgeoning village was two years shy of incorporating as a city. 

Beyond the commercial district where the railroad chugged through, much of Mount Vernon’s four-square miles formed a patchwork of farms, fields, orchards, and eighteenth-century manors.

A 39-year-old Boston native, Forster thrived on real estate deals, buying and selling along the Hudson River and in Riverdale. In 1888 he came to Mount Vernon to referee an auction of contested land.

Before long he returned, now in partnership with three local men: Winfield, Murphy, and Lucas. These three were big boosters of the city and looked forward to investing in property and making a lot of money.

The blustery Winfield claimed he was already a millionaire, having made his fortune buying and selling land in South Dakota.

Forster had no particular affinity with Mount Vernon, although periodically during the next 20 years he would make noises about building a house there. The house never materialized, and it appears that Forster conducted business from a distance.  

Ironically, three city streets are named for him although he declined the opportunity to lend his name to a small park.

Original bricks are still visible under
street pavement on Forster Avenue.

That park, where my friend and I used to chalk up the sidewalks with childish pictures, lay in the middle of what became known as the Forster Tract.

Eventually the four men amassed 75 acres. Since the tract bore Forster’s name, his investment probably was the largest.

By 1901 they were on their way. “The Choice Forster Tract Being Improved,” one headline stated, “The Most Desirable Land in Fifth Ward.”

Winfield, Murphy, and Lucas hired men to regrade the terrain, lay out and macadamize the streets, and install sewers and gas lines after slugging out costs with the city.

On some of the new streets one might find an old farmhouse. But most of the lots stood empty, waiting to be purchased.  

 

SECURE FIRST LOTS AT BOTTOM PRICES.
High ground, flagged sidewalks, high terraced lots.

Only 10 minutes walk to Station.

 

The Forster Tract 

 

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Alas or perhaps not alas, Frederick Forster never got to see the development of the Forster Tract. In 1912 he leased out the family home on West 84^th Street and skedaddled to Milton, Mass. with his wife Edith and six of their children.

There, in the winter of 1913, the Forsters hosted their daughter Dorothy’s wedding to a Yale man with the inimitable name of Rutger Bleecker Miller.  

Soon after, the scandal hit the papers. As executor of several large New York City estates, Forster had borrowed and embezzled upwards of $900,000, even causing one man to go to jail because he could not pay alimony.

The ensuing lawsuits and bankruptcy uncovered securities fraud.  

Forster’s defense—he claimed to have been afflicted with partial paralysis—did not hold water with the eminent Judge Samuel Seabury, who would go on to bring down Tammany Hall in the 1930s.

In 1914, Forster was forced to relinquish his unsold property in Mount Vernon. This may have broken his heart. If so, he did not suffer long, dying one year later at age 62.

I must confide that this news came as a terrible shock. Although it has been impossible to find a portrait of Frederick Prentiss Forster, I imagined him as an amiable bearded man who put the interests of his clients first.

It would seem to follow that the streets which bear his name—Frederick Place, Forster Avenue, and Forster Parkway—honored a generous spirit with an artful sensibility.

I love Mount Vernon, but it has a habit of misleading me.

 

 

 

To be continued.

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/01/the-forster-tract-mount-vernon-story.html/