Betty Wales Gardens: A Mount Vernon Story

 

Newspaper advertisement for home
 in Betty Wales Gardens, 1921

The Goldman Costume Company took off right around 1900, turning out dresses, skirts, and shirtwaists for America’s young women.

New York City’s garment industry flourished in sweatshops while the exhausted girls who hunched over sewing machines marched and struck for nearly a decade before they won higher wages and fewer hours. 

By that time, Jacob Josiah Goldman, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and president of the company, had become restless. In the manner of E.H. Harriman, he became J.J. Goldman and decided to leave the city.

J.J. moved his family—wife Lollie and four children—to Mount Vernon, N.Y. He purchased a massive stone house, “Grey Rocks,” up on a hill near the border of the highly restrictive village of Bronxville. 

Stone pillar at the corner of "Grey Rocks" property

There, in 1913, J.J.’s son Louis was married in a spectacular wedding where potted palms outnumbered guests. The mansion still looms over the street below, largely unseen by passersby.

In August 1914, while the world panicked about troop mobilization in Europe, J.J. Goldman announced a contest in the trade journal Women’s Wear Daily. Fifty dollars for the reader who proposed the best name for a new line of dresses for young women, to be manufactured by the Goldman Costume Company.

Up in Rutland, VT, Lena B. Carr, the business manager of a local power company, occasionally sat down at her typewriter and wrote articles for Women’s Wear Daily. That’s how the contest came to her attention.

Carr didn’t pull “Betty Wales” out of the air.

One of her neighbors in Rutland, Edith K. Dunton, was a Smith College graduate and author of a series of popular books starring a young woman named Betty Wales. Dunton wrote under the penname Margaret Warde.

The first book, Betty Wales, Freshman, was published in 1904. Seven more followed, in which Betty Wales attended college and found her first job, as a secretary.

Before J.J. Goldman chose the name “Betty Wales” and handed a $50 check to Lena Carr, he went to Vermont to meet with Dunton. They signed a licensing agreement. At Goldman’s request, Dunton penned the last book in the series, Betty Wales, Business Woman (1916).

It was a great match of bestsellers: Betty Wales dresses and Betty Wales books. Occasionally Goldman advertised promotions: buy a dress, get a free book. He opened Betty Wales shops around the country. Department stores carved out prime retail space for the brand.

Then Goldman turned his attention to real estate.

 

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Unfortunately, Mount Vernon was effectively segregated by a railroad cut, dug in the late nineteenth century, which created a “South Side” and a “North Side.”

By 1917, investors had bought up land well north of the cut. They intended to create residential neighborhoods far from the commercial district in the four-square mile city. 

Among the picturesque properties, the 75-acre Forster Tract, assembled during the 1890s, cried out for development. There was a rush to lay out and macadamize streets, plant trees, and build houses.

As a well-known philanthropist and founder of Mount Vernon’s Rotary Club, J.J. Goldman surely had made the acquaintance of local businessman Walter King Cooley, a crackerjack realtor and builder, president of a new firm, Gramatan Homes, Inc., where a talented young man named Lewis Bowman was chief architect.

Announcement in the 
Mount Vernon Daily Argus, 1917

Now they joined together to create “Betty Wales Gardens,” a 12-house community with a swimming pool and tennis courts. The Mount Vernon Country Club lay a block away.

The 12 English cottages would be designed by Bowman. Gramatan Homes announced:

 

The property is to be laid out in the form of an English garden, with shrubbery, trees, etc., and will probably have its own water supply from artesian wells.

 

Within two years, “two of the cutest little homes that have ever been built” were put up for sale on Wales Place, a new street without sidewalks that wended its way down a small hill.

More cottages followed and the development was successful. Bowman designed a few Tudor-style homes, too. I have identified 11 houses but not the twelfth.

Betty Wales cottage, built 1918

Then tragedy struck in 1921. J.J. and Lollie Goldman, who had sold Grey Rocks and moved to the Hotel des Artistes in Manhattan, were in a  car crash outside Chicago. Lollie was killed.

Goldman returned to Mount Vernon, where his daughters and their families lived. He moved into yet another stone mansion where his daughter Elizabeth (Bessie) Einstein lived with her husband Jay and their three children. 

Eventually, Goldman retired to Miami, where he died in 1948. By then, new brands were overtaking Betty Wales dresses.  

Wales Place remains, a quiet lane with an incongruous name off the beaten path. Some of the houses have been refaced or painted bright colors, and one or two look abandoned. 

And not an artesian well in sight.

Aerial view of Betty Wales Gardens
(Google maps)

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