Now and Then

 

Why We Celebrate Our Holidays 
by Mary I. Curtis (1924)

In the chilly spring of 1888, James Russell Lowell was invited to give an address at the newly established Reform Club of New York. 

A well-known political and social observer, the bushy-bearded Lowell had honed his intellect since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1842. Poet and essayist, diplomat and abolitionist; a linguistics scholar who became the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Lowell moved in distinguished literary circles.

Lowell also drew contempt. Some of his peers dismissed him as a moody lightweight who espoused convenient, inconsistent arguments. He and the Transcendentalist author Margaret Fuller detested each other. “Posterity will not remember him,” she once wrote.   

However, in his remarks at the Reform Club, just a few years before his death at age 72, Lowell identified an interesting twist in American culture. It seems especially intriguing now, when we face controversial interpretations of patriotism and American history.

Up until the start of the Civil War, Lowell told the elite audience, Americans were filled with optimism, “seeing the future in rose-color.”  

He had an explanation for this antebellum anticipation of endless American glory. 

“The hues of our dawn had scarcely faded from the sky. Men were still living who had seen the face and heard the voice of the most august personage in our history.”

Did he mean George Washington? I believe so. 

“This was what may be called the Fourth of July period of our history,” Lowell said.

During that time, he explained, Americans were still close to the epochal events of the past. Inevitably, many traditions had fallen by the wayside. A few old holidays—once momentous celebrations—had lost their meaning, and industrialization chipped away at community cohesion.

Yet thousands of Americans still remembered the big events or held onto the 18^th- and 19^th-century stories recounted by people who were there in the moment. For many years, those memories drove profound feelings of citizenship. 

Of course we could not live perpetually in the Fourth of July period, but it continued to glimmer.

During the Bicentennial in 1976, the writer Brendan Gill mused aloud that we possess founding documents but no recordings of founding voices. After a pause, his friend Ned announced: “I have heard an eighteenth-century voice.”

 

“We pressed him to tell us how that was possible,” Gill recalled. ‘I was born in 1883,’ Ned said, ‘and I was brought up in part by my great-grandmother, who as a little girl was taken down to the new Federal Hall, on Wall Street, to observe Washington being sworn in as the first President of the United States. That was in 1790.’”

Statue of George Washington
Federal Hall, New York City
(National Park Service)

Through these remarkable leaps, 20^th century Americans could touch the deep past. My mother liked to recall a parade in the 1930s where she watched veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic march by.

Really? I’d ask, dubiously.  

Yes, really. In fact, there is a newsreel of the parade. On Memorial Day 1935, Civil War veterans were among the soldiers who marched up Broadway toward the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Riverside Park.  

Universal Newspaper Newsreel, May 1935

G.A.R. veterans at the 1935 parade

Even today, the past may resonate unexpectedly, unprompted by a monument, fireworks or a battle reenactment. You might be driving on Interstate 435, a beltway that surrounds the Kansas City metropolitan area. Along the way, the road slopes down to a marsh. The land is undeveloped although not primeval. A low bridge carries you across the Missouri River. 

You might recall “Shenandoah,” a popular 19^th-century American folksong.

 

            Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

            Away, you rolling river

            Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

            Away, I’m bound away, ’cross the wide Missouri.

             

“Shenandoah” is a lilting river ballad filled with love and longing. Any online search will tell you that. Shenandoah was an Indian chief whose daughter the riverboat captain wished to marry but had to leave behind. 

And there you are, back in time and place, brushing up against the Fourth of July period of our history. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/07/now-and-then.html

Onstage with Evelyn Archer

 

Evelyn Archer, newspaper photo, 1927;
earliest known picture of her. 

One of the lovely aspects of early-twentieth-century American life was the wide-open opportunity for reinvention. Not just once, but as often as necessary. You could hop on a train and disappear into cities and small towns. Abandon everything, even your past! Not a breadcrumb left behind.

Eva Sterry Hubbard, born in Wisconsin in 1878 or 1880 or 1885, got out as soon as possible. She would have done well enough in the river city of Eau Claire, the daughter of Martin, a county clerk, and Alice, a descendant of settlers, who liked to address the crowd on patriotic holidays. 

Perhaps Eva consulted an astrologer and saw her future in the theater, so off she went to Chicago. While time ticked on and the century wound down, she probably worked as a cabaret dancer. Burlesque had kicked and teased its way into the city with the 1893 Columbian Exposition.    

Eva decided to take a stage name—“Evelyn Archer”—and her star rose a bit. Cast in Quo Vadis?, a six-act drama about Nero’s destruction of Rome and the rise of Christian martyrs, Evelyn toured Jim Crow America with performances in Indiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Missouri, and Kentucky.

In 1901, she married James Dille Barton, born Dillie Barton Black in Newark, Ohio, son of a Scottish immigrant physician.

Barton was at least 12 years older than Evelyn but the same age in ambition. He, too, escaped his hometown, along with his given name, because he saw his future in show business. The couple left Chicago and went east where J.D., as he dubbed himself, hit the jackpot as a theatrical agent and producer.

J.D. Barton, passport photograph

They settled in a New York City suburb, Mount Vernon, and built a grand house. Evelyn had a baby, bought a brindle bull puppy, and forsook the theater for a while. She and J.D. gadded about town. When they visited the circus, a monkey reached through the bars of his cage, grabbed a $300 diamond pin from Evelyn’s lapel and swallowed it “with a little jerk of his neck,” noted a reporter. The circus refused to chloroform the monkey or reimburse the Bartons. 

Archer appeared on Broadway in 1918.

The marriage ended quietly and the glitz receded. Evelyn and her little girl moved to a more modest house several blocks away. Evelyn landed a few Broadway roles, including The Copperhead (1918), opposite Lionel Barrymore. Before long she heard the siren song of Florida.

St. Petersburg, 1920s

The 27^th state had become its own brand of the Wild West, a place for reinvention; perfect for Evelyn. She and daughter Polly, now about 11 years old, arrived in St. Petersburg right after the end of World War I when the land boom began its rumble. By the mid-1920s, real estate speculation reached a frenzy as investors snapped up waterfront lots for hotels, apartment houses, and casinos. 

But September 1926 spelled devastation. The Great Miami Hurricane wiped out the coastline, local banks, and investors. In fact, the hurricane triggered Florida’s economic decline well before the 1929 Wall Street crash.

Evelyn landed on her feet, or perhaps on her Cuban heels. She had married Fred Rittenhouse, a prominent dentist and realtor, in 1925. Newly launched as president of the “New York Society”—an association of 330 New Yorkers who wintered in Florida—Evelyn regained social stature and influence.    

Cuban heels were all the rage in the 1920s.

After Polly won a few beauty contests, Evelyn brought her daughter back to New York City, helped her get a job with the Ziegfield Follies, and guided her toward movies. As Polly Archer, she appeared in Java Head, The New School Teacher, and The Enchanted Cottage in the early twenties.   

Her greatest feat was yet to come. On New Year’s Eve, 1929, Polly wed a local theater owner while soaring high over St. Petersburg in a “Tin Goose,” Henry Ford’s three-engine airliner.

Polly Archer's wedding photo

The city sparkled 1,500 feet below as the bride and groom walked to the rear of the plane, where the Reverend J.A. McClure performed the ceremony at the stroke of midnight.

The guests threw rice as the plane began its descent. Two hundred people greeted the bridal party at the end of a grass runway at Piper-Fuller Field.

Polly’s career languished and she became an apartment building manager in St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, the snowbird population grew and Evelyn came to preside over an empire. Inevitably, as the years passed, she lost her cache and had to let go.

I guess they made the best of things, a mother and daughter who didn’t land in the place they’d hoped for.

*Evelyn Barton Rittenhouse died in 1970, outliving Polly by eight years. J.D. Barton flourished as a writer and producer, including his 1907 drama Through Death Valley, based on his encounters with rattlesnakes while living in Arizona.       

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/

 

 

 

How I Got to Harry

 

The little boy levels a serious gaze at the photographer peering through a Graflex camera. Ery Kehaya, Jr. has just tugged off a veil that covered The Discus Thrower, a bronze statue by a Greek sculptor who won first prize in an art contest held in conjunction with the 1924 Paris Olympics.

Now Ery’s father, a Turkish-born businessman married to a Southern belle, will present the statue to the City of New York. Grace stands beside him on the dais, watchful but smiling.

And look over there at the man with the wispy gray beard, 84^th Street receding over his shoulder. Dressed in an overcoat on a warm spring day, he seems to have emerged from the eighteenth century. Is he Rip Van Winkle?

Impossible—this is Central Park, May 1926.    

The Kehaya family liked Park Avenue apartments and inhabited quite a few during the decades when Ery, Sr. ran the Standard Commercial Tobacco Company. Born in 1885, he grew up near Samsun, Turkey, along the southern coast of the Black Sea, a region known for a particular type of tobacco: aromatic and nutty with small leaves. 

Steered by his family toward religion and philosophy, Kehaya decided to go into the tobacco business instead. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1910 and founded his company two years later with $5,000. By 1928 the company had become a public corporation worth $12 million.

Kehaya influenced the tobacco trade in two important ways. He popularized Kentucky, Virginia, and Carolinas tobacco among Europe monopolies, and he introduced Asian and European tobaccos to American cigarette manufacturers.

It was all about the blend.

Ery Kehaya, 1926

Kehaya’s 1964 obituary did not mention the $4 million stock swindle that he and three of his officers pulled off in 1937. At trial, they pleaded guilty to violating Federal mail fraud, securities and exchange, and conspiracy statutes. The fines totaled $8,400; no sentences were imposed.

The company reorganized and flourishes today. The two-year old boy who disrobed the statue grew up and joined the company in 1945. He started by unloading tobacco on the New York docks and retired as chairman.

 

***

 

Among the four perpetrators, Harry D. Meyer was a vice president and director of Standard Commercial. The newspapers reported that he lived in Bronxville, an affluent village outside the city.

Like Ery Kehaya, Harry was born in 1885. His parents, Henry and Henrietta, were Alsatians who arrived in New York City during the 1880s, peak years of German immigration.

Living in Weehawken, N.J., the Meyer family grew quickly with seven children across 14 years. Henry owned a restaurant for some time. His sons went to work at young ages: Arthur and Herman became machinists in a factory and Harry, Edward, and Louis were office clerks.

Daughter Flora took off early; married and moved to Spokane. The youngest, Alfred, graduated from Cornell and became a veterinarian.

Now here came Harry, evidently ambitious. At the American Express Company, he started as a file clerk and was assistant to the general manager of the New York office when Standard Commercial hired him.  

American Express building,
Manhattan, 1910

Originally, American Express was a transport company. Until shifting to travel services during World War I, it specialized in freight forwarding. Freight forwarding encompasses all logistics and documentation involved in shipping a product (like tobacco) internationally.

Of course, the import and export of tobacco lay at the center of Keyaha’s business, and hiring Harry would have brought expertise in shipping. Unsurprisingly, Ery Kehaya came to depend on his new employee.

Within a few years, he entrusted Harry with an intriguing mission at a critical time in Western history.  

On February 21, 1917, Standard Commercial asked the U.S. Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, for permission to send Harry Meyer overseas.

The plan was for Harry to visit Russia, where he would purchase and arrange the shipment of tobacco to the U.S. Next up: Japan, Sweden, Norway, Canada, and England. The trip would last about six months.

Off went Harry on the Empress of Asia, departing Vancouver on March 15 and arriving in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) on April 22, 1917.

This was 16 days after President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany and six days after Vladimir Lenin, after years of self-exile in Europe, returned to Russia.

Petrograd, 1917

During Harry’s weeks in Russia, the country was in turmoil. Following the February Revolution, just months earlier, the Bolsheviks had forced the Tsar to abdicate.

With the Tsar dispatched, a Provisional Government, democratic in spirit, shared power with the Soviet (Bolsheviks). But the new regime did not fulfill its promise to lift up the starving, beleaguered masses, and Russia continued to commit soldiers and money to the Allied Powers fighting Germany.

Subsequently, the Bolsheviks withdrew their support of the Provisional Government and consolidated power under Lenin and Leon Trotsky. This was two days after Harry’s arrival.

The Bolsheviks quickly nationalized tobacco production. One wonders what became of the shipments Harry arranged. 

***

In 1944, Ery found his friend dead in his room at the Hotel Fresno. The two men had traveled to California to explore the possibility of raising tobacco in nearby Clovis. This would have been an unlikely enterprise. Fresno was a center for manufacturing and distributing cigarettes during World War II, but the soil had already proven to be inhospitable to tobacco.

The coroner reported that Harry died of a heart attack while playing solitaire.     

Hotel Fresno in its interwar heyday

 

*The Discus Thrower stood in Central Park until 1936, when it was moved to Randall’s Island. After years of neglect and vandalism, it was restored and now stands in the shadow of Icahn Stadium.

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/03/how-i-got-to-harry.html

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.

 

***

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/2026/02/the-houses-lewis-bowman-left-behind-html 

 

*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.    

 

   

 

 

  

 

   

 

 

 

 

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 

 

***

 

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/

The Short Happy Life of Norman F. Wells: a Mount Vernon Story, Part II

 

Newspaper announcement, 1939

When he registered for the draft in 1918, Norman Wells described himself as a “print expert.”

His employer, the prestigious commercial art gallery M. Knoedler & Co., prized his knowledge and taste. Yet he had started his career as a clerk, uninitiated in the art world.

Nearly every summer between 1924 and 1938, Norman traveled with his wife Mathilde to Europe. There he met with art dealers and visited museums and chateaux, wherever an Old Master print might turn up and he could make an offer. 

Paris, London, Amsterdam, Geneva – which city did he love most?

That would be Mount Vernon, N.Y., where he grew up rough-and-tumble with the neighborhood boys; friendships forged for life.

Norman joined Knoedler in 1897 when he was 22. I imagine the commute, which would last for fifty years. He steps onto a train at the Mount Vernon West station and rides to the city; walks down Fifth Avenue to the firm’s rowhouse gallery at 34^th Street.

Over time the company moves farther north and Norman keeps rising.

He is a busy man.

Back in turn-of-the-century Mount Vernon, an exhilarated Norman just became a volunteer fireman with Engine Company 3, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. Commissioners, chiefs, deputy chiefs, superintendents, and captains—he knew them all and they loved him like a brother, revered his modesty and judgment.

Mount Vernon, N.Y. Fire Department, 1908

Norman also had just dipped his toe into local Republican politics. During the next four decades, he would attend every party dinner, meeting, and inaugural buffet. He hobnobbed with the popular Mayors Edwin Fiske and Edward Brush and sought appointments on local commissions.

Perhaps his favorite Mount Vernon pursuit was the Mike Nitz Bowling Club, organized in fall of 1897—that lucky year—with Norman as its captain.

The club’s first big event did not occur at a bowling alley but on City Island, which is located in Long Island Sound very close to The Bronx.  

City Island is fun, the way it transports you to an eighteenth-century village on the Massachusetts coast. In 1897, when the bowlers crossed the bridge in a carriage lent by the local funeral home, City Island must have been a blast. 

City Island Drawbridge circa 1880
www.bridgesnyc.com 

Norman and nine of his friends went to Flynn’s Restaurant, where they danced till midnight and then devoured a sumptuous feast, according to the Mount Vernon Argus. Everyone was home by 4 in the morning.

In 1898 they had another great time: dinner at Bock’s Alleys in Mount Vernon, followed by performances on banjo and xylophone.

In 1899, the highlight of the year turned out to be a Decoration Day outing with baseball, fishing, boating, and a shore dinner to beat the band.

Checking the old scores in the local papers, I understand why the Mike Nitz bowlers were happiest when they were eating and drinking. The club ranked poorly in its league.

But the happy bowlers persisted: beer bottler William Hobby, lawyer George Appell, saloonkeeper Alvin Bardes, county clerk Leon St. Clair Dick, jeweler Alfred Schickerling, diamond setter Martin Van Orden, and Norman Wells.

They rolled on after Norman’s death, and never forgot him.

Parke-Bernet auction catalogue, 1946.
Mrs. Wells sold most of the couple's prints.  

See part I, August 13, 2025

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2025/10/the-short-happy-life-of-norman-f-wells.html 

Note: During the summer of 1940, Mathilde Wells presented the Mount Vernon Public Library with print cases for the new Norman F. Wells Alcove on its spacious second floor. She changed the displays seasonally—bird etchings, scenes of old New York, and work by modern artists Louis Lozowick and Martin Lewis—until her death in 1964.