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.

 

***

 

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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Betty Wales and J. J. Goldman

Ambitious and imaginative, J. J. Goldman filed
a patent for a button-detachment device in 1893.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Jacob J. Goldman and his brother Michael were chugging along in the garment business in New York City.  Their company, Gold Quality Skirts, manufactured skirts for women and girls. 

They were the sons of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before the Civil War and settled in Baltimore.  Their father Samuel had brought a trade from Poland:  he was a tailor who specialized in hoop skirts.

Therefore, it is not surprising that Samuel’s sons went into women’s apparel.  By 1880, Jacob had moved to New York to start his career.  Michael soon joined him.   

At that time, the “needle industries,” as some called the garment business, occupied large swaths of Manhattan.  As far north as Fiftieth Street all the way down through the Village and ending east of City Hall, women’s wear was manufactured in tenements and factory buildings where immigrants toiled over sewing machines and other equipment or worked by hand.  These places were known as sweatshops.*

This 1922 map shows how the garment industry
(red and blue) was eventually consolidated
below 34th Street in Manhattan.

Around 1900, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) began to demand better working conditions and humane treatment of workers.  In 1909 they scored success with 14-week strike in which 20,000 women participated.

That same year, the Goldman brothers met their own kind of success with the new Goldman Costume Company.  By 1910, J. J. was ensconced on Riverside Drive with his wife Lollie and their two children.  

Then J. J. had an idea. He wanted to develop a new line of dresses for young women; those in college or at the beginning of their careers. In search of a name for the new brand, he announced and advertised a contest in a trade journal, Women's Wear. After a mix-up involving the winner, he chose the name "Betty Wales," suggested by Lena Carr, an administrator at a power company in Rutland, Vermont. 

Edith Kellogg Dunton published Betty Wales, B.A. under her pseudonym, Margaret Warde, in 1908.

It just so happened that one of Carr's neighbors was Edith Kellogg Dunton, a Smith College graduate and author of the bestselling girls’ series Betty Wales.

The daughter of a judge, Edith was born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1875.  At the age of 18, she entered Smith, where she flourished as a writer.  After graduating in 1897, she worked as an English teacher in Rutland.  She also managed publicity for Smith, and received praise for her clever public relations strategies.

Then inspiration struck.  Edith decided to write a series of books for girls, all starring a capable young woman named Betty Wales.  There would be eight books, from Betty Wales, Freshman (1904) to Betty Wales, Business Woman (1917), all published by the Penn Publishing Company in Philadelphia.  Edith used the pseudonym Margaret Warde although her fans soon uncovered her identity.

Edith Kellogg Dunton, 1900

Many aspects of the stories seem autobiographical as Betty makes her way through the fictional Harding College and out into the world, surrounded by a circle of devoted friends.  The books were promoted as “college stories” about modern young women.  They quickly became bestsellers.

Now here came J. J. Goldman with a proposal for Edith and the Penn Publishing Company. Of course, J. J. and Edith made an unlikely pair. But he knew he could harness the popularity of the books and its heroine.   

The deal was sealed in 1915.  Within a few years, J. J. renamed his company Betty Wales Dressmakers.  Eventually, after his brother Michael died, he manufactured only Betty Wales dresses.

Ever the innovator, dubbed “father of a great idea,” J. J. devised all sorts of gimmicks to build the brand. 

His opening gambit was that every woman who purchased a Betty Wales dress would receive one of the books.  In the early 1920s he staged a contest guaranteeing a free dress to booksellers who sold a certain number of Betty Wales books.  Another contest asked for slogans; yet another for essays on “Why customers buy Betty Wales dresses.” 

As sales rose, J. J. spent heavily on advertising, especially in women’s magazines.  No one had done that before.  Patent medicine and soap?  Those items had been advertised for years in the Ladies Home Journal. 

But never a women’s clothing brand.

J. J. decided to make Betty Wales dresses available exclusively at one store per city, and eventually, he started a chain of Betty Wales Dress Shops.  By the 1930s, a kind of fervor surrounded the dresses, as reported in The American Cloak and Suit Review:

Betty Wales is a practical Twentieth Century personification of an idea, with the power to materialize to the modern girl or young woman in the form of a dress, a smart, refined, wearable and original dress, more dear to the heart of a girl than any legendary Goddess.

The dresses were popular through World War II and lingered into the early 1960s, although J. J. had long since sold the business and moved to Florida.  He died in 1948.  Edith spent most of her life in Rutland, where she died in 1944.  Penn Publishing continued to turn out juvenile book series through the postwar era.

And Betty Wales – she lifted her lamp beside the golden door of merchandising.   

*The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire killed 145 young women who could not escape the sweatshop because the doors were locked.  That tragedy led to major reforms demanded by organized labor.

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