Chasing Charles Hemstreet

 

Charles Hemstreet, 1900s

Up in Buffalo, N.Y., Lake Erie narrows like a funnel into the Niagara River. Even before the Erie Canal opened in 1825 and through the nineteenth century, a shipbuilding industry flourished on the American side of the river.

Charles Hemstreet’s father, William, was a Buffalo ship carpenter who helped build some of the steamers that plied Lake Erie carrying freight and passengers. William’s oldest son, Felix, became a ship carpenter’s apprentice at the age of fourteen.

But Charles, born in 1866, had greater aspirations. Although he advanced no farther in school than sixth grade, Charles loved to read newspapers and books about history. Around 1885, he went south to New York City to look for a job that would suit his interests. 

During these years, the city was home to at least fifteen daily English language newspapers. Charles worked as a police reporter at a time when the department was at its most corrupt. The job required much hanging around headquarters on Mulberry Street. Charles stayed a few years, then became night manager of the Associated Press, a position he held for a decade.

New York City Police Headquarters, 1890s
when Theodore Roosevelt was Commissioner

Everything seemed to come his way, this foppish young man with a poet’s hair, dark and wavy, who liked to assume dramatic poses.

An officer of the New York Press Club, Charles often visited a shaky old building on Spruce Street, off Newspaper Row near City Hall Park, to carouse with fellow members of the notorious Blue Pencil Club.

Blue Pencil Club members at play

He’d bound up and down the stairs with a bunch of mischievous, irreverent reporters, editors, writers, cartoonists, and illustrators. They published a bawdy short-lived magazine and ran all over town drinking and declaiming.     

Charles’s wife, Marie Meinell, daughter of a grumpy Civil War veteran from Oyster Bay, also joined the Blue Pencil Club. Not only did Marie qualify as a published author (of insipid poetry), but she was mischievous, too.

In 1893, quarantined in a hospital with scarlet fever, Marie decided to escape by sliding down a rope to the street. Traveling under the name “Edith Fish” because she thought she might be sent to prison for running away, Marie raced off to Jersey City and Philadelphia. Finally she made her way to the Adirondacks where Charles came to comfort her and presumably did not catch scarlet fever.  

Charles was just 34 when he announced his retirement from journalism. According to a widely published notice, he would now devote himself to writing books. His first one, Nooks & Corners of Old New York, was published by Scribner’s in 1899, followed by The Story of Manhattan (1901), When Old New York was Young (1902), and Literary New York (1903).

 

But Charles couldn’t just sit around and write books. One day he was called to the scene of an excavation for the subway in lower Manhattan. Italian immigrant laborers had unearthed a stone from a Revolutionary War fort. He told a Times reporter:

 

I understand that the contractor is preparing to present the slab to the New-York Historical Society. I will do all I can to prevent this. Once in the possession of the society it would be as inaccessible to the general public as though it had been left in its underground resting place.

He was correct. And how delightful to be regarded as an expert on old New York, long the domain of patricians with trailing pedigrees.  

In 1906, Charles and Marie sailed to Europe to collaborate with Jeannette Pomeroy on a scientific study of the appearance of American women. Mrs. Pomeroy, an English woman descended from Indian occultists—she said—was widely admired for her beauty advice and business acumen. The New-York Tribune reported:

 

If Mrs. Pomeroy is right in her conclusions that the women of America are growing less beautiful year by year, she will invoke national, state and municipal governments to aid her in forcing women to become beautiful whether they will or not.

 

The remedy for the dearth of beautiful women, Charles said in a statement, “is to simply surround women with delectable odors, dulcet sounds, palatable foods, beautiful sights, and correct ideas.”

 

Mrs. Jeannette Pomeroy

I was sorry to learn that Charles dealt in such sexist foolishness because he’s so likable otherwise.  

Enmeshed in a lawsuit that would result in the loss of her cosmetics empire, Mrs. Pomeroy faded from the scene while Charles and Marie stuck around to research a book, Nooks and Corners of Old London. Once back in the U.S., Charles accepted the position of manager of Burrelle’s Press Clipping Bureau. He had found a new career.

An Ohioan named Frank Burrelle established the bureau in New York City in 1888. It is said that he came up with the idea after overhearing two businessmen discuss the need to collect news stories about their own companies. Frank’s second wife, Nelle, expanded the business and became its president in 1910 after Frank died on a cruise ship in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

Nelle Burrelle deserves her own novel. It suffices to say she was an adventuress. When Louis Chevrolet invited her to race with him, they circled the 1-1/2 mile Morris Park Racetrack in 53 seconds. Shortly before her own mysterious death, she flew around in a Curtiss airplane above Mineola Field on Long Island.

Nelle Burrelle, 1910

In 1911 Nelle fell ill at her apartment in the Carlton Hotel on 44^th Street and was attended for several days by three physicians, including Dr. Jesse W. Amey whose romantic advances she had spurned after her husband’s death. The physicians listed acute nephritis as the cause of death but the coroner received an anonymous tip that Nelle had been murdered. He performed an autopsy and ruled her death to be of undetermined cause.

 Nelle’s will disappeared, of course. Then it reappeared, a torn, stained piece of paper that had been slipped under the door of Dr. Amey’s apartment, he said. Charles Hemstreet got wind of its existence and asked the surrogate to demand it from the doctor.

 

Burrelle's advertisement, about 1915

The date and Nelle’s signature were missing, rendering the will invalid. Unsurprisingly, given the shady story, someone leaked its contents: 16 shares of Burrelle Clipping Bureau stock to Charles Hemstreet, $2,000 to Marie Hemstreet, a few shares to various employees and relatives, and the balance to Dr. Jesse W. Amey.

One year later, the same surrogate approved a different will for probate. It split the estate between Nelle’s two sisters. And that was that.

If Charles Hemstreet was left out in the cold, he carried on at Burrelle’s and drew income from his books, which continued to be popular with the exception of a novel, The Don Quixote of America, the Story of an Idea, published in 1921.

The book stars John Eagle of upstate New York, who dreams of building a new city in the western wilderness and travels by train to Los Angeles. There, nothing goes his way. He is beaten up and the butt of jokes. Upon his return home, however, he is greeted with fanfare and hailed by his friends and family.  

One critic wrote:

 

The jacket hints of an “underlying idea.” I have spent weary nights over the home brew trying to excavate it. I leave it for future literary archeologists to unearth.

Charles Hemstreet of America, an idea for a story.

 

 

 

*Charles Hemstreet died in 1941 and Marie in 1943. 

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2022/10/chasing-charles-hemstreet.html

FAKIR!

Oliver Victor Limerick as Billy Burgundy

Billy Burgundy’s Letters, published in 1902, is one of Oliver Victor Limerick’s several rude books that ridicule high society, Wall Street, and affairs of the heart.

In the first chapter, “Jilted,” Burgundy writes about his ex-fiancée, Sylvia Heartburn:

A girl can fool a whole detective agency if she takes a notion. Just to prove what I say, Gertrude Hatpin told me last night that old man Heartburn was a janitor until he struck oil in Pennsylvania, and that the family history that I loved and respected was bought from a Fulton Street family tree fakir.

"Fulton Street family tree fakir"! I must investigate. Along the way, I might find out why a man named Oliver Victor Limerick would assume such a pedestrian penname as Billy Burgundy.

"Find the Fakir"
from a late nineteenth-century 
newspaper story

There are a few definitions of fakir: a Hindu or Muslim mendicant; a Hindu or Muslim man who rejects worldly goods. In antebellum America, fakirs were entertainers and necromancers, of various ethnicities, who performed magic and feats like levitation and “Asiatic jugglery.”   

The widely-known Fakir of Ava was an illusionist named Isaiah Hughes, born in England, who cashed in on the mania for miracles during the 1840s and 50s, touring the U.S. in make-up and regalia.     

After the Civil War, “fakir” came to be used colloquially to describe any con man or trickster. It likely got conflated with “faker.” Down on Fulton Street in New York City, a fakir was any peddler who sold cheap wind-up toys, Japanese dolls, all imaginable tzatchkes, and—according to Oliver Limerick—faux family trees.

Fakirs also harassed tourists “to bunco the hayseed,” according to one observer.

         

They bring in fluffy little puppy dogs, that look pretty in babyhood, but may be guaranteed to grow up into the toughest looking mongrels imaginable. They offer cheap cologne, that is labeled all right, but proves to be water when it is uncorked.

Sometimes, the fakirs ventured north toward Union Square, but the police chased them back to Fulton Street where they continued to attract crowds and the occasional reporter, this one in 1898:

FAKIRS’ TRADE BOOMING

Busy Times, These, Down Along Fulton Street

No one called Oliver Limerick a “fakir,” but he had the whiff of the unsavory about him. 

Born in the bustling river port of Rodney, Mississippi, in 1873, son of a pharmacist, Limerick made his way to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and graduated in 1893. Then he moved to New York City and secured an appointment at the Brooklyn Diagnostic Institute. From that perch, he announced a cure for asthma and hay fever: Asatco, a new Austrian drug, which was available in free samples by mail.

Before long, Limerick got caught up in a blackmail scheme involving the Frazer Tablet Triturate Manufacturing Company and the Cincinnati Health Department. Limerick was said to be the middle man between the city’s health officer and the company, demanding $10,000 or he would publicly “pronounce the tablets impure.”

In 1897, sentenced to two years in a state penitentiary, Limerick asked for a second trial and was granted one. I don’t know if he got off.

But lo, Limerick reappears in 1901 with a book, Toothsome Tales Told in Slang by Billy Burgundy. One critic described it as “weak, vulgar and insane.” That may have been the case. Either way, Limerick was imitating a popular series of pamphlets, Billy Baxter’s Letters, that reportedly sold four million copies.

During the late nineteenth century, a market developed for literature that featured “slang,” irreverent sendups of men and women’s foibles using a derogatory street vocabulary and self-deprecating style. 

The first perpetrator, George Ade, a Chicago newspaperman and playwright, wrote a syndicated column, “Stories of the Street and of the Town,” for the Chicago Record. Some consider Ade to have been the forerunner of Mike Royko, whose man-on-the-street columns appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Daily News across thirty years.

"Billy Burgundy's Stories to be Syndicated" 

A Democratic congressman, Edward W. Townsend, became famous for his “Chimmie Fadden” stories about the Bowery Boys, also heavy on “slang.” Two were made into films directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

Then along came William J. Kountz, Jr., whose Billy Baxter character “coined his slang and filled his little books with new phrases which gave unspeakable delight to people who are close students of English as it is twisted in this country,” according to Kountz’s obituary. He died in 1899 at age thirty-one.

When he wasn’t railing against “tobacco-phobes” who didn’t agree that smoking was a healthy pursuit, Limerick kept on publishing stories about Billy Burgundy. He fell in with a bunch of rowdy artists and writers who caroused all around town and never, ever shed their cynicism about women.

The doctor-cum-author died in 1926 and was returned to Rodney, now a ghost town ever farther away from the big bad city where Limerick left Billy Burgundy behind.

Rodney, Mississippi, 1940s

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2021/06/fakir.html

Untangling the Life of Xesia Y. Z.

Newspaper story about Xesia (1891) 

As a young journalist who covered the theater, Allan Forman hung around eavesdropping and hoping for a glimpse of the leading ladies.  

In 1886, Allan’s long edgy article, “Around the Stage Door, Men Who Haunt It and Girls Who Pass through It,” was syndicated widely in the U.S.

Surely he spoke from experience in describing the many ways that men made fools of themselves by fancying actresses and singers, married and unmarried.

 One that "knew" an actress --
sketch used in Allan's article

In 1900, he met and married his own actress, Xesia Yrsa Zephania Carlstedt. 

Really? you say.

Do you mean the Swedish-born Xesia Yrsa Zephania whose career never quite took off even though she acted in such memorable plays as “The Noble Son,” “The Pearl of Pekin,” and “The Corsair”? 

Do you mean Xesia Yrsa Zephania who inherited thousands of dollars from her former lover, a Swedish baron named Falkenberg to whom she was promised in marriage by her father, a consul general whose home was located next door to the baron’s castle?

The papers reported that she ran away to America to be free of entanglements. 

Cut to 1891.

“A Man About Town,” starring Xesia, has just flopped in out-of-town tryouts. The cast practically walked back to New York, critics say. Arriving home, the hapless Xesia received a thick envelope from a lawyer detailing the bequest of “the man who loved her so well and so unsuccessfully.” 

It was the baron. He left her $50,000!

She probably did receive the money, although some whispered that in fact the baron had rejected Xesia because she lacked aristocratic lineage.  

It’s not as if her family was undistinguished, however. Xesia’s father, Axel B. C. Carlstedt, descended from a long line of musicians and composers. The position of organist in the churches of Sodra Villie and Orsjo had been held by a member of the Carlstedt family for more than 130 years.

Axel emigrated from Sweden to the U. S. in 1872. 

Upon arriving, he moved to Massachusetts, studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, earned a doctorate, married an American woman, and eventually founded the South Side College of Music in Chicago.

Axel fathered 11 children. Some were born in Sweden during his first marriage but the details are hard to figure out.

What matters is that he went about naming them “in the most delightful way,” to quote Mary Poppins.

Since his own name began with the initials ABC, Axel continued the pattern with his children.

Thus:

Axel Bernhard Conrad, Jr.

Dagobert Edvard Fritiof

                            Gustaf Harald Julius

Knut Leonard Maltidius

                             Nellie Olivia Pauline

                                           Quelie Rosalie Sophie

Theresa Urania Vilhelmina

                             and Xesia Yrsa Zephania.

The names of the last three children did not fit the alphabetical pattern but exceeded expectations for ingenuity. They were: 

              Aberta Agir Ostgota, Detolfta Johanna Marie, and Bror Tretton Methodius.                    

While Axel taught music and became a papa repeatedly, several of his children, including Xesia, gravitated toward music and theater. She toured the country drawing slight attention for her performances, for no Lillie Langtry was she.

Meanwhile, Allan ran his magazine, The Journalist, and wrote about everything. During the 1890s, he addressed “The Cigarette Question,” “The Ways of Blackmailers, a risky business that doesn’t always pay,” and “The Typewriter Question.”  

He also complained about “Eating to Honor Somebody”:

It always seems a trifle absurd to me, to call together a lot of men to eat in honor of somebody. The respect expressed by inducing dyspepsia may be genuine. Ovations and oysters, sympathy and soup, releves and roasts, enthusiasm and entrees, homage and hominy, compliments and champagne, may all go very well together but . . . I should prefer a sandwich and a cup of coffee in a quiet corner.

Allan did not hesitate to be honored with a
Chop Suey dinner, given by the Blue Pencil Club 
(1901)

After their marriage, Xesia and Allan lived in Brooklyn until Allan’s father died in 1908. Then Allan retired and began a renovation and expansion of Nabichaugue, the family’s Long Island estate. He and Xesia lived there for the rest of their lives.

When Allan and Xesia renovated Nabichaugue before
World War I, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran a long story about it.

After Allan’s death in 1914 the Baroness, as she now started to call herself, drew quite a bit of publicity when she started farming at Nabichaugue to help the war effort.  

It may be a far cry from singing grand opera in the presence of cheering thousands to growing seed corn . . .  but it is understood that Mrs. Allan Forman of this place agrees that producing seed corn, when you hit it right, is fully as pleasant and almost as remunerative as appearing nightly in the footlights.

She was an acclaimed opera singer all along.

Xesia Y. Z. Carlstedt Forman;
passport photo, 1930s

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/04/xesia.html

 

Blue Pencil Bohemia

Ashcan School painter George B. Luks sketched dinner
at Maria's restaurant in Greenwich Village, 1890s.

In the 1890s, Maria’s restaurant on MacDougal Street drew quite a crowd.

Maria herself presided over the kitchen. While she cooked and served, men and women toasted each other, recited poetry, sang, teased, and argued as they milled around large tables.

At Maria’s, a meal of soup and spaghetti, roasted meat, salad, fruit, cheese, coffee, and Chianti could be had for fifty cents.

That’s where Ernest Jarrold – a newspaperman also known as Mickey Finn – often was goaded into singing “Slattery’s Baby.” Like much of Jarrold’s output, the song mocked Irish immigrants:

 Oh, I’m sorry to shtate I’m in trouble of late,

              From Slattery as well as the childer;

              He tries all the while me patience to rile

              An’ me poor broken heart to bewilder. . .

               

The scene at Maria’s restaurant, dubbed “Bohemian” by social observers and participants alike, rolled merrily along gathering artists and storytellers. Soon enough, it attracted uptown swells who hoped to be fashionably edgy. When Maria’s moved to Fourteenth Street, everyone followed. Intent on preserving their fun and exclusivity, the artists and writers established The Pleiades Club which met weekly at the restaurant.*

After a while, the lawyer and poet William E. S. Fales broke off to start The Blue Pencil Club. He located it in lower Manhattan near Newspaper Row, and invited the bawdy Mickey Finn and other journalists and illustrators to come along.

Among club members, the cartoonist R. F. Outcault was especially well-known. He had made his name with the inimitable character, the Yellow Kid. The bald urchin in an oversized yellow nightshirt emerged from a comic strip about street kids called “Hogan’s Alley,” which Outcault created for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Soon enough, William Randolph Hearst lured Outcault to his New York Journal. It is said that the term “yellow journalism” originated with the circulation battle that ensued between the two papers. **

The Yellow Kid is front and center in this panel
from R. F. Outcault's "Hogan's Alley."

The irony is that newspapermen like Finn and Fales were a long way from the down-and-out, unconventional style that took its name from the early-nineteenth century vie de Boheme of Paris’ Latin Quarter.

Still they persisted in identifying as Bohemians, even declaring Fales “the King of Bohemia.” There are many histories of Bohemianism in the United States, some of which mention the crowd at Maria’s and none of which mention the Blue Pencil Club, but I won’t split hairs.     

What’s interesting is that the newspaper offices where these men worked were spitting distance from the neighborhoods where Chinese, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants had settled since the 1880s. In this way, they were right on top of the cultural and social changes brought about by new demographics.  

One change was the proliferation of ethnic table d’hote restaurants in lower Manhattan. In those days, table d’hote referred to a small restaurant, often in a cellar, where the chef and his family lived, cooked, and served dinner to guests. For these boisterous fellows, a visit to a Hungarian, Spanish, French, German or Romanian joint constituted a Bohemian adventure. 

Something new and different, unsullied by crowds hoping to be cool.

Besides, by 1900, a spaghetti dinner could be had at one of many “Italian eating houses,” one writer would recall.

* The Pleiades Club continued into the 1930s.

** Since the cartoonist had not copyrighted “Hogan’s Alley” or its characters, the World was able to continue the strip by employing a different illustrator and retitling it. That illustrator was George B. Luks, who went on to become a member of the Ashcan School of painting. Later, Outcault created Buster Brown, a comic strip character as well as the mascot of the Brown Shoe Company of St Louis.

See posts: 1/25/17, 2/1/17, 2/14/17.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/02/blue-pencil-bohemia.html

 

Blue Pencil Boys

In 1899 when they started the Blue Pencil Club, the men were a bunch of rambunctious, though well-established, writers.

They rented some rooms on Spruce Street in lower Manhattan. Around the corner, the row of buildings that housed the city’s newspapers reached to the sky with a gold dome and towers.

The club was a mess, though:  The floor, when covered at all, was carpeted with sawdust. The ceiling decorations were mostly cobwebs. . .  The furnishings consisted of bare tables, tubs, beer kegs, a telephone and a bar.^*

From time to time, police busted the members for lack of a liquor license. But who had the heart to penalize such rollicking consumers of theater, literature, and Chinese culture?

Purveyors of wit that has, 117 years later, lost some of its luster, they joyously took down Tammany Hall, pompous publishers, and business titans.

But it should be noted they were rather smug themselves.

The point of the club was to have a good time, and to publish the Blue Pencil Magazine which they packed with doggerel, drawings, and tales ridiculous and fantastic.

Blue Pencil Magazine, cover of first issue

And the names of these men?

They were Billy Burgundy and Mickey Finn (pseudonyms) and Billy Fales.

And there was Forman, the pince nez’d scion of one of Brooklyn’s first families who got his start when the legendary Irish editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Thomas Kinsella, sent the lad to San Francisco in 1877 to cover an anti-immigrant uprising fomented by a labor leader named Denis Kearney.

Advertising card for cigarettes featuring Allan Forman

Forman ended up reporting on the Sand Lot riot, a three-night rampage during which four Chinese men were killed. He went on to write about theater, manners and the like. For 25 years, he edited The Journalist, the nation’s first magazine for writers and editors.

His essay, “How to Eat an Orange,” which appeared in Northwest Magazine in 1890, was well-received as they used to say.

As for Billy Burgundy!  Why would anyone named Oliver Victor Limerick need a pen name?

A Mississippi native who trained to be an allopath, Limerick was an incorrigible joker. He came to New York to edit a medical journal. After a while, he decided that he would rather write stories than practice medicine.

Limerick’s amusing advice column, “Billy Burgundy’s Balm for Burdened Bosoms,” and his books, such as Billy Burgundy’s Tales in Toothsome Slang, satirized romance:  

Percival was the confidential valve in the Borated Talcum Powder Trust, and drew down a voluptuous salary for his services in behalf of the Chafe-Allaying Industry. . .

Ernest Jarrold appeared on the frontispiece of
the February 1901 issue of Blue Pencil Magazine.

Then there was Mickey Finn, a.k.a. Ernest Jarrold, an Englishman who had been hanging around Newspaper Row for years, contributing short stories to The New York Evening Sun, Harper’s Weekly and other magazines. He often poked at Irish immigrants.

And there was Billy Fales – of whom his friends wrote:

Brave, brilliant Billy! No man or woman ever heard from his lips of the great grief that paralyzed his ambition and made a wreck of his career, for there was no yesterday on his calendar,

and

He often said that life was a joke and he generally appeared to make this epigram the maxim of his career.

A poet, essayist, diplomat, attorney, and adventurer, Fales bore the nickname “the Encyclopedia.” Married thrice, indifferent father of two sons, he caroused Manhattan, eating and drinking heavily.

Chow Chop Suey at Mong Sing Wah in Chinatown, the spaghetti at Maria Da Prato’s on MacDougal Street, the oyster stalls at Fulton Market, and the Lomo de Puerco con Platanos at Braguglia & Carreno on Broadway; Billy loved it all.

Artist's sketch of "Spaghetti Night" at Maria del Prato's

He steered the members of the Blue Pencil Club through the night, returning at dawn to his home on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights.

They called him, as many had been called before, “The King of Bohemia.”  

Through the Hourglass: Blue Pencil Boys

*See posts on William E. S. Fales, 2/1/17 + 1/25/17 & about his mother, Imogene C. Fales, 5/25/16; also post on Allan Forman, March 22, 2017.