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 Mount Vernon Territory

 

During the 1960s, we lived in a Tudor house on a corner lot, built in 1917. Ivy crept up the stone chimney and twirled around an iron lantern at the front door.

The street it faced felt dim and mysterious yet wide and bright. A straight, quiet street with overarching sycamores and a slate sidewalk of many hues.

Sidewalks lilted up the sunny side of the street and darkly down the other, shaded in part by a granite precipice on which two homes perched.

The massing of slate, brick, and stone beneath tall trees was like a piano chord played by a child who holds the “sustain” pedal for as long as possible.

And Forster Avenue has, more or less, sustained itself.

The exception is a few houses that are falling apart, including the Tudor house on the corner where the windows are broken, the iron lantern has disappeared, and the weeds are as a high as an elephant’s eye.

I’m not optimistic.

But the Manhattan lawyer Frederick Prentiss Forster sure was optimistic when he came bounding out of Manhattan to make a mint in Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Frederick Forster did not actually attend law school but he was a Harvard graduate, class of 1873, who made his way to New York City where he boomed in the real estate business.

You don’t need to visit the municipal archives to examine the rolled-up maps that crackle with time. Every day the newspapers published Forster’s voluminous transactions in fine print, and now it’s all digitized. 

Forster moved from firm to firm, sometimes working with his older brother George, brokering deals largely on the Upper West Side. There, on West 84^th Street, he commissioned a five-story brick mansion for his family.

During the late 1880s, he had some business in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in southern Westchester County. Something about the place grabbed him. Ev'rythin' was up to date in Mount Vernon: newspapers, funeral homes, even a department store. The city fathers had just laid the cornerstone for a hospital.

And they had already made a grave mistake—the decision to lower the train tracks that passed through the commercial district. Italian immigrant laborers performed the back-breaking work. In effect, the railroad cut segregated the city and still does today.  

Digging the railroad cut in Mount Vernon, N.Y., 1894
 (Westchester County Historical Society)

“Developer” wasn’t a term yet, but Mount Vernon's real estate men had been busy since the Civil War ended. Now, as the 19th century wound down, the descendants of 17th-century landowners were ready to let go.    

It wasn’t Forster’s style to show up one day like a stranger in town. He found three associates: Richard M. Winfield, a newcomer to Mount Vernon, and John H. Murphy and Edwin Lucas, who had spent most of their lives in the city.

Was there a glint of the Wild West? Pocket watches and checkered vests. Nary a gun in sight, although they were girded with purchase agreements and leaky pens.

Not to mention that Lucas was once charged with assault in the third degree when he punched out a restaurant keeper.

Walking the dirt roads on the north side of the city, the four men eyed family estates, farmland, and even a golf club, which they eventually assembled into one parcel. The Forster Tract would encompass 75 acres.

The Tudor house on the corner lot rose years later, after Frederick Forster fled New York in disgrace. 

Even today, more than a century later, certain Mount Vernon foreclosure notices refer to the Forster Tract, Map No. 1603, filed in the county's Register's Office on March 19, 1906. It looks like one has already been served on the house I love.   

 

Map with the Forster Tract marked, 1920s

To be continued. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/