Hidden Landmarks: Private Houses

Title: Hidden Landmarks: Private Houses

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As you may have heard by now, we're celebrating WNYC's 100 years on the air. While the station is 100 years old, the building that housed the station for its first 80-some-odd years, 1 Centre Street, the Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan, is even older. There's so much history in the buildings all over the city, across all the boroughs, some well known, like the Municipal Building, some less famous. A new book looks at the history of some of those lesser known places. It's called Hidden Landmarks of New York: A Tour of the City's Most Overlooked Buildings. For the rest of this membership drive, we're going to end the show, that's today through Friday, with the author of the book, Tommy Silk, who will guide us to some of these places we pass, maybe without noticing, as we make our way around town. You might already know Tommy Silk from one of his tours or his Instagram account, which is very popular, Landmarks of New York. Welcome to WNYC, Tommy. Thanks so much for coming on.

Tommy Silk: Thanks, Brian. Thrilled to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Today we're going to talk about private homes that you identify in the book, mostly preserved for the accomplishments of the people who live there. Let's start in East Flatbush in Brooklyn with a building preserved, however, for its own accomplishment. Wyckoff House. What was that?

Tommy Silk: Yes. The Wyckoff House is the oldest building remaining in the five boroughs and potentially, depending on how the archaeologists date it, the oldest building in New York state. It was built in the 1650s, so we're talking back when this was still the colony of New Netherland. The English aren't going to take over and turn it into New York until 1664. Generations of the Wyckoff family lived in this farm, this homestead. It was expanded a little bit upon in the 1800s. Then they sold it eventually to the city of New York to make a farmhouse in a museum.

It is currently a working farm. The Wyckoff family, the original Wyckoff who lived there, was the manager of the farm, or back then, the bowery of Peter Stuyvesant, who was the final director general of New Amsterdam and New Netherland. The last name that you're probably familiar with, whose namesake for things like Stuyvesant High School or Stuyvesant Street in the village.

Brian Lehrer: That was the first building to be landmarked. When did that process even start? When was the first landmarking?

Tommy Silk: That was back in the 1960s. I believe it was 1965, and this kind of came to a head. The famous example of this was the destruction of the old Penn Station that kind of really rallied the powers that be to decide that there needed to be some way for the city to protect basically private buildings that were in the public interest. We also then have the preservation fight over Grand Central Terminal, famously with Jackie Kennedy Onassis. That helped this law go up to the Supreme Court that did, in fact, rule in favor of a city's ability to landmark these private buildings for the public good.

Brian Lehrer: The first one was Wyckoff House in Brooklyn. Let's go up to the Bronx and talk about Poe Cottage. Edgar Allan?

Tommy Silk: Yes, the same. A lot of people in Baltimore like to claim The Raven as their own, including their football team, but that was actually written on East 84th, or, sorry, West 84th street. Poe is going to move into this cottage, which was built around 1812, back when the Bronx was a series of villages in Westchester. Poe and his wife ended up moving up there because Poe's wife was very sick, and this was the 1840s. The medical advice at the time was, go breathe some fresh air, you'll be fine. Unfortunately, his wife would pass away just a year later.

Now, when Poe lived in the actual cottage, this is up the road from Fordham University. The urban legend goes that the poem The Bells was inspired by him hearing the bells of the Fordham University chapel at night. He actually became very good friends with the Jesuits, which at the time was at St. John's college. In addition to that, he also ended up writing Annabel Lee and Eureka while living in the home. He would actually pass away here just a few years later in, I believe, 1849. Then the house itself had to physically be moved when Kingsbridge Road was expanded. Its current location was a move to preserve it back in 1913.

Brian Lehrer: I love that story that he moved to the Bronx in the 1840s for the clean air. I guess there was no Cross Bronx Expressway yet. Let's go next to Queens and talk about the Lewis H. Latimer house in Flushing. Tell us about Latimer and why this house was preserved.

Tommy Silk: Lewis Latimer is fascinating. He was born in Massachusetts. His parents had escaped enslavement in the south, and he joined the Union Navy during the Civil War. Afterwards, he ended up becoming a draftsman. He was responsible for doing things like technical drawings for patent applications. He worked with some of the most prolific inventors in american history, so Hiram Maxim, Alexander Graham Bell, and famously Thomas Edison, which is where he really made his mark, because although Edison collected all the patents for these things, Latimer, who was an inventor in his own right, ended up coming up with a cheaper, more efficient way to create the carbon filament. That's the stuff that would glow in the light bulb.

Without him, the accessibility of light bulbs, it would have been a much more expensive product to make, and it wouldn't have been as long lasting. In addition to all of his work in the technological space, he was also incredibly involved with the civil rights movement back at the turn of the 20th century. A lot of the famous early civil rights activists frequently visited this home when the Latimers lived here at the beginning of the 1900s.

This is also a home that was moved as well. It was originally located on Kissena Boulevard in Flushing, and then due to threat of destruction, they actually were able to move it to its current home, 137th Street.

Brian Lehrer: Staten island also has a landmark private home that you write about called the Conference House. It's in Tottenville, home to a British naval officer. The house played an important role in the revolution?

Tommy Silk: Yes. This one dates all the way back to the end of the 1600s, sometime between the 1670s and 1680s. Christopher Billup was a British captain who-- There's a fun story about him and Staten island becoming part of New York, which has been debunked, but the urban legend was that he was able to sail around Staten island in a day to claim that for part of New York, as opposed to New Jersey. What you're referencing is during the Revolutionary War, New York City is going to be occupied pretty much for the duration of the war.

There were informal peace talks that happened at the Conference House, hence the name Conference House, between Lord Admiral Richard Howe, who was in charge of the British command, and Edward Rutledge, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. Those four men met inside of this house to try to see if they could negotiate some sort of peace. Admiral Howe did not have the full backing at this point of the British government, so he was only doing what he thought he could do to avoid bloodshed, but he wasn't able to make too many promises. Eventually, the colonial delegation backed out.

Brian Lehrer: We've hit four of the five boroughs. Let's finish up in Manhattan, where there is the building that I understand got you started on this path, literally, on your walk home from a job you hated, the Sara Delano Roosevelt and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt houses on East 65th Street. We could tell from the name why it's significant, but what caught your attention?

Tommy Silk: I had been walking home a different way each night from my office in Midtown East to my apartment on the Upper East Side. I finally saw this plaque, and I decided one night I was going to stop and read it. I realized what you just said, which was, this is the first home where a married FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt lived together. It was built in 1908. It's, I like to call it a glorified duplex because although it looks like one home, if you look at it, it has two addresses. That's because Franklin Roosevelt's semi-overprotective mother, Sara, built this as a wedding present for them, but she lived in one half of the building, they lived in the other half.

After Sara passed away in the 1940s, it was sold to Hunter College, which FDR was so thrilled about because he thought his mother would love that, that he ended up donating the first set of books for the collection.

Brian Lehrer: All right. We will talk about more lesser known landmarks of New York as we go through the week, including some that serve to highlight what's missing, the stories of all of us left out in the early history books. For now, we thank Tommy Silk for today, whose new book, Hidden Landmarks of New York: A Tour of the City's Most Overlooked Buildings, comes out officially tomorrow.

If you're interested, you can see him at the launch event at Grace church. That's tomorrow night at 6:30 PM. That's free, but you can reserve a spot through the Strand bookstore's website. We'll also have a link on our page. Thanks for today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tommy Silk: Sounds good, Brian. Thanks.

 

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