The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It

By Matthew Spady

“An illuminating treat! . . . it retraces the neighborhood’s fascinating arc from remote woodland estate to the enduring Beaux Arts streetscape.” —Eric K. Washington, award-winning author of Boss of the Grips

This fully illustrated history peels back the many layers of a rural society evolving into an urban community, enlivened by the people who propelled it forward: property owners, tenants, laborers, and servants. It tells the intricate tale of how individual choices in the face of family dysfunction, economic crises, technological developments, and the myriad daily occurrences that elicit personal reflection and change of course pushed Audubon Park forward to the cityscape that distinguishes the neighborhood today.

A longtime evangelist for Manhattan’s Audubon Park neighborhood, author Matthew Spady delves deep into the lives of the two families most responsible over time for the anomalous arrangement of today’s streetscape: the Audubons and the Grinnells. Beginning with the Audubons’ return to America in 1839 and John James Audubon’s purchase of fourteen acres of farmland, The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot follows the many twists and turns of the area’s path from forest to city, ending in the twenty-first century with the Audubon name re-purposed in today’s historic district, a multiethnic, multi-racial urban neighborhood far removed from the homogeneous, Eurocentric Audubon Park suburb.

“This well-documented saga of demographics chronicles a dazzling cast of characters and a plot fraught with idealism, speculation, and expansion, as well as religious, political, and real estate machinations.” —Roberta J.M. Olson, PhD, Curator of Drawings, New-York Historical Society

The story of the area’s evolution from hinterland to suburb to city is comprehensively told in Matthew Spady’s fluidly written new history.” —The New York Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780823289431

Book preview

The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot

THE NEIGHBORHOOD MANHATTAN FORGOT

Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It

Matthew Spady

AN IMPRINT OF FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK 2020

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020910123

First edition

for my mother, my father, and Scott

CONTENTS

A Word about Place Names and Street Names

Introduction: Humanizing the Landscape

1 Triumph and Tribulation on White Street

2 The Land before It Was Minnie’s

3 Arcadia Found . . .

4 . . . and Too Quickly Lost

5 Audubon Park Begins to Bloom

6 Fruit Basket Turnover

7 Audubon Park’s New Power Brokers

8 The Hemlocks

9 Three Widows, Three Households

10 Reconstructing the Park

11 A Gilded Lily

12 Panic

13 Halcyon Days

14 Waning Days of Summer

15 Exit Strategy

16 Partition Suit

17 Clinging to the Past . . .

18 . . . and Facing the Future

19 Rapid Transit, Rapid Transformation

20 When the Bloom Faded 272

Postscript

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Additional photographs

A WORD ABOUT PLACE NAMES AND STREET NAMES

OVER THE CENTURIES covered in the following narrative, the geographic region surrounding the Audubon Park suburb had multiple, often overlapping names. For centuries, the Native American Lenape called it Penadnic. When European settlers pushed northward from their farms on the Harlem Plains, they called it Jochem Pieter’s Hills, in honor of an early settler, and later, Harlem Heights. That was the name in use when the Audubons moved to their farm in the spring of 1842, though Richard Carman was already promoting Carmansville as a name for northern Manhattan. By mid-century, Fort Washington and Washington Heights equaled Carmansvilles in popularity, so people living side by side might, and did, use any one of the three in city directories.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Washington Heights was the official city designation for the area, with a southwestern boundary at 135th Street. Today, Washington Heights defines the area between the Harlem and Hudson rivers from 155th Street to Dyckman Street, where Inwood begins. Fort Washington survives in place names such as the avenue, library branch, park, and local post office, but excepting a playground and Weatherbug.com location, the Carmansville name is extinct.

During its lifetime, Audubon Park’s boundaries varied depending on who was describing them. For the purposes of this history, that name will refer to the land west of Broadway between 155th and 158th streets.

St. Nicholas Avenue, a name dating to an 1880s real estate boom in northern Manhattan, originated as the Wickquasgeck Trail, which the Lenape people developed for north-south travel on the island of Manahatta. European settlers continued using it and called it, successively, Harlem Lane, the King’s Road, and the Kingsbridge Road.

Tenth Avenue became Amsterdam Avenue in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Eleventh Avenue, present-day Broadway, did not exist north of 155th Street until after the American Civil War, when the Central Park Commissioners began developing streets west and north of the park. The Boulevard (or Grand Boulevard) initially ran from 59th Street, where Broadway ended, to 155th Street. A few years after it opened, the street commissioners extended it to 156th Street and then veered west to continue up the Hudson River’s shore. Confusion arose when the commissioners opened a second Boulevard north of 156th Street paralleling Tenth Avenue. That roadway appeared on maps and in city directories as both Eleventh Avenue and the Boulevard until February 14, 1899, when it became Broadway. The original portion carried various names, including the Public Drive, the French Drive, and the Boulevard Lafayette, until the Riverside Drive extension absorbed it in 1911.

Beginning with the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan, Twelfth Avenue appeared on maps and as a coordinate in deeds. The city street commissioners never graded or opened it through Audubon park, but present-day Riverside Drive runs along the line of Twelfth Avenue between 155th and 157th streets. In the late 1850s, the Audubons built a private road following Twelfth Avenue between 155th and 158th streets. Its northern end is still in use as an unnamed alley servicing garages beneath apartment buildings facing Riverside Drive and Riverside Drive West.

The Boulevard Lafayette name became obsolete when the Riverside Drive extension opened in February 1911. The city named the block between 157th and 158th streets Audubon Place, renaming it Edward M. Morgan Place in 1926, to honor the first city postmaster to rise to that rank from postal deliveryman.

In 1928, Riverside Drive West opened on a viaduct connecting 155th and 162nd streets and bypassing the original Riverside Drive’s serpentine route through Audubon Park. When the Henry Hudson Parkway opened in 1937, the northbound side absorbed Riverside Drive north of 181 Street, though a three-block section still remains at the northern end of Fort Tryon Park.

The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot

INTRODUCTION

Humanizing the Landscape

For nearly sixty years, from about 1850 until 1910, a tract of land in upper Manhattan was known as Audubon Park.

AS THE YEAR 1850 came to an end and John James Audubon’s illustrious life with it, his wife, Lucy, and sons, Victor and John, argued about the fate of Minnie’s Land, the family farm nine miles north of New York’s City Hall. The business-minded Victor saw Minnie’s Land as a liability that burdened the family’s finances with taxes, insurance, and upkeep, while yielding small dividends. He wanted to sell any or all of it and believed survival lay in family unity and continued loyalty to carrying on his father’s work. John saw Minnie’s Land as a rare opportunity to show his true grit. Often patronized by the rest of the family as an erratic hothead whose short temper derailed his good intentions, he had succeeded in carving fields, orchards, and a homestead from raw woodland and learned in the process that he could be happy as a portrait-painting farmer. He threatened to uproot his wife and children, abandon the Audubon family business, and start afresh elsewhere if his brother sold the fields and orchards and robbed him of the means to contribute to the family’s welfare. Lucy saw Minnie’s Land as her reward for years of hardship while her husband pursued his dream painting and cataloging the Birds of America. She was, after all, Minnie (a Scottish term for mother that her sons had begun using sometime in the 1830s while the family was living in Edinburgh), and the land, at least the greater part of it, was legally hers. When Audubon bought the property in 1841, he had registered it in her name, and soon the adjective-noun combination describing Minnie’s land had morphed into its name. Lucy had spent the last decade as mistress of all she surveyed and saw no reason that her sons could not forge a viable plan that would enable her to continue life as it was.

Ironically, her husband’s vision of a family-run business and her own domineering spirit had deprived Victor and John of the experience and business skills they needed to develop that plan. Victor had already speculated in Brooklyn real estate and invested in a foundry, and John even led an expedition to California in search of gold. But each of these ill-timed ventures failed. Now, all that was left was land and competing ideas on how to use it. Eventually, a compromise emerged. They would sell part of the farm and, with the capital, build houses they could lease for continuing revenue. John would stay in the family fold—at least until the real estate plan was complete—and be in charge of developing the property and building the houses. As a reward, he could build a house for his growing family. Victor would build one, too, and the family would consolidate itself along the river’s edge. Lucy would live six months of each year with Victor and six with John while enjoying rents from letting her own house.

Within four years, Italianate villas, stables, and other dependencies had replaced fields and orchards—a house even rose in the old chicken yard— and Minnie’s Land had disappeared beneath a suburban enclave bearing the evocative name Audubon Park. While the Audubons’s plan transformed the landscape, it did not, in the end, yield the financial results they had hoped, and by 1864, with both her sons dead, Lucy sold her remaining property and left. That same year, John’s widow, Caroline, lost her house in foreclosure proceedings. Victor’s widow, Georgianna, hung on with the assistance of her brother-in-law, Edward Talman, but after he died in 1878, she also moved, and no Audubons remained in the park that bore their name.

In the first years of the twentieth century, the Grinnell family sat in the center of Audubon Park, their family home besieged on a battlefield of their own making. Like the Audubons fifty years earlier, they had found themselves the owners of extensive property that was not yielding sufficient income to pay taxes, insurance, and maintenance. And like the Audubons, they planned a strategy for controlled change that would have an unexpected ending. On the southern side of the Grinnells’s property, an army of workmen was blasting a cavernous foundation for Archer M. Hunting-ton’s Hispanic Society Museum, an exercise as unpredictable and disruptive as cannon fire. Snaking around the western and northern sides of the Grinnells’s property, a separate, but equally destructive army had demolished a house dating back to the 1850s, and when they were done, began leveling trees to open a roadbed for Riverside Drive, which in some places would push against a stone retaining wall more than forty feet high. On the east, another army would soon appear. Though it may have seemed benign, this was the army that would destroy the Grinnells’s way of life. For soon, subway kiosks would begin disgorging legions of solidly middle-class New Yorkers lured north to new apartment buildings designed specifically for their aspirations. Squeezed on all sides by the progress they had encouraged, the Grinnells surrendered their property to developers, who completed the process of urbanization that Audubon had unwittingly set in motion seventy years earlier. Within less than two years, Audubon Park had disappeared, and its name had faded into legend.

The study of Audubon Park’s origins, maturation, and disappearance is at root the study of a rural society evolving into an urban community, an examination of the relationship between people and the land they inhabit. The park’s predecessor, Minnie’s Land, was never as remote from the city as later generations romanticized it to be, but it did offer the Audubons an opportunity to meld with the land and water in a way they hadn’t enjoyed since they owned property on the Ohio River more than thirty years earlier. Within a decade, however, their Arcadia crumbled. The residents who replaced them weren’t seeking an agrarian existence. Influenced by mid-century thinkers such as Catherine Beecher, Henry David Thoreau, and Andrew Jackson Davis, they sought a simpler, healthier life than they believed possible in the confines of a city. The park’s villas, set among spacious lawns under a canopy of aged shade trees and connected by gracefully curving drives, symbolized economic as well as social acceptability. But men spending their days in offices or mercantile operations had no time for tilling the soil, fishing the river, or hunting the woods. They didn’t depend on the soil for sustenance, and they didn’t particularly mourn its disappearance beneath their elegant villas. While the park promised them privacy and security, its houses offered them the luxury of light, ventilation, and views, as well as space that none of them could have afforded in the city’s fashionable residential districts.

Stepping deeper into Audubon Park’s history prompts a look at how its people reacted to their environment, economic cycles, technological developments, personal and family crises, and the many seemingly innocuous occurrences that elicit personal reflection and a change of course. The transformation from farm to suburb had taken a dozen years. The passage from suburb to city would take more than five decades. One reason for this disparity was surely the park’s isolation, tucked away on a slope above the river far beyond the city’s northern edge. Another was the Audubons’s attempt at regulating land use through covenants that prohibited a variety of dangerous noxious unwholsome or offensive trades and restrained population density (while assuring the park’s exclusivity) by prohibiting any building or tenement of less value than $2,000 and any tenement or tenement house for laboring men. The strongest factor resisting change, however, was one man: George Blake Grinnell, a long-term real estate investor, who accumulated more than two-thirds of the park’s land and houses and showed no interest in subdividing lots, opening streets, building houses on speculation, or making any improvements beyond those that would ensure his family lived comfortably. Not until his children assumed control of the family property after his death did the park complete the final leg of its journey from farmland to city.¹

Numerous themes wind their way through Audubon Park’s history and provide milestones and measuring sticks for its evolution. Bookending its lifetime and recurring throughout it as catalysts for growth are developments in streets, roads, and particularly mass transportation. The Audubons may have loathed the Hudson River Railroad, which spewed soot and disrupted their peaceful surroundings as it passed by their door on its way from lower Manhattan to Poughkeepsie and beyond, but when they began converting their property to a suburb, regular train service delivered desirable neighbors to their door, respectable families whose best option for escaping the crowded conditions in the city was jumping over the fashionable (and expensive) residential districts to possibilities beyond. Ensconced in newly constructed villas fitted into a parklike setting—with a gate at the main entrance to emphasize their separation from working-class Carmansville—these young families inhabited Manhattan’s first railroad suburb. Five decades later, when the Grinnells began dismantling Audubon Park, another railroad—this one running underground—carried their plans forward. The Grinnells embraced the subway, agitating with fellow property owners and enlisting their political connections to ensure that when it opened and brought the population explosion Washington Heights had been awaiting half a century, the entrance to the 157th Street city-bound station would sit in their former vegetable garden.

Changes in population density and housing stock charted Audubon Park’s transition from farm to city, expanding quickly before the American Civil War and then slowing to a crawl before exploding during the first decade of the twentieth century. Initially, eight Audubons and their servants lived in the homestead, the coachman and his wife lived in a small cottage, and a few men who worked the farm lived in huts near the fields and orchards. By 1850, eight grandchildren had expanded the family, and the federal enumeration found twenty-five individuals in Minnie’s Land, with three generations of Audubons living under one roof. In the decade between Audubon’s death and the Civil War, while New York City’s population grew by 57 percent, the park’s population expanded 388 percent, to 122 individuals. The number of houses jumped from two to a dozen. Then, growth in the park stopped. Between 1860 and 1900, while the city pushed its physical boundaries up the island and into the sky and its population jumped from 800,000 to 1.85 million, the park’s population density remained virtually unchanged—fluctuating only slightly with the size of families moving in and out. Its net gain in houses was one. Population density increased significantly in the years just before the city engulfed Audubon Park, with lodgers renting the Audubon houses along the river and a convent of thirty nuns leasing a villa from the Grinnells, but the sea change came with the first apartment building in 1910. Overnight, more families could live in one apartment house than had previously lived in the entire park. Equally telling, each apartment house occupied roughly the same footprint as one of the previous houses and its gardens.²

Population growth was exactly what land investors, land speculators, and community boosters (often the same individuals) had wanted for lower Washington Heights. In the 1880s, property owners had organized themselves and promoted northern Manhattan for its healthy air, cool breezes, semirural lifestyle, and spectacular views, all at prices significantly lower than those closer to the city—selling points northern Manhattan’s property owners had been using since colonial times, and still do today. They also established religious and cultural institutions and lobbied the city government for improved water supply, sewers, lighting, and schools. Above all, they pushed for mass transit that would expand the population and drive the area to its full potential as a first-class residential district. The tipping point arrived at the turn of the twentieth century when the subway opened just in time to bring New York City’s unprecedented population surge to new homes in northern Manhattan.

The advantages of living distant from the city center were the same for the Audubons in 1841, the Grinnells in 1880, and the first apartment dwellers in 1910—and they remain the same for renters and condo owners in the twenty-first century. Drawn by the Prices, Betting on the Neighborhood, the title of a 2004 New York Times article about living in northern Manhattan, could apply to almost any period in the area’s history. In 1841, fourteen acres of farmland cost the Audubons a tenth of what they would have paid for the house they were leasing on White Street. And in 2018, the money a co-op or condo owner spent for an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side would purchase two to three times more space in an apartment in Audubon Park’s twenty-first-century footprint. But equally true is that over time, each dollar has purchased less space. The $352.75 per acre ($10,500 in 2019 dollars) that Audubon paid for Minnie’s Land in 1841 would not have bought the acre his son sold Wellington Clapp for $5,400 ($181,000) a decade later, much less the three-thousand-plus square-foot co-op apartment, roughly 0.07 of an acre, that an owner in the Audubon Park footprint sold in April 2017 for $2.1 million.³

Once apartment buildings erased most of Audubon Park in 1911, any remaining interest in the old neighborhood’s connection to the naturalist shifted to a narrow strip of land hidden on the lower side of Riverside Drive’s retaining wall. There, between the wall and the river, barely accessible except by a wretched alley some called Audubon Lane, sat the old Audubon houses, which owners had crammed with renters—starkly contrasting with their illustrious pasts and with the luxury apartment buildings along Riverside Drive forty feet above. Accelerating the downward spiral, sheds and warehouses—Garage Village—sprang up like weeds among the old houses. When the penultimate set of apartment houses claimed Audubon’s homestead in 1932, the last vestige of earlier times, the Audubon Park name quickly receded from memory except for a few references in Audubon biographies, guidebooks, and footnotes to New York histories. Then, in 2009, after a decade of lobbying from neighborhood preservationists, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated an Audubon Park Historic District, protecting a trove of architectural treasures, reviving an evocative name that had lain dormant for a century, and rekindling interest in the neighborhood’s rich history.

The seed that grew into this book began germinating in 1998 when my partner, Scott Robinson, and I bought a co-op unit at the Grinnell, an imposing brick and stone apartment building designed by architects Schwarz and Gross and dating to 1911. That seed took root and grew during the years I helped prepare a request for evaluation and advocated for the Audubon Park Historic District. I had lived two blocks away from the Grinnell since 1987 and had a vague knowledge that John James Audubon had lived nearby sometime in the distant past, but I had not sorted through the timeline or details. Pursuing the simple question that Scott posed, Who or what was Grinnell, started me on the journey that culminates with this book. Over the twenty-plus years I’ve been studying and sharing Audubon Park’s history, I’ve delved into thousands of deeds, censuses, church records, wills, and newspaper articles. I’ve studied scores of photographs and maps and read hundreds of pages from letters, journals, and memoirs. Being something of a completist, I have yet to run into a bit of Audubon Park information that I didn’t find fascinating, but keeping in mind some sage advice from biographer John Taliaferro (who began and completed a biography of George Bird Grinnell while I was finishing this book), I’ve constantly reminded myself that I’m telling a story, not writing an encyclopedia. So I’ve sifted through and chosen the kernels that I think best move the narrative forward and illustrate the key themes in Audubon Park’s journey from farm to cityscape.

The Audubon family dynamic is key to the development of Audubon Park, so the narrative begins with the Audubons returning to America in 1839, taking up residence in New York City, and grappling with family events that led them to move to Minnie’s Land. Since Minnie’s Land did not emerge from a void, some backstory is necessary to explain what the Audubons found when they moved to northern Manhattan, how they forged a farm from a rocky wooded hillside, and how that farm evolved into the railroad suburb that was to come. Audubon Park will emerge in Chapter 4 and remain at center stage for the duration of the story. The postscript begins during the Great Depression, just after the old Audubon homestead disappeared from the streetscape, and continues through the decades when the Audubon Park name fell into disuse. It ends in the twenty-first century with the name repurposed in today’s Audubon Park Historic District, a multiethnic, multiracial urban neighborhood far removed from the homogeneous, Eurocentric Audubon Park suburb.

Audubon Park’s path from forest to city followed many twists and turns. At any one of them, the score of acres that eventually comprised Audubon Park might have deviated from its path to urbanization and evolved into a very different footprint from the one existing today. If Manhattan’s earliest European settlers had migrated from north to south as the Lenape people had done before them, Audubon Park might now be at the heart of the business district rather than an outlying—albeit increasingly popular—residential enclave. If Richard Carman and James Conner had been successful in their 1835 land speculation scheme, New York City’s aldermen might have preempted the Trinity Corporation and established a rural cemetery twice the size of the present one, erasing Audubon Park’s entire existence and history. Had the auctioneers Cole and Chilton put Minnie’s Land on the block as scheduled in October 1851, the Audubon farm might have evolved into two hundred row houses on English basements stretching down a steep hill to Riverside Drive, rather than a series of Beaux-Arts apartment and museum buildings sitting in an irregular footprint disrupting Manhattan’s grid. And, if the Grinnells had failed in their well-laid plans at the turn of the twentieth century, Audubon’s house might have survived long enough for well-organized, well-funded preservationists to save it, either in situ or somewhere nearby.

But neither these nor the many other possible variations played out. Instead, the chain of events that John James Audubon set in motion in 1841 moved forward inexorably to the streetscape that emerged seven decades later. The story of how that happened makes up the pages of this book.

1

Triumph and Tribulation on White Street

WHEN LUCY AUDUBON left 86 White Street on a bright April morning in 1842, bundling her two granddaughters, Lulu and Hattie, and their new stepmother, Caroline, into a barouche that her husband had recently bought with borrowed money, she may have breathed a sigh of relief that she was leaving the leased house and its sorrows behind her and heading out of town to a new home.¹

Four years earlier, when work was nearing an end on the Birds of America and the accompanying narrative text, the Ornithological Biography, Audubon had already planned what his family would do next and was deciding where they should settle. If the thought occurred to him that his sons, Victor and John, might want to strike out on their own—and nothing about his actions ever suggested he did—he subdued it. He had already conceived two new works that would continue the family business for another decade: a small, lithographed version of the Birds in octavo format (which Audubon called the little work), at a price that would draw a new set of subscribers, and the Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, a lithographed companion piece for the Birds, that would catalogue the continent’s mammals. Audubon’s Charleston friend the Reverend John Bach-man, whose daughter Maria had married Audubon’s son John, would collaborate on the Quadrupeds, as would Victor and John, just as they had on the completion of the Birds.²

A few days after his engraver pulled the last print for the Birds, Audubon took off for Edinburgh to work with his editor, William MacGillivray, on the Ornithological Biography, leaving the rest of the family in London— Lucy, Victor, John, and Maria, who amid celebrations surrounding Queen Victoria’s coronation, gave birth to the first Audubon grandchild. She and John named their daughter Lucy but called her Lulu to distinguish her from her grandmother. John was eager to take his wife and daughter home to America, but his father had other ideas. He thought John should remain about one Year longer in Europe, where he could become better master of his Art and enter on his career as a Portrait Painter. Victor agreed. John liked the idea of specializing in portraiture, but this wasn’t the first time family consensus had dictated his future, nor would it be the last.³

From Edinburgh, Audubon wrote Lucy that the family should join him as soon as possible because accommodations were much cheaper there than in London. Lucy, never one to mince words when complaining about family finances, wrote her father’s cousin Euphemia Gifford that it had been so very disagreeable as well as expensive for the family to be split between the two cities. As soon as her health permitted—she had been unwell for almost three years with a complaint the doctors could neither diagnose nor treat—they would all move to Scotland. But America was the frugal place for a family of their limited means, so once Audubon completed his work, that’s where they would go.⁴

At the end of the year, expecting that he would complete the Ornithological Biography and a Synopsis by the following spring, Audubon sent Victor to scope out suitable cities where the family might settle in America, with an eye to the eastern seaboard. Audubon was not yearning for urban life. Despite his success in British cities, where he had exploited Europe’s fascination with the American wilderness and the men who roamed it, he had voiced his opinion often and vehemently that he found city living repugnant. Even so, the Audubons’s subscription business demanded that the family remain in an urban center, where Audubon could collect from existing subscribers, canvass for new ones, and be in close contact with lithographers, colorists, printers, publishers, and distributors.

John and Maria departed with Lulu for a brief trip to Paris and then continued to New York, where John promptly set up shop as a portrait artist at 300 Broadway. Victor was already in New York, but still dithering about where the family should live, so he waited for the arrival of Papa with hope we may come to some conclusion soon after his arrival. Victor wanted to invest in property, but as he wrote his friend Mary Davis in Charleston, given the family’s financial state, bathing in the sea at the Battery was the only luxury he could afford, so purchasing a house was out of the question for the time being.⁵

For personal as well as practical reasons, Victor wanted the Audubons to winter in Charleston with the Bachmans. While the families were together there, he could marry his fiancé, Maria’s sister Mary Eliza; Audubon and Bachmann could plan the Quadrupeds; and Maria, who was pregnant again, could have her second child in familiar, and familial, surroundings. Lucy was amenable to living in either New York or Charleston as long as Victor could find suitable accommodations—meaning not with the Bach-mans if they traveled to Charleston and not with her sister Eliza Berthoud if they remained in New York. After years of living in other women’s homes, often as governess, Lucy was not willing to relinquish her recently reclaimed status as head of her own household.

Audubon wasn’t interested in Charleston, but in early September, when he and Lucy arrived in New York on the George Washington, he still hadn’t decided where the family would live—Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or New York City. The determining factors, as he wrote to Samuel G. Morton, his agent in Philadelphia, were Rent, Markettings &c and also of the probable share of Success as to subscribers obtainable on the appearance of the first numbers of the two works he and his sons would produce next. He was ready to begin the little work, and wherever he decided to live, he wanted his sons there to help. John would reduce the drawings with the camera lucida, and Victor would assume more responsibility for canvassing and collecting. Audubon was a good father, a loving father, but he would not let go of his sons, observed biographer Shirley Streshinsky. He had always believed that theirs should be a family enterprise, that their futures should be inextricably tied to his. One thing was obvious: The money that supported all of them came primarily from his labors.⁶

The question of whose talent and money supported the family would reappear in the coming decade as the burden of wage-earner shifted from a physically and mentally incapacitated Audubon to his sons. The wild card in the deck was the demanding and money-conscious Lucy, whose long years of experience with her husband had convinced her that no amount of wealth was enough. She would outlive all three men in her life and eventually put her own spin on the term breadwinner. But those events were still years in the future; in September 1839, the question was where to live.

After spending a few weeks in Mrs. Waldron’s boardinghouse on Broadway, Audubon reunited the family about a mile uptown at 86 White Street, a house he leased two blocks from Broadway and, in 1839, near the city’s geographic center. Within a decade, as the city continued expanding northward, White Street would become a mercantile center, but when the Audubons settled there, it was still a residential neighborhood with three- and four-story houses lining both sides of the street, their façades a continuous street wall. Number 86 was in the center of a block of houses that stretched halfway into their lots, leaving room for dependencies and small gardens behind. Windows on the street faced south with bright sun for a large portion of the day, rendering them suitable for Audubon to use for painting, but John’s camera lucida work required abundant light, which he may have found by retreating to the garden or even going into the street.⁷

In an era when New York’s population—more than 300,000 strong—had outpaced housing stock, many urbanites were trying out a variety of types of ad hoc multiple dwellings. With three generations sharing 86 White Street, the Audubons were no exception. Audubon described the house as large, but his English engraver, Robert Havell, and his wife, immigrating to America, soon joined the Audubons while they hunted for a home, and at the end of October, Maria increased the family with another daughter, named Harriet Bachman in honor of her maternal grandmother and called Hattie. In addition, four female servants, including a nurse for the babies, lived in the house; sleeping in the attic or perhaps the basement kitchen, overseen by Lucy’s careful eye, they worked at the myriad tasks that kept the household running.⁸

Beyond cramped conditions, limited light, noise from neighboring Broadway, and the inconvenience of primitive waste disposal, White Street was perilously close to one of the city’s seamier districts. In 1839, a relatively prosperous year wedged between the Panic of 1837 and the depression of the early 1840s, government, religious, and civic leaders argued about responsibility for the poor, while overcrowding and unemployment bred slums with rising rates of crime, pauperism, and immorality. The house at 86 White Street was seven blocks—a few-minutes’ walk—north of City Hall, and even closer to the notorious Five Points, narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking every where with dirt and filth where destitution, disease, prostitution, high infant mortality rates, and violent crime smothered any chance of human dignity. Though the Audubons had no cause to venture into Five Points, nothing kept its undesirables from traveling in the opposite direction. Equally obnoxious, mid-century New York City was a maelstrom of activity, noise, and odors—most of it unhealthy. In the absence of zoning regulations, tanneries, foundries, distilleries, and slaughterhouses lay close enough to residential neighborhoods that their horrific noise added to the cacophony of wheels crunching on paving stones, horse hooves clanging, and competing omnibus and street railroad drivers shouting curses at each other as they jockeyed for passengers; manufacturing’s pungent odors competed with the stench of garbage, sewerage, and horse droppings. Roaming pigs would have been more objectionable had they not proved robust street cleaners.⁹

With the White Street house as an anchor, the Audubons remained a peripatetic group. Audubon traveled the East Coast canvassing for subscribers to the little work and promoting the Quadrupeds. When Victor received word that Eliza’s health had taken a turn for the worse, he dashed to Charleston and married her there in early December. His parents, realizing that Victor planned to remain with the Bachmans for the winter, quickly wrote suggesting—with a directness that was clearly a command— that he bring his bride back to the best of medical aid and fine warm house in New York. The elder Audubons’s wheedling and demands brought Victor and Eliza to White Street for a reunion with her sister that had a positive effect on Eliza’s health, but did nothing to help Maria, who had been in a physical decline since Hattie’s birth. Alarmed at her condition, John took her to Charleston in the second week of February. Fully aware of the constraints his parents had placed on Victor, he took his camera lucida and painting supplies so they couldn’t accuse him of shirking his responsibility to the family’s business.¹⁰

John and Maria took Lulu with them but left the infant Hattie in Lucy’s care, a practical move, but one that would have lifelong consequences for the entire Audubon family. Lucy interpreted this temporary guardianship, given by a dying mother, as license to treat Hattie—and Lulu when she returned—as her adopted daughters, figurative replacements for the infant girls she had birthed and buried three decades earlier in Henderson, Kentucky. Lulu’s filial relationship with her grandmother would alter somewhat after she married and gave birth to the next in a long line of Lucys, but Hattie, who remained single, lived in the same house with her grandmother and slept in the same room with her for the next thirty-five years.¹¹

Maria’s failing health forced the elder Audubons to acknowledge the obvious: she and Eliza suffered from consumption. They had likely contracted it from their father, who moved to Charleston from Schaghticoke, in upstate New York, because the southern climate improved his weakened lungs, a result of tuberculosis in young manhood. Mycobacterium tuberculosis was little understood in the early nineteenth century. Until the 1820s, physicians treated its symptoms—fatigue, fever, lesions, and telltale bloody sputum—as separate diseases. By 1839, when J. L. Schönlein named these various consumptive diseases tuberculosis, it had become the most rampant fatal illness among city dwellers. Treatments that Hermann Brehmer developed in the 1850s emphasized fresh air at high altitudes and nutrition and gave rise to the sanatorium but came too late for the Bachman sisters.¹²

A trip inland to Aiken, South Carolina, for treatment had no effect on Maria, and back in Charleston, she breathed her last on Tuesday the 15th [of September] at about one o’clock. The family buried her in the cemetery attached to St. John’s Lutheran Church, where her father was pastor, and John immediately sent the news to White Street. Victor relayed it to his father, who was traveling, and in the same letter expressed fears about Eliza’s progressing illness. Perhaps, he suggested, he should take her to Havana in the winter. Audubon adored the lively Eliza, who reminded him of his half-sister Rose—he even called her Rosy—and gave his consent, but as he had never traveled to Cuba, he expected Victor to use the trip to research the local birds. Within days of Maria’s funeral, John brought Lulu back to New York so that he could assist his father while Victor and Eliza sailed south. They stopped in Charleston where Maria Martin, Eliza’s aunt, joined them on the next leg of the trip to New Orleans. There Eliza rested and Victor collected from existing subscribers and canvassed for new ones before the trio traveled on to Cuba.¹³

With one daughter-in-law dead and the other critically ill, year-end celebrations at 86 White Street were subdued. Young George Burgess arrived from England just before Christmas and called upon Mrs. Audubon, a very nice old lady, who was very warm in her invitations. Christmas Day, he joined the Audubons’s dinner table along with Lucy’s sister Eliza Berthoud and her children (a very nice family), noting in his journal that John, a widower of three months, seemed in much grief.¹⁴

Burgess had come to America to establish a thread manufacturing enterprise, and Audubon (a very fine old man indeed) encouraged the venture, dismissing Burgess’s penury and assuring him that capital was easily obtained for legitimate purposes, though out of his hearing, he voiced concerns that the young man could succeed. The Audubons pressed Burgess to visit them often and not stand upon the formality of an invitation; come just as you would to your father’s house. Taking them at their word, he returned to White Street for New Year’s Eve and again two days later for dinner, sealing a friendship that would deepen over the years and continue after Audubon’s death when he became one of Lucy’s trusted advisors.¹⁵

Burgess also called on James Hall, a British expatriate living in New York City and operating an import business with his brother John. The Halls had also been friends with the Audubons in England and had renewed their acquaintance in New York. On New Year’s Day, 1841, Burgess visited Hall in Brooklyn, when he went to make some calls according to the custom of the town. In mid-nineteenth-century New York, gentlemen called upon as many households as possible on New Year’s Day—twenty or thirty being routine—while the women stayed at home and offered their gentlemen guests refreshments. At Hall’s home, Burgess was ushered into a very handsome room into the presence of Mrs. Hall and Miss Hall two very elegant women who were exceedingly polite— most likely James Hall’s wife, Mariah, and his sister Caroline. During the next few weeks, whether Burgess visited the Halls or the Audubons, he found the two families together. John clarified the reason at the end of January, when on the way home from dinner with the Halls, he told Burgess that he was engaged to be married to Miss Hall. Maria had been dead four months.¹⁶

That spring, either because of his growing wealth from mounting subscriptions for the little work or because Maria’s death reminded him of his own mortality, Audubon made a will leaving all of his real and personal property of whatever nature or kind soever to Lucy and his sons, who would share and share alike as joint executors, the only exception being household furniture Articles of Silver and Silver Plate that went to Lucy.¹⁷

At the beginning of May, Victor, Eliza, and Maria Martin returned from Cuba, stopping in Charleston, where the Bachman family realized that Eliza was dying. Once again, Audubon and Lucy wanted Victor back in New York to help with business and manipulated him there with a breathtaking callousness to Eliza’s health and her family’s feelings.

I cannot help thinking my Dear Eliza [Lucy wrote to her daughter-in-law] that you are much the better for your trip to that beautiful but seemingly unoccupied land, Cuba—but your dread of the New York winter is rather more than it need be for this has been a very mild season on the whole and our having nothing frozen within doors contrary to last year is a proof of it and yet we have had only half the fires under our roof. I heard from your mother a few days ago, she strenuously objects to my plan of your coming home direct, but I still wish it.¹⁸

Eliza returned and died in New York a month later, on May 25, hundreds of miles from her parents, at the age of twenty-two, surviving her sister by less than a year. The pall of death hanging over the house on White Street may have pushed Audubon to find a permanent home outside the city.

The idea wasn’t new. Victor had been pressuring his father to invest some of his earnings in securities or property ever since the family had returned from abroad, but Audubon had urged him to go slowly and part not with your Money without full Confidence that you are not taken in. For most of the nineteenth century, when land speculation was the only form of gambling sanctioned by polite society, buying property was a far sounder proposition than buying securities. Just one year before the Audubons leased 86 White Street for $800 per annum, Edwin Lord had bought the house from Adolphe Le Barbier for $15,000. Half that sum would buy a house and substantial acreage farther from the city center.¹⁹

Audubon’s aversion to investing ran deep. Two decades after his bankruptcy and brief stay in a Kentucky debtor’s prison, despite the little work’s promise of a steady and healthy income, he refused to consider securities, but as he freely acknowledged, the family was poor and needed to leave the city.

I will do all in my power to ennable you to purchase a house pretty soon as well as to Collect our back debts, but for your own Sakes and Mine, do not buy a single Share in Any Stock Whatever until further advise from me! Think of the 2000$ We have as dead in Kentucky Bank Stock, Would not that Sum assist in the purchase of a House?— No No Keep your Money at Home.²⁰

In July, Audubon’s friend and subscriber Edward Harris told him about twenty-five acres of farmland near his home in Moorestown, New