This beautiful castle is in New York City, in the Bronx neighborhood of Kingsbridge. This part of Kingsbridge is now technically in Riverdale. Its modern address is 6301 Riverdale Avenue at West 263rd Street.Actor Edwin Forrest (1806-1872) purchased farmland overlooking the Hudson, in Kingsbridge, in 1847 and had this castle built for him to live in with his wife Catharine.
Forrest was a well-known Shakespearean actor who was also famous for the messy and sensational divorce case that he became embroiled in.I am going to write about the Forrest case in a future post - it has been in my to-do file for some time, and it was pure serendipity that I decided to write about this building.
Forrest named the property Fonthill, after writer William Beckford's Fonthill Abbey in England. Beckford (1760-1844) is best known for his Gothic novel Vathek (1786). The original Fonthill was nicknamed Beckford's Folly. Beckford lived there alone in one of the 12 bedrooms. The doors were 35' tall and it took 500 workers several years to build. Twice the 300' tower on the abbey collapsed and had to be rebuilt.Forrest sold his Bronx Fonthill to the Sisters of Charity and the College of Mt. St. Vincent, in 1856. This was doubtless part of the fall-out of his divorce in 1850. In 1849, Edwin and Catherine separated and Forrest had moved back to his native Philadelphia.
Fonthill has been a beautiful part of the Mt. St. Vincent campus ever since 1856. In 1912 Stephen Jenkins wrote that it was being used as a combination chaplain's residence, library and museum.
The stereoscopic picture of Edwin Forrest's Fonthill is from NYPL Digital Gallery and dates from the 1860-1915 period. The Mathew Brady photograph of Edwin Forrest is from Wikipedia, as is the picture of Beckford's Fonthill.
Hermalyn, Gary and Robert Kornfeld. Landmarks of the Bronx (1989), p. 27.
Jenkins, Stephen. The Story of the Bronx (1912, 2007 ed.) p. 325.
It may look like an elegant Victorian chemistry experiment, but Friday's mystery contraption is actually a coffee maker from the mid-1850s. And a lot of you were totally on the right track. However, many congratulations and cups of fine coffee to 
My favorite Victorian balance siphon coffee maker, however, is Jefferson Davis' locomotive coffee maker, which Jack Finney writes about in 
I was able to make this picture a decent size this week, which is a good thing since it has all sorts of decorative detail on it.
This most uplifting object is a Flying Hat, the subject of a late Victorian trick photograph (although the trick is not that astonishing - if you look closely you can see three wires attached to the hat).
The sad story of one of these young ladies is told in a letter which her mother wrote in 1853 to the Mayor of New York, Fernando Wood. It was printed in the 
Prewster was certainly in New York City by 1850, in which year she is listed in the census with daughter Caroline. Prewster seems to have been born in Philadelphia* about the year 1811, and possibly first practiced fortune telling there. She may have known Madame Morrow, who was from the same city and roughly the same age. She was still in New York in the 1860 census but I have been unable to trace her beyond the year 1863, when she is listed in a New York directory.
This object is so decorative, it's hard to believe that it is a medical instrument - but that is exactly what it is. The Friday mystery object is a silver and ivory pleximeter, dating from about 1850.
Percussion did not become a popular technique until the 19th century, after Napoleon's physician, Jean Nicholas Corvisant, wrote about Auenbrugger's innovative methods. By the mid-19th century pleximetry was a popular method of diagnosis, and pleximeters were made - first of wood, but later of glass, ivory, gutta percha and silver. They were often marked with gradations to help the physician locate the precise area the sound was coming from. Pleximeters came in a variety of shapes and sizes and could be used in conjunction with the fingers, a stethoscope (first invented in 1816 by French physician 
Many thanks to all who took part in this round of Guess the History Mystery. And I apologize for not being able to show this from different angles or bigger - the sites I find these on have only one picture of the object, as a rule. When I tried to enlarge the image, it got blurry - so I didn't.
In the late 1860s, a Dr. Chatham in New York City came up with one of the strangest ideas I have ever come across: Pain Paint.
A man named Peter Minck wrote most of the Pain Paint poetry, including the epic "A Hundred Years Ago," at right. He signed the piece entitled "My Wife Had An Ulcer" which is a tribute to the Paint which "the Doctors told me was humbug." Minck's verse concludes:
So what was this astonishing mixture which wiped out all manner of aches and pains, and made restauranteurs wax poetic? A Dr. Crull in the 
If you were a lady in the Victorian era, and you wanted to go for a walk - whether in the country or the city - there was a problem. The problem was the interaction of your long and trailing skirts with rural mud or dirty city streets (full of heavens know what sort of filth). But a solution was no farther away than a loop attached to your belt or chatelaine.
A chatelaine, from the French word for "chain," was a belt hook with chains attached to it, worn by ladies. Each chain held a useful object, such as scissors, thimble, watch and keys. This picture of a chatelaine is from the 
And here is the solution to the problem of mud versus skirt: the skirt-lifter! The tonged part held the bottom of your skirt up and kept it clean. The Friday one was fairly plain. Some of them were quite fancy looking, as you can see. The seashell-shaped lifter is from 
It's Friday and it's mystery time again. This one does not look like anything 'normal' like a vase or a pocket watch so I'm hoping it will be a little bit more mysterious and fun.
The Umbrella Hat is a seemingly modern summer convenience (you can get the Wacky Umbrella Hat, at right, through 
Many thanks to Don at 
Congratulations are in order to Bill Nelson and to 
Celery was prized at the Victorian table both as a delicacy on its own, or as an ingredient in sauces, soups and salads. It was harvested in early spring, and was regarded as cleansing both the palate and the entire digestive system after a winter of stodgy meals.
There are many examples of gorgeous glass celery containers on line. The image at the right is from the 
Jude at 
Noted photographer 
Even by the early 1900s, the rural world that this house had been built for was long gone. Cathedral Parkway was being filled with large and elegant apartment buildings. The Britannia, for example, was a few steps away from this little house, at 527 Cathedral Parkway. George Gershwin was a resident of one of the apartment buildings at 110th and Amsterdam; he wrote Rhapsody in Blue while living there.
