A Terrible Descent: Augustus Hicks, June 1891

Tenement air shaft [NYPL Digital Gallery]

Note: I've been working on this one for about a week, and I'm going to post it as it is. It remains - as do all my extended Hicks and true crime posts - a work-in-progress. If and when it makes it into The Book, it will have more background, more New York history and (I hope) more answers than mysteries to share.

It was the evening of Tuesday, June 9th, 1891. Picture an Old Law tenement building on Third Avenue at East 100th Street - 1805 Third Avenue, no longer there. It was probably five or six stories high, and had  few windows. The building, one of several crammed together, has 3 foot indentations at the middle of each side - space for an air shaft which allows light and air to penetrate the dark center.

Augustus T. Hicks was my great grandfather Charles Hicks' first cousin. Augustus and his wife Carrie lived in one of the dark narrow flats at 1805. He was in his early 40s and had been married for ten years. Augustus was described as a photographer by the New York Times and in the New York Evening Telegram as a "clerk" - but in any case he was out of work, and had been for at least two months. He and Carrie were starving. One newspaper noted that "the life of himself and his wife, both deserving people, had long been a hard and most wretched one."

Augustus was the only child of Brooklyn photographer Lemuel S. Hicks and his first wife, Lydia Newell, herself a photographer, which had ended in an acrimonious divorce in 1863. Lemuel married a second time in 1868, to Jane Anderson, and they had several children. Lemuel and Jane and their children are listed in the official 19th century Hicks genealogy.  Lydia and Augustus were omitted; perhaps they were an embarrassment to that old Long Island family, descended from John Hicks, who emigrated in the 1630s.*

In the 1870 census Lydia and Augustus were recorded as living in Brooklyn, both working as photographers. In the late 1870s, still in Brooklyn, Augustus was juggling two careers: he was a photographer and also sold shoes (see notes below). He married Carrie C. Barton there in 1881. They were in Brooklyn as late as 1889. They were in Manhattan by about 1890, where their fortunes must have declined.

Tenement room, early 20th c. [NYPL]

By June 1891, Augustus had been out of work for two months and felt absolutely desperate. He and Carrie had no food and no money. Enough to bring anyone to the point of despair. Then add in the darkness that seems to have haunted this particular branch of the Hicks family. Consider Lemuel and his brothers Andrew and Daniel (my great great grandfather), all prone to fits of rage.Andrew's daughter Sarah (Augustus' cousin) had committed suicide in 1887, four years before, at the age of 24. Daniel and another brother, Hiram, had drinking problems that were severe enough to warrant alarm. Augustus drank, too: since he had lost his job, the Times said, he had been "drinking to excess."

The New York Evening Telegram tells what happened next, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, June 10th

All...evening he acted in an insane manner, walking about the house with a clothes basket on his head and a teakettle in his hand. He muttered incoherently and from time to time he would take a drink from the kettle. His queer actions alarmed the neighbors and they advised the distracted wife to notify the police. She declined to do so and tried to quiet her husband. 

Presbyterian Hospital

This state of affairs continued until half past three o'clock in the morning, when Hicks started downstairs. At last Mrs. Hicks, now thoroughly alarmed, sent for the police. When Hicks heard them coming he rushed upstairs to the second floor, barricaded the room, and when entrance was forced he jumped out of the window, down a very narrow air shaft. In his descent he struck the cornices of the windows opposite, crushing his face and head. His right arm and leg were crushed and his recovery is impossible. He was removed to the Presbyterian Hospital.**

Augustus was not expected to live, the papers all said.  But he did. I cannot imagine how, considering the trauma and injuries he must have sustained. I do not (yet) know what happened to him until 1905, when the New York State Census shows him in Brooklyn, a resident of the Kings County Alms House on Clarkson Street. In 1910, he was a widower living in the German Evangelical Home in Bushwick. He seems to have died in 1911 (see notes below).

German Evang. Home for the Aged [NYPL]

A paragraph in a long-forgotten newspaper article can evoke a scene so vividly that you are transported back into a moment that - but for some long-ago reporter - would have disappeared. A little window that you never knew was there. Ever since I found the Telegram article, I have been thinking of Augustus and Carrie. Of how they arrived at that June night at 1805 Third Avenue - and of what happened to the afterwards.

*Ironically, John Hicks' wife Herodias Long was a Colonial version of Lydia - she divorced John in Rhode Island (he countered by divorcing her in New York, where he'd gone with his son Thomas, ancestor of the Long Island Hickses) and was the heroine of many scandals.

** In 1891, Presbyterian Hospital was located at Fourth Avenue between 70th and 71st Streets, as is shown in the picture above.

SOURCES

"It Is Suicides' Day; August Hicks' Desperate Attempt To Kill Himself," New York Evening Telegram, June 10, 1891, p. 6.
"City and Suburban News," New York Times, June 11, 1891, n.p.
"News Items," Lowell [Mass.] Daily Courier, June 13, 1891, p. 5.

For more on Old Law tenements check out:

Tenement Museum at 108 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side
Living Together: Dumbbell Tenements at Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures
Ephemeral New York on Old Law tenements 

Augustus Hicks in the records (all directories are Lain's Brooklyn Directories unless noted):

1860 US Census, pop. schedule, Brooklyn Ward 14 District 10, Kings, NY, P.O. Williamsburgh:
Augustus T. Hicks age 11 b NY living with parents Samuel [sic Lemuel] S. age 31 Photographer b NY and Lydia A. age 30 b NY.

1870 US Census, pop. schedule, Williamsburgh Ward 14, Kings, NY, dwelling 761, family 2074, Roll M593_955, page 258A, image 519, FHL film # 552454. [August Hicks age 20, Book Keeper, b NY, living with his mother Lydia age 35 [sic - she was about 40], Photographer, b NY $3000 pers.]

1875, 1892 NY State census: as yet not found. To be researched further.
1880, 1900 US census: as yet not found. To be researched further.

1879: Augustus Hicks, photographer, 195 Grand St., res. 391 Herkimer St., Brooklyn. A separate listing in the 1879 Lain's shows him as A.T. Hicks, res. 391 Herkimer, in the business of "shoes" at 1710 Fulton. Many members of this particular Hicks family were in the shoe business including my gg grandparents and my great grandfather - all at various Fulton Street addresses: 1590, 1620, 1710 and 1720. My grandmother was born in 1889 above the family shoe store at 1590 Fulton.

1881: Augustus "F" Hicks marries Carrie C. Barton, Brooklyn, NY certificate #  . No other marriage record found and since Augustus was married in 1891, am going on assumption that Carrie was the Mrs. Hicks of the article. Other scenarios are of course possible. Note that a Caroline Hicks age 55 (born ca 1845) died in Manhattan 4 May 1900 certificate #15497, which might be this Carrie.

1889: Augustus Hicks, photographer at 478 Myrtle St., Brooklyn

1905 NY State Census, pop. schedule, Brooklyn Assembly District 14, ED 14, image 43, FHL film #1930276, Kings County Alms House, Clarkson St. [August Hicks, Inmate W M 59y, US citizen, former occ. Photographer]

1910 US Census, pop. schedule, Brooklyn Ward 28, Kings, NY, Roll T624_982, page 7A, ED 0915, image 434, FHL film # 1374995, German Evangelical Home for the Aged [Augustus T. Hicks, Inmate W M widowed 65y, b NY, parents b NY]

1911: Augustus J [sic?] Hicks age 67 dies Brooklyn, NY April 22, 1911 [b ca 1844] certificate #8516; undoubtedly the Augustus J. Hicks buried at Greenwood Cemetery Apr. 25, 1911. However, have not been able to place the Hickses in same lot (29725/134) in our family, so perhaps not correct Augustus. Having said this, have only identified one Augustus born in mid to late 1840s in Brooklyn area. To be researched further.

The Dutch Grocery

NYPL Digital Gallery

This old Dutch building, dating from the 17th century, housed a grocery in the 19th. It has the "step gable"  typical of traditional Dutch and German architecture. It looks altogether like a tidy place.

But a Victorian New Yorker, hearing the term "Dutch grocery," would picture not this charming place, but a shabby emporium, like the one Henry James wrote of in The Bostonians (1885-6).  James' character New Yorker Basil Ransom lives on the Upper East Side, well away from Fifth Avenue. And it was not a fancy place at all, as this passage tells us:

Old house in Delft

...The two sides of the shop  were protected by an immense pent-house shed, which projected over a greasy pavement and was supported by wooden posts fixed in the curbstone. Beneath it, on the dislocated flags, barrels and baskets were freely and picturesquely grouped; an open cellarway yawned beneath the feet of those who might gaze too fondly on the savoury wares displayed in the window; a strong odor of smoked fish, combined with a fragrance of molasses, hung about the spot; the pavement, towards the gutters, was fringed with dirty panniers, heaped with potatoes, carrots and onions...The establishment was of the kind know to New Yorkers as a Dutch grocery; a red-faced, yellow-haired, bare-armed vendors might have been observed to lounge in the doorway.

NYPL Digital Gallery (prob. dates from 1850-75 period)

Nineteenth-century New York "Dutch groceries" mainly were run by German shopkeepers - Dutch being used in the same sense as "Pennsylvania Dutch" - as a corruption of Deutsch, or German. The Brooklyn Eagle in 1872, for example, mentions a Dutch grocery's "Teutonic storekeeper" ("Hydrophobia," Mar. 8 1872 p. 4). The earliest references to Dutch groceries seem to date from the 1850s - which also marked the beginning of a rise in German immigration to New York.

The Dutch grocer and his store were often the targets of racist jokes. The cartoon on the left shows a Dutch grocer, and pokes fun at his accent and lack of comprehension. It may refer to the failure of the  Croton Reservoir which stood at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street ) where the New York Public Library stands today) in October 1855: "Visiting there during the past week, we found it shorter by several feet than usual. Housekeepers should be careful about fires just now, and the police, if not too busy in politics, should look out for incendiaries" ("Short of Water," New York Times, Oct. 22, 1855, n.p.).

In the Brooklyn Eagle of 1854, a reader referred to "the...Dutch grocery way of doing business" - meaning, charging 25 cents for 24 cents' worth of goods (Aug. 10, 1855, p. 2). And as late as the 1890s, the Eagle ran so-called "funny" series called "The Gowanusians" which featured an Irish housewife and her run-ins with a "Dutch" (German) grocer (see, for example, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Apr 22, 1894, p. 4 and Jul. 2, 1893 p.4).

In addition, the Dutch grocery was a symbol of a "low" and dangerous area. In Putnam's Monthly (vol. 4, 1854, p. 51) in a story entitled "Hard Up," a description of "horrid" Elizabeth Street in lower Manhattan includes "a Dutch grocery...loom[ing] at either corner, where at night a red, unwholesome light glares out upon the dark street, and shrieks and blasphemies, and cries of murder echo along the street." And in 1856,  $3000 worth of  "saddles and shoes, teaspoons and overcoats, silk dresses and sleighbells, cart-wheels and ear-rings" - were found stowed away in trunks (behind the counter, it is implied) in a Dutch grocery at the corner of Mott and East Houston Streets* "kept by a German named William Randeau."(New York Times, Mar. 29, 1856, n.p.) Randeau had fled, so the police arrested his hapless clerk - who was also German.

*Just a few blocks from the tenement at 441 East Houston where my grandfather was born into a German immigrant family in 1893 - none of them had a grocery, though.