The Ghost Who Paid No Rent

In the summer of 1901 people began to notice a ghostly woman in the windows of a vacant house at 92nd Street and Fort Hamilton Parkway in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn. The house had been the home of a wealthy man named Christensen who had died two years before. The photo on the left is a 1928 shot of the corner of 92nd and Fort Hamilton. I am hoping that the house on the right is the Christensen mansion, because it looks just the way a haunted house should look.

The neighbors told police that the Fort Hamilton ghost appeared about three times a week, sometimes dressed all in white, sometimes all in black. She stood at one of the windows with a lamp in her hand, moaned loudly for awhile, then disappeared. People started watching the house every night. Children made detours on their way to and from school in order to avoid going near it. And people started remembering "the ghost of old Drury, supposed to have haunted the old Town Hall." There was a lot of excitement, in other words. Eventually there were about 200 people gathering around the old house every night to wait for the moaning, sobbing woman with the lamp in her hand, dressed in black or white.

Finally, a police detective named Martin White had had enough and decided - accompanied by "a hundred men and boys" - to break right into the haunted mansion and confront the ghost. They searched the empty house and found nothing. But just as they were about to give up, White saw a woman's foot sticking out of the side of the fireplace. He dragged her out of it and, pulling a sheet off of her head, discovered a very real woman - quite frightened, too, as you can imagine. She was a squatter - I do not think there was such a word in 1891 but that's what she was - named Mrs. John Barrett, a "trim" woman, about 35 years old. She told White that "the ghost business was merely a sham to keep people from entering the house."

The Brooklyn Eagle article ends there - but to me, that is just the beginning of the mystery. Who was she? Why was she living alone in an empty house - that she had broken into? Most Victorian women were not squatters. And for heaven's sake, what happened to her after White pulled her out of the fireplace?

******

I will probably write some short posts in the next few weeks, related to my NaNoWriMo endeavors in November - the mystery set in New York and Brooklyn in the 1890s that I've had in my head for, well, a long time now. It's been totally revamped as far as plot, though - and there are some dark corners of NYC history I need to do a bit of research on. To be continued...

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"The Ghost Was A Woman Who Did Not Pay Rent," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 29, 1901, p. 3.

Shanty Restaurants and New York Shantytowns

Billboard, May 30, 1942

The Shanty restaurants were a chain of diners, as far as I can tell (there isn't much information about them) that were popular in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s.There were 18 Shanty restaurants in the city by the late 1940s. They were all below 53rd Street, which may be part of the reason I never had heard of them from my parents, who were living uptown then, near Columbia.

Over on eBay you can buy a 1949 Shanty menu (and paper napkin) which features "Egg Dishes," "Hamburgers," and "Griddle Cakes" - which makes me think that it was more of a generic diner, albeit one with a slightly southern touch. Most restaurants with the word "Shanty" in the name tend to be seafood places or serve country food.

The Shanty restaurants specialized in diner-type breakfasts, and also served sandwiches, salads, ice cream and doughnuts. The 1949 menu (which is great fun to look at, over on eBay) shows that a full breakfast of two eggs, bacon, toast and coffee "with Pure Cream" was only 55 cents. If you wanted to move on to things like ice cream sundaes, they were a quarter.

In 1939 The New Yorker published this anecdote about The Shanty: 

A Southern gentleman stopping in New York got into the habit of having an occasional breakfast in one of the Shanty restaurants, because it served corn muffins that reminded him of home. Last Sunday he ordered a rounded southern breakfast, winding up with instructions about plenty of syrup for the muffins. The girl set his order before him with "O.K. Tobacco Road.*" [ "From Dixie," Dec. 9 1939]

NYPL Digital Gallery

The word shanty had two meanings: it could be a sea song or chant sung by ship's crews to pass the time while working; or it meant a shed or shack. There were many shanties in New York, long before the restaurant chain. The Old Shanty - which is hardly a true shanty - stood on Delancey Street. The picture on the right shows it in 1861; it is the small building in the righthand side, and was a "News Depot."

There were shantytowns in New York City at the end of the 19th century. They were mostly the homes of poor Irish and German immigrants. An early settlement at 1st Avenue and 40th Street was called Dutch Hill (i.e. Deutsch or German, as in the Dutch grocery) was what one historian calls "a well-known squatter colony, where [people] tended their cows, pigs, goats and fowl, and worked in near-by quarries and manure heaps." Another Civil War era shantytown was located west of Sixth Avenue between 40th and 80th Streets.

from Darkness and Daylight; or Lights and Shadows of NY Life (1892)

As the city grew northward, the shantytowns moved farther north too, ahead of new buildings and increasing urbanization. In the 1880s, there was a shantytown between 65th and 85th Streets near Central Park. By the late 1890s, they centered around 90th Street; there is a photograph of this last settlement in Old New York In Early Photographs by Mary Black (Dover 1976, p. 199). Black notes that it would vanish by the early 1900, replaced by "row houses and mansions."

Yet as late as the Depression, in the early 1930s, many people who had lost their jobs and homes lived in shacks in Central Park. The area was called "Shanty Village" or "Forgotten Man's Gulch," according to Louise Chipley Slavicek in her book New York City's Central Park (2009, p. 97).

The Shanty seems like a strange name for a chain of downtown restaurants specializing in cheery breakfasts, when you look at the pictures of real New York shanties, uptown.

*The waitress was referring to the 1932 novel (and/or the 1933 play based on the novel) by Erskine Caldwell, which was about sharecroppers in Georgia. The phrase also can refer to the tobacco-growing regions of North Carolina.

Additional Sources

Campbell, Helen. Darkness and Daylight; or Lights and Shadows of New York Life (Kessinger 2005, 1st pub. 1892, p 418)
Erst, Robert.  Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1863 (Syracuse UP 1994, p. 40).
Husband, Julie and Jim O'Loughlin. Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870-1900 (Greenwood 2004, p. 32)

Behind the Curtain: Finding My 18th Century Theatrical Ancestors

Wikipedia

Meet my 7th great grandfather, the 18th century actor Johann Friedrich Schoenemann, whose rather jolly picture is on the right. I would like to think that the ladies in the balcony behind him are his wife, Anna Rachel Weigler, and his daughter (my 6th great grandmother) Elisabeth, who were both actresses -  but unfortunately they have not been identified.

I discovered my acting ancestors on my copy of a hand-drawn family tree (literally drawn as a tree with the names in little medallions) from about 1900. The tree listed my great great grandmother, Juliane Livonius (born in 1840), her parents and grandparents, and so on. One of Juliane's great grandmothers was Henriette Caroline Charlotte (Loewen) Rudow. Henriette's parents were listed as Loewen and Schoenemann - no first names. I received the tree from a relative back in the 1970s, and for 30 years Henriette's ancestry ended there.

The relevant detail of the tree is below left - the scan is horrible, since my copy is a 1970s Xerox (remember Xerox?). Henriette is at top left and her parents "Hofsecretarius Loewen" and "Loewen - Schoenemann" are at middle and bottom right ( "Ilsabe Maria Rudow - Hansen," bottom left, is Henriette's MIL, so please disregard).

Family tree detail

Last summer I was looking around on Google Books and searched Henriette's full name, just for fun. And there was a mention of a Henriette Caroline Charlotte Loewen-Rudow. Yes, I thought, that's her!

She was in a book that mentioned her mother - a Madame Loewen -  and acting. And then, as I started looking at the German text,  I noticed an actor called Johann Friedrich Schoenemann who was mentioned in conjunction with Madame Loewen and her poet-theatre critic husband and thought: I wonder...? And then another 19th century German book mentioned the name of Henriette's husband -  the same name as the one on my family tree: Friedrich Ulrich Aemilius Rudow.* And just like that, thanks to Google Books, I had found some lost  - and really interesting - ancestors.

Johann Friedrich Schoenemann was born in Crossen an den Oder, Prussia (now Krosno Odrzanskie, Poland) on October 21, 1704. He seems to have been from a reasonably well-off family; he was studying medicine when he ran away to join a traveling Harlequin troupe in 1725 at age 21. Five years later he joined the theatrical troupe of Caroline Neuber, and specialized in comic parts. He married one of Neuber's leading actresses, Anna Rachel Weigler and in 1740 the two broke off from Neuber to start their own company. Schoenemann was not considered to be a great actor, but he was very good at spotting talent and hired several actors who would go on to great careers on the German stage.

By the 1750s Schoenemann lost interest in acting (as he had done with regards to medical school) and started a brief career in horse trading, of all things. Having failed at this, he and his family went to Schwerin, Mecklenburg, where he became a minor court retainer - hence the "Hofsecretarius" or Court Secretary designation on my family tree. He died in 1782 in Schwerin.

Loewen's Hamburg National Theater

Johann and Anna Rachel had two sons and one daughter, Elisabeth (in some sources, Eleanora) Lucia Dorothea Schoenemann, born in 1732; she is the "Loewen -Schoenemann" of the tree. Elisabeth, like her mother, was considered a good actress. She met her husband, theater critic and poet Johann Friedrich Loewen through her father. Loewen himself deserves a separate post - he wrote the first history of the German theatre and established (briefly) the first national theatre in Germany, in Berlin, in 1767.

Loewen and Elisabeth married in 1757, and at that time Elisabeth retired from acting. However, she returned to the stage, briefly, 9 years later in 1766 as Madame Loewen. When Johann Friedrich Loewen established (briefly) a German National Theater in Hamburg the following year, Elisabeth returned to the stage (as Madame Loewen) for a short time -  and she was pregnant with  my 5th great grandmother Henriette (born in July 1767) by then.

Prince Louis, Loewen's employer

The Loewens and Schoenemanns finally settled in Schwerin, Mecklenburg. Loewen had already been working, in addition to his writing and theatrical endeavors, as the private secretary of Prince Louis of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. J.F. Loewen moved with his family to Rostock in 1769, and died there 2 years later. He continued to write poetry until the end of his life - his works include "Die Walpurgisnacht," in which a certain Dr. Faustus appears on the witches' mountain, the Blocksberg. This is thought to have given Goethe inspiration for his own Faust: A Tragedy (1808).

I suspect that the Schoenemann-Loewen contingent were deliberately left off of the official family tree precisely because they were actors and thus slightly disreputable. The rest of the family (traced back to the 16th century in northern Germany) were clergymen, merchants, government officials and lawyers. Friedrich U.A. Rudow, the lawyer/mayor who married Henriette Loewen, was exceedingly respectable. The Schoenemanns and Loewens were by far the most famous people in the family** - but not quite respectable enough to join it entirely, at least on the official family tree.

I'm regarding this post as a placeholder for further research, so please read it as an interesting piece, rather than a definitive treatment. There's a lot I left out, of course - but I'm reading and making notes, slowly. And I may move the Schoenemanns and Loewens to a sub-blog or separate section of Virtual that will be strictly genealogical in nature - I'll let you know when and if I do.

Johann Friedrich Schoenemann (1704-1782)  =  Anna Rachel Weigler (abt 1705-1770)
Elisabeth Lucia Dorothea Schoenemann (1732-  ) =  Johann Friedrich Loewen (1727-1771)
Henriette Caroline Charlotte Loewen (1767-1820)  =  Friedrich Ulrich Aemilius Rudow (1759-1831)
Juliane Rudow (1791-1841)  =  Joachim Christian Livonius (1776 - 1852)
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Livonius (1808-1868) =  Louisa Friederike Lisette Muller (1813-1868)
Juliane Livonius (1840- ca 1924, NYC ), my great great grandmother

*Friedrich Ulrich Aemilius Rudow (1759-1831) was a lawyer/politician whose lengthy bio I found on GoogleBooks in an 1833 book published in Mecklenburg. This biography mentions that he married Henriette Caroline Charlotte Loewen, and that their eldest daughter Juliane married a man named Livonius (these last two were my 4th great grandparents).

**There are many mentions of Schoenemann, Loewen and Elisabeth Schoenemann ("Madame Loewen") in books about German theater; in addition, J.F. Loewen published several books, and Schoenemann wrote at least one book.  And in 1895 Hans Devrient published a biography of Johann Friedrich Schoenemann (which I intend to read all the way through one of these days; one of my New Year's resolutions is to get my German reading skills back up to speed).

New Mown Hay Face With Montague Curls

Brooklyn Public Library

Brooklyn Public Library

Any lady in the last quarter of the 19th century who wished to have a beautiful complexion and curly bangs (which were especially fashionable in the 1870s) had only to look to one cosmetics manufacturer for all her skin and hair care needs: one R.M. Hunter of Philadelphia. The 1880s trade card shown above, from P. Jackson's Botanic Drug Store in Brooklyn, extolls two of Hunter's products: Invisible Powder, and Quince Bandoline Powder, guaranteed  to work wonders upon women's faces and women's hair.

Advertisement from Scribner's Magazine (1889)

Hunter's Invisible was a face powder sold in the late 1880s and 1890s. The advertising copy tells the usual story: it is completely natural, it is the best cosmetic of all time, and so on. Best of all, the  ingredients were "happily blended." This is very good to know. And it's also good to know that with Hunter's Invisible you could have a "New Mown Hay Face" - according to the tin below (which is for sale at goantiques.com, by the way).

1897 Hunter's Invisible tin

Mr. Hunter also made Pure Quince Bandoline Powder, which sold for 10 cents a packet. Bandoline was a sticky, scented hair fixative made from quince, Irish moss or gum tragacanth. It was the Victorian equivalent of styling gel, in other words. In 1880 the New York Times ran an article entitled "The Mystery of Bandoline"* which stated that:

The preparation is a viscous fluid used for the purpose of gumming to the forehead[s] of the women of fashion the flat devices of hair which are known as Montague curls...In rural New-England, they were called 'spit-curls,' - not a nice name, as the candid reader will admit, but sufficiently expressive of a style of hair-dressing which prevailed before bandoline was invented.

1879 drawing from a French catalogue

According to The Dictionary of Fashion History by Valerie Cumming and C.W. Cunningham  Berg, 2010, p. 134), they were arranged in crescent-shaped bangs over the forehead. The lady at the left seems to be wearing them. It must have taken a lot of bandoline to hold all those curls.

The Times added that some ladies made their own bandoline by pouring water over quince seeds. Hunter's Bandoline Powder seems to have been made of ground up dried quince seeds (others were made of gum tragacanth). When reconstituted with water, it became "half a pint of Elegant Bandoline" - enough for a whole household of fashion-forward late Victorian ladies.

*Which is a wonderful name for a lost Victorian sensation/romance novel, don't you think? Written by Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth. Or possibly Ouida. There would be a tragic, weepy heroine with many perfect Montague curls and a pearly complexion, married by mistake to the wrong groom who shows up in place of his twin brother, after which she runs away and becomes a famous opera singer.