Betty Wales Gardens: A Mount Vernon Story

 

Newspaper advertisement for home
 in Betty Wales Gardens, 1921

The Goldman Costume Company took off right around 1900, turning out dresses, skirts, and shirtwaists for America’s young women.

New York City’s garment industry flourished in sweatshops while the exhausted girls who hunched over sewing machines marched and struck for nearly a decade before they won higher wages and fewer hours. 

By that time, Jacob Josiah Goldman, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and president of the company, had become restless. In the manner of E.H. Harriman, he became J.J. Goldman and decided to leave the city.

J.J. moved his family—wife Lollie and four children—to Mount Vernon, N.Y. He purchased a massive stone house, “Grey Rocks,” up on a hill near the border of the highly restrictive village of Bronxville. 

Stone pillar at the corner of "Grey Rocks" property

There, in 1913, J.J.’s son Louis was married in a spectacular wedding where potted palms outnumbered guests. The mansion still looms over the street below, largely unseen by passersby.

In August 1914, while the world panicked about troop mobilization in Europe, J.J. Goldman announced a contest in the trade journal Women’s Wear Daily. Fifty dollars for the reader who proposed the best name for a new line of dresses for young women, to be manufactured by the Goldman Costume Company.

Up in Rutland, VT, Lena B. Carr, the business manager of a local power company, occasionally sat down at her typewriter and wrote articles for Women’s Wear Daily. That’s how the contest came to her attention.

Carr didn’t pull “Betty Wales” out of the air.

One of her neighbors in Rutland, Edith K. Dunton, was a Smith College graduate and author of a series of popular books starring a young woman named Betty Wales. Dunton wrote under the penname Margaret Warde.

The first book, Betty Wales, Freshman, was published in 1904. Seven more followed, in which Betty Wales attended college and found her first job, as a secretary.

Before J.J. Goldman chose the name “Betty Wales” and handed a $50 check to Lena Carr, he went to Vermont to meet with Dunton. They signed a licensing agreement. At Goldman’s request, Dunton penned the last book in the series, Betty Wales, Business Woman (1916).

It was a great match of bestsellers: Betty Wales dresses and Betty Wales books. Occasionally Goldman advertised promotions: buy a dress, get a free book. He opened Betty Wales shops around the country. Department stores carved out prime retail space for the brand.

Then Goldman turned his attention to real estate.

 

***

 

Unfortunately, Mount Vernon was effectively segregated by a railroad cut, dug in the late nineteenth century, which created a “South Side” and a “North Side.”

By 1917, investors had bought up land well north of the cut. They intended to create residential neighborhoods far from the commercial district in the four-square mile city. 

Among the picturesque properties, the 75-acre Forster Tract, assembled during the 1890s, cried out for development. There was a rush to lay out and macadamize streets, plant trees, and build houses.

As a well-known philanthropist and founder of Mount Vernon’s Rotary Club, J.J. Goldman surely had made the acquaintance of local businessman Walter King Cooley, a crackerjack realtor and builder, president of a new firm, Gramatan Homes, Inc., where a talented young man named Lewis Bowman was chief architect.

Announcement in the 
Mount Vernon Daily Argus, 1917

Now they joined together to create “Betty Wales Gardens,” a 12-house community with a swimming pool and tennis courts. The Mount Vernon Country Club lay a block away.

The 12 English cottages would be designed by Bowman. Gramatan Homes announced:

 

The property is to be laid out in the form of an English garden, with shrubbery, trees, etc., and will probably have its own water supply from artesian wells.

 

Within two years, “two of the cutest little homes that have ever been built” were put up for sale on Wales Place, a new street without sidewalks that wended its way down a small hill.

More cottages followed and the development was successful. Bowman designed a few Tudor-style homes, too. I have identified 11 houses but not the twelfth.

Betty Wales cottage, built 1918

Then tragedy struck in 1921. J.J. and Lollie Goldman, who had sold Grey Rocks and moved to the Hotel des Artistes in Manhattan, were in a  car crash outside Chicago. Lollie was killed.

Goldman returned to Mount Vernon, where his daughters and their families lived. He moved into yet another stone mansion where his daughter Elizabeth (Bessie) Einstein lived with her husband Jay and their three children. 

Eventually, Goldman retired to Miami, where he died in 1948. By then, new brands were overtaking Betty Wales dresses.  

Wales Place remains, a quiet lane with an incongruous name off the beaten path. Some of the houses have been refaced or painted bright colors, and one or two look abandoned. 

And not an artesian well in sight.

Aerial view of Betty Wales Gardens
(Google maps)

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/04/betty-wales-gardens-mount-vernon-story.html

April 1

April 1

 

How I Got to Harry

 

The little boy levels a serious gaze at the photographer peering through a Graflex camera. Ery Kehaya, Jr. has just tugged off a veil that covered The Discus Thrower, a bronze statue by a Greek sculptor who won first prize in an art contest held in conjunction with the 1924 Paris Olympics.

Now Ery’s father, a Turkish-born businessman married to a Southern belle, will present the statue to the City of New York. Grace stands beside him on the dais, watchful but smiling.

And look over there at the man with the wispy gray beard, 84^th Street receding over his shoulder. Dressed in an overcoat on a warm spring day, he seems to have emerged from the eighteenth century. Is he Rip Van Winkle?

Impossible—this is Central Park, May 1926.    

The Kehaya family liked Park Avenue apartments and inhabited quite a few during the decades when Ery, Sr. ran the Standard Commercial Tobacco Company. Born in 1885, he grew up near Samsun, Turkey, along the southern coast of the Black Sea, a region known for a particular type of tobacco: aromatic and nutty with small leaves. 

Steered by his family toward religion and philosophy, Kehaya decided to go into the tobacco business instead. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1910 and founded his company two years later with $5,000. By 1928 the company had become a public corporation worth $12 million.

Kehaya influenced the tobacco trade in two important ways. He popularized Kentucky, Virginia, and Carolinas tobacco among Europe monopolies, and he introduced Asian and European tobaccos to American cigarette manufacturers.

It was all about the blend.

Ery Kehaya, 1926

Kehaya’s 1964 obituary did not mention the $4 million stock swindle that he and three of his officers pulled off in 1937. At trial, they pleaded guilty to violating Federal mail fraud, securities and exchange, and conspiracy statutes. The fines totaled $8,400; no sentences were imposed.

The company reorganized and flourishes today. The two-year old boy who disrobed the statue grew up and joined the company in 1945. He started by unloading tobacco on the New York docks and retired as chairman.

 

***

 

Among the four perpetrators, Harry D. Meyer was a vice president and director of Standard Commercial. The newspapers reported that he lived in Bronxville, an affluent village outside the city.

Like Ery Kehaya, Harry was born in 1885. His parents, Henry and Henrietta, were Alsatians who arrived in New York City during the 1880s, peak years of German immigration.

Living in Weehawken, N.J., the Meyer family grew quickly with seven children across 14 years. Henry owned a restaurant for some time. His sons went to work at young ages: Arthur and Herman became machinists in a factory and Harry, Edward, and Louis were office clerks.

Daughter Flora took off early; married and moved to Spokane. The youngest, Alfred, graduated from Cornell and became a veterinarian.

Now here came Harry, evidently ambitious. At the American Express Company, he started as a file clerk and was assistant to the general manager of the New York office when Standard Commercial hired him.  

American Express building,
Manhattan, 1910

Originally, American Express was a transport company. Until shifting to travel services during World War I, it specialized in freight forwarding. Freight forwarding encompasses all logistics and documentation involved in shipping a product (like tobacco) internationally.

Of course, the import and export of tobacco lay at the center of Keyaha’s business, and hiring Harry would have brought expertise in shipping. Unsurprisingly, Ery Kehaya came to depend on his new employee.

Within a few years, he entrusted Harry with an intriguing mission at a critical time in Western history.  

On February 21, 1917, Standard Commercial asked the U.S. Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, for permission to send Harry Meyer overseas.

The plan was for Harry to visit Russia, where he would purchase and arrange the shipment of tobacco to the U.S. Next up: Japan, Sweden, Norway, Canada, and England. The trip would last about six months.

Off went Harry on the Empress of Asia, departing Vancouver on March 15 and arriving in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) on April 22, 1917.

This was 16 days after President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany and six days after Vladmir Lenin, after years of self-exile in Europe, returned to Russia.

Petrograd, 1917

During Harry’s weeks in Russia, the country was in turmoil. Following the February Revolution, just months earlier, the Bolsheviks had forced the Tsar to abdicate.

With the Tsar dispatched, a Provisional Government, democratic in spirit, shared power with the Soviet (Bolsheviks). But the new regime did not fulfill its promise to lift up the starving, beleaguered masses, and Russia continued to commit soldiers and money to the Allied Powers fighting Germany.

Subsequently, the Bolsheviks withdrew their support of the Provisional Government and consolidated power under Lenin and Leon Trotsky. This was two days after Harry’s arrival.

The Bolsheviks quickly nationalized tobacco production. One wonders what became of the shipments Harry arranged. 

***

In 1944, Ery found his friend dead in his room at the Hotel Fresno. The two men had traveled to California to explore the possibility of raising tobacco in nearby Clovis. This would have been an unlikely enterprise. Fresno was a center for manufacturing and distributing cigarettes during World War II, but the soil had already proven to be inhospitable to tobacco.

The coroner reported that Harry died of a heart attack while playing solitaire.     

Hotel Fresno in its interwar heyday

 

*The Discus Thrower stood in Central Park until 1936, when it was moved to Randall’s Island. After years of neglect and vandalism, it was restored and now stands in the shadow of Icahn Stadium.

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/03/how-i-got-to-harry.html

The Houses Lewis Bowman Left Behind: A Mount Vernon Story

Mount Vernon home designed by Lewis Bowman in 1917.
He and his family lived there until 1920. 

 

Bowman was born in 1890 in New York City. His family soon moved to a “Foursquare” on Franklin Avenue in Mount Vernon, N.Y., a fast-growing suburb.

“Foursquare”—because the clapboard house was boxy with a porch and a dormer, a rising architectural style that rejected ornate Victorianism. 

“Bowman”—because some people who live in the houses he designed more than 100 years ago have the habit of announcing: “it’s a Bowman!” as one might exclaim, “it’s a Picasso!” These homes are clustered in southern Westchester County, about 30 minutes by train from Grand Central Terminal.

Quite a few of the best-known, grandest houses that Bowman designed are located along Elm Rock Road in Bronxville, N.Y. They belong to very proud residents of a village that considers itself close to perfection, right next door to Mount Vernon. 

Yet Charles Lewis Bowman, who graduated from Cornell University in 1912 with a B.A. and an M.A. in architecture, left an equally consequential imprint in his hometown.

 

***

While studying at Cornell, Lewis Bowman (he dropped “Charles”) worked summers at the renowned architecture firm, McKim, Mead & White. The prestige did him no harm, of course, but he said it was like working in a factory.

Therefore in 1912 he returned to Mount Vernon, moved in with his parents,  and joined the Milligan Company.

House designed by Lewis Bowman for the Milligan Company, 1917.

Lewis Bowman's drawings for the house pictured above.

Andrew W. Milligan had made a fortune in metals before turning his attention to home construction in 1906. His trajectory resembled that of Andrew Carnegie and other capitalists who rode the wave of modern industry. Milligan sold many a battleship and cruiser to the U.S. Navy during its sweeping nineteenth-century rehabilitation. 

Now 50 years old, Milligan rented an office on First Street overlooking the railroad cut and joined forces with Walter King Cooley, a hometown real estate broker who had planned to become a physician but changed his mind.

“I consider the outlook bright!” Cooley proclaimed to anyone who asked about Mount Vernon’s prospects.  

Walter King Cooley
Who's Who in Westchester (1925)

Indeed, most American suburbanites looked forward to a charmed future.

Milligan and Cooley planned to build up-to-date homes on small plots in a variety of architectural styles. Alas, Milligan died unexpectedly in 1907. Cooley continued the construction business, which was quite successful. Subsequently, he reorganized the company and established Gramatan Homes, Inc.*

Lewis Bowman was just 21 when Cooley offered him the position of chief architect.  

This decision transformed the new company.

Young Lewis Bowman in his studio
(Bronxville History Center)

 

The young man proved to be extraordinarily versatile. He created dozens of Colonials, Tudors, and English cottages that went up quickly during the boom years surrounding World War I.

I believe there are far more than have been identified. Clues appear in trade journals wherein Bowman’s designs were lauded. Occasionally, he published an article and sat for an interview. One can only hope that greater access to Bowman’s plans and properties will come someday, when the City of Mount Vernon decides to run a professional Building Department.

Bowman disliked modernism, insisting that he could not imagine swapping stone, brick, slate, and other classic building materials for steel.

Yet he embraced modern conveniences: attached garages, heated garages, the best furnaces and boilers, closets with shoe shelves, sinks flanked by porcelain drain boards, and so forth.

The houses that Bowman built in Mount Vernon fall largely within a slice of the Forster Tract (see previous post), a multi-acre property assembled by developers in the 1890s.  

Bowman designed this house for an investor's daughter. It is located on Frederick Place,
 Mount Vernon, N.Y. 

In 1917, Bowman decided to build his own house on a double lot in the Forster Tract. He had married Eleanor Holwick of Canton, Ohio in 1913, and their daughter, Jean, came along just as the house reached completion. Perched on a rocky corner, it incorporated features that would distinguish his later work.

House designed by Bowman, 1920, Mount Vernon, N.Y.

One wonders when Bowman began longing to be on his own. As the twenties progressed, he surely saw the possibilities. In the meantime, an unusual adventure awaited the Gramatan Homes gentlemen.

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/02/the-houses-lewis-bowman-left-behind-html 

 

*The company took its name from an Indian sachem who conferred land to white settlers, the area now encompassed by Eastchester, around 1700. The story has never been documented fully.    

 

   

 

 

  

 

   

 

 

 

 

Late Afternoon

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/01/late-afternoon.html

The Forster Tract: A Mount Vernon Story

 

Corner of Forster & Primrose Avenues, around 1900

Around 1890, when the lawyer Frederick P. Forster shifted his gaze from Manhattan to Mount Vernon, N.Y., the burgeoning village was two years shy of incorporating as a city. 

Beyond the commercial district where the railroad chugged through, much of Mount Vernon’s four-square miles formed a patchwork of farms, fields, orchards, and eighteenth-century manors.

A 39-year-old Boston native, Forster thrived on real estate deals, buying and selling along the Hudson River and in Riverdale. In 1888 he came to Mount Vernon to referee an auction of contested land.

Before long he returned, now in partnership with three local men: Winfield, Murphy, and Lucas. These three were big boosters of the city and looked forward to investing in property and making a lot of money.

The blustery Winfield claimed he was already a millionaire, having made his fortune buying and selling land in South Dakota.

Forster had no particular affinity with Mount Vernon, although periodically during the next 20 years he would make noises about building a house there. The house never materialized, and it appears that Forster conducted business from a distance.  

Ironically, three city streets are named for him although he declined the opportunity to lend his name to a small park.

Original bricks are still visible under
street pavement on Forster Avenue.

That park, where my friend and I used to chalk up the sidewalks with childish pictures, lay in the middle of what became known as the Forster Tract.

Eventually the four men amassed 75 acres. Since the tract bore Forster’s name, his investment probably was the largest.

By 1901 they were on their way. “The Choice Forster Tract Being Improved,” one headline stated, “The Most Desirable Land in Fifth Ward.”

Winfield, Murphy, and Lucas hired men to regrade the terrain, lay out and macadamize the streets, and install sewers and gas lines after slugging out costs with the city.

On some of the new streets one might find an old farmhouse. But most of the lots stood empty, waiting to be purchased.  

 

SECURE FIRST LOTS AT BOTTOM PRICES.
High ground, flagged sidewalks, high terraced lots.

Only 10 minutes walk to Station.

 

The Forster Tract 

 

***

 

Alas or perhaps not alas, Frederick Forster never got to see the development of the Forster Tract. In 1912 he leased out the family home on West 84^th Street and skedaddled to Milton, Mass. with his wife Edith and six of their children.

There, in the winter of 1913, the Forsters hosted their daughter Dorothy’s wedding to a Yale man with the inimitable name of Rutger Bleecker Miller.  

Soon after, the scandal hit the papers. As executor of several large New York City estates, Forster had borrowed and embezzled upwards of $900,000, even causing one man to go to jail because he could not pay alimony.

The ensuing lawsuits and bankruptcy uncovered securities fraud.  

Forster’s defense—he claimed to have been afflicted with partial paralysis—did not hold water with the eminent Judge Samuel Seabury, who would go on to bring down Tammany Hall in the 1930s.

In 1914, Forster was forced to relinquish his unsold property in Mount Vernon. This may have broken his heart. If so, he did not suffer long, dying one year later at age 62.

I must confide that this news came as a terrible shock. Although it has been impossible to find a portrait of Frederick Prentiss Forster, I imagined him as an amiable bearded man who put the interests of his clients first.

It would seem to follow that the streets which bear his name—Frederick Place, Forster Avenue, and Forster Parkway—honored a generous spirit with an artful sensibility.

I love Mount Vernon, but it has a habit of misleading me.

 

 

 

To be continued.

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/01/the-forster-tract-mount-vernon-story.html/

Piano Lessons in Marble Hill

 

It would be perfectly fine for the 12-year old girl to ride the trolley across the 225^th Street Bridge. By 1940, she knew the city well and could glare fiercely at anyone who scared her.   

During those years her mother was chronically ill and often disappeared into hospitals and sanitariums. But Rose was around often enough to decide that her only child, Gloria, should have piano lessons, and she went about finding the right teacher.

That turned out to be Mrs. H. Victoria Wilde. Born in England in 1864, Mrs. Wilde immigrated to the U.S. in 1894. There, she taught piano and voice for decades.

Around 1910, Mrs. Wilde and her family moved from Brooklyn to an apartment in Marble Hill, N.Y.

New York, 1911
Mrs. Wilde, unknown woman, Elsie 
& Muriel, seated
(courtesy of the family)

Marble Hill is such an evocative name. One imagines Primrose Hill in London, with its panoramic views. Mrs. Wilde’s Marble Hill was a hilly hodge-podge of narrow streets lined with houses and apartment buildings. Except for the commercial district along 225^th Street, near the subway and trolley stations, the neighborhood stayed pretty quiet. It had its own charm.

There is a strange twist in the history of Marble Hill. Originally, in the time of the Lenape Indians who inhabited Manhattan until the early 1600s, a narrow creek, which the Dutch named “Spuyten Duyvil,” flowed around the northern tip of the island between the Hudson and Harlem Rivers.

In 1886, the city fathers decided to widen and reroute the creek to accommodate a growing number of barges and tugs. Over nine years, as laborers constructed the Harlem Ship Canal, Marble Hill was transformed into an island and subsequently, through the miracle of landfill, became part of The Bronx.

Politically, it remains affiliated with Manhattan. Marble Hill’s residents vote in Manhattan elections.

Amusingly, in 1939 the Bronx Borough President, James T. Lyons, planted a Bronx flag at the highest point of Marble Hill and claimed it for his borough.

Everyone laughed and the Times declared Marble Hill to be The Bronx’s Sudetenland.  

Trolley tracks on the 225th Street Bridge 

Gloria, her parents, and her grandmother lived in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan. In order to get to Marble Hill, Gloria rode the trolley north on the lower level of the swing bridge that crossed the Harlem Ship Canal. Debarking on the other side, she’d walk a few blocks to Mrs. Wilde’s apartment.

Every spring, Mrs. Wilde hosted a piano recital to show off her students. She printed programs, so I know that Gloria performed pieces by Chopin and Grieg, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Program for Mrs. Wilde's recital, 1942. 
On the left, Elsie Wilde performs a song by Clara Edwards;
 on the right, Gloria Stromberg performs Gershwin.

The recitals were held in Mrs. Wilde’s living room. Perhaps you’re wondering how all of the pupils and their guests squeezed in.

Mrs. Wilde didn’t teach on a grand, not even an upright. Her piano, a spinet, was small with extra-short keys. Spinets became popular during the Depression. Though eminently affordable, they fell short of the rich tone of grand pianos.  

In addition to the spinet, the room held a chest of drawers and a couch. As many chairs as possible were rounded up for the audience. 

45 Marble Hill Avenue

While she managed everything with aplomb, things had been bumpy since Henriette Victoria Hodson Wilde sailed from England to America in 1894 at the age of thirty.

She arrived with her six-year old daughter, Elsie, and the man who would soon become her mercurial common-law husband, William (Willoughby) Wilde. He traveled under “William White.”

Henriette and Willoughby were met by a friend, Francis Wilde. He went by Frank. The two men were not related. 

They had a plan, however, so everyone set out for North Adams, Mass., where Willoughby had been hired to perform as an organist or choirmaster, possibly accompanied by Mrs. Wilde’s voice.

But Mrs. Wilde might have been indisposed because her second daughter, Muriel, was born in North Adams.  

Before long they were off to Oskaloosa, Iowa, where Willoughby had secured a position as the organist and choirmaster at the First Presbyterian Church. He also directed the new philharmonic society in town.

Mrs. Wilde became very popular in Oskaloosa. She gave vocal performances at musicales, women’s clubs, graduations, and churches. The local papers showered her with praise: “artistic,” “delightful,” “sweet and dainty,” “the gem of the evening.”

Meanwhile, Frank worked in bookbinding or real estate. Sometimes he sold clothing and fruit.

In 1895, the family moved to Reading, PA, where Sidney was born. Before long they were off to Lebanon, PA, as the family began its zigzag journey back east, ending in Marble Hill.

Willoughby S. Wilde surrounded by members of
his chorus for an operetta, "The Ballet of the Seasons,"
performed in Reading, PA, 1903.

Of course, Mrs. Wilde’s students did not know that the British lady in her mid-70s had inhabited far more American cities and towns than they could imagine.

The teacher possessed her own odd story and so did my mother, who took piano lessons for at least ten years and insisted that my brother and I do the same. But we never heard her play a note. 

Mrs. H. Victoria Wilde and Gloria held their years close.

They have gone away but the mysteries remain.

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2025/11/piano-lessons-in-marble-hill.html

 

*Deepest gratitude to Tom and Liz, who opened up their memories and files.