The Short Happy Life of Norman F. Wells: a Mount Vernon Story, Part II

 

Newspaper announcement, 1939

When he registered for the draft in 1918, Norman Wells described himself as a “print expert.”

His employer, the prestigious commercial art gallery M. Knoedler & Co., prized his knowledge and taste. Yet he had started his career as a clerk, uninitiated in the art world.

Nearly every summer between 1924 and 1938, Norman traveled with his wife Mathilde to Europe. There he met with art dealers and visited museums and chateaux, wherever an Old Master print might turn up and he could make an offer. 

Paris, London, Amsterdam, Geneva – which city did he love most?

That would be Mount Vernon, N.Y., where he grew up rough-and-tumble with the neighborhood boys; friendships forged for life.

Norman joined Knoedler in 1897 when he was 22. I imagine the commute, which would last for fifty years. He steps onto a train at the Mount Vernon West station and rides to the city; walks down Fifth Avenue to the firm’s rowhouse gallery at 34^th Street.

Over time the company moves farther north and Norman keeps rising.

He is a busy man.

Back in turn-of-the-century Mount Vernon, an exhilarated Norman just became a volunteer fireman with Engine Company 3, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. Commissioners, chiefs, deputy chiefs, superintendents, and captains—he knew them all and they loved him like a brother, revered his modesty and judgment.

Mount Vernon, N.Y. Fire Department, 1908

Norman also had just dipped his toe into local Republican politics. During the next four decades, he would attend every party dinner, meeting, and inaugural buffet. He hobnobbed with the popular Mayors Edwin Fiske and Edward Brush and sought appointments on local commissions.

Perhaps his favorite Mount Vernon pursuit was the Mike Nitz Bowling Club, organized in fall of 1897—that lucky year—with Norman as its captain.

The club’s first big event did not occur at a bowling alley but on City Island, which is located in Long Island Sound very close to The Bronx.  

City Island is fun, the way it transports you to an eighteenth-century village on the Massachusetts coast. In 1897, when the bowlers crossed the bridge in a carriage lent by the local funeral home, City Island must have been a blast. 

City Island Drawbridge circa 1880
www.bridgesnyc.com 

Norman and nine of his friends went to Flynn’s Restaurant, where they danced till midnight and then devoured a sumptuous feast, according to the Mount Vernon Argus. Everyone was home by 4 in the morning.

In 1898 they had another great time: dinner at Bock’s Alleys in Mount Vernon, followed by performances on banjo and xylophone.

In 1899, the highlight of the year turned out to be a Decoration Day outing with baseball, fishing, boating, and a shore dinner to beat the band.

Checking the old scores in the local papers, I understand why the Mike Nitz bowlers were happiest when they were eating and drinking. The club ranked poorly in its league.

But the happy bowlers persisted: beer bottler William Hobby, lawyer George Appell, saloonkeeper Alvin Bardes, county clerk Leon St. Clair Dick, jeweler Alfred Schickerling, diamond setter Martin Van Orden, and Norman Wells.

They rolled on after Norman’s death, and never forgot him.

Parke-Bernet auction catalogue, 1946.
Mrs. Wells sold most of the couple's prints.  

See part I, August 13, 2025

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2025/10/the-short-happy-life-of-norman-f-wells.html 

Note: During the summer of 1940, Mathilde Wells presented the Mount Vernon Public Library with print cases for the new Norman F. Wells Alcove on its spacious second floor. She changed the displays seasonally—bird etchings, scenes of old New York, and work by modern artists Louis Lozowick and Martin Lewis—until her death in 1964.

The Mount Vernon Territory

 

During the 1960s, we lived in a Tudor house on a corner lot, built in 1917. Ivy crept up the stone chimney and twirled around an iron lantern at the front door.

The street it faced felt dim and mysterious yet wide and bright. A straight, quiet street with overarching sycamores and a slate sidewalk of many hues.

Sidewalks lilted up the sunny side of the street and darkly down the other, shaded in part by a granite precipice on which two homes perched.

The massing of slate, brick, and stone beneath tall trees was like a piano chord played by a child who holds the “sustain” pedal for as long as possible.

And Forster Avenue has, more or less, sustained itself.

The exception is a few houses that are falling apart, including the Tudor house on the corner where the windows are broken, the iron lantern has disappeared, and the weeds are as a high as an elephant’s eye.

I’m not optimistic.

But the Manhattan lawyer Frederick Prentiss Forster sure was optimistic when he came bounding out of Manhattan to make a mint in Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Frederick Forster did not actually attend law school but he was a Harvard graduate, class of 1873, who made his way to New York City where he boomed in the real estate business.

You don’t need to visit the municipal archives to examine the rolled-up maps that crackle with time. Every day the newspapers published Forster’s voluminous transactions in fine print, and now it’s all digitized. 

Forster moved from firm to firm, sometimes working with his older brother George, brokering deals largely on the Upper West Side. There, on West 84^th Street, he commissioned a five-story brick mansion for his family.

During the late 1880s, he had some business in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in southern Westchester County. Something about the place grabbed him. Ev'rythin' was up to date in Mount Vernon: newspapers, funeral homes, even a department store. The city fathers had just laid the cornerstone for a hospital.

And they had already made a grave mistake—the decision to lower the train tracks that passed through the commercial district. Italian immigrant laborers performed the back-breaking work. In effect, the railroad cut segregated the city and still does today.  

Digging the railroad cut in Mount Vernon, N.Y., 1894
 (Westchester County Historical Society)

“Developer” wasn’t a term yet, but Mount Vernon's real estate men had been busy since the Civil War ended. Now, as the 19th century wound down, the descendants of 17th-century landowners were ready to let go.    

It wasn’t Forster’s style to show up one day like a stranger in town. He found three associates: Richard M. Winfield, a newcomer to Mount Vernon, and John H. Murphy and Edwin Lucas, who had spent most of their lives in the city.

Was there a glint of the Wild West? Pocket watches and checkered vests. Nary a gun in sight, although they were girded with purchase agreements and leaky pens.

Not to mention that Lucas was once charged with assault in the third degree when he punched out a restaurant keeper.

Walking the dirt roads on the north side of the city, the four men eyed family estates, farmland, and even a golf club, which they eventually assembled into one parcel. The Forster Tract would encompass 75 acres.

The Tudor house on the corner lot rose years later, after Frederick Forster fled New York in disgrace. 

Even today, more than a century later, certain Mount Vernon foreclosure notices refer to the Forster Tract, Map No. 1603, filed in the county's Register's Office on March 19, 1906. It looks like one has already been served on the house I love.   

 

Map with the Forster Tract marked, 1920s

To be continued. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/

The Short Happy Life of Norman F. Wells: a Mount Vernon Story, Part I

M. Knoedler & Co.
14 East 57th Street, 1900 

 

Like many commuters, Norman Wells traveled by train between the suburbs and the city for nearly 50 years. It was just a half-hour ride from his hometown, Mount Vernon, N.Y., to Manhattan.

On Valentine’s Day, 1939, he left work on East 57^th Street and walked over to Grand Central Terminal, probably stopping to pick up a box of chocolates or a bouquet of flowers for his wife Mathilde.

On the train, he suffered a heart attack and died. He was just 65.  

At the time of his death, Norman Freeman Wells had achieved success that far exceeded his family’s expectations.  

He and his wife Mathilde lived in a large stucco house on the fancier side of town. Their home was filled with art, and the couple traveled extensively.  

Walter Wells, Norman’s father, descended from early English settlers. He had been a carpenter since boyhood. In the 1890s, he started building pedestals and managing display equipment at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1897, Norman began his career at M. Knoedler & Co., art dealers with an impeccable reputation, specializing in Old Master prints and post-Impressionist art.    

It’s not clear how Norman found his way to the gallery. He had no formal education in the field and must have been a quick study because he rose swiftly in the organization.

During the late nineteenth century, however, such a trajectory occurred more often than one might expect. As the antiquarian art market became increasingly competitive, enterprising young men sought entry-level jobs at shops and bookstores that dealt in maps, prints, and engravings.

Some started off sweeping floors. Those who prospered might eventually take over the store or go out on their own.

Originally, M. Knoedler & Co. was part of Goupil, Vibert & Cie, a Paris auction house that established a New York branch in 1848.* The branch’s founder, Michael Knoedler, eventually bought out Goupil. He left the gallery to his son Roland, who hired Norman as a clerk and promoted him quickly.

Knoedler advertisement, 1905

In 1908, when Norman married a Mount Vernon girl, Mathilde Kelly, one of the Knoedler sons attended the wedding and the firm gave the couple a piano and music cabinet for their new home, a small frame house on N. High Street set on a corner lot with a stone barn.  

Most of their years would be spent there, on the city’s west side, a largely German and Irish enclave. The neighborhood was their comfort.

Mount Vernon, N.Y., 1900s

 

Every summer, the Mount Vernon papers published an announcement that Mr. and Mrs. Norman F. Wells had sailed to Europe, where they would spend two months touring and Mr. Wells would conduct business. 

Norman learned well from an older colleague, Charles Carstairs, who worked closely with such high-end art collectors as the industrialist Henry C. Frick and the financier J. P. Morgan, Sr. When Carstairs was sent off to establish Knoedler’s Pittsburgh branch and subsequently moved to London to direct that branch, he left room for Norman to flourish.

The younger man developed a friendship with Herbert Greer French, a vice president at Proctor & Gamble, whom he advised on purchases of Old Masters prints. Eventually, this multitude formed the core of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s fine prints collection.  

At the time of his death, Norman was Knoedler’s secretary-treasurer. Many an artist inscribed and presented prints to him, which must have brought him great happiness.

What was his true passion, however?

Knoedler Annual Dinner, 1907;
Wells is among those standing.

 

 

To be continued.

*Dates vary. In 1863, the business officially became M. Knoedler & Co. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/

 

Conjuring Jane Pierce

 

Imagine Jane Pierce in her black gown and mantilla. She sits on a slipper rocker in her second-floor bedroom in the White House. Clutching her Bible and a sheath of letters, the tubercular First Lady dwells in her memories. As usual, she does not feel well.

It is 1852.  

Entering and departing the world in just 57 years, Mrs. Franklin Pierce lived an antebellum life of grief and despair. Seeking answers, she agonized through illness, chronic insomnia, and the deaths of three young sons.

The deaths she attributed to her husband’s political career and their years in Washington, D.C., 1837 to 1842, when he represented New Hampshire in the U.S. Senate.

The city was a den of iniquity, she insisted in letters back home. In her Calvinistic assessment, she included the 3^rd Street boarding house near Capitol Hill where she and Mr. Pierce resided after their arrival in Washington and paid a few extra dollars for a rocking chair in their room.

 

Newspaper sketches, 1850s

Politics was a raucous business pursued in taverns and hotel lobbies where every glass  overflowed with whiskey. Men flocked to cockfights; arguments led to deadly duels. Although Dolley Madison, approaching 80, still presided over polite society, Washington’s sharp-tongued hostesses competed cattily for supremacy.   

Jane found the city intolerable, especially compared to the quiet New England towns from whence she came. Modern manners, outré fashions, and heavy drinking offended her delicate sensibility. She could hardly bear parties and public events and never stopped hoping that Franklin would leave politics for good.   

A temperance advocate, she anguished over his uncontrollable alcohol consumption.

Franklin Pierce was a Southern sympathizer. As president, he signed into law the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which reversed the Missouri Compromise and launched the nation toward civil war.

Yet Pierce possessed a spirited interest in the wide world, political and military ambitions, and a jovial temperament. Only the losses of his sons seem to have transformed him, temporarily, into the reverent man Jane wished him to be. 

 

 

***

 

If she had not been the wife of a president, her afflictions would not merit a second glance.

Still, considering how much attention has been showered on other First Ladies, Jane Pierce may deserve greater scrutiny—especially since so many of them were depressed.

 

Jane Pierce doll,
First Ladies of the White House 
by Mary Ann Horneman (1941)

Her biographers have been few, with research hampered by a missing diary which belonged to Jane’s Aunt Abigail, who lived in the White House between 1853 and 1855 and kept company with her disconsolate niece.*

Eventually the diary entered the possession of a descendant who happened to be a professor. Surely he was aware of the importance of sources. After his death in 1957, however, his wife lost or hid the diary. By now, experts agree, it is gone.

Fortunately, a few people had the chance to review the diary, and excerpts are sprinkled through a few books. One line that has always grabbed me is: “. . . gloom engulfed her and she sat for the rest of the day in a stupor.”

Jane Appleton was reared in a puritanical home where God’s will was believed to determine every facet of existence, and salvation was not guaranteed. Such an environment would certainly induce anxiety.

In her time, women of her socio-economic class and race conformed to four values: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. These constituted the “cult of true womanhood” as defined by the scholar Barbara Welter in 1966. 

Jane exemplified those virtues. Still, even if she felt trapped and rebellious, as did many women like her, it would not fully explain her intractable despondency.

Tuberculosis has destroyed billions of lives, having originated more than 70,000 years ago. The bloody cough, the exhaustion, the high fever—all contributed to but probably did not cause Jane’s wretched emotional state.

 

Jane Pierce pictured in an early guide
to the Smithsonian's First Ladies Exhibition

Her father, a minister, died when she was 13. Her first son died in infancy and the second at age four. Eleven-year old Benny died before his parents’ eyes during a horrific train derailment.

No one recovers from the deaths of children.

Yet Jane Pierce was incapacitated by lifelong anguish. She came into the world and exhaled misery.

I wish that diary would turn up.

 

 

 

*Abigail Kent Means

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2025/06/conjuring-jane-pierce.html

The Girl in the Pictures

 

Inwood neighborhood, northern Manhattan, 1930s. 

https://myinwood.net/map-oval/ 

On the day before my mother died, she lay fully dressed and propped against pillows atop her neatly made bed. As always, she wore a silk scarf around her neck.

By the time I arrived in the early afternoon, she felt very sick. In a few weeks she would be 96 years old and something was catching up with her. 

Though pleased to have a visitor, she spoke little and spent much of our time together looking at a wall by the bed where hung two portraits of herself at a very young age.

Once, breaking the silence, she gestured toward the pictures and said that she liked looking at them.

They had hung on that wall since she moved into the apartment seven years earlier. I’m now certain that they were there by some grand design:  for the moments she still inhabited and those that followed the next morning until she was gone. 

My mother shared very few memories of growing up as an only child in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City with her grandmother and parents.  

Yet it happens that she shared the stories of the portraits.

One weekend in September 1929, perhaps a month before the stock market crashed, my 1-1/2 year old mother toddled happily along Dyckman Street, a busy shopping street in her northern Manhattan neighborhood, Inwood.  

Her delight was captured in a photo snapped by her father (most likely), but it was her mother who decided to have it enlarged and colorized. She must have hung it on the living room wall.

The second picture came to be in 1932, the worst year of the Depression. My mother’s parents operated a luncheonette on East 20^th Street in what is now called the Flatiron District. 

In the luncheonette, my grandmother worked the cash register and my grandfather cooked. Their four-year old daughter, my mother, accompanied them downtown when no one could watch her at home. 

One day a penniless artist came by. He offered to draw my mother in return for a meal. Afterward, my grandmother folded the drawing and stuck it in a drawer, surely under some handkerchiefs. She had many. It was retrieved and framed after her death in 1968. 

The two pictures are my closest point of reference for understanding my mother. Gazing at them evoked something inside her—not so much a jolly childhood as the city where she was born in 1928, which she adored throughout her life.

“I was in love with New York,” wrote Joan Didion.

 

I do not mean love in any “colloquial” way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who touches you, and you never love anyone quite that way again. 

My mother told me that she never asked her parents and grandmother about their escape from Ukraine during the first decade of the twentieth century. The bleakness and horror that once filled their eyes and ears became deep wounds that one would not share with a child, even if she were to inquire.   

For the little girl, however, there was New York City. It stretched as far as she could see in every direction, hers to discover:  first, with the three adults; then on her own.

Her neighborhood at the top of the island, its old-growth forest crowned with schist and marble formations, ran down to meet the Hudson River.

The George Washington Bridge rose 40-odd blocks south.

The “A” train’s last stop was 207^th Street, whose steps she flounced down or ran up thousands of times.

It’s an old story. The daughter of immigrants who have the great fortune to come to America, she finds herself at home in the city. The two pictures were the beginning.  

George Washington Bridge, 1931

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2025/05/the-girl-in-pictures.html

Tangled Trees

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2025/03/tangled-trees.html

Introducing Mr. Primrose Avenue

George Primrose, promotional card, 1880s

 

In my hometown of Mount Vernon, New York, Primrose Avenue ran less than a mile between two main streets. Yet to a child, it seemed to go on forever, uphill and down dale. 

Since we walked and biked everywhere until we got our drivers licenses, the streetscape etched itself into our youth.  

Passing by, day after day, trudging or whizzing along, one couldn’t help noticing the graffiti on a traffic box, the unruly shrubs that overran a particular corner, and the tree roots pushing up sidewalk slates. 

I don’t remember seeing primroses but surely they had bloomed 90 years earlier . . . small vibrant flowers scattered beneath the trees that shaded Mount Vernon’s undeveloped tracts.

Of course that’s why the street was called Primrose Avenue. And the grassy triangle where the terrain dipped was Primrose Park.   

But the time has come to make a correction. The name has nothing to do with flowers. 

George H. Primrose, an entertainer who made his fortune as a Blackface minstrel, arrived in Mount Vernon around 1885. Before long, he built a “showplace mansion” for himself, his wife Emma, his brother Albert, and a terrier named Baby.

 

Primrose Avenue, circa 1900

In 1959, an old-timer watched from across the street as the big house was razed to make room for a parking lot.

He recalled Primrose as an “end man,” the comic who stands at the end of a row of performers at a Blackface minstrel show. The end man banters with the master of ceremonies, whose serious manner contrasts with the insulting racial stereotypes that the audience finds uproarious.      

Primrose, his role central to the show, continually refined his act. He was alert to “modern trends in minstrelsy,” according to a newspaper report.

Despite the demolition of his mansion, Primrose left an imprint on Mount Vernon. While he toured widely, he found time to buy land on the north side of the city where he built speculative homes with turrets, broad lawns, and wraparound porches. They still stand.

Scientific American published
special editions on architecture and building.
(1893)

By now no one recalls Primrose’s many appearances at the local Proctor’s Theater, which opened in 1914. How delightful to stroll along the promenades and enjoy climate control that was “cool and comfortable as an ocean breeze.”

  

Black minstrelsy became an American fixture during the 1830s, launched by Thomas D. Rice, who conceived the character of "Jim Crow,” a plantation slave.  

Before each show, white actors darkened their skin with shoe polish or burnt cork and dressed in outlandish costumes. They performed as duos or in troupes that drew crowds through the Antebellum Era, the Civil War, and into the 1920s.   

White audiences howled with laughter at skits, songs, and monologues that ridiculed Black life and culture. When vaudeville became popular in the late nineteenth century, Blackface performers also appeared on the bill. These variety shows catered to working-class whites, but racist entertainment also showed up in high and mighty places.

Poster for Primrose & Dockstader,
1880s

During the Theodore Roosevelt administration (1901-1909), the White House welcomed Mary L. Leech, a singer of “coon songs” including “You’se Just a Little Nigger, Still You’se Mine All Mine.”  

George H. Primrose, a Canadian born in 1852, came on the scene in Buffalo as a circus performer. In 1871, he turned to Blackface.

For much of his career, Primrose toured with William H. West. Their troupe, Primrose & West, celebrated its 25^th anniversary at Madison Square Garden in 1896. Mount Vernon residents must have been excited that one section of prime seats was set aside for them. 

 

During the show, Primrose & West pleased the old-timers with a clog dance from their early days and plenty of Blackface acts.

Just a few months later, the U.S. Supreme Court would establish the “separate but equal” doctrine in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

Racism was continuing at a nice clip.

As an up-and-coming city, Mount Vernon naturally would want to be in the vanguard, so it’s not surprising that a Blackface minstrel got to be the namesake of an avenue and park. 

George H. Primrose
(1852-1919)

https://throughthehourglass.com/2025/03/introducing-mr-primrose-avenue.html