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

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.

 

 

*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

Riccadonna

 

Riccadonna Restaurant
newspaper sketch, 1890s

The snappy young men bounded up the brownstone steps, opera stars trailed their gloved hands on the iron balustrade, and a few sightseers stood shyly at the door.

Close by, a bronze statue of a nude woman wobbled on her stand. Soon, she would be auctioned alongside pianos, looking glasses, tropical plants—the entire contents of the building, not to mention a three-year lease.

It happened without warning, just as anyone’s livelihood may suddenly be destroyed.

During dinner on August 1, 1897, a sheriff appeared at the restaurant, interrupted service, and ushered everyone outside. Then he announced that the proprietor, Abele Riccadonna, owed $1,000 to a partner in an import company that supplied the restaurant with macaroni and olive oil.

The next morning, standing at the curb, Riccadonna greeted a newspaper reporter: Ah! ¡Come va, caro amico mio!

The former owner stood amid the restaurant’s furnishings, newly arranged on the sidewalk and street. Gesturing toward the portrait of Garibaldi, the Bohemian glass dishes, and piles of linen to be sold that day, he declared, “I will begin all over again.”  

 

***

 

The Riccadonna restaurant and hotel had inhabited 42 Union Square since 1880. Its menu was sublime, le tout New-York declared: spaghetti, lobster, and fritto misto washed down with Chianti or Barolo.

 

Riccadonna menu

Oh! to have a “big time” in the opulent dining room, where crystal and candlelight sparkled and laughter and several languages flew through the air. From crowded vestibules and hallways, hopeful patrons watched and waited for a table.

Oh! to sit in the bay window overlooking springtime in Union Square, Chopin’s Polonaise in F-Sharp Minor floating down from the conservatory above. A visitor enthused:

 

The first blush of the rising breakfast that tints your reverie is radishes. They melt imperceptibly into sardines. There is no jar in the glowing glory of the gustation. It unfolds noiselessly and slowly: opalescent flushes of veal cutlet deepen into filet; orient omelette spreads over the scene, bringing with it a pristine sense of Parmesan cheese, and gathering color and force, the full breakfast breaks at last in salad and coffee.    

 

Born in Milan in 1848, Abele Riccadonna left Italy in his late teens and settled in Paris, where he worked as an apprentice and subsequently opened a restaurant on the Right Bank. He flourished until 1871 when the Paris Commune—a revolutionary government that controlled Paris for two months—scared him away.  

 

Abele Riccadonna, 1890s

Abele traveled to Havana and ran a restaurant there until yellow fever surged and chased him to America. He arrived in New York in 1873.

In the years after the Civil War, Italian, French, German, and Hungarian immigrants introduced a new style of restaurant service to Americans. Table d’hôte, also known as prix-fixe, was a European innovation.   

In eighteenth-century New York City, table d’hôte restaurants began as modest affairs, usually occupying the basement or front room of a house where the chef and his or her family lived upstairs.

Abele Riccadonna opened two restaurants in the West Village. Around 1880, feeling confident, he moved uptown to Union Square. Nearby, the Academy of Music—largely an opera house—attracted wealthy New Yorkers, diplomats, producers, and performers. They became his clientele.    

Regulars included the opera stars Adelina Patti, Diego de Vivo, Luigi Ravelli, and Pasquale Brignoli. The renowned actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse both dined regularly at Riccadonna.    

In 1894, on top of the world, he married Frances Reynolds, 25 years his junior, a daughter of Scottish immigrants. She and Abele named their daughter Adelina in honor of Patti.  

Three years later, the sheriff arrived and turned the Riccadonnas’ lives inside out.  

Rumors zipped around town: Abele was a drunkard and a gambler. He’d run out of money and couldn’t pay his debts.

It is true that the restaurateur had gone broke and owed money to a lot of people. That was because of his boundless generosity. The man adored artists and impresarios and would do anything for them.

If an artist was down and out, “Ric” would say, “Come! Eat at my table until you have work. You may pay when able. Come!” 

When “Ric” was down and out, no one came to his aid. “The ingratitude of his numerous pensioners cut the Italian to the soul,” wrote a reporter.  

There’s something odd about the story of Abele Riccadonna. What emboldened the sheriff to storm into a prestigious New York institution and shut it down? How did he arrange to auction off everything in less than 24 hours?

I think Abele may have been touched by the Black Hand, the Mano Nera. This society of extortionists, an extension of the Sicilian Mafia, rose to power in the United States during the late nineteenth century.

The tragedy of the Black Hand was that so many Italian immigrants were forced to reckon with it, even the most impoverished stonemason. No matter how little one earned, the Black Hand would seize a few coins. The men were scary—brimming with threats and violence. Demands often arrived in the form of a letter bearing an imprint like a skull and crossbones.

Abele Riccadonna would have been a good target. In order to keep his restaurant running, he relied on a tangled network of laborers, entertainers, and suppliers of food and décor. In 1897, New York City’s Police Department devoted few resources to combat the Black Hand and some cops were compromised or looked the other way.

Yet Abele did begin again. He opened a new Riccadonna on West 27^th Street and it was there, in 1902, that he died “in harness,” according to a newspaper headline, in rooms above the restaurant.

His nephew Angelo took over.

 

Riccadonna advertisement, 1900

In 1906, Angelo shook off a Black Hand demand that he fire a flutist who performed at Riccadonna. Although the police department announced it would redouble its efforts to wipe out the organization, Angelo decided to leave Manhattan for Brooklyn.

Between Coney Island, Steeplechase Park, and the race course, the Brooklyn Shore could hardly keep up with its own popularity. Angelo opened the Hotel Riccadonna in Brighton Beach. He invested heavily in the property, including the installation of cold storage, which received a lot of publicity in trade journals.

After several incarnations, the Hotel Riccadonna closed for good in 1927.         

If you're passing through Union Square around twilight, you might catch sight of Abele Riccadonna hurrying by. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2024/12/riccadonna.html

Tuberculosis

 

Montefiore Hospital's Country Home Sanitarium,
early twentieth century

A father and son, both stricken with tuberculosis, died 30 years apart.

Their cases were ruinous, and little could be done to save either man.

Sure, there were advances in treatment between 1905, when Jacob Olechowsky died, and 1935, when Bernard Olcott died. Yet the most reliable treatment remained rest and fresh air until the introduction of the antibiotic streptomycin after World War II.

In Bedford, N.Y., where Jacob convalesced at the Montefiore Country Home Sanitarium, and in Asheville, N.C., where Bernard was a patient at the Oteen V.A. Hospital, both men carried sputum jars and submitted daily to temperature and weight checks. 

Jacob lived to be 39 and Bernard, 38.

When Sarah—widow and mother—rode a bus south to visit her son at the V.A. hospital, passengers scolded her for offering her seat to a pregnant Black woman.

That was the story Sarah told upon returning home to her daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law. It was the early 1930s, the bottom of the Depression, as they sat at the kitchen table in their small apartment in New York City.  

I doubt that Sarah reported on her son. Her heart was a lock box, and she shared little. One of her secrets may have been that Bernard was not Jacob’s son. Jacob had left Russia and sailed on the ship Dania, from Hamburg to Ellis Island in 1895. Bernard was born two years later.

However, many immigrants fibbed about their ages on passenger manifests and naturalization papers.

When so much is obscured, how can one know the truth?

We know that Jews who fled the Pale of Settlement were not permitted to travel through Germany unless they had booked passage on a German ship from a German port.

In 1902 Sarah and her two children made the arduous trip through Austria and Switzerland and into Belgium to reach Rotterdam, where they boarded the Statendam.

Arriving in New York, they were met by Jacob and went to live at the farm in Queens where he worked. He already showed signs of TB and transmitted the disease to his seven-year-old daughter, Rose, as well as five-year old Bernard.*

After two or three years, Jacob became so sick that Sarah could not manage. She made her way through the complicated city, seeking social services.

She must have been quite desperate although certainly not alone in her plight. Public health was in crisis and tuberculosis the deadliest disease among Eastern European immigrants, exacerbated by small, crowded tenements and sweatshops.

Bedford Hills, N.Y. train station, 1900s.
Tuberculosis patients disembarked here and rode in a carriage
up a hill to the sanitarium. 

By the late nineteenth century, wealthy German Jews had established hospitals in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities. Now, Sarah hustled to get Jacob to Montefiore Hospital’s Country Home Sanitarium in Bedford, N.Y.

First, he was examined and diagnosed. He returned for various tests and a review of his “civic merits.” Finally, he boarded a train to Bedford where he was met at the station and driven to the sanitarium. Fed and bathed, he met with caseworkers to figure out a plan. I’m sure they all spoke in Yiddish.

Forty miles north of the city, the sanitarium had opened in 1897. Perched on a hill, it accommodated 170 early-stage patients who could look out the big windows at trees, sky, and sunlight. Many would become well enough to return home.

Recent picture of the Bedford, N.Y. train station

There also was room for 50 men with advanced tuberculosis, known as “incurables.” Jacob counted among them, I believe, because he appears to have died within a year after he arrived.  

With help from charities, Sarah placed her children in an orphans’ asylum until she could get back on her feet. A fine seamstress, she carried her sewing machine on her back and worked in the garment district.

By 1915, Sarah had retrieved her children, and they lived in Brooklyn. Rose, a high school graduate, was a bookkeeper and Sarah an operator in a coat factory. This data, typical of the time and place, repeats itself row by row in the urban census.

Unsurprisingly, Bernard enlisted in the army. It was a way out. He traveled to the Mexican border where General Pershing was in fruitless pursuit of the revolutionary, Pancho Villa.

I like to imagine Bernard leaving New York and going west by train. Desperate to assimilate, he had changed the family name to Olcoff. Now he could smoke and joke and become a man, having been reared in a household churning with female anxiety. 

During World War I, Bernard served in the Aisne-Marne, Saint-Mihiel, and Meuse-Argonne campaigns in western France. He worked in the engineer corps, building and blowing up roads and bridges. He didn’t see combat but was gassed and came home to the U.S. without a future.

It was 1920. 

The Army sent him to Tuscon where a sanitarium had grown from three to 86 buildings. The men lived in open-air cottages, hoping to recuperate. 

Bernard Olcott, Arizona, 1920s

In the early 1930s, betting on mountain air, the doctors moved Bernard to Asheville, N.C. He died there at Oteen, the government’s largest hospital devoted to treatment of TB.

Bernard smoked a pipe and liked to catch butterflies and mount them under glass.

I believe he was fixated on acculturation. He made sure that Olechowsky eventually became Olcott. 

 

Oteen Veterans Hospital, 1920s
(National Library of Medicine)

 

*It is possible that Jacob acquired TB on the farm, drinking unpasteurized milk or working with infected cows.

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2024/10/tuberculosis.html