Vilna Lamplight

 

My grandparents during the late 1920s

When the 19-year old immigrant arrived in New York City in 1914, he knew all about fur. This was borne out by a story that he—my father’s father—liked to tell my brother and me. The incident took place in the shadowy nineteenth century long before his birth.

The family lived in Vilna, a city in Lithuania, a Northern European nation that borders the Baltic Sea on the east and Belarus to the west. During that time, Vilna was part of the Russian Empire.

His grandparents owned a fur shop—beautiful minks, he described, laid out on deep wooden counters.

One day, like many other days, the Cossacks came to plunder Vilna.*

Inside the store, they demanded: “Give us the furs.” But his grandmother cried, “Never!” and flung her body across the pelts. Why would they spare her life?

By the time we heard this story for the first time, in our grandparents’ apartment in the north Bronx, he had retired from the fur business and liked to watch the Lawrence Welk Show on a Zenith color television.    

Now, looking at early 20^th century photographs of Vilna: the cobblestone streets crowded with old, bearded men and little boys wearing caps and short pants, I understand fully the distance that he, like all immigrants, traveled.  

In the winter of 1934, a naturalized American at last, married with two sons, co-owner of a small fur processing company, he returned to Vilna. His parents had died but several brothers and at least a dozen cousins remained.

“I went back to Vilna,” he would often say. “I stood under the lamplight and waited. And my own brother walked by. I stopped him and . . . ” 

Here he would tear up. “I said, ‘It’s Josef, it’s me! Your brother!'” 

That is all I know about his visit except that the encounter with his brother must have occurred in the Jewish Quarter. Also that most of the family members whom he saw on that trip were still living in Vilna in June 1941 when the German occupation began.  

In May, while visiting Vilna, I looked for the light under which he perpetually stands. But there are so many. Turning down this street and that, a multitude of iron lanterns revealed themselves and lit up my grandfather’s story.  

I am ever, ever grateful that he left to become an American. 

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/

Note: Following the formal recognition of Lithuania's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Vilna became Vilnius. After World War I, when the city was part of the Second Polish Republic, it was called Wilno. 

 

Through a Screen, Darkly

 

Onstage with Evelyn Archer

 

Evelyn Archer, newspaper photo, 1927;
earliest known picture of her. 

One of the lovely aspects of early-twentieth-century American life was the wide-open opportunity for reinvention. Not just once, but as often as necessary. You could hop on a train and disappear into cities and small towns. Abandon everything, even your past! Not a breadcrumb left behind.

Eva Sterry Hubbard, born in Wisconsin in 1878 or 1880 or 1885, got out as soon as possible. She would have done well enough in the river city of Eau Claire, the daughter of Martin, a county clerk, and Alice, a descendant of settlers, who liked to address the crowd on patriotic holidays. 

Perhaps Eva consulted an astrologer and saw her future in the theater, so off she went to Chicago. While time ticked on and the century wound down, she probably worked as a cabaret dancer. Burlesque had kicked and teased its way into the city with the 1893 Columbian Exposition.    

Eva decided to take a stage name—“Evelyn Archer”—and her star rose a bit. Cast in Quo Vadis?, a six-act drama about Nero’s destruction of Rome and the rise of Christian martyrs, Evelyn toured Jim Crow America with performances in Indiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Missouri, and Kentucky.

In 1901, she married James Dille Barton, born Dillie Barton Black in Newark, Ohio, son of a Scottish immigrant physician.

Barton was at least 12 years older than Evelyn but the same age in ambition. He, too, escaped his hometown, along with his given name, because he saw his future in show business. The couple left Chicago and went east where J.D., as he dubbed himself, hit the jackpot as a theatrical agent and producer.

J.D. Barton, passport photograph

They settled in a New York City suburb, Mount Vernon, and built a grand house. Evelyn had a baby, bought a brindle bull puppy, and forsook the theater for a while. She and J.D. gadded about town. When they visited the circus, a monkey reached through the bars of his cage, grabbed a $300 diamond pin from Evelyn’s lapel and swallowed it “with a little jerk of his neck,” noted a reporter. The circus refused to chloroform the monkey or reimburse the Bartons. 

Archer appeared on Broadway in 1918.

The marriage ended quietly and the glitz receded. Evelyn and her little girl moved to a more modest house several blocks away. Evelyn landed a few Broadway roles, including The Copperhead (1918), opposite Lionel Barrymore. Before long she heard the siren song of Florida.

St. Petersburg, 1920s

The 27^th state had become its own brand of the Wild West, a place for reinvention; perfect for Evelyn. She and daughter Polly, now about 11 years old, arrived in St. Petersburg right after the end of World War I when the land boom began its rumble. By the mid-1920s, real estate speculation reached a frenzy as investors snapped up waterfront lots for hotels, apartment houses, and casinos. 

But September 1926 spelled devastation. The Great Miami Hurricane wiped out the coastline, local banks, and investors. In fact, the hurricane triggered Florida’s economic decline well before the 1929 Wall Street crash.

Evelyn landed on her feet, or perhaps on her Cuban heels. She had married Fred Rittenhouse, a prominent dentist and realtor, in 1925. Newly launched as president of the “New York Society”—an association of 330 New Yorkers who wintered in Florida—Evelyn regained social stature and influence.    

Cuban heels were all the rage in the 1920s.

After Polly won a few beauty contests, Evelyn brought her daughter back to New York City, helped her get a job with the Ziegfield Follies, and guided her toward movies. As Polly Archer, she appeared in Java Head, The New School Teacher, and The Enchanted Cottage in the early twenties.   

Her greatest feat was yet to come. On New Year’s Eve, 1929, Polly wed a local theater owner while soaring high over St. Petersburg in a “Tin Goose,” Henry Ford’s three-engine airliner.

Polly Archer's wedding photo

The city sparkled 1,500 feet below as the bride and groom walked to the rear of the plane, where the Reverend J.A. McClure performed the ceremony at the stroke of midnight.

The guests threw rice as the plane began its descent. Two hundred people greeted the bridal party at the end of a grass runway at Piper-Fuller Field.

Polly’s career languished and she became an apartment building manager in St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, the snowbird population grew and Evelyn came to preside over an empire. Inevitably, as the years passed, she lost her cache and had to let go.

I guess they made the best of things, a mother and daughter who didn’t land in the place they’d hoped for.

*Evelyn Barton Rittenhouse died in 1970, outliving Polly by eight years. J.D. Barton flourished as a writer and producer, including his 1907 drama Through Death Valley, based on his encounters with rattlesnakes while living in Arizona.       

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/

 

 

 

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.