The House at 88 Grove Street

This house in the West Village was built in 1827, by my Great-Great-Great Grandfather Henry Halsey, a mason, and his brothers Jesse and Edward.

According to a letter written by my Great-Great Aunt Babbie in 1936 to the then owner of 88 Grove Street, Henry's father, Charles Fithian Halsey, had died in 1814 and his mother, Phoebe Rogers (daughter of Capt. William Rogers of Bridgehampton), "unable to give her boys a college education although she owned much land here, [left Watermill and] took them to New York and apprenticed them to a master mason. They built 88 Grove Street for themselves, buying Lot No. 52 from Thomas R. Mercein at the time, I think, when Greenwich Village was taken into the city. Henry brought his bride [Eliza Halsey] there, and his mother, brothers and two sisters [Elizabeth and Mary] lived on one floor, he and his wife on the other."

Aunt Babbie goes on to say that her father, my Great-Great Grandfather--the first Charles Henry Halsey--was born in the Grove Street home in 1830, as were his siblings Amanda in 1833, Wilman in 1836, Mary in 1839. A third son, Jesse, was born in Southampton in 1845. In an interview I conducted in December 2005, Aunt Abigail, however, contended that 49 North Main was built in 1832 and Amanda was the first child born in that home.

(A note on the progression of Jesse Halseys.)

In 1843, Jesse and Edward Halsey would become whaling captains and go to sea, while Henry (known as Capt. Harry of North End) would return with Eliza and their children to Southampton in 1832 and build the family home on North Main, employing many of the same architectural devices (including interior cornices and trim) that are found in the house at 88 Grove Street.

After the Halseys had returned to Long Island, the house at 88 Grove Street played a notable role in the history of 20th century social change.

In 1902, 88 Grove Street was owned by Ferruccio Vitale, a landscape architect, and rented to 5 staff members of the nearby Greenwich House settlement, serving as the colony's men's annex. The 5 residents were deemed "only the first among many well-to-do social progressives to occupy either 88 or 90 Grove Street over the next decade."

In 1903, former headworker of the University Settlement Robert Hunter and his wife, Caroline Stokes, moved in. They purchased the home in 1907. The house next door, No. 90, was purchased by Caroline's unmarried sister, the painter and social activist Helen Stokes, and let to various friends in her upper-middle-class socially progressive circle.

Starting in 1907, Grove Street housed various members of the A Club, a "more or less radical" writers' collective and "residential community in which gender roles did not divide along the conventional lines of men doing the 'real' work and women taking care of the the kids, meals, and the laundry." A Club member, social reformer, novelist, and journalist Ernest Poole took up residence in the house for a year, along with his family. In 1910, following the death of her first husband, another A Clubber--suffragist, writer, labor activist, witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and single mother of three who was written out of her own wealthy mother's will for her bohemian ways--Mary Heaton Vorse moved into the home with her aged father and small children.

In 1915, Helen Stokes's brother, James Graham Phelps Stokes, bought 88 Grove Street and moved in with his wife. J.G., and sisters Harriet and Caroline, were the scions of New York merchant and banker Anson Phelps Stokes. After a short but successful stint with the railroads, J.G. made headlines in 1902 when he left his parents' Madison Avenue mansion to become a settlement worker in the East Village. A frequent name on the city's Socialist ticket, Stokes would make headlines again in 1905, when we became engaged to Rose Harriet Pastor, "a young Jewess, who until two weeks ago was a special writer on The Jewish Daily News, and prior to that worked in a Cleveland cigar factory."

Quite the rabble-rouser, Rose Stokes would garner significant press attention for her presence at the 1918 trial of Eugene Debs and, according to the New York Times: "While the Stokeses lived at 88 Grove Rose Stokes risked arrest by passing out birth-control literature at Carnegie Hall in 1916 and was convicted in 1918 of Federal espionage charges for antiwar statements, although her 10-year sentence was set aside." The charges ultimately would be dropped, but on the night of November 3, 1918, police raided 88 Grove Street and arrested Rose for registering to vote in New York while under bail in Kansas for seditious utterances.