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.

Letter from Abigail Fithian Halsey re: 88 Grove Street

34 Post Crossing

Southampton, L.I.

December 17, 1936

My dear Mr. Stokes,

This is a letter I have intended to write a long time giving you some information about your house which was built by my grandfather Henry Halsey and his brothers Jesse and Edward in 1827.

Their father had died and their mother Phoebe, unable to give her boys a college education, although she owned much land here, 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 there, and his mother, brothers and two sisters lived on one floor, he and his wife on the other. My father, Charles Henry Halsey was born there in 1830. In ’33 the two younger brothers went to sea, became whaling captains, the others came home to Southampton where Henry built the house my brother, Rev. Jesse Halsey of Cincinnati, still owns.

It may interest you to know that the cornice in the old house in Southampton is the same as in yours. I know because one day long ago as I passed, I plucked up my courage and called to tell you all this. Neither you nor Mrs. Stokes were home, but your faithful Anna gave me a glimpse of the lovely interior of these old rooms.

It is in gratitude for your preservation of that which is beautiful and precious to us that I write at this Christmas season to wish you Joy in the old house.

Very sincerely,

Abigail Fithian Halsey

History of the Village of Saranac Lake

from United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service The Village of Saranac Lake
NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES

The dense urban streetscape of the village of Saranac Lake, New York, is a marked
contrast to the vast stretches of unpopulated forest and tiny isolated hamlets which
exist in the Adirondack region. The extraordinary building stock of Saranac Lake,
with its multiple porches and walls of windows, its sophisticated conmercial blocks
and elegant residential districts, is the unique legacy of more than seventy years
when this community was an international center for the the treatment of pulmonary
tuberculosis. Here doctors developed the first successful methods of treating - and
even curing - a disease which had been the equivalent of a death sentence for almost
all of recorded history. In so doing, they also developed a specific building type -
the cure cottage - designed to facilitate the healing process for tubercular patients.
Many of these cure cottages still stand in Saranac Lake, the most visible reminders of
the village's days as America's "Pioneer Health Resort."

The incorporated Village of Saranac lake is located in the Adirondacks, a jagged
outcropping of mountainous peaks sliced by rapid-flowing streams and dotted with clear
glacial lakes, which juts up out of the glacial plains of upstate New York. Six
million acres of this rugged country and its isolated valley hamlets are part of the
Adirondack Park, where 2.5 million acres of state-owned forest land have been
protected as "forever wild" since as early as 1885. Deep in the heart of this
wilderness, in a sheltered valley crossed by the winding Saranac River, lies "the
little city of the Adirondacks."

The modern village of Saranac Lake is still the largest settlement within the
Adirondacks. Its political boundaries cross both county and town borders: two-thirds
of the village lies within the town of Harrietstown, in Franklin County; while the
remaining third is split between the towns of North Elba and St. Armand in Essex
County.

***

The quest for health in the nineteenth century was more than the narcissistic
self-improvement fads of modern times. For many/ the search was a matter of life or
death. The "White Plague" ran rampant for much of the century. Ihe number of Americans
infected with tuberculosis in the nineteenth century was as great as the combined number
of cancer and heart disease patients today. By 1873 tuberculosis, also called
consumption, killed one out of every seven Americans in a slow but unalterable physical
decline.

It was primarily a lung disease, but the tubercle bacillus could attack
any part of the body. Once lodged, the infection spread unchecked, steadily wearing
down the body's defense system, and eventually creating cavities in the lungs. At its
more advanced stages the best known symptoms were coughing, night sweats, paleness,
weight loss, virulent sputum, and spitting up blood. There was no known cure.

Transferred by airborne bacilli, the disease spread rapidly in enclosed or crowded
environments, threatening immediate family members as well as neighbors. Slum dwellers
and struggling factory workers were especially vulnerable, as were the very rich,
paradoxically, who employed servants from poor living conditions who unknowingly
harbored the disease. The disease did not confine itself to the very old and the very
young, but instead most frequently struck people in the prime of their life. [7]
In its sheltered position in a deep basin of hills, the village of Saranac Lake nad
begun to attract invalids as early as 1860 with the opening of Martin's Hotel. Until
the 1870s, however, none of these patients seemed to have braved the frigid winters of
the Adirondacks. Ihe first tubercular patient credited with staying year-round in
Saranac Lake was Mr. Edward C. Edgar who spent the winter of 1874 at the boarding
house run by the wife of Lucius Evans, a well-known local guide. At this time, the
village of Saranac Lake was little more than a saw mill, a small hotel for guides and lumbermen, a schoolhouse and perhaps a dozen guides' houses scattered over an area of an eighth of
a mile.

***

In the summer of 1883, Trudeau suggested the idea of a semi-charitable sanitarium
for the study and cure of tuberculosis to Anson Hielps Stokes, a New York bankersummered nearby at St. Regis Lake. Stokes immediately contributed five hundred dollars
to Trudeau's proposal. Ihe St. Regis camp owners and their friends vacationing at Paul
Smiths became the backbone of financial support for the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium^
Dr. Loomis and other prominent doctors offered their professional support. Local
guides and residents chipped in to buy sixteen acres of a sheltered hillside overlooking
the valley and donated the land to Trudeau's new project.

Trudeau modeled his fledgling institution on one founded in Goebersdorf, Germany, in
1852 by Dr. Hermann Brehmer, who advocated a climatological treatment for tuberculosis,
bringing patients to higher mountain altitudes where the combination of fresh air,
exercise, ample rest, and good food could effect their cure. By 1884, only a handful of
sanitoria were available for healthseekers - and all of them were in Europe. Trudeau
opened his Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in February 1885 with the completion of an
administration building and three small cottages, including Little Red," a one-room
cottage with a small porch. Trudeau's first two paying patients, Alice and Mary Hunt,
sisters who worked in a New York City factory, occupied "Little Red," a one room cottage
with a small porch.

For most of the nineteenth century, the term "sanitarium" was applied to all chronic
care institutions. Coming from the Latin word sanitas, meaning health, its most common
meaning is "health resort." Today it is most commonly the designation for mental health
institutions because of its close etymological links with the word "sanity." By the
early 1900s, however, a place for the treatment of invalids, particularly consumptives,
was more often called a "sanatorium," from the Latin word sanare, which means to cura or
heal. Trudeau christened his institution the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in 1885.
After his death, it was renamed the Trudeau Sanatorium.

***

For most of the nineteenth century, invalids in search of health took up residence
in public hotels in the mountains. As the infectious nature of tuberculosis became
known, however, tourist hotels throughout the Adirondacks began to refuse tuberculosis
guests. Some villages would not even allow them as residents. As a result, more and
more invalids came specifically to Saranac Lake, and the number of private cottages
catering to the needs of the sick jumped. By 1890, the village's population had tripled
to 1,582 and in the next thirty years, it would more than quadruple in size. Throughout
the village, the pace of building slowly began an acceleration that would last for the
next thirty years, imbuing the community with a sustained boom economy, and a boom
psychology as well.

Up at the "San" (the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium), Trudeau's fundraising efforts
continued to expand the facilities available for patients. In 1890 alone, three more
cottages and an open air amusement pavilion were added. Ihe first year's figures had
shown about 25% of the tuberculosis cases were arrested, and his success rate continued
to show promise. Because the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium only took needy patients, in
the early stages of their disease, there was a great need for patient housing for those
who were too sick or too wealthy to cure at the San. local residents began to take
patients into their homes or to open houses which functioned as private commercial
sanatoria. Holding fewer than twenty patients and most often around twelve, these
private sanatoria became known as "cure cottages."

***

The hilly open pastures which lay east of Church Street, between the riverside core
of the village and the Old Military Road (Pine Street), were next divided to create the
first large residential subdivision in the village. In 1892 Frederick A. Isham, a lake
Placid attorney, formed a partnership with the Orlando Bloods to divide 21 acres of
sheep pasture into 174 "Villa Sites." This became Helen Hill, named for its central
artery, Helen Street, which climbed straight up the steep slope. Soon the hill was
covered with houses, many of them private homes for prominent local citizens and/or
wealthy health seekers. Over the next twenty years, as the original owners died or
moved away, many of the houses were converted into commercial private sanatoria, growing
and changing to suit their new use, a pattern repeated along Church Street below.

"An Old Southampton House in New York"

Friday, May 20, 1938 | Southampton Press

No. 90 Grove Street and No. 88 Grove Street, N.Y.C.

Among the many houses and gardens exhibited for the benefit of Greenwich House in New York last week was that of Mr. and Mrs. J. G. Phelps Stokes, 88 Grove Street. The house was built in 1827 by three Halsey Brothers of Water Mill, Henry, Jesse and Edward. Later Jesse and Edward went to sea and became captains. In 1833, Henry, with his wife and infant son, Charles Henry, moved to Southampton and built the house on North Main Street owned by Rev. Jesse Halsey. The brothers, when they retired from the sea, also built in Southampton, Capt. Jesse, the house now owned by Dr. D.H. Hallock and Capt. Edward the house on Hill Street owned by Mrs. George Burling.

In the older house in New York are details that are repeated in the Southampton houses. It was built at the time when Greenwich Village (The Green Village) was made a part of the City of New York. The streets are irregular here and depart from the rectangular plan of the city . . .  A.F.H. 

 Sheridan Square, N.Y.C., 88 Grove Street Center

[Abigail Fithian Halsey] 

Images courtesy Abigail Fithian Halsey Files | Southampton Historical Museum Archives and Research Center