New York City’s Lincolns

Last week, a pair of anniversaries concerned two of the USA’s most-admired presidents. November 22^nd was 61 years since John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas; and November 19^th, 161 years, nearly exactly a century earlier, when Abraham Lincoln delivered what many agree was one of the great public addresses in history, the Gettysburg Address, on the northernmost battlefield of the Civil War, when he encapsulated America’s purpose in three short paragraphs comprising 271 words. He was wrong about only one thing: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” Contrary to apocryphal stories that he wrote it on the back of an envelope in a train en route to Gettysburg, Lincoln instead prepared it carefully, going through four drafts until he was satisfied. Edward Everett, a former U.S. Representative, governor and senator recognized in his era as one of the finest orators in the country, wrote to Lincoln: "I should be glad, if I could flatter myself, that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Lincoln has a number of connections to New York City, before and after his death, not all of them positive; he spoke at Cooper Union in 1860 during his first presidential campaign, and is said to have visited nearby McSorley’s on E. 7^th St., though there are different accounts of whether the tavern was in existence by that year. New York City was in many ways sympathetic to the South and while the Civil War wasn’t fought in the city, some of its worst riots in history broke out in 1863 when a draft was instituted for those who couldn’t afford the $300 necessary to buy amnesty. After his death, his body made a stop at the 30^th St. railroad depot, now the site of the Morgan postal facility on 9^th Ave., during a countrywide tour.

Abraham Lincoln has numerous streets named for him in New York City, as well as Lincoln Center, located at a crossroads previously called Lincoln Square. Above is shown the west end of Lincoln Pl., the lengthiest street called Lincoln in New York City. At 5th Ave., Warren St., Baltic St., Butler St., Douglass St., Degraw St. and Sackett St. all change their names and became Places: Prospect, Park, Sterling, St. Johns, Lincoln, and Berkeley. That in itself is odd, as in NYC, the “Place” street designation usually refers to streets that go one or two blocks only. However, these “Places” go on and on, dozens of blocks east to the Bedford-Stuyvesant-Brownsville border at E. New York Ave.

If you look at an 1855 map of what was the City of Brooklyn at the time, you see, though, that the Butler, Baltic, Douglas(s), Degraw, and Sackett names once extended all the way east into Bedford-Stuyvesant. Only later did they became Places. What happened? Murder.

On March 20, 1873, Lizzie Lloyd King, aka Kate Stoddard, fatally shot her boyfriend, Charles Goodrich, who wished to break off the relationship, at 731 Degraw, just west of 5th Ave. (the address has been renumbered since). She fled with several of Goodrich’s possessions before returning the next day to clean and dress the corpse before going to her job at a hat factory. Just another day in Park Slope. After a three-month investigation, aided by Stoddard’s friend Mary Handley, the murderer was apprehended and sentenced to the State Lunatic Asylum in Auburn, NY; the building still stands. A 2013 play by Claudia Barnett examined the murder in the context of the works of Emily Dickinson.

Real estate values in the area dropped as a result of the murder. Degraw St.’s name was changed and the other parallel streets in the area followed suit between 1874 and 1881. Warren and Baltic became “Prospect” and “Park,” a bit clever, for nearby Prospect Park; Butler, “Sterling Place’ for William Alexander, Lord Stirling, who led the patriots in the Revolutionary battle at the Old Stone House; Douglass (the name isn’t connected with abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass) became St. John’s Pl., for St. John’s Episcopal Church, built in 1870 on Douglass in 1870; Degraw became Lincoln Pl., for Abraham Lincoln; and Sackett became Berkeley Place, for Irish philosopher and Anglican minster George Berkeley (1685-1753).

Mott Haven gained the reputation in the early-20th century as NYC’s piano manufacturing capital. The South Bronx was known as “The Piano Capital of the United States” prior to World War I. The most impressive of the old piano works is Estey Piano, with its clock tower at Bruckner Blvd. and Lincoln Ave.

The Estey Piano & Organ Company was one of the most important players in the late-19th and early-20th century Piano & Organ manufacturing business. Established in 1846, Estey was one of the few American manufacturers to survive over a century. For decades, Estey manufactured several lines of upright pianos, player pianos and grand pianos. Estey instruments are known as being exceptionally well-made and durable, and they’re well worth restoration and preservation today. Production under the Estey name was discontinued sometime in the 1970s. Many other piano factories, the Bollermann-Kroger, Haines-Kroger and Krakauer Piano and others, still stand on Bruckner Blvd. and surrounding side streets. It’s time for the Landmarks Preservation Commission to give these great buildings their imprimatur.

I note this Victorian-era house at the corner of Lincoln Ave. and Edison St. in Grant City in the heart of Staten Island every time I’m in the area. Its owner meticulously cares for it even down to placing mini-sculptures, similar to those seen during the holidays at the New York Botanical Gardens Train Show, on the mailboxes. Grant City was named for President Ulysses S. Grant by prominent businessman John Thompson in the 1880s. The London plane tree is by far New York City’s most numerous, but Grant City takes things to another level: every street in the enclave, bordered by Richmond Rd., Jefferson Ave., Locust Ave. and Hylan Blvd. is lined by hundreds of London planes, some of them over a century old. There are streets named for prominent late-19^th century figures such as Grant, Lincoln, John C. Fremont and Horace Greeley.

There’s only one street named for Lincoln in Queens and it’s fairly obscure; Lincoln St. in South Jamaica runs for about a mile between Rockaway Blvd. and the Van Wyck Expressway. It’s athwart the prevailing street grid, usually a good indication it’s an old road, and it shows up on maps from the early-20^th century well before other streets were laid out.

—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)