Manhattan Court, 10-16 Manhattan Avenue

by Tom Miller

Real estate operator and builder Robert M. Silverman filled the eastern blockfront of Manhattan Avenue between 100th and 101st Street in 1905 with four harmonious apartment buildings.  The northernmost, the Manhattan Court, would encompass half of the block.  Designed by George F. Pelham, the six-story building was faced with red brick and trimmed with limestone.  Arched pediments and carved spandrel panels were inspired by Italian Renaissance precedents.  A store occupied the 101st Street corner.

The Manhattan Court was home to professionals, like architect Elliott Waight Hazzard, an 1898 graduate of the Georgia School of Technology.  Two years before moving into the building, he married Susan Culter Seabrook.  The couple had two children, Elliott, Jr., born in 1908, and Michael Seabrook, who arrived in 1919.  Hazzard was a member of the architectural firm of Bruce Price.  He was described by the Asheville Citizen-Times as a “well known architect.”  He left the Manhattan Court in 1918 to move his family to China to accept the position “as the American representative and architect for construction of schools and colleges built from the Boxer Fund,” according to the Asheville Citizen-Times.  (Tragically, he would die there in a Japanese prisoner camp in May 1943.)

As was common among Upper West Side apartment buildings at the time, the Manhattan Court was home to several artistic residents.  Alberto Himan taught “piano, technique and theory” from his apartment in 1910, and as early as 1913, Madame Minna Schloemann ran her studio from her home.  On September 17 that year, Musical Courier announced, “Minna Schloemann, the well known vocal teacher, who is interested in serious pupils only, is spending the summer at her camp, Hemlock Lodge, in Poultney, Vt., where she has been preparing a number of her pupils for the season’s work…Madame Schloemann will resume her vocal instruction September 23, at her home studio, 10 Manhattan avenue, New York.”

A bizarre tragedy occurred here on the night of August 10, 1912.  The Evening World began its reporting by saying, “A woman’s shrill scream in the night—a solitary pedestrian’s hat knocked from his head and a suitcase dashed from his hand—then the thud of a body on the stone pavement.  Such were the swift incidents of a second shortly after midnight this morning.”  Sarah S. Dayan, who was estranged from her automobile salesman husband, took an apartment on the fourth floor and moved in with two roommates, Margaret Lambert, who was an artist’s model, and Mary McNiff, a stenographer.

Margaret told Sarah that McDonald had been outside her window attempting to open the sash. 

In June 1912, Sarah Dayan met architect John D. McDonald.  The two had a few dates over the subsequent weeks, and around 8:00 on the evening of August 9, McDonald appeared at the apartment and invited Sarah (“a demure little woman, quite pretty,” according to The Evening World”) to dinner.  They returned to the apartment around 11:45, according to Sarah, McDonald, “stayed until a few minutes after 12.”

A few seconds later, McDonald’s body crashed to the sidewalk, knocking the hat off the head of Alfred Wolf and slamming his briefcase to the pavement.  Wolf ran to a policeman.  Identifying the 35-year-old by his wallet, the officer asked the night elevator boy if he knew McDonald, who said he had been out that evening with Mrs. Dayan.  At the apartment, Sarah denied that she ever met John D. McDonald, however when the officer forced her to look at the corpse, she broke down and admitted she did.

The three women’s stories, which changed over the next day or two, were hard to believe.  Sarah initially explained that she said goodnight to the architect, then moments later heard Margaret Lambert scream.  Margaret told Sarah that McDonald had been outside her window attempting to open the sash.  How McDonald could have reached Margaret’s window on the fourth floor was not addressed.  In the end, police attributed the architect’s death accidental, and the case was closed.

Working in an entertainment field far removed from Alberto Himan and Madame Schloemann were Jeanette and Bill Power.  Bill was described in 1915 by The Sun, as “one of the stage’s best known leading mahouts [i.e., elephant tamer].”  Jeanette was at home on March 22, 1915, when Bill prepared to walk his four female elephants on “a nine mile hike from the Hippodrome stage door to the stage door of the Flatbush Theatre across the river.”  But Gold Tooth Lena, “the largest of Bill’s lady elephant quartet, according to The Sun, got wedged into the tunnel from the Hippodrome basement to the street.  Happily, with the assistance of the other three elephants, Gold Tooth Lena was pulled back from her imprisonment.  But another glitch soon arose.

Powers led the pachyderms to another, wider tunnel that led to Sixth Avenue.  But now Roxie refused to leave.  Nothing could move her.  The Sun reported, “And so there was a long wait until Jeanette Power was aroused from bed and brought all the way down from her home at 10 Manhattan avenue.  The nine mile hike to Brooklyn was started when Jeanette Power had made Roxie hot foot it out of the basement at the first word of command.”

Living in a sixth-floor apartment at the time of the elephantine crisis was Japanese-born Don-Show Kodama, who advertised himself as “professor of Oriental divination.”  In February 1925, the New-York Tribune journalist Emma Bugbee described him as the “prophet who three weeks ago was received in the private drawing rooms of the Four Hundred, where he held his audience breathless with terror of the spirit world.”  Bugbee visited his apartment, describing the seer’s “audience room” as “a sparsely furnished room with only a few bits of pottery and a dish of incense to distinguish it from any other common, or Harlem, living room.”

Kodama predicted, “You will be very happy until 1921.  Then you will have an illness.  It will not be very serious.  I think it will be indigestion.  You should be very careful what you eat between now and then.”  Bugbee paid $5 and left.

It appears that the article was noticed by the New York City Police Department.  The following month, undercover detective Ada MacMahon paid a visit to Don-Show Kodama’s apartment.  The New York Times reported on March 20, “Mrs. MacMahon said she found Kodoma in a receiving room fitted up as an Oriental temple, wearing a flowing robe, woven sandals and girdle of white silk; at his right sat his interpreter, also in Far-East garb, incense was burning on a table which bore a black jar containing the thirty-six ‘mystic sticks’ and fourteen blocks of ebony.”

On March 20, 1915, The New York Times reported, “Don-Show Kodama…and his interpreter, William Yasuda, were held in $500 bail each…on a charge of fortune telling.”

Kodama told the detective,

You are contemplating a lawsuit.  It would be advisable to settle out of court.  You will not recover the jewel you have lost.  So much for the present; the future is bright for you.  You will marry and be happy and there will be much gold for you.  Investments in which you take part will turn out well.

On March 20, 1915, The New York Times reported, “Don-Show Kodama…and his interpreter, William Yasuda, were held in $500 bail each…on a charge of fortune telling.”

A pharmacy occupied the corner store in 1919.  On May 14, two gunmen barged in, demanding, “Put up your hands!”  In fact, the crook who uttered the pronouncement stuttered so badly that his accomplice had to translate.  The two men fled the store in different directions.  Lawrence Levy was arrested nearby running away from the scene.  Police were looking for “a young man who wears large, horn-rimmed spectacles and stutters like a machine gun,” according to the New-York Tribune.  When he was asked “to account for his haste,” he stuttered so badly he could not be understood.  It was enough to prompt officers to frisk him, at which point a revolver was found.

Karl Heinz, who was born in Germany in 1902, was a clerk and occupied an apartment here during World War II.  His movements were watched by the War Department, who noted that he had been a member of the Nazi Party since May of 1932.

At some point in the second half of the 20th century, the cornice was removed, resulting in an unfinished appearance, and more recently a prison-ready entrance door was installed.  Otherwise, little has outwardly changed to the building since its first residents moved into the Manhattan Court 120 years ago.

Tom Miller is a social historian and blogger at daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com