Washington Terrace Part 3: Gemstones, Bicycles, and Artwork

Part 3 in the series about Washington Terrace, a small street at 186th Street in upper Manhattan that is off the regular street grid. See Part 1: Murders. Part 2: Survivor.

Gemstone dealer Samuel Lyons cut his daughter Sophia out of his will. 

His decision even made the papers. According to the New York Times, he considered her behavior “unbecoming and unloving,” and he split his estate among his other three children. 

But, he didn't cut Sophia out of the estate completely. He instructed his oldest child, Isabel, to give something to Sophia after his death, but to keep the value under $10. Even in the early 1900s, $10 wasn't much of an inheritance. 

We needn’t worry too much about Sophia. First, she was an adult and she was not dependent on her father’s money. And second, her father changed his mind a few years later and put Sophia back into his will. She still didn't get an equal share in the estate with her siblings, but Samuel left Sophia three paintings that hung in his dining room on Washington Terrace in upper Manhattan. The artist was George W. Platt of Denver.

Washington Terrace at 186th Street these days might not seem like a place where businessmen hang artwork in their dining rooms, but when the half-block stretch first opened in the early 1900s, it was a new street in a desirable neighborhood, and professionals who worked downtown lived there. 

Washington Terrace in 2017. Photo by PBM, used with permission

What caused the fall-out between gemstone businessman Samuel and his daughter Sophia? 

Perhaps Sophia's disinheritance was simply one more difficulty following a decade of difficulties for the family. The 1890s started out with the tragic death of Edgar, Samuel’s son and Sophia’s younger brother. The decade ended with the death of Samuel’s wife and Sophia’s mother.

And, in the middle of the decade, there were the family's bicycle troubles.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art & Architecture Collection, The New York Public Library. "Ride Sterling bicy[cles]." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1895 - 1917. 

In 1894, Samuel’s son Theo married Mabel, a Manhattan millionaire’s daughter, and Mabel was into bicycles. Bikes were the craze during the 1890s, and both Theo’s bride and his sister Isabel joined fad. Not only did people love to ride, but bicycle racing was a popular spectator sport too.

It wasn’t long before Mabel’s interest in bicycles bothered her new groom. Theo didn’t approve of her “acquaintances made while biking,” as reported in The World. Theo accused Mabel of being “infatuated with the wheel” and with a wheeler named Charles Cafferty, a local champ in the bike-racing circuit. Cafferty denied the accusation, but after Theo divorced Mabel, the bike-racer married her. 

While bicycle drama upset Theo’s marriage, bicycling upset his sister Isabel too. 

Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "Woman after falling from bicycle." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1896. 

While riding in their uptown neighborhood on a spring day in 1897, Isabel hit a rut in the road and injured her toe. Blaming the city for the rut, she filed a $10,000 lawsuit, though it didn't go well and the case was thrown out of court.

His children rode their bikes around Manhattan, and Samuel rode the train out of the city. He took two trips each year out West to peddle precious stones. 

The family gem business was headquartered in the original diamond district of New York City, on Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan. In the 1900s, Lyons & Son was in the Diamond Exchange, a building especially made for gem dealers. It was built with extra-strong floors to hold the heavy safes and with big windows for natural light that made the gems sparkle. The building still stands today.

By Unknown - Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide: v. 53, no. 1366: May 19, 1894, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52445068

It turns out that Lyons & Son had some financial issues in the 1890s. It wasn’t that the business lacked assets, but, rather, it lacked cash to pay the bills. Samuel sometimes bartered and traded his goods rather than selling them for money. He obtained land out West through trade, for example, and perhaps he traded some gemstones for the artwork in his dining room as well.  

Fortunately, Samuel and Theo convinced their creditors they could pay their bills in full if given some time, and their creditors were lenient with payment schedules. 

It’s possible that on one of his business trips to the West in the 1890s, Samuel Lyons obtained the George W. Platt paintings – the artwork that would be Sophia’s inheritance.

The artist George W. Platt didn’t always live in the West. He grew up in New York and then studied art in Munich and Philadelphia. 

Platt liked the trompe l’oeil technique of creating an optical illusion, making it look like the objects in the painting were actual, three-dimensional objects rather than painted renditions. The American style of trompe l’oeil at the time often featured items from the Western states, such as hunting game and hunting gear.

Trompe l'oeil piece by George W. Platt

The trompe l’oeil painting that was Platt’s most famous was called Vanishing Glories, and it has apparently vanished itself. There is no known record of where it ended up.

Platt himself ended up in Denver, but that was after he taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and married one of his students there. After the couple moved to Denver, Platt taught at the University of Denver and continued painting – mostly fruits and flowers as well as portraits.

I don’t know what paintings by Platt that Samuel Lyons hung in his dining room and left to his daughter Sophia. The history-hunter in me hopes one of them was the missing Vanishing Glories. But, I suppose it’s more reasonable to guess that Samuel Lyons would have chosen still-life paintings of food to hang in his dining room on Washington Terrace rather than trompe l’oeil frontier scenes. 

Whatever the paintings were in Samuel Lyons' dining room, the New York Times reported they were left for Sophia "as a mark of returned love to her" by her father.

Still life by George W. Platt

This happy ending ends the series on Washington Terrace, a short street off the regular Manhattan street grid - a place where we discovered murder stories; a survival story; and this story of gemstones, bicycles, artwork, and reconciliation.

Sidenotes of interest:

• One creditor of Lyons & Sons was Jos. Frankel’s Sons, the firm that bought the famously unlucky Hope Diamond.
• Theo remarried after his father died, and he remained in the gem business. On a trip out West in the 1920s, he was robbed of $20,000 worth of his goods.
• Mabel, Theo's first wife, was the daughter of man who made a fortune in the cracker-making business. Watch for his story down the road on History Underfoot.

Sources are found here.

Washington Terrace Part 2: Survival

In Part 1 of this mini-series about Washington Terrace, Ella, who lived on the street, was found murdered a few miles away. As a reminder, this mini-series is about a little street in Manhattan that was built off the regular street grid.

In the same year that Ella was found murdered, 1907, a young man arrived in New York City as a newcomer from Norway. This story is about the survival of his son, Arthur Wigeland.

Arthur and his older brother Hans grew up on Washington Terrace. Their home was likely a lively place with the two brothers, their parents, two cousins from Norway, and three more boarders - also from Norway - all in one apartment.

Arthur spent his childhood, from the 1920s until he enlisted in WWII, living in this row of houses,
shown here as they appear in 2017. Photo by blog author.

When World War II broke out, Hans and Arthur both enlisted in the Army. Hans was a musician and he ended up playing in an Army artillery band. Arthur, age 21, had a job selling advertising for The New York Times when he enlisted as a private.

Arthur Wigeland. New York Times Studios.

Arthur reported for duty with the Army at Fort Jay on Governor’s Island. The small island is in the upper bay of New York Harbor, just off the southern tip of Manhattan. A United States military post since the beginning of our country’s independence, it was a place for troops to muster before heading overseas during WWII.

Manhattan and Governor's Island. Fort Jay is on the lower left side of the photo,
the structure surrounded by open land.

Plane Flying above Governor's Island, 1935, unknown photographer. 

From the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York.

Arthur headed to Western Europe with the Armored Field Artillery Battalion, and his job was Forward Observer in a tank. 

Captured

In January 1945 Arthur was riding with a small group of tanks in Belgium when he was surrounded by Germans.

Arthur was in Belgium at tail end of the Battle of the Bulge. The battle began a month before, in December 1944, when the Nazis were in a desperate situation, and Hitler launched an all-out attack against the Allies. It was the largest battle on the western front, and it was brutal.

Arthur’s tank was attacked and the driver was killed. Arthur and several others found an abandoned house as shelter, but it didn’t offer them lasting protection. They fought the Nazis from the house but soon succumbed. 

Arthur had been fighting in the war for almost  three years when he was taken prisoner. Whatever bravery he pulled from himself to fight during those years, he would need to pull out even more to survive as a P.O.W. in a German stalag, a prison camp for enlisted troops.

After capturing the soldiers in Belgium, the Germans marched the prisoners to Limburg, Germany. They passed through small towns, and one veteran who survived the march recalled townspeople throwing apple cores at the prisoners to watch them dive for the cores and fight each other over a small bite of food.

The soldiers marched for days and days without adequate meals – often without any food at all. Escapees were shot on the spot.

Stalag XII

Their destination was Stalag XII. The place had served for years as a staging camp where newly-captured prisoners were sent before being disbursed to other places like work camps. As temporary housing for the prisoners, the conditions were stark to the extreme, devoid of anything to make the place habitable.

By the time Arthur arrived in 1944, Stalag XII housed P.O.W.s long-term, though the conditions remained inhumane.

Stalag XII. Photo from Indianamilitary.org

Stalag XII had no lights, no heat, no beds, no blankets. The men slept on the ground – which was cobblestone for those in tents – with lice-filled straw. I’m sure you can imagine the state of the latrines without my description, and many men suffered dysentery. 

Conditions, however, would get worse. 

In March 1944, the Allies progressed closer and closer, and the Nazis loaded the P.O.W.s from Stalag XII onto railway boxcars to move them toward Berlin. The men were so crowded that there was only room for them to stand, body-to-body, though in some cars they were able to rotate rest times when men could sit while others stood waiting their turn. 

The boxcars full of prisoners sat on the tracks for 36 hours. And then they were strafed.

Strafe comes from the German verb strafen, which means to punish. In WWI, the word strafe entered the English language through the Brits when they heard the German phrase, “Gott strafe England,” meaning, “May God punish England,” and strafe was used to describe any type of attack. 

In WW2, however, the word strafe meant, specifically, attacking the ground from machine-gun fire from a plane flying above.

The prisoners in the boxcars were strafed by Allied planes. The cars were not marked with “P.O.W.” as they should have been according to Geneva Convention rules. The Allies had no idea they were killing and wounding fellow countrymen. They thought they were bombarding enemy transport.

The German guards fled. Some reports say the guards opened the railcar doors before they left. Other reports say the prisoners broke free themselves. However the prisoners escaped, they did it while being strafed.

Shirts off their Backs

As the men ran or stumbled or fell out of the cars, leaders among them organized the group. A Scottish military chaplain arranged them into a formation with the hope that it would save their lives.

If the Germans didn’t label them properly as P.O.W.s, they would label themselves. The men were ordered to take off their shirts and bend over, using their bare bodies in the sun to spell out the letters P O W that could be read by the pilots above.  

Completely unarmed and defenseless under fire, they held the formation. The strafing continued. Men were hit, and one man broke formation to run away. Everyone else remained feet on ground, bodies bent over – except the wounded and two chaplains who performed last rites on the dying.

The P47 Thunderbird pilots stopped the attack when they realized the men were prisoners, and they dipped their plane wings in acknowledgement that the message was received. The pilots flew away, but still the men on the ground held position, half-dressed, mostly starved, in the elements, all afternoon. 

Arthur Wigeland from Washington Terrace was among them.

It seems like the next thing I should write is the Allies returned and the man were safe, but that’s not what happened. Instead, in the evening, the German guards returned. The prisoners couldn’t be moved by train, and at 1 o’clock in the morning, the prisoners were ordered to march.

But not Arthur. He didn’t march. He escaped that night, and he wasn’t the only one. 

Escape and Rescue

Another prisoner slipped away when the group started moving, and he found his way to a farmhouse. A woman there gave him coffee and food. The word was going around the town that the Americans would soon be in Limburg.

Meanwhile Arthur met up with some others who escaped and they hid in a house. There was no resident there to feed them, but they found apples in the cellar – the first food they had had in weeks.

After a couple of days, they recognized the sound of American tanks, and the men wept. 

The tanks were part of the “most powerful tank force ever assembled on the western front,” according to The New York Times report. The enemy had destroyed bridges and left rubble in the streets to block the way of the Allies, but the American bulldozers busted through the mess and the tanks rolled into Limburg at 3:45 in the afternoon of March 27, 1945. 

Allies advancing eastward through Germany. Limburg, where Stalag XII was located, is
circled in red by blog author. Berlin is to the northeast. Map from The New York Times, March 28, 1945.

Arthur and the other starving men came out of the house where they were hiding, and the American soldiers in the tanks tossed chocolate, K-rations, and cigarettes to them. 

Arthur had survived. He went home weighing 130 lbs on his 6’2” frame as one of the lucky ones. Maj. David Roberts told The New York Times the survivors of Stalag XII “were in a pitiful state of well-being.”

Arthur returned to the States around the time of the VE-Day celebrations. The war in Europe was over.

VE-Day celebration in Times Square. Photo from americanairpowermuseum.com

Back in New York City, the New York Times gave Arthur a position again in the ad department, and, over the years, he worked his way up in the advertising industry. 

Arthur left his childhood home on Washington Terrace to fight in a war. Almost twenty years to the day after his capture by the enemy in Belgium, he died in New Jersey at age 43 after a long illness. He left behind a wife, three children, five battle stars, a Purple Heart, and this story of his survival.

After covering murders in Part 1, and war in Part 2 of this mini-series, Part 3 will be about artwork on Washington Terrace.  

Sources.