Stone & Steel

In 1799, a stone carriage house was built on East 61st Street in Manhattan and 27 years later, was converted into a “day” hotel called the Mount Vernon Hotel. Because my sister likes to do her research before we journey places, she knew about this hidden treasure, a place certainly unbeknownst to many New Yorkers.

In the 1820s and 30s, the city only went as far north as 14th Street. It takes a real stretch of the imagination to picture most of the island of Manhattan as open fields with hills and trees and flowers and grazing cows, but wide open space it was. And those who could afford it would hop a steamboat or stagecoach and travel four miles up to the Mount Vernon for a summer day that might include a splash in the East River, followed by a luncheon of turtle soup…and for the ladies, embroidery and pianoforte in the upstairs parlors, and for the men, a flagon of beer, a game of cards, and a lively discussion in the tavern below.

You can hear these stories if you take a tour of the hotel, quiet now except for the voices of the guides and the visitors’ footsteps on the creaky plank floors, and no doubt, the swish of a ghost or two in the wee hours. Outside, the traffic courses up and down the avenues, horns blare, and the Roosevelt Island trams swing from the high wires crossing the river, and New York is the New York we know.

But then, there is this New York we don’t know. It’s good to venture into these long-ago places that jar us out of our present-day realities and conditioned ways of thinking. Places that have stories to tell about who came before us and the lives they lived and the circumstances of their lives. We can be eternally grateful that the Colonial Dames of America purchased the old stone building in 1924 from the Standard Gas Light Company (today’s Con Edison), extensively restored it, and opened it in 1939 for all of us to see.

I think about the old houses here in my village on Cape Cod, some of which have been lovingly and intelligently restored with their integrity intact and others that have been painfully made new or razed and carted away. Once gone or once “remodeled,” the stories go too and with the stories, our own deepening awareness of how we and our surroundings have been shaped by the happiness or unhappiness of those who came before us and what they believed was of value and what was not. We need those stories and the buildings that contain them and so eloquently, give them voice.

For more information on the Mount Vernon Hotel, visit www.mvhm.org.