I’ve never been able to track down where the four oldest Russo children were for the first years they were orphaned or abandoned or lost. I do know that the only boy was eventually sent west on the orphan trains and later died in a factory explosion in Kansas. My grandmother’s youngest sister, an infant, was adopted, while she and her sister May were eventually taken into the Mother Cabrini home for Italian orphans, where they grew up and lived until they married, both before age twenty.
My grandmother had ten children who survived into adulthood, and she died at age seventy-two in 1955, six months before my birth. In accordance with Italian custom, I was named for her. This rather mundane fact is actually more complicated than it might seem. Here’s the thing: No one was ever really sure of her name.
It is spelled phonetically on her baptismal record; on marriage, birth, and death certificates it appears as Rosa, Rose, Rosie, or Rosina, with a surname that varies just as widely: Russo, Russ, Ross, and Rose. Her children each had a different story about her name and origins. The first seed for this novel was planted when my aunt Kate told me her version: Your grandmother’s name was Rose Rose, and you were named after her.
It was in researching my grandmother’s life that I first began to think about Manhattan in the 1880s, and to imagine a story. This is not my grandmother’s story, which is still to be discovered, but one of my own making.
Second: To really understand Manhattan in 1883 you have to forget the Manhattan you think you know. In 1883 there was no Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, Flatiron Building, Times Square, or New York Public Library, to name just a few landmarks. Transportation was limited to walking, horse-drawn or steam-driven vehicles, elevated trains, and the growing railroad system. In 1883 gaslight still dominated; electric light had just begun to replace gas streetlights, and very few buildings had made the switch. The telephone was on the horizon, but in 1883 a telegram was the only way to move information quickly from place to place.
This novel was a research-intensive undertaking. Some information about that research that might be useful to those interested in the history or who are dedicated fact-checkers:
I will admit to a weakness for maps, and a particular weakness for the David Rumsey Map Collection (davidrumsey.com), which was especially useful in reconstructing Manhattan as it existed in 1883. Since that time streets have disappeared and morphed, while others have been renamed. The map of the city is further complicated because in a relatively short period of time public transportation went through multiple incarnations: elevated train lines went up and came down, dozens of railroads vied for street space and custom, and the first of them were dropped into tunnels to run underground, a precursor to the subway system. In a similar way real estate boomed as the city moved northward; Manhattanites didn’t hesitate to tear down elaborate structures less than fifty years old if there was a potential for profit in replacing them with something else.
What you find here are the original names and locations of buildings, businesses, institutions, intersections, residences, elevated train routes and stations, restaurants, schools, and everything else, in as far as I was able to document them.
The exceptions are first, the residences of fictitious characters: I’m sorry to say that you shouldn’t bother to go looking for the Quinlan, Savard, Maroney, or Campbell homes or the Mezzanotte shop, greenhouses, or farm, because they never existed. Also, I should point out that I’ve appropriated a block on Waverly Place just east of the original building that housed NYU for my fictional purposes. In 1883 this block was mostly commercial in nature and home to merchants who specialized in all kinds of clothing.
The New Amsterdam Charity Hospital is also fiction, and was never to be found in Manhattan.
With very few exceptions, the names of real people have been changed to allow me more interpretive license. This is especially the case where the historical record is lacking. For example, Father John McKinnawae is a highly fictionalized version of Father John Drumgoole, who established the Mount Loretto Orphan Asylum on Staten Island and the Catholic home for orphaned boys at the intersection of Great Jones Street and Lafayette; conversely, the head of the Foundling Asylum (known still as just the Foundling) was in life (as she is in the novel) Sister Mary Irene, of the Sisters of Charity. Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi was a real person, one who deserves to be widely known, married to another physician, Dr. Abraham Jacobi, whom some think of as the founder of modern pediatric medicine. All other physicians are fictional.
Anthony Comstock’s public actions and life history are drawn from newspaper accounts, contemporaneous tracts and books, and historical scholarship. However, the people he hounded and drove to suicide—something the Weeder in the Garden of the Lord (a title he gave himself) bragged about—have been fictionalized.