The Skiddys
View south from Oak Bridge; photo Sara Cedar Miller
The views from Oak Bridge and Hernshead are two of the best places to photograph New York's world-famous skyline framed, as it is, by the woods and water of Central Park. The bridge and the rocky peninsula both jut out into the Lake, and in warm seasons the scene is gaily animated with rowboats and the occasional sighting of the park's authentic Venetian gondola.
But before Central Park's designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, created their masterpiece beginning in 1858, the site was hardly a photographer's dream. The landscape surrounding Hernshead and Oak Bridge—two blocks between Central Park West and Seventh Avenue and from 75th Street to 77th Street—featured patches of level ground, several massive rock outcrops, and marshland that the co-designers transformed into a portion of the manmade Lake.
The challenging terrain did not deter savvy speculators from exchanging west side property as far back as the 1660s. After changing hands by descendants of a few English elite families for a century, those blocks and the adjacent land of the New-York Historical Society were purchased in 1811 by "Master Mariner" John R. Skiddy. He was a leading figure in New York's shipping industry who saw the emergence and growth of New York as a world port in post-Revolutionary America. As manager of the Mariner's and Merchant's Association, he helped open a Registry Office for seamen seeking employment that would act as a "moral influence" and as "a powerful motive for fidelity and good conduct." [1] In 1813, he sailed from New Haven to Lisbon when a French privateer took Skiddy as a prisoner. The ship's insurance company paid his ransom of over $1,300 in Bordeaux. [2] When Skiddy died, his sons commissioned the construction of the John R. Skiddy. This 930-ton packet ship was engaged in the New York-Liverpool trade that brought many Irish immigrants to America.
Stepson William Taylor Skiddy was the child of Captain Justus William and Rosetta Taylor of Peekskill, New York. When Taylor died of yellow fever in 1799, his widow married John Skiddy, who adopted her son. At age ten, William began his career as a cabin boy and ultimately rose through the ranks of merchant mariners. He became a prisoner in the War of 1812, and after his release, he received a commission in the U.S. Navy from President James Madison. During William's brief military service, he emerged as a talented artist, sketching some of the war's significant battles and later a skilled render of ships and marine scenes that are in the collection of the G.W. Blunt Library of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut. In partnership with his half-brother, Francis, William began designing and constructing naval vessels. He remained a mariner until his retirement in 1847.
But William entered the history books due to the 1837 Supreme Court case, the United States vs. William Skiddy. [3] While sailing from France to New Orleans in 1835, Skiddy's ship, the Garonne, was seized by federal agents. Skiddy was charged with breaking the law "to import or bring in any manner into the United States or territories thereof, from any foreign kingdom, place or country, any negro, mulatto or person of color with intent to hold, sell or dispose of such negro, mulatto or person of color as a slave or to be held to service or labor."
Priscilla, enslaved since birth, was returning from a stay in France to Louisiana, the home of her enslaver, Mrs. Smith. Her passport identified her as an enslaved person and she was accompanied by an escort. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who would preside over the infamous Dred Scott vs. Sanford case in 1857, ruled that Captain Skiddy did not violate the federal law that ended the slave trade. In continuing to uphold the institution of slavery in the nation’s highest court, Taney determined that Skiddy was transporting an enslaved person back to her enslaver's home after "a temporary absence" and not importing a foreign "person of color" for sale. Captain Skiddy got off scot-free. Priscilla did not.
As discussed in Before Central Park, the blood and sweat of slavery fueled the world's sweet tooth. The plantations of the Caribbean-Cuba, Barbados, Jamaica, Mexico, and South America exploited enslaved people as much as cotton did in the southern states. The sugar cane enriched the elite merchants of pre-Revolutionary New York. The Livingstons, Bayards, Roosevelts, and Van Cortlandts owned the early sugar houses and established New York as the capital of the sugar refining world.
It is uncertain when William's half-brother Francis Skiddy began his profession, but according to one writer, he became in his day "the chief sugar broker in Wall Street." [4] Francis brokered the deals, and his brother William piloted the ships that transported the sugar from the plantations to the port of New York.
Sugar refining began at the plantation, where the raw canes became dark brown muscovado sugar. When the muscovado sugar arrived for refinement in New York, several processes removed impurities and acidity. Next, the brown muscovado slurry passed through a medium of blackened and crushed animal bones—known as bone black, bone char, or animal charcoal. The result was a clear liquid that, once dried, became the sparkling "white gold" crystals we know as granulated sugar.
The most noxious aspect of the process was the transformation from animal bones to bone char. First, the carcasses were boiled in cauldrons to remove their fat and gristle. The cleaned bones became charcoal when they were subjected to the searing heat of the furnace. This process was all done in a bone-boiling factory, so offensive to genteel New Yorkers that they were situated far from upper- and middle-class neighborhoods. To German immigrant George H. Moller, the sparsely populated prepark seemed like an ideal location for his factory.
The Skiddys' connections to the industry remove any doubt about how Moller came to lease the flat land for a bone-boiling factory—today a meadow ringed with flowering plants inside Central Park West and 75th Street to 76th Street. Francis and William Skiddy were his landlords. The brothers inherited their father's west side prepark land in 1835, and by 1849, Moller had signed a lease with Skiddy for $150 a year. [5]
Figure 2: The tall chimney of the bone-boiling factory can be seen in this 1858 lithograph of Cental Park’s construction. Photo collection of Stephen Manheimer
Several members of the Moller family were in the refining business. In 1850, Cord Moller, a relation to George, signed a lease with landowner Jacob Harsen for a second bone-boiling establishment at Eighth Avenue and 68th Street. At some point, Moller either sold or subleased that factory to German immigrant William Menck. [6] Today that factory is, in part, a section of the world-famous Tavern on the Green restaurant, serving sugary desserts since 1934.
In 1856, when the City of New York compensated the renters and the landowners to create Central Park, renters George Moller received $3,850 and William Menck $4,523 for the factories. [7] Landowners Francis and William Skiddy received $64,179, a 2,790-percent increase from their father's initial investment.
Unlike the majority of landowners and renters who were displaced to construct Central Park, wealthy Francis Skiddy saw the park as an investment enterprise. He understood that the park would create new residential neighborhoods and new transportation needs to connect to the downtown business district. In 1864, the year after the taking of the park to 110th Street, the New York Times reported that Skiddy and such fellow developers as John Jacob Astor, Jr. introduced a bill into the state legislature to authorize an "underground railroad" so people living near Central Park could reach the Battery "within fifteen minutes." The reporter noted, "all London is alive with similar enterprises." [8]
It would take another forty years for that scheme to be realized when the city's first subway line rumbled up Broadway on October 27, 1904. But it was not until September 10, 1932, that the Eighth Avenue Line—today's A, C, and B trains—would speed under and through the Skiddys' former Central Park property.
[1] The Sailors' Magazine and Naval Journal, American Seaman's Friend Society, Volumes 3-4, August 1831, pages 34-35.
[2] Greg H. Williams, The French Assault on American Shipping, 1793-1813: A History and Comprehensive Record of Merchant Marine Losses (Jefferson, NC, and London, McFarland & Company, 2009), 233.
[3] The full title of the case is The United States, Plaintiffs in Error v. The Ship Garonne, William Skiddy, see https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-skiddy/?PHONE_NUMBER_GROUP=P.
[4] The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer: A Weekly Newspaper Devoted to the Sugar, Rice and Other Agricultural Industries of Louisiana, Vol. 42, No. 21, May 22, 1909, 323. See also, Elwell v. Skiddy, https://casetext.com/case/elwell-et-al-v-skiddy-et-al. A portrait of Francis Skiddy by artist Eastman Johnson on https://www.eastmanjohnson.org/catalogue/entry.php?id=638.
[5] Skiddy to Moller 517 654, 1849.
[6] Harsen to Moller L548 P173, 1850. The Mollers also bought prepark property from Jacob Harsen on 71st Street and Eighth Avenue, Harsen to Moller, L548 P169 and P171, 1850.
[7] Central Park Releases, Municipal Archives.
[8] "The Underground Railroad," New York Times, March 26, 1864, 6.