Garden Home – Frank McNally on the Irish origins of a quintessential American suburb

To be Irish in New York, I always think, is to feel a certain sense of ownership. We built this place, you can tell yourself, with only some exaggeration.

Or at least I do. Even as an occasional tourist there, I like to think I’m checking on the progress of a family business, albeit one in which I didn’t inherit any shares.

The feeling subsided a little on a visit last weekend, when accommodation costs drove me and my young-adult children to the outer darkness of Long Island.

It weakened further on Saturday night, after the sporadic train service and a taxi black hole combined to have us walking the last four miles home to our Airbnb, earning curious looks from Long Island drivers, who may never have seen pedestrians before.

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Custer’s Last Tune – Frank McNally on the dubious history of the ballad Garryowen

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The route took us through a verdant suburb called Garden City, with its picture-perfect houses and manicured lawns. It was a microcosm of the American Dream, apart perhaps for one house, which had a big sign saying: “Blue Lives Matter. Defend the Police.”

Our Airbnb host, who prided himself on many shrewd investments, housing and otherwise, told us he had once tried and failed to buy a home in Garden City.

He claimed it was the neighbourhood’s extreme regulation – “I couldn’t have a pool!” – that put him off; although on the question of cost, he also consoled himself that, when driving through there, “you never see people enjoying their properties”. They were too busy working to pay them off.

Anyway, to pass the time on the long walk home on Saturday night, I googled the history of Garden City. And what do you know? That too, it turns out, was built by an Irishman.

Lisburn-born and Trinity College-educated, Alexander Turney Stewart (1803–1876) is probably better remembered today for having also invented shopping as we now know it, or used to, via a series of palatial department stores in Manhattan.

But at the height of his success, he decided to develop a residential village, for his employees and others, on the then sparsely populated Hemstead Plains, 20 miles east of the city.

And to serve it, he built the Central Railroad of Long Island (now part of the Long Island Rail Road, on which my Children of LIRR and I spent a lot of last weekend).

For a time, the shortage of residents in Garden City led journalists to call it “Stewart’s Folly”. But like most of his ideas, it proved a long-term success, even if he didn’t live to see it fully developed.

Stewart’s retail empire started with a tiny shop on lower Broadway, where he made creative use of the pavement: his low-priced goods causing clutter and drawing the crowds that were his only advertisement.

As well as selling cheap, however, he had the revolutionary idea of treating his (usually female) customers well.

Many were “ignorant, opinionated, and innocent,” he noted: “You will often have the opportunity to cheat them. If they could, they would cheat you. [But] you must never actually cheat the customer, even if you can. You must make her happy and satisfied, so she will come back.”

This enlightened philosophy helped him upgrade first to the “Marble Palace”, an opulent four-storey shopping emporium, also on Broadway, then the “Iron Palace”, a vast establishment that occupied a city block and employed 2,000 people.

Those and a burgeoning mail-order business made him almost as rich as the city’s Astors and Vanderbilts and funded a Fifth Avenue mansion. But – no doubt partly because he was raised during his teenage years in the home of a Belfast Quaker – Stewart was also a great philanthropist.

He sent a shipload of food to Ireland during the Famine, bringing emigrants on the return journey. He also donated generously to victims of the Chicago Fire. And in his will, he left a quarter of a million dollars to be shared in gratitude among long-term employees.

In the meantime, his reputation went before him. The New York Public Library has “thousands” of letters addressed to Stewart in the years 1862-75, in which “the poor, middle class, merchant, illiterate, and well-educated” wrote seeking money.

When he died in 1876, he was buried at St Mark’s Churchyard in the Bowery, where his neighbours included Thomas Addis Emmet, brother of Robert. But that was not, in the pious cliché, Stewart’s final resting place.

He also had the unusual distinction of being posthumously kidnapped: his remains stolen in 1878 for a $20,000 ransom. The money was paid eventually and the remains returned.

In the meantime, Stewart’s wealth had funded construction of Garden City’s episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation: the only cathedral in the US paid for by, and commemorating, a single person.

He was reburied in a mausoleum there, with precautions against further unauthorised resurrection.

According to popular belief, at least, the crypt is booby-trapped in such a way that, if disturbed, the cathedral bells will sound the alarm.