January 2020

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XVII, Number 1                                          January 1, 2020

“The study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner

HAPPY 2020: And happy 17^th anniversary to the Saving Monticello newsletter. This publication began in 2003 after I had attended a book-marketing panel at the Virginia Book Festival in Charlottesville and one expert advised starting a newsletter. I went with the newsletter form because in those days weblogs had just become known as “blogs” and weren’t on my radar.

I don’t know if I thought back then how long I’d keep doing the newsletter, but it’s pleasantly surprising that I have produced one every month since. It’s also been an unexpected pleasure to regularly find material I hadn’t come across while doing the research for the book twenty years ago.

Thanks very much to all the SM Newsletter subscribers—especially those who have told me about newspaper and magazine articles and other primary-source materials that were new to me. I continue to search digital archives (thank you, Google University) for potential newsletter items, often while doing research for my other books. It’s always a shot in the arm when I come upon newly digitized material that augments what I have written in the book about the history of Monticello.

For example: I just found a one-paragraph article from The Sun, the old New York City newspaper, dated October 9, 1887, that provides details of Jefferson Monroe Levy’s ownership of the Merchants’ Hotel in New York City. That article buttresses what I wrote in Saving Monticello about how Levy became a millionaire around that time primarily through buying, selling, and managing real estate in his hometown—and in Charlottesville. (He also had great success as a stock market speculator.)

I described some of Jefferson Levy’s more notable real estate dealings in the book. But I hadn’t known that he owned the Merchants’ Hotel for four years. 

The Merchants' Hotel

One of New York City’s oldest hotels, dating from the late 18^th century, the Merchants’ also was one of the city’s most exclusive. It was “famous before the Astor House [the city’s first luxury hotel] was built in 1836,” according to the article. Jefferson Levy purchased the place in 1883 (four years after he’d bought Monticello) for $80,000, and sold it in 1887 for $185,000, more than doubling his investment.

Levy did well in that business venture. As the article noted, he also had received “$11,000 in rents from it, beside his profit on the present transfer.”

In the early and mid 19^th century the Merchants’ Hotel on Cortlandt Street in Lower Manhattan—as its name implies—was a home away from home for out-of-town merchants. They came in New York mostly from the West and South, usually on semi-annual trips to “purchase goods [from][ the great wholesale houses,” as an October 10, 1887, New York Evening World article put it in announcing the sale—but not naming its new owner. The hotel “in those days was a much larger and more pretentious hostelry than it is now,” the paper said, “and covered two lots adjoining” Broadway. “It was a favorite resort for the merchants… who flocked here in thousands.”  

The article went on to note that those merchants, with their “persuasive eloquence,” were known to “break the hearts of the chambermaids and dining-room girls right and left.” 

Dining-room girls?

James Monroe (Thomas Jefferson’s Albemarle County neighbor) stayed at the Merchants’ Hotel in June 1817 when he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Big Apple, according to the 1915 book, Old Taverns of New York by William Harrison Boyles.

After a visit to City Hall to meet with the city’s mayor, Jacob Radcliff, and New York’s Gov. DeWitt Clinton, Boyles wrote, the President “was escorted by a squadron of cavalry to the quarters provided for him at Gibson’s elegant establishment, the Merchants’ Hotel in Wall Street.”

Following another round of official duties, President Monroe “returned to the hotel at five o’clock and sat down to a sumptuous dinner prepared for the occasion.” Among the guests were the former New York Gov. Daniel Tompkins, who then was Monroe’s Vice President, and sitting N.Y. Gov. Clinton.

The Merchants’, Boyles noted, was “selected as a proper place to lodge and entertain the President of the United States” because “there is hardly a doubt that it was considered second to none in the city.” The Merchants’ Hotel is long gone. Today, the 54-story skyscraper called One Liberty Plaza takes up the entire block of Cortlandt Street where the hotel stood, between Church Street and Lower Broadway, two blocks east of the 9/11 Memorial.

EVENTS: I have one event in January. On Sunday, January 12, I’ll be doing a talk on Saving Monticello for Sephardi Federation of Palm Beach County, Florida, at Temple Shaarei Shalom in Boynton Beach. I’ve done more than 225 talks on the book since it came out in 2001, but this will be a first. I’ll be doing it live—but electronically via Zoom.

There’s always the chance that I may have a last-minute talk or signing. For the latest on that, or to check out my scheduled 2020 events, go to the Events page on my website at http://bit.ly/Eventsandtalks

If you’d like to arrange an event for Saving Monticello, or for any of my other books, feel free to email me. For info on my latest book, Ballad of the Green Beret, go to http://bit.ly/GreenBeretBook

GIFT IDEAS:  Want a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello? Please e-mail me at marcleepson@gmail.com  I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcover copies, along with a good selection of brand-new copies of my other books.