Saving Monticello: The Newsletter
The latest about the book, author events, and more
Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson
Volume XX, Number 1 January
2023
“The study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner
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THE LEVYS OF NEW YORK: Saving Monticello, the story of Uriah Levy and Jefferson Monroe Levy’s 89-year stewardship of Thomas Jefferson’s Essay in Architecture in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, naturally focuses on Monticello and Charlottesville. But the story of the Levys also threads through New York City, where both men lived for most of their lives.
So here’s a brief tour of the Big Apple through the lives of Uriah and Jefferson Levy and their forebears and close relations who lived and worked there, primarily in Lower Manhattan, Greenwich Village, Murray Hill, and Central Park West.
We begin with Uriah Levy’s great grandparents, Maria Caetana Nunez and David Mendes Machado, who helped settle Savannah, Georgia, in July 1733 with 38 other Sephardic Jews who had escaped the Portuguese Inquisition, sailed to London, and then to the New World.
Not long after arriving in Savannah with her family, 19-year-old Maria Nunez (known as Zipporah) married David Machado. Soon thereafter, the young couple relocated to NYC, where Machado, a Jewish theologian and scholar, became hazzan at Congregation Shearith Israel, the first Jewish congregation established in North America.
That Sephardic congregation was founded in 1654 by the first Jews who had come to Niuw Amsterdam from Brazil. Until 1825, it was the only Jewish congregation in the city. When the Machados arrived in Manhattan, the congregation was meeting in a small house on Mill Street (in drawing, above)—the first building designed to be used as a synagogue in North America. Mill Street, now known as South William Street, is in Lower Manhattan near Wall Street.
Zipporha and David’s oldest daughter, Rebecca Machado, was born in New York in 1746. She married Jonas Phillips—a merchant who had immigrated to the colonies from Germany—in 1762 in Philadelphia. They lived in Manhattan for a while, where Jonas Phillips owned and operated a retail store. The couple moved to Philadelphia in the early 1770s. Their grandson, Uriah Phillips Levy, was born there in 1792, the son of their daughter Rachel Phillips and Michael Levy, who had come to the U.S. from Germany.
Uriah Levy grew up in Philadelphia and joined the U.S. Navy in 1812 to fight in the war against England. That brought him to New York for the first time, when on October 21, 1812, the 20-year-old received his official U.S. Navy appointment as a Sailing Master from President James Madison and briefly served on the U.S.S. Alert in New York Harbor.
After the war, in January of 1828, Uriah returned to New York City, and never left—except for his Navy postings and his visits to Monticello, which he purchased in 1834. Soon after arriving in New York, Uriah began investing in real estate, specializing in rooming houses in Greenwich Village and elsewhere in Lower Manhattan. He quickly amassed a not inconsiderable fortune through his New York City real estate holdings.
Sometime in the winter of 1836-37, Uriah bought and moved into a four-story brick house on East 9th Street in what is now known as the East Village. That structure, between 3rd and 4th Avenues, is long gone.
UPL lived there with his widowed mother, Rachel Phillips Levy, and his unmarried sister Amelia. His mother died at Monticello in 1839 while Uriah was at sea and is buried there. In the early 1850s Uriah moved to another large East Village house at 107 St. Mark’s Place between First Ave and Avenue A. That building was demolished and today is the site of a six-story brick apartment building.
Jonas Phillips Levy, Uriah youngest brother, who was born in Philadelphia in 1807, lived in New York City periodically throughout his life, and settled there for good in 1866 after the Civil War. He had married Frances Mitchell (known as Fanny) in 1848.
Their four children, including Jefferson Monroe Levy, were born and raised in Manhattan. When Jefferson Levy was born in 1852 his parents were living on Bank Street in the West Village. Earlier, they had lived at 498 West Houstan (Houston) Street on a block near the Hudson River that no longer exists. At his death in 1883, Jonas Levy was living with his wife Fanny at 108 E. 40th St., between Lexington and Park Avenues in Murray Hill.
Jefferson Levy, a lawyer by trade, became an extremely successful real estate and stock speculator. Over the years, he rented office space in several buildings in Lower Manhattan, including at 38 Park Row, 30 Pine Street, and 100 Broadway, one block from Wall Street. Today, the latter is the site of the Neo-Renaissance, 26-story American Surety building, one of New York’s earliest skyscrapers, which was completed in 1896. (See recent photo of the entrance below.)
Jefferson Levy’s younger brother and business and law partner, Louis Napoleon Levy, lived with his wife Lillian Hendricks Wolff and their four daughter at 18 West 72nd Street, a stone’s throw from Central Park on the Upper West Side not far from Shearith Israel, where he served as president of the congregation for many years beginning in 1895. The family later moved a few blocks south to 26 West 69th Street.
Jefferson Levy’s sister, Amelia Levy Mayhoff, who was born in 1858, married Carl Mayhoff, a New York City cotton broker, in 1890. They lived most of the year on East 34th Street, on the same block where Jefferson Levy lived between Lexington and Park Avenue, a few blocks from the Empire State Building.
Jefferson
Levy later moved three blocks north to 17
East 37th Street, between Madison and Fifth, close to famed
financier John Pierpont Morgan’s library, now known as the Morgan Library & Museum. That’s where Jefferson Levy died on March
6, 1924, of heart disease, five weeks short of his 72nd birthday.
·
January 12, 7:00
p.m. in person screening at the New Orleans JCC. Info: https://tinyurl.com/2p82dhpm
·
January 13-25,
Miami Jewish Film Festival, streaming. Info at https://tinyurl.com/mws7687x
·
January 22
at 2:00 p.m, at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture in Richmond, Va.,
as part of the 14th annual Israeli and Jewish Film Festival.
Info: https://tinyurl.com/36334a35
· January 29, at the James City County Library in Williamsburg, Va., as part of the Virginia Peninsula Jewish Film Festival info: https://tinyurl.com/2dvkps8v
February screenings include in-person events in Charlotte, North Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; and Orange County, California. We’ll have details on those and more in the February newsletter. Meanwhile, for more information on these and other screenings, go to https://bit.ly/LevyDoc or Google, “The Levys of Monticello screening.”
EVENTS: Just one this month. On Thursday, January 26, I’ll be doing a talk on Saving Monticello and book signing at the monthly luncheon meeting of the Northern Virginia Questers chapter in Falls Church.
If you’d
like to arrange an event for Saving
Monticello or for any of my other books, email me at marcleepson@gmail.com
For details on other upcoming events, check
the Events page on my website: https://bit.ly/NewAppearances
GIFT IDEAS: For a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello, please e-mail marcleepson@gmail.com I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcover
copies, along with a good selection of new copies of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate
Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag:
An American Biography; and Ballad of
the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.
The SM
Newsletter on Line: You can read back issues of this
newsletter at http://bit.ly/SMOnline
