Family Archaeology Project: John Kee MacGowan

John Kee MacGowan, one of my great-grandfathers, was almost famous. No biography has been written of him. And there are only a few mentions of him in books and in the archives of the New York Times. But his is a remarkable American story, which, I feel a compulsion to tell.
John was the son of Scottish immigrants in Philadelphia, a poor boy whose father died when he was 4 years old, a clerk and then a railroad agent who, somehow, became one of the first non-family partners in Guggenheim Bros., which was at the time the largest mining empire in the world. After about 30 years with the Guggenheims, traveling the world as their chief purchaser, he resigned and became a corporate turn-around artist for the last years of his life. He died in New York City and is buried in a family plot in Bala Cynwyd, PA.

So, if you're inclined, please join me in an archaeology project, to discover and tell the story of John Kee MacGowan. (I address this appeal most directly to my father, siblings and cousins, but extend it to others who may have knowledge or expertise that might be useful.)  Please send me via comments and email any pictures, facts, stories, etc. No scrap of evidence is too small. I will keep updating this post as new bits trickle in.

Out of this, hopefully, will come a new sort of 21st century biographical expression. So, let's go.


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The place where I start is in the staircase of my grandmother's house on South Bowman Avenue in Lower Merion, PA.  There, on the landing, was a painted portrait of John Kee MacGowan Sr., John's father. We don't have a picture of John, so this is as close as we'll get to knowing what he might have looked like.

Here's a photo of the house. When I was growing up, I thought it was a mansion. But, it turns out to be a very nice home of modest size--not a rich person's house.

The house on South Bowman

 I put together a chronology of facts about John's life based on records I found in the New York times, the US Census, Ancestry.com and other sources on the web. The skeleton of a biography. No attempt at artfulness, either. That may come later.

John's parents were John Kee and Mary MacGowan, who, according to the US Directories - Philadelphia, lived at 120 North 15th Street, in 1868, 70, 72, 74, and 77. This is in downtown Philadelphia. The father's occupation was listed in various years as "clerk," "music" and "sauces." John, the son, was born on Dec. 19, 1874.

His father, John Kee MacGowan Sr., was born in 1841 in Scotland, and died in 1877 at age 36. His mother, Mary Wilhelmina Petersen, was born in 1848 in Hightstown, NJ, and died in Philly in 1884. She was 46.
 
The house they lived in no longer exists. The land is now part of a high-rise construction site (as of March 2013). The door lady at the luxury apartment building across the street said the site was previously a parking lot and before that an Acme grocery office building.

Here are some pictures:

The site of John's birthplace

A building across the street that could be from the same era

Tim pointing to the site

When I visited John's original home site, I discovered that he and I had a bit of geography in common. I was born in Hahnemann Hospital, which was one block away from the family's 15th Street address. Here's a picture of the hospital.

Compared to other poor boys of his time, John was very fortunate. He was chosen based on merit to be a student at Girard College, a boarding school in north Philadelphia that had been set up by Stephen Girard, a long time Philadelphia resident during the Colonial and post-Colonial periods, and, for his time, the richest person in America. Girard left money in his will to establish a school for poor white boys whose fathers were dead. All expenses were paid.

Here's the school:

Founder's Hall

Dormitories

Memorial to Stephen Girard

In 1894, when John was 20, he lived with his mother at 2249 Vanpelt in North Philly. That area is now the home of extremely poor black people, perhaps poorer than John and his mother were at the time. His occupation was given as "clerk."

Here are some photos of the house and neighborhood. We were there at noon on a Saturday, and very few people were stirring outdoors. It was as if the houses were abandoned, as, certainly, some of them were. In American society today, it's taboo even to mention the poor. For all practical purposes, they don't exist in the national dialogue. I think these photos capture that reality pretty well.

It's the red building with white trim

Here's a video of the bleak scene on Vanpelt

In 1895, John married Marian Wallace from Havre de Grace, MD, in Philadelphia. They moved to Denver, where he worked as a "general agent" for several railroads, including Chicago and Great Western. Another of the railroad companies, listed as Leadville & G Railways in the city directory, ran freight to and from Leadville, Colo., which is where the Guggenheim brothers, who were originally from Philadelphia, had their first mine.

The address where the MacGowan family lived was listed as 1530 Detroit, on the outskirts of downtown Denver. Their house was one block from City Park, Denver's version of Central Park. It has been torn down and the lot is now used for parking. My grandmother, Mildred Todd MacGowan, was born there in 1898. It would be cool if somebody would send me a digital photo of her in her infancy so I can insert it here.

Here's the lot:

 Here's the house next door, which looks like it probably existed in 1898, so it gives you an idea of what the MacGowan house might have looked like:

Here's the park, where, I imagine, my great-grandparents probably rolled my grandmother around in a baby carriage:

 

John MacGowan shows up in the US Census of 1900 living with his wife, my grandmother, and, Helen, her sister, in East Orange, NJ, a suburb of Newark and New York City. He's listed as working a a manager at 30 Broadway, NYC. The Guggenheim Bros. had offices at 120 Broadway at the time. (See interesting info about the Broadway neighborhood at the time here.) Maybe they had offices at 30 Broadway, too. The way I piece things together, he must have met up with one of the brothers or their managers in Denver and returned east as an employee.

The address in East Orange, 515 Park Avenue, is now a small parking lot. The older buildings around there suggest that the avenue was once one of the expensive areas of East Orange. There's a once-grand apartment building across the street with Moorish design motifs. But the houses along the same side of the street as the parking lot are working-class multifamily dwellings of a more recent vintage. The people who live along the avenue now are mostly poor blacks and Hispanics. Some of the middle-aged men appeared to be junkies. They had the glazed-eye look and unsteady gait. Oddly, on some of the site streets, there were neighborhoods with beautiful, well-kept houses on graceful properties. Something strange is going on in East Orange.

Here are some pictures:

Site of 515 Park Avenue, East Orange, NJ

The house next door, 507

The houses down the block

The building across the street

The New York Times picks up the story on Aug. 21 1904, when the family returns from a vacation in Europe and stays at the Ontwood, in the Poconos, for the season. So, between the late 1890s, when he was a railway agent in Denver, and the early 1900s, John became rich. That's quick work.

In 1913, the US City Directories lists John as an "agent" working at 165 Broadway and living at 210 Riverside Drive. This is in the neighborhood of Joan of Arc Island and Grant's Tomb, both in Riverside Park. A doorman let me into the lobby. He bemoaned the fact that the building owners plan on replacing the elevator, which is original equipment.

Here are some photos:

Some nice stained glass in the lobby

The grand old elevator

The New York Times on Dec. 2, 1914, reported that John, a general purchasing agent for the American Smelting and Refining Co., (a subsidiary of Guggenheim Bros.) had just returned from Europe. He described conditions on both sides of World War I, and had some scary moments crossing the front lines.

Next, the family apparently lived at The Belnord, a luxury apartment building at the corner of 86th and Broadway, which was built in 1908. This was the address on passport applications and NY Census records in 1914 and 1915. He was listed as a director at American Smelting and Refining Co. A passport application says he was traveling to England, France, Germany, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy and Belgium to buy equipment and supplies to be send to Chile.

The Belnord remains a very tony building, $10,000 per month for a two-bedroom apartment, according to one of the doormen. It has an interior courtyard that the doormen wouldn't let me into. There are a bunch of stores around the sides of the building at street level, and a PC Richard in the basement.

Here are some pictures:

Here's a listing from Who's Who from that period:
 

John Kee Capitalist b Philadelphia Pa Dec s John Kee and Mary Peterson MacGowan ed Glrard Coll m Philadelphia June 20 Wallace Boyd children Helen Sept 24 1897 Mildred Todd b Nov 1898 Dir mem Exec Com and gen pur agent Am Smelting & Refining Co Smelters Securities Co mg r and Smelters Steamship Co dir & Northwestern RR New River Collieries Co Western Mining Co RR Consolidated Kansas & Refining Co Pa Soc of NY Clubs Sleepy Hollow Country Engineers City Lunch Residence The Belnord 86th St and Broadway Address 165 Broadway NY City

By 1918, when John registered for the draft, the family lived at 190 Riverside Drive, one block from their previous home on Riverside Drive. In various documents, he was listed as an executive at American Smelting and Refining Co., but in the 1920 US Census, he's listed as "president, coal company." Seems like the census taker might have gotten the details a bit wrong. The family had three servants living with them.

Here are some pictures of and around that building:

They lived on the 9th floor

Grant's Tomb in the background

John's US passport application in 1923 listed him as an executive in metal mining and said he was going to Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, England, France and other continental countries.

The New York Times on Feb. 9, 1925 reported that the Guggenheim Bros. admitted two outsiders to their partnership, John and a guy named E.A. Cappelen Smith. It said John started with the company in 1899, 10 years after it was formed.

On Nov. 3, 1925, the Times reported that John, Marian and Helen attended the premier of La Gioconda at the New York Metropolitan Opera. They're listed as "notables" along with the Whitneys and Vanderbilts.

The Crash of 1929 apparently hit John hard. His son-in-law, Newlin Paxson, recounted at my grandmother's 80th birthday party that in late 1929 John had summoned him to New York city to fetch a package and take it back to family members in Philadelphia. Newlin took a train from Philly to New York and got the package. It contained $50,000 in cash.

On Dec. 30, 1929, the Times reported that John would retire from the Guggenheim Bros. on Jan. 1, 1930.
 
The US Census of 1930 shows John living with Marian and two servants at 190 Riverside Drive. Once again, he's listed as a "coal company executive."

Somewhere between 1930 and 1940, the relationship between John and Marian went bad. (Their family names were Buddy and Bama.) He sent her off to live with their daughter, Mildred (aka Gammy), in Lower Merion, PA., where Mildred lived with her three children, Robert (Bob), Marian (Toddie) and Katherine (Kitty). Bama was all of 5'1" tall, but she was a fearsome presence to some of her grandchildren. She was nearly deaf and used an ear trumpet.

Mildred was divorced from Henry K. Miller. So the three children grew up in a household run by two embittered women, Kitty later told her daughter Kathy. Another cousin, Elizabeth Sperry, says she never heard Gammy say a negative word about her ex-husband, though.

Toddie, Bob and Kitty

In the 1940 Census, John was living at 1 East 60th Street with a woman named Marcelle Dulac, age 42, a textile designer, and Marcel Keene, 53, a real estate agent. John was an executive at Axle Anto Trich. The report said he claimed to have had one year of college. It also says he, or Marcelle, had another house in Florida.

1 East 60th Street is one top addresses in New York city, at the intersection of 60th Street and Fifth Avenue, across from Central Park and the former Plaza Hotel. It's the home of the Metropolitan Club, a club formed by JP Morgan and other wealthy and powerful individuals in 1891. There must have have some apartments there--and may still be. I have visited there a couple of times as a reporter. The inside is as grand as the outside.

Here are some pictures of the club and its surroundings:

The former Plaza Hotel diagonally across the street

 In the early 1990s, when I visited uncle Bob in Los Angeles, he told me that he had visited his grandfather in New York on occasion when he was going to college at Princeton. Buddy would take him out to fancy restaurants, and introduced him to his girlfriend.

In 1938 and 1940, there are a series of articles in the New York Times describing activities at The Auburn Central Manufacturing Co., and its subsidiary, the Auburn Automobile Company. John was president and chairman of Auburn Central Manufacturing, and it seems he reorganized the company and staved off bankruptcy.

In 1942, John lived at 420 Lexington Avenue. That's the Graybar Building, which is next to--and connected to--Grand Central Station. Graybar is an office building, so there must have been apartments in it.

Here are some photos of the Graybar and environs:

Grand Central Station

Here's some info I pulled off the Web that provides some tidbits from later in his life: (I don't know the source/s)

Began as agent of St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad. Became purchasing agent for Guggenheim mining interests throughout the world. Partner Guggenheim Brothers for 5 years.

President Empyre Fire Extinguisher Corporation, New York City. Director Auburn Central Manufacturing Company, Standard Gas & Electric Company, Chicago, Central Foundry County, New York City.

Membership

Clubs: Metropolitan, St. Nicholas, Pilgrims, Records (New York City). 

Says he was a Republican and a Presbyterian. His daughter, my grandmother, was a died-in-the-wool Republican. She referred to FDR as "that awful man."

John died on Nov. 22, 1942, according to the New York Times death announcements. He was still married to Marian Wallace MacGowan. Funeral Services were held at St. Agnes Chapel, 120 West 92nd Street, NYC, but he was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, about one mile from the family house in Lower Merion.

When we went to the cemetery, the office was closed and the signage was really poor, but I used my iPhone and the cemetery's Web site to find the family plot.

I have been told that Marian Wallace MacGowan was gravely ill when I was due to be born and willed herself to stay alive until I came into this world on Jan. 27, 1952. She died three days later.

These overlaps of lives and places are fascinating to me. Are they meaningful? Only if you feel them, I guess. I think they help promote the desire to make a positive impact on the world--to be worthy of your ancestor's hopes and ambitions. Such a thought would never have crossed my mind when I was a young man. I was barely aware that John and Marian existed, and had scant interest in them. But, not surprisingly, as I have become older, these things matter.

One last series of photos, of the house that John helped build:

 I started on this biographical journey late last year after my wife, Lisa, invited me to participate in a cruise around Manhattan on a classy little tour boat with the staff of the Columbia University Press, where she works. We started at Chelsea Peers in the late afternoon and headed south. Then we headed up the East River and the Harlem River and then down the Hudson. It was dark as we motored south on the Hudson and I marveled at the beauty of the city lights. I felt lucky to have come to this city and to have made it mine.  But I felt a little like an interloper--until I remembered that my ancestors had lived up on Riverside Drive those many years ago. I vowed to find where they had lived, and, also, to find our who they were. I feel like I have made a start. But I have barely scratched the surface.