Word: wendels
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...great generation passed with the death of Ella Wendel, last of a truly New York family. In Ella a long line of men and women concentrated all their traditional reverence and single-minded passion for property in a vain attempt to perpetuate their ideals in an alien world...
...point of view, the long, wide Manhattan boulevard which humans have named Park Avenue and enthusiasts call the world's finest residential street, is not the place it used to be. The change dates about from the time when the policeman at 39th Street berated old Miss Wendel, the recluse who lived with her maiden sisters in the big brick house on Fifth Avenue, for bringing her elderly poodle over to Park Avenue for airings when she had a perfectly good yard of her own in which it could run, sniff...
...Ella Wendel lives in the bleak red brick house that stands on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 39th Street, across the street from the (soon-to-pass) Union League Club, one block down from the Public Library, one block up from the famed department store of Lord & Taylor. All day shoppers pass the house by tens of thousands, glance curiously at the shuttered windows, the heavily barred front door. Not for 25 years have those windows or that door been opened. Only the side door is used. The house, which cost $5,000 to build, is assessed today...
Also dead, well over a decade ago, is the person whose fanaticism kept intact the $100,000,000 Wendel realty holdings, who turned all his sisters but one into eccentric old maids. The silent, grim old house on Fifth Avenue, lighted by gas and without a telephone, is a monument to John Gottlieb Wendel. He it was who dominated his six sisters, holding all the titles to the Wendel properties in his own name, forbidding them to marry lest the family property be split up. He looked on with approval as they made their own clothes and wore the round...
When iron-willed John Gottlieb Wendel died, he left $80,000,000 in real estate, $10 in clothing. He also left a tradition as to how the property was to be managed. He and his sisters had long agreed that theatres or saloons should never be allowed on their properties. Electric signs were equally taboo. They established a record in Puritanism when they held up a $1,000,000 lease until they obtained guarantees that certain first-aid kits in the projected building would not contain more than one pint of whiskey. The main tradition handed on by Brother John...