Good morning. It's Monday. Today we'll meet the woman who owns what she describes as the oldest private dwelling in New York City. She's resuming tours after a pandemic hiatus. |
 | | Juan Arredondo for The New York Times |
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"Don't you think it's spectacular?" Marion Duckworth Smith asked. "I thought it would be the first thing you'd notice when I opened the door." |
She was talking about her necklace, a glittery strand circling a gold-and-faux pearl medallion that she said was "like something Queen Elizabeth would wear." |
This was an hour into a visit to the oldest house in New York City that is still a private home — hers, the Lent-Riker-Smith Homestead, a 17th-century farmhouse in East Elmhurst, Queens. |
It was built by Abraham Riker, a Dutch settler whose family name haunts the neighborhood and the city's consciousness: The road to the city's troubled Rikers Island jail complex is about 1,500 feet from Smith's back door. "Rikers Island used to be part of the farm," she said. |
There had been things to notice before the necklace, like the cemetery in the backyard. She first encountered it on a second date that left her thinking: "I've met the man of my dreams who has the house of my dreams.'" |
For decades she worked to make the house a destination, charging for tours of the first floor, the cemetery and the garden — and renting them out for photo shoots. What the visitors and the photographers saw was an ugly duckling that she had transformed. When she saw it on the second date, the floors had wall-to-wall carpeting. Vinyl, linoleum and "1960s molding" were everywhere. |
"I pulled it off, pulled it all off, and uncovered the original door frames with the wooden pegs," she said. "Isn't that amazing? And I'm saying, 'Who would do this? Who would desecrate this?' But that's what everybody did back in the 60s." |
The pandemic halted the tours and the photo shoots — and the income they brought. "The location scouts went out of business," she said. "I couldn't continue the tours because I couldn't do social distancing in these small rooms. I can't handle people following me from room to room." (She is now resuming tours.) |
She has lived there longer than old Abraham Riker, also known as "Abraham Rycken or de Rycke, as his name is indiscriminately written in our early records," the website riker.org notes. These days, the house is as much about her as it is about him. There is a nude above one of the fireplaces. "That's a portrait of me, done by my first husband when I was 28," she said. "I can validate that I looked like that." A few feet away is another nude, of her sister, "one of Hugh Hefner's original Playboy bunnies." |
This was after she had pointed out the ceiling in that room, part of a 1729 addition, was slightly higher than the ceilings in the original section, which dates to the 1650s. |
It was also after a walk through the cemetery, with an iron gate that makes a sound she described as "right out of 'The Addams Family.'" Some of the headstones have been smoothed out by wind and weather, but the name and dates on the obelisk for Abraham Riker were readable — another Abraham Riker, not the one who built the house. She said this Abraham Riker had died at Valley Forge in the Revolutionary War. |
Inside, in the front parlor, is a Steinway grand piano with only 85 keys. It was made in 1888, she said, before piano makers settled on 88 keys as the standard. |
Not far away are her carnival chalkware — Snow Whites, Charlie McCarthys and Donald Ducks — and her carousel artifacts. |
And there is her collection of Broadway theatrical memorabilia. She bid at Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS auctions for walk-on parts in shows like "The Will Rogers Follies," "Carousel" and "Hello, Dolly!" and struck up a friendship with the jewelry designer Larry Vrba after buying Carol Channing's necklace from "Dolly!" She said Vrba had made the necklace was wearing, the one she had expected to be noticed. |
"What's your first impression?" she asked. "Does it look like it's neglected or does it look charming or does it look — what?" she asked. "Do you see the leak in the ceiling? Do you see the rotted wood on the patio? Do you see the overgrowth, which I had an estimate for $12,000 for the tree work? I mean, I have a limited income. I don't have 12,000 extra dollars to have the trees trimmed. I don't have that kind of money at 82." She said she sees herself as "the keeper of the flame." |
She said that years ago, there were negotiations with city parks officials about taking over the house, and later, with state officials, but the talks fell through. More recently, she said, she had looked into setting up a nonprofit. "To start over, to try and become a foundation, to have a board of directors, to have meetings, to have decisions made by a board — I thought, I'm in my 80s," she said. "I don't think I can undertake this." |
That was not what she said when she plunged into restoring the house after the second date and marriage to Michael Smith, who owned a directory-publishing business, where she was working as a proofreader. "I needed a job because I was getting a divorce," she said. "It was an easy job." |
She said Michael Smith had moved into the house in 1966, renting it for $100 a month. He later bought it. |
"People who knew me said, "OK, Marion, did you marry him for the house?'" she recalled. "I said, 'Look, when I met him, I didn't know he had the house. When he lit the candles and I came in and stood in the center hallway" on the second date, "I broke out in goose bumps and I thought, 'Wow, this house has been waiting for me.'" |
Expect a brisk, cool and rather cloudy day with highs in the low 60s. At night, prepare for a chance of showers with lows in the high 40s. |
In effect until Wednesday (Yom Kippur). |
 | | Stephanie Keith for The New York Times |
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A friend from New Zealand arrived just before the blizzard of December 2010 blanketed New York with more than 30 inches of snow and brought the city to a standstill. I drove into Manhattan from Pennsylvania to meet him and parked on the Upper West Side. |
After the storm ended, I returned to the car to get something. While clearing enough snow to open the hatchback, I began talking with the super of the nearby building about various things. |
Later that day, my friend and I went looking for an open restaurant in Greenwich Village, which was eerily quiet. We found a wallet in the snow outside a coffee shop. A worker there said the driver's license belonged to a regular customer who had left 10 minutes earlier. |
We walked to the address on the license and came to a building with a doorman and a concierge who looked at each other when we told them why we were there. |
"Not again!" one of them said. "She doesn't live here anymore, but her mother is upstairs." |
The mother soon appeared, thanked us and rewarded us with a bottle of champagne. |
A couple of days later, my friend and I were back at my car, this time chagrined to find it entombed in a mountain of plowed snow. |
Lacking other implements, we began to clear the snow with our hands and feet. The super soon appeared with three shovels and cheerfully helped us dig out. |
We gave him the champagne. |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
| Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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