An Improbable Repeat Birthplace
In this image: The Majestic Hotel in 1907, with corner of the Dakota in right foreground
There is one street in Manhattan that has the unique distinction of having helped birth disability activism in our City--not once, but twice, in completely independent episodes that are separated by more than half a century and are remembered by practically no one.
That street is West Seventy-Second Street. The place where I was born in 1958, and where my family resided until 1977.
Today it’s a busy mixed-use street, four blocks long, with small 19th Century buildings, early and modern apartment buildings, and lots of stores and restaurants. It’s an improbable candidate for disability distinction--especially when you consider the street’s origins.
The bottom layer on West 72nd Street is wealth, big money, as epitomized by its anchor tenant, The Dakota, the dowager queen of American communal palaces, built in 1880 to 1884 on land bought from August Belmont. By the 1890s the street was filled with showy rowhouses and private mansions, each trying to outdo the other. For about fifteen years, 72nd Street was the main boulevard in the City’s newest place to be, the Upper West Side.
In 1894 the Dakota was joined by a massive 600-room hotel right across the street, the Majestic Hotel. It was a fancy place indeed. In “Custom of the Country,” the novelist Edith Wharton described its charms, lightly fictionalized, as featuring rooms with “wainscoting of highly-varnished mahogany, hung with salmon-pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of Marie Antoinette and the Princess de Lamballe. In the centre of the florid carpet a gilt table with a top of Mexican onyx sustained a palm in a gilt basket tied with a pink bow.”
In this image: Likeness of Louise Balfe Erlanger from 1889, during her days as an actress on the British stage
It was in this building that the improbable became real, in the form of a fundraiser run by Louise Balfe Erlanger, the wife of Abraham Erlanger, the most fearsome and feared theatrical producer in the United States. Erlanger was the author of the widely quoted statement, “I never trust a man I can’t buy.” His company discovered such enduring classics as Dracula, Ben Hur, and the Jazz Singer, and built the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street. They became millionaires in the process.
By 1901 the Erlangers were searching for something to distract from Abraham’s ruthless reputation. Ideally, it would be something sufficiently removed from anything theatrical to preclude talk that Abe was being self-serving, yet possess sufficient publicity potential to enable him to be exactly that. It should be a project primarily for his wife—charitable projects had become quite fashionable among elite New York women, and the Erlangers might earn respectability that way.
One of the subjects of the Erlangers’ mixed-motive outreach was a woman named May Darrach.
In this image: Photo of May Darrach, 1902
Darrach was born in 1869, in New Jersey. At less than three years old she was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis. She was unable to walk unaided until she reached thirteen, and she retained a hunched posture and diminished height.
In 1890, at the age of twenty, Darrach conducted the first survey of disability in the general population. She later established the nation’s first school classes for children with disabilities, and raised an endowment sufficient to open the Darrach Settlement Home for Crippled Children on West 69th Street, a twenty-bed combination school and shelter.
In her spare time, she went to medical school and became a doctor.
Darrach was disabled, yet she was far too formidable to be overlooked. A unique figure in the United States, Darrach was the first disability activist.
May Darrach was tailor-made for the Erlangers! She had made disabled children an up and coming cause—and the appeal of the kids was undeniable. The icing on the cake was May Darrach’s highly impressive self, while the incredibly convenient location of her Settlement Home, just a couple of blocks from the Erlangers’ brownstone on West 70th Street, meant an easy visit with other fashionable wives, followed by a no doubt self-congratulatory tea in the Erlangers’ parlor. What could be better?
And so it was that May Darrach landed her most important backer, shortly after New Year’s Day, 1901.
On a Friday afternoon that March, Erlanger threw what she called a “charity euchre” on behalf of Darrach’s Settlement Home (complete, of course, with publicity in the New York Times and elsewhere.) The location was the Majestic Hotel at Central Park West and 72nd Street, the most elegant public place on the entire West Side.
Erlanger and Darrach proved an instant hit. Many more events followed, and Darrach plowed the receipts back into her Settlement House, which moved to a larger building on West 104th Street.
As her budget and her medical practice expanded, Darrach set up offices in a ground floor suite in the newly-built Severn Apartments, at 73rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, two blocks from the Majestic.
In this image: A recipe for buttermilk bread written on May Darrach’s office letterhead, circa 1905-6
Erlanger and Darrach only lasted three years. The reasons for the split are far from clear, but after it ended, in the trademark Erlanger style Louise set out to bury her former benefactee. Stealing Darrach’s concept and setting up a better-funded and better publicized competitor, Mrs. Erlanger began raising funds for her own settlement home, the “New York Home For Destitute Crippled Children.” Erlanger used the same fundraising and promotional methods as she had for Darrach, complete with a kickoff fundraiser at the Majestic Hotel.
The new project moved ahead fast, repurposing a brownstone. Mrs. Erlanger had been busy—you could tell from the doorway plaques which announced that five beds had been endowed by Edward Albee; another four beds by Anna Held. The matron’s room came courtesy of Isadora Duncan.
Who knew the little children had friends in such high places?
But you’ve got to hand it to Darrach—she fought back. She figured prominently, for example, in a nearly full-page spread in the Times about the Children’s Aid Society’s work on behalf of children with disabilities. Mrs. Erlanger retaliated with a fundraising auction of dolls at the Waldorf-Astoria, just in time for Christmas.
Their competition reached a conclusion--in Mrs. Erlanger’s favor—a few years later, when Erlanger held an actors’ field day fundraiser at the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan, presided over by George M. Cohan. It drew an audience of five thousand and raised a small fortune.
Amazingly, the actors’ field day remained a nearly annual New York City event into the 1980s, and probably no one at all remembers its origins in an unlikely rivalry between the nation’s first disability activist and the wife of Abraham Erlanger.
While the Erlangers slugged it out with Darrach, the universe surrounding disabled children in New York City expanded with incredible speed. Thanks to Darrach the cause had won the backing of New York’s elite, and new organizations multiplied.
It was the beginning of the peak in what I’ve dubbed the Dickensian Disability Movement--a largely private-sector effort that was led, especially in its earlier years, mostly by elite college educated women whose primary cause was what they called “crippled children.”
But Darrach would not live to see her efforts fully flower. In 1910 her health broke down, and she passed away a few years later, age forty nine.
Over her twenty-year career Doctor May Darrach achieved success beyond anything she might have reasonably expected. Yet she was often minimized--more than one contemporary telling of the children with disabilities charity movement states that it was “begun by a woman who was herself a cripple,” but neglects to identify who that person was, or recount any portion of her story.
The sad outcome is this: my old street’s role in the Dickensian Disability Movement may be forgotten, but May Darrach is very likely the single most important person in the history of disability rights in New York City, and she is forgotten too.
In the years after Darrach’s 1910 retirement, West 72nd Street transformed. Half the fancy brownstones were replaced by skyscraping apartments and hotels a dozen stories tall and more, and most of the remaining houses got storefronts grafted onto them. The street turned to carriage-trade retail, more downtown than de luxe.
The great gangster Arnold Rothstein (who famously fixed the 1919 World Series), built himself a hotel across from the Dakota, the Franconia, whose quiet looks disguised that it was perhaps the only place during Prohibition where New Yorkers could drink openly, thanks to Rothstein’s generosity with the local police.
The fun and games stopped with the Crash of 1929. The building boom dried up, the shopping wilted, Rothstein was shot to death and Prohibition was repealed. For the first time in its fifty year history my old street experienced a decrescendo, as the nation, the City, and the neighborhood hunkered down for what turned out to be more than a decade of hard times, followed by the Second World War. The voltage continued to slowly drop. Growing up there a few generations later, it sometimes seemed as if time itself had stopped on the West Side somewhere in the 1940s.
During the Depression’s housing collapse, many of the West Side’s apartments went begging for tenants, and that gave an opening to less well-heeled people. That’s when the Upper West Side grew its famously leftist personality. The radicals’ high point probably came in 1944, when the Communist Party opened what it called a school of social science at Broadway and 72nd, right across from the old Colonial Club building. The Colonial Club had been home to the most high-nosed moments of the street’s best-pedigreed days. Despite conversion into offices, its old headquarters remained a monument to the wealthy people who’d once dominated my old neighborhood, but did so no longer.
Among the newcomers was an all-female family--a divorced mother with three daughters--which in 1941 moved into a shabby penthouse previously reserved for servants, atop a once-grand apartment house at 105 West 72nd Street. The youngest sister, Mollie, had a severe case of epilepsy, then a feared and loathed illness.
In 1953 Mollie became involved with the oddly named New York Variety Club Foundation to Combat Epilepsy, the first-ever self-help organization for people then known as epileptics. At a time when going public with epilepsy carried some risk, Mollie made an appearance on WEVD radio using her real name, on a show known as Science For The People, to discuss the disease and the prejudice surrounding it.
In this image: The Shaws in 1969 (l-r: Jenina, Julie, Mollie, Warren)
Not long after, in 1955, she was joined in the penthouse by her soon-to-be husband Julie, a crutch-using polio survivor who’d been President of a Communist-front political action organization during the 1940s. In 1958, with twins on the way, they anglicized Julie’s family name from Sheikewitz to the more anodyne Shaw. And it was as Mollie and Julie Shaw that they began 72nd Street’s second chapter as a birthplace of disability activism.
The second chapter began in the early Sixties, when Julie and Mollie became part of the Handicapped Drivers Association, an activist group that won New York’s first-ever legal protections for people with mobility impairments—an exemption from paying parking meter fees—in a campaign that took more than five years.
Building and sustaining that effort brought the Shaws into contact with the Ansonia Reform Democratic Club. Conveniently located right across the street, Ansonia provided important resources—in particular, Democratic District Leader Dorothy Walasek and her husband Paul. Dorothy was a pretty quiet, disciplined person, quite a contrast to my parents’ more brash style, but within a short time the Shaws and the Walaseks forged a working partnership. It was the 1960s version of Darrach and Erlanger—disability activists who had the backing and the networking pull of people in the mainstream.
In this image: Dorothy Walasek, circa 1967
Over the next several years, this partnership helped make free parking at meters a reality. Not long after, on January 24, 1967, came a transformative picket at City Hall, protesting a new plan to ease traffic congestion in Midtown by prohibiting parking and towing away all parked cars—including those belonging to people with disabilities. That campaign had truly far-reaching impacts, and much of the planning and execution came out of the second-floor apartment we’d recently moved into, bolstered and amplified by Ansonia and the Walaseks.
Other initiatives included the retrofitting and correction of accessibility problems at then-new Lincoln Center, a few blocks away; accessibility-related changes to the City’s 1968 Building Code; and the introduction of a proposed amendment to the State Constitution to protect the civil rights of people with disabilities. Dorothy and Julie drafted the amendment; Dorothy introduced it, and Julie testified in favor. This would have been the first constitutional protections for the rights of the disabled in the history of the United States, but the effort did not succeed in New York, then or since (though a similar amendment will come up for a statewide vote in November of 2024).
Shaw-Walasek helped engineer the 1968 creation of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped, the predecessor to the Mayor’s Office of People with Disabilities (or MOPD). They wangled Julie a seat on the new body.
That same year, though, the Ansonia Club split over whether to support Lyndon Johnson’s reelection as President, among other things. Along with the Walaseks, the Shaws co-led a revolt by 350 Ansonia members. They briefly set up shop in the old Colonial Club building before moving to 128 West 72nd Street, a second floor walkup space above a Chinese restaurant, literally next door to Ansonia.
The new club’s name was the Lincoln Square Independent Democratic Club, or LSID. It was originally supposed to be Lincoln Square Democrats, but that got changed after someone noticed that the initials spelled LSD—a real no-no in the era of Flower Power.
Shaw-Walasek came to an end in the early 1970s. Dorothy lost an election for State Assembly to Dick Gottfried, and the Walaseks began to phase out of leadership at LSID. In 1972 Julie experienced a health crisis that forced him to largely stop using crutches. He was barely able to get up to LSID’s second floor headquarters after that.
Nonetheless my parents continued to produce for the disability community, supporting the upgrading of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee into the Mayor’s Office for Handicapped (another step towards MOPD)—and waging a long, long campaign to get an elevator installed in City Hall.
To me the City Hall elevator may be the greatest of the Shaws’ projects, even beyond the enactment of legislation. The elevator meant actual physical entry to the very seat of municipal power. Instead of being relegated to a little room across the street, or making noise protesting outside the City Council’s windows, the newly organized community would finally have its say, like anyone else.
On a more somber note, our apartment building had four steps in the outer lobby, and with Julie’s new health situation our lives on 72nd Street acquired an expiration date. In 1977 we moved away, to an accessible building in Brooklyn. Julie became the second Director of the Mayor’s Office of the Handicapped. He served a few years, until he retired.
As a political duo, the Shaws were done.
And so was 72nd Street’s second chapter as a birthplace of disability activism.
Note: A version of this entry appeared in Able News, ablenews.com
by Warren Shaw
