Traveling to History: Five
NELLIE BLY’S NEW YORK
On the Trail of the World-Famous Investigative Reporter
By James F. Lee
Nellie Bly. H.J. Myers, photographer. Library of Congress. {{PD-US}}
“I am off for New York. Look out for me.” That was all 22-year-old Elizabeth “Pink” Cochrane (pen name Nellie Bly), wrote in 1887 to columnist Erasmus Wilson. She had just quit her job as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Dispatch and set off all by herself to conquer the world, or rather The World, Joseph Pulitzer’s famous newspaper. Within a few short months, she would achieve an unprecedented level of fame for any reporter of that era, let alone a woman.
Bly became known for stunt journalism, a form of undercover reporting in which the writer becomes part of the story. And her fame continues to this day. In 2009, the Museum of the City of New York named her one of “The New York 400,” the city’s all-time most influential people. The New York Press Club gives the Nellie Bly Cub Reporter Award annually to a promising young reporter. And Tonya Mitchell’s “A Feigned Madness,” a novel about Bly’s first big undercover story exposing conditions at New York City’s lunatic asylum for women, was published in October 2020.
Most of the New York City sites associated with her life are gone, but with a little digging, I was able to track down vestiges of the asylums, jails, teeming tenements, and Victorian skyscrapers of Bly’s New York.
When she arrived in New York in May 1887, Bly found lodging on 15 W. 96th Street in a townhouse between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, a building demolished long ago. As of this writing, a new condo development with a view of Central Park is going up at the site, but if you look across the street today, a row of brownstones gives a sense of the streetscape from the early 1900s.
Newspaper Row @1906. The World building is to the left. The former Times building, to the right, is still standing. The Times photo archive. {{PD-US}}.
Borrowing money from her landlady for the trip downtown, she wasted no time knocking on all the doors of “the newspaper gods of Gotham,” along Park Row across from the City Hall. In 1887, this was the center of the journalism universe, home to the Sun, The World, the Mail and Express, and The Times. Dominating the Row was the huge New York Tribune building with its soaring pinnacle, a city landmark. In just three years, Pulitzer would challenge the Tribune’s vertical supremacy by erecting a new World Building, then the city’s tallest structure.
Much has changed here since Bly’s time. Today, she would recognize the old Times Building at the corner of Spruce Street, now part of Pace University, as well as the richly ornamented terra cotta façade of the Potter Building next door, and the statue of Benjamin Franklin. Sadly, the Tribune Building is gone, as is Pulitzer’s World Building, demolished in 1955 to make way for an access ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge.
The World gave Bly her big break, sending the young reporter on a risky first assignment to expose the horrible conditions at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in the East River. Her plan was to go undercover, posing as a patient.
NYC Asylum for the Insane (Women) Blackwell’s Island in 1893. The Octagon in the foreground is still standing. Mechanical Curator Collection. British Library. {{PD-US}}
Bly first checked into the Temporary Home for Females at 84 Second Avenue, where she put on a bravura acting performance that so frightened the landlady that the poor woman called for help. Several doctors examined Bly, pronounced her insane and committed her to the infamous asylum. I stood in front of 84 Second Avenue with an 1887 illustration of the building in hand, struck by the similarities between that earlier image and the vacant building there today, especially the three distinctive small rectangular windows on the top floor. Is this the original building? Records from the city’s Department of Buildings indicate that the building on the site was built in 1915, yet the New York City Planning’s Zoning and Land Use map lists the house as built in 1841, which would make it the actual building where Bly was examined.
During her time on Blackwell’s Island, Bly endured cold baths, verbal abuse, filthy bedding, wretched food, and an ever-present threat of violence. Her undercover assignment resulted in “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” a ringing indictment of the cruelty and neglect suffered by the inmates, many of whom were clearly not insane. The story made her a star.
I took the F train to Roosevelt Island (Blackwell’s Island’s name has changed twice since Bly’s day; it’s been known under its current name since 1973), and then the free shuttle up to the Octagon Building, the only remaining structure from the Lunatic Asylum. This privately restored, five-story, blue-grey stone building was once the asylum’s entrance. The shuttle follows the same route Bly took in 1887 along with other inmates in a horse-drawn wagon, passing the still standing Blackwell House, the late-18th-century farmhouse of the island’s one-time owners. The Octagon’s double-winged staircase and utilitarian stone bulk would be intimidating for someone about to be committed, but with an incongruous architectural whimsy, the building is topped by a playful mansard dome ornamented with deeply projecting windows looking like a heavily iced wedding cake. Charles Dickens mentioned the Octagon Building in “American Notes” 45 years before Bly’s adventure there, remarking on the impressive circular stairway inside. The ground floor of the Octagon is open to the public, where you can gaze up at the restored circular stairway.
Judith Berdy, president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, thinks Bly’s name endures because of her pluck. “She did what women didn’t do back in 1887,” Berdy said.
The Octagon today. Courtesy of Judith Berdy, Roosevelt Island Historical Society
Fame brought her better lodgings; a large apartment she shared with her mother at 202 W. 74th Street, near the triangle formed by Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, and later at 120 W. 35th Street across the street from where Macy’s now stands. Neither building remains.
After the asylum piece was published in The World, Bly took the mantle as a tireless champion of the poor. She exposed the filthy, overcrowded conditions in the city’s tenements. She spent two hot August days in a tenement at 222 Second Street, where she was kept awake all night by the heat and smell, but above all by the constant noise of 117 people crammed into one building, sleeping on fire escapes or under wagons out on the street. That building no longer exists.
Bly covered the rich, too. In one piece early in 1894 she interviewed John Jacob Astor IV (who later died aboard the Titanic) at his mansion on Fifth Avenue and West 43rd. Several months later in a curious incident, Astor’s mother’s house at 350 Fifth Avenue was broken into by a tramp who was found sleeping in a bed in the house. Bly interviewed the tramp at the Jefferson Market Court House at 425 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village where he was taken to be charged. Much to Astor’s disgust, the tramp was let go after paying a fine of $3. Neither of the Astor residences survive, but the brick and limestone Victorian Gothic Jefferson Market building with a fairy-tale tower modeled on Neuschwanstein Castle is today a branch of the New York Public Library.
Hotel McAlpin Post Card 1914. Bly lived here at the time of her death in 1922. Today the building is the Herald Towers at Broadway and West 34th Street. This is the only Bly residence in New York City still standing. Retrieved from www.dismuke.org. {{PD-US}}
Her most famous stunt was an around-the-world journey in 1890 trying to break the record of the fictional Phileas Fogg from Jules Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days.” Circulation skyrocketed as readers eagerly followed her progress in the pages of The World. Once back in New York, on day 72, she was greeted by an enormous crowd of well-wishers flooding Park Row.
Bly married at age 31 to a wealthy man 40 years her senior. One newspaper wondered if this was just another example of Bly’s stunt reporting, sort of a “Nellie Bly Tries Marriage.” But it was for real. From the marriage, Bly came into ownership of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company and the American Steel Barrel Company in Brooklyn, occupying a whole city block between Flatbush and Bushwick Avenues. Her residence now was her husband’s four-story brownstone at 15 West 37th Street. Neither the factory nor the brownstone remains.
Bly’s complicated business dealings suffered a blow just before World War I, when the Iron Clad went bankrupt. Perhaps running away from her troubles at home, Bly spent most of World War I in Europe, occasionally reporting back stories from the fighting. On her return, she found that the steel barrel company was now in her brother’s hands. She even lost the West 37th Street house to creditors.
In 1919, she took up residence at the McAlpin Hotel, now the Herald Towers apartments, on the corner of Broadway and West 34th Street. The building is notable for the decorative terra cotta accenting its upper floors. It remains the only Bly residence still standing in New York City.
Church of the Ascension at West 10th Street and Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Village. Bly’s funeral was held here in 1922. Photo by David Shankbone. CC BY-SA 3.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Bly made a comeback in her final years, writing a column for the Hearst-owned New York Evening Journal. Still driven to expose human misery, she wrote stories about abandoned children, convicted murderers, and neglected seamen. Bly died in 1922 at age 57 at St. Mark’s Hospital on Second Avenue and 11th Street. The hospital was torn down in 1935. Her funeral was held at the Church of the Ascension, which still stands today in Greenwich Village. She is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where a monument in her honor was erected by the New York Press Club in 1978.
Her old boss, Pulitzer, isn’t far away.
Sources: Brooke Kroeger, “Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist.” Times Books, 1994.
Judith Berdy phone interview, November 2020.
