What is it about New York? Lillie Stone was from Manhattan.
Her family got off the boat from Castle Garden and Ellis Island and almost never left Manhattan.
Lillie had style. She had flamboyance and also shyness. Like many children of immigrants, she was ambitious and eager, but also patient – especially with her children.
Her own childhood was tough. She was born at 1 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. Father Harry worked for the New York Herald, and walked to work on Newspaper Row downtown. Mother Irene sewed for sweatshops, often from home. One tenement they lived in burned while she and her sister Alice were home alone. Their parents were, as usual, at a speakeasy. The very young girls saved themselves, and though it slowed them down, they dragged the Singer out the back bedroom door, through another apartment, and to the fire escape. They knew the machine put food on the table. To do it, they had to step over the dead body of another resident. I remember that treadle machine, with its wood completely singed and black on one side. I used to wonder about it, but never knew the story until later. By the time the Herald relocated to Herald Square, the family could afford to move with it, to a brownstone elevator building in Chelsea. It was later rent controlled, so they stayed there for many decades, until the last of us left New York County, which of course is the island of Manhattan.
When I think of my own, protected childhood and then all that, I am amazed. Where did she pluck that patience and goodness from, in the childhood she never liked to talk about?
