The writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky once wrote, “For decades, Silvina Ocampo was the best kept secret of Argentine letters.” Silvina Ocampo: Selected Poems is published by NYRB/Poets. She was also a prolific translator -of Dickinson, Poe, Melville, and Swedenborg-and wrote plays and tales for children. The first of Ocampo’s seven collections of stories, Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Journey), appeared in 1937 the first of her seven volumes of poems, Enumeración de la patria (Enumeration of My Country) in 1942. Her eldest sister, Victoria, was the founder of the seminal modernist journal and publishing house Sur, which championed the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and in 1940 Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo were married. After studying painting with Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger in Paris, she returned to her native city-she would live there for the rest of her life-and devoted herself to writing. On May 6, 1968, The New York Times wrote, “A small, barred window from a sugar house used as a British prison during the Revolutionary War will be spared during demolition for the new Brooklyn Bridge ramp system.” When the window was unveiled, it bore a plaque reading in part “This window was originally part of the five story Sugar House built in 1763 at the corner of Duane and Rose Streets and used by the British during the Revolutionary War as a prison for American Patriots.”Īs is often the case, legend trumped history and in this case it resulted in a small chunk of historic preservation.Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993) was born to an old and prosperous family in Buenos Aires, the youngest of six sisters. It was moved to a pedestrian zone behind One Police Plaza where it is maintained by the New York City Police Department. While the Victorian office building was lost, the window was not. The other was incorporated into the new Rhinelander office building, demolished in 1968. One was donated to the National Society of Colonial Dames in the State of New York and was installed in the Van Cortlandt House in the Bronx.
HOUSE MADE OF SUGAR STORY WINDOWS
The long-lived urban legend that the Rhinelander Sugar House had been a British prison where American boys suffered misery and torture resulted in two of the windows with their wrought iron grills being preserved. Bracklow from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York Somewhat amazingly, while nearly all the colonial architecture of Lower Manhattan was either burned (the Great Fire of 1845 destroyed 345 buildings downtown) or razed, the utilitarian sugar house survived. Yet the story succeeded in drawing tourists and the warehouse was romanticized in etchings and documented by early photographers. Indeed, to this day, no contemporary documentation has come to light supporting the Rhinelander building ever being used as a prison. “The Rhinelander Sugar House, still standing, is averred by all of our older citizens to have been a prison, and there is no doubt about it, but we have seen no contemporary evidence of the fact.” In 1890 historian Wesley Washington Pasko, in writing on the prisons of the revolution in his book “Old New York,” tip-toed around the veracity of the legend. In any event, local lore persisted that the Rhinelander Sugar house was a Revolutionary War prison.
Possibly old-timers, after the war, confused the two buildings or perhaps stories that the last standing sugar house in lower Manhattan was once a prison made good tourist publicity. It was under the supervision of a cruel officer, Sergeant Waddy. One of these was the Livingston Sugar House on Liberty Street. By 1790 he had come into possession of Cuyler’s massive sugar house.ĭuring the British occupation of New York, large buildings such as churches and sugar houses were used as prisons. William Rhinelander, like Cuyler, came from an old Knickerbocker family, and he made a fortune in the sugar business. Loyalists were banned from the state under penalty of death “without benefit of Clergy” and their property sold at auction. Following the Revolution, the Act of Forfeiture was passed. Instead of backing the rebellious gang set on upsetting the government, they remained Loyalists.
Unfortunately for the Cuyler family, they chose the wrong side in the coming war of revolution.
HOUSE MADE OF SUGAR STORY MANUAL
Valentine’s Manual of 1857 from the collection of the New York Public Library