GLR March-April 2023

ESSAY

The Sublime Sewer Club W ILLIAM B ENEMANN

I T WAS A NEW PROBLEM for which property devel opers, ever eager to pocket a buck, found the perfect so lution. In the 1870s and ’80s, a disturbing species began to invade Manhattan: undomesticated young men long ing to live free of their parents, but a little short of the ready to do so. They were painters and poets starving for their art; they were twenty-somethings just entering their profes sions, with good prospects but meager wages; they were scions of great wealth waiting for Daddy to die. Untethered and randy, the men were looking for somewhere to live that was stylish, cheap and convenient to all the sensual pleasures the metropolis had to offer. Cue the rise of the bachelor apartment building. Building for bachelors offered several significant opportu nities for cost-cutting. Since the tenants would take their meals at restaurants or clubs, there was no call for a proliferation of kitchens. Single men might even be amenable to communal toi lets or shared showers. No nurseries, no live-in nannies or housemaids, no visiting in-laws to accommodate. All that the young gentlemen demanded was a thin veneer of NewYork so phistication—and a discreet doorman trained to avert his eyes from folly of all kinds. The first of these men-only apartment buildings was Bigelow took on the commission for designing The Benedick, the firm enjoyed a sterling reputation. However, the partner ship soon imploded due to a double homosexual scandal. In 1874, Charles McKim married Annie Bigelow, his partner’s sister. But the marriage was not a success, and the couple sep arated after only a few years, Annie decamping for Newport with their daughter and a live-in companion named Rose Wag ner. In the messy custody dispute that followed, Annie alleged that Charles engaged in “unnatural acts against the bounds of Christian behavior,” behaving in ways “repugnant to and in violation of the marriage contract.” Rumors suggested that not only did Charles prefer men, but it was Rose Wagner who had broken up the marriage, Annie and Rose being lesbian lovers. Forced to side either with his partner or his sister, William Bigelow chose to leave the firm. He was replaced by Stanford William Benemann is the author of Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail , and Men in Eden: William Drum mond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade . erected at 79-80 Washington Square East. Called The Benedick in honor of the mar riage-averse character in Much Ado About Nothing , the building was intended as stu dios and residences for bachelor artists. To design it, the developer turned to the fore runner of the company that would become the iconic architectural firm of the Gilded Age. At the time that McKim, Mead &

White—and the venerable firm of McKim, Mead &White was born. The Benedick opened its doors in the autumn of 1879. It of fered 33 apartments for unmarried men and included on the top floor four artists’ studios available for rent, studios that were accessible via that sine qua non of New York sophistication: an elevator (which would, the tenants were assured, run day and night). In residence in the building’s basement was a custodian who would provide maintenance service and furnish the men with breakfast. Also provided were maid and bootblack serv ices. Some of the cheaper apartments lacked bathroom plumb ing, however—not even the common amenity of a sink in the room—“for the sake of keeping out sewer gas.” (Before the in novation of the S-trap for plumbing, sewer gas could back up into people’s homes.) From the outset, The Benedick marketed itself as a haven for artists. Perhaps inevitably, it attracted a significant number of men who were also, in the euphemistic term of the period, “artistic . ” Those tenants would be pleased that their apartment was only two blocks away from the notorious Slide at 157 Bleecker Street, identified by historian George Chauncey as the pre-eminent “fairy” bar in New York in the late 19th century. The idea of an apartment building de the French flat plan, except that no women or kitchen are in cluded.” These young men, by slipping their familial bonds, were evading one of the basic obligations of American man hood. “They are destitute of manly pride, but full of the foolish vanity of dandyism. Vicious also? Naturally.” In 1888, a group of these vicious dandies rented an apartment in The Benedick to use as a private homosexual party space. Per haps as a poke at the developer who had banned sinks from the rooms to avoid leaks of sewer gas into his new building, the group defiantly dubbed themselves the Sewer Club. The leaders (and chief financial supporters) of the club were the architect Stanford White and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. “Stan” and “Gus” first met in 1875, and while both were at tracted to women, and both would eventually enter into con ventional marriages, the erotic charge that leapt between them was instantaneous. White and Saint-Gaudens began a long-term sexual relationship that was bawdy and playful. That relation ship can be traced through their correspondence (though after White’s murder, his son sorted through the files and destroyed signed specifically for bachelors raised alarms among the guardians of virtue. “It has suddenly become the fashion,” one New York newspaper fumed, “to keep bachelor apartments, no matter how adequate to all rational requirements their family homes may be. Within two years a dozen or more magnificent buildings have been erected on

The Benedick opened its doors in 1879. It offered 33 apartments for unmarried men and included four artists’ studios on the top floor.

March–April 2023

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