Just as interesting followup to our article about the old knocker from the door to the Blackwell House that Maud Stoutenburgh Eliot gifted to President Roosevelt, we present this bit of correspondence showing a “colorful” bit of the history of the door it came from. As quoted by Thomas Cogan in the Queens Gazette, Liz Reynolds of the Brooklyn Museum said: “That door has been through a lot.”
What Boswell said of London is scarcely less true of New York. Its aspects are manifold, and, while each man finds in it the Mecca of his pursuits, it comprehends not one class alone, but the whole of human life in all its variety. The city of New York now includes Manhattan Island; Blackwell’s, Ward’s, and Randall’s Islands in the East River; Governor’s, Bedloe’s, and Ellis’s Islands in the bay, occupied by the United States Government; and a portion of the mainland north of Manhattan Island separated from it by Harlem River and Spuyten Duyvil Creek. It is bounded north by the city of Yonkers, east by the Bronx and the East River, south by the bay, and west by the Hudson River. Its extreme length north from the Battery is sixteen miles; its greatest width from the mouth of the Bronx west to the Hudson is four and a half miles. Its area is forty-one and a half square miles or twenty-six thousand acres.
Maud Stoutenburgh Eliot, one of the original founding members of the Stoutenburgh-Teller Family Association, gave President Roosevelt a gift of the old brass knocker from the door of the Blackwell house.