Double Agent (39 page)

Chicago Daily

: John C. Metcalfe, “I Am a U.S. Nazi Storm Trooper,” and numerous accompanying articles,

beginning September 9, 1937, and running through September 24, 1937.

: In those days, the neighborhood’s Germanic boundaries spread roughly east from Lexington Avenue to the East River and north from East Seventy-Ninth Street to East Ninety-Sixth Street, although it is impossible to draw precise lines in a metropolis as diverse and ever changing as New York. To the south was a Hungarian section, followed by a Czech quarter; to the north were the Italian and Puerto Rican divisions of East Harlem; to the west toward Central Park resided the wealthy denizens of Park, Madison, and Fifth Avenues, the “Silk Stocking” district. Scattered within were Irish and Jews, many of whom were enmeshed in the commercial, if not cultural, life of the community.

The story goes that the Germanization of Yorkville didn’t begin until 1904, when the steamship

caught fire and sank in the East River, killing a thousand German immigrants on their way to a church picnic on Long Island and casting a kind of curse on the old neighborhood, Kleindeutschland, in what is today the East Village/Lower East Side. But the flight to the rapidly urbanizing quadrant of northern Manhattan was in full progress by the 1880s, aided by the construction of the elevated subway lines above Second and Third Avenues that allowed the four-mile journey to be completed in minutes. Jobs could be had in the breweries founded by German immigrants that occupied a large swath of Yorkville’s northern section, including George Ehret’s Hell Gate Brewery, which was the country’s greatest producer of beer in 1877. Spiritual comfort was on offer in the Teutonic churches constructed in the final decades of the nineteenth century—Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran on East Eighty-Eighth Street at Lexington Avenue with its three bronze bells donated by Augusta, empress of Germany, the larger of two German Lutheran congregations in the neighborhood; St. Joseph’s on East Eighty-Seventh Street, a German national Catholic parish in a “handsome brick building with a steeple that could have been lifted right out of the Black Forest,” according to a church history; and, most spectacularly, the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity on East Eighty-Eighth Street near Second Avenue with a church, bell tower, rectory, and parish house built in French Gothic and Renaissance Revival styles to recall the ambience of the Loire Valley. Less architecturally striking were the rows of standard brownstones and brick tenements that were being thrown up to house the growing population.

Still, it’s true that Yorkville didn’t become America’s Little Berlin until the early twentieth century, when secular shrines were erected to serve the innumerable benevolent associations, singing societies, home-region guilds, reading circles, women’s auxiliaries, shooting clubs, etc., that were an indelible part of the German immigrant experience. “The first thing that two Germans do when they meet abroad is to found three associations” went the quip. The Yorkville Casino, which would remain the anchor of the main block of Eighty-Sixth Street until the 1960s, opened during the same year as the

disaster, 1904. Built by a musicians’ union, the six-story building had meeting rooms and performance spaces (including one of fifteen thousand square feet) that were used for political rallies, gala banquets, Bach recitals, theatrical performances, and, soon, first-run German-language motion pictures. The Casino was far from the only

gathering spot to welcome the

. The multilevel Kreutzer Hall was opened just a few steps to the east to catch any overflow business. Two blocks south, the Labor Temple was established as a center for the Socialist and trade-union crowd, but before long it became a “funny, musty” place where “everything in the world goes on”—including singing-canary competitions hosted by “strange, little old people” who gather “around like gnomes listening eagerly to the silvery liquid notes of their birds,” wrote a visitor. The New York Turnhalle at the corner of Eighty-Fifth and Lexington had a fourth-floor gymnasium among its assembly spaces, making it the natural headquarters for German sporting organizations, but it was better recognized around town for the ground-level restaurant, Adolph Suesskind’s, which became Hans Jaeger’s, which attracted sophisticated diners over from Park Avenue for its lamb chops and roast pork.

By the early 1920s, Yorkville was seen as “a quiet German colony, with German theaters, the occasional beer garden or two, an epidemic of delicatessen stores, pork stores and bird stores—active by day and wholly out of it by night,” which is only partially true. A strip of vaudeville and movie houses lined the block of Eighty-Sixth between Lexington and Third, establishing what a magazine writer called “an important amusement center” that surely functioned after dark. Yet it was the appearance of a theme bar called Maxl’s, which specialized in creatively flaunting the Prohibition laws, that inaugurated Yorkville as a nightlife hot spot listed in all the visitors’ guides. In 1925, Maxl Harder opened a restaurant/tavern on the bottom half of a brownstone on the north side of Eighty-Sixth Street near Second Avenue that was remodeled (both exterior and interior) to evoke a

cottage right out of

, perhaps the first act in the Disneyfication of Manhattan. The scene inside was raucous. “There is a stringy three-piece orchestra, which stops every other moment to drink and sing a toast to each newcomer,” according to one guidebook. The boozy highlight of the evening was the singing of “The Schnitzelbank Song,” a number traditionally used to teach children the German language. Hilarity ensued as the conductor pointed with a “schoolmarm’s rod” at “a huge poster bearing the words in German illustrated by quaint little drawings,” while the orchestra squawked along in accompaniment. The place grew so popular and spawned so many imitators that it was required to call itself The Original Maxl’s. Another guidebook described the genre: “A Brau Haus (86th Street version) is a place in which all the waiters wear short, corduroy pants, Alpine hats, socks that cover only the calves of their legs, and funny suspenders,” wrote Rian James in 1934. “The gentlemen are engaged (1) because they have grand German accents; (2) because, even if they can’t sing, at least they know all the words to the popular old-school German

ditties; and (3) because they have learned to transport successfully sixteen steins of beers in one hand, while they write out and incorrectly add a patron’s check with the other!” It was suggested that people avoid visiting during college football season, when “the teams and cheering sections are in town” from Syracuse, New Haven, or Pittsburgh, which makes it “a little bit strenuous for anyone who isn’t up on forward-passing a frankfurter.”

Although the Yorkville beer gardens survived Prohibition largely unmolested for reasons that might’ve had to do with the respected US senator who lived at 244 East Eighty-Sixth Street (the German-born Robert F. Wagner Sr.), Harder sold out for big money in 1929 and opened a classier joint across the street that was not reliant on the ostentatious consumption of vats of Bavarian lager. The Café Hindenburg featured dancing to the big-band sounds of Maria Wadynski and her orchestra in an upstairs ballroom and chocolates and pralines over quiet conversation in the downstairs lounge. Even with the onset of the Depression, the Hindenburg faced strong competition from along the boulevard and up and down the side streets, which only increased after Prohibition’s repeal in 1933 removed any worries about the open consumption of spirits. The Gloria Palast (in the lower level of the Yorkville Casino building) described itself as “Yorkville’s leading cabaret restaurant,” with three large dining and fox-trotting spaces that could hold upward of two thousand people. Directly across the street, the Corso also went for the sleek look of a Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers picture (“a futuristic stairway”), but boasted that its two orchestras could be enjoyed without a minimum-drink requirement. A few strides to the east, Restaurant Platzl employed the “famous” Willie Schiesser to direct its orchestra for nightly dancing, while the Café Mozart (249 East Eighty-Sixth Street) had Franze Deutschmann and his men render the romantic waltz beneath a bust of Wolfgang Amadeus with pfeffernüsse, anise, marzipan, and

served till dawn. “A broad, bustling crossway, where you will find diversion good and plenty,” wrote a nightlife author of New York’s version of Unter den Linden. “Picture and four-a-day vaudeville halls. Beer dens with yodeling waiters. Roof gardens echoing guttural song. Fox trots at ten cents a dance. Plain, unpretentious haunts, on the whole, with a sympathetic air. And even if evening togs be few, the laughter is real and spontaneous.”

Charles Shaw,

(New York: John Day, 1931), 139–43; Helen Worden,

(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1932), 338–49; “Yorkville, Where Beer Never Ceased to Flow, Will Celebrate Return of Legality Tonight,”

April 7, 1933; James Rian,

(New York: John Day, 1934), 127–29, 241–44; Scudder Middleton,

(New York: Dodge Publishing, 1938), 82–85; and “News and Gossip of Night Clubs,”

May 1, 1938.

: According to the 1930 census. Ira Rosenwaike,

(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 205.

:

April 30, 1938.

: US Congress, House Special Committee on Un-American Activities,

vol. 6, 1st sess., testimony of Helen Vooros, August 18, 1939.

: Raymond J. Batvinis,

(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 34–35, 48; Curt Gentry,

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 207–9; and “Spy Quiz Shows U.S. Has None of Its Own,”

June 21, 1938. Mr. Batvinis provides a comprehensive account of the FBI’s counterintelligence creation story in his important book. A scholar and former FBI special agent, he was most generous in offering his insights and research assistance to the author.

: The institutional history of Carl L. Norden Inc. is explored in Stephen L. McFarland,

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).

: “Story of Norden Bombsight Released,”

newsletter, December 1944.

: Ibid.

: In his book, Ritter writes that Pop Sohn lived at 248 Monitor Street, which is located in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. Public records reveal that Pop Sohn lived at 70-12 Sixty-Sixth Street in Glendale on the Queens-Brooklyn border, demonstrating Ritter’s tendency to add dubious color to incidents that we know from other sources did actually occur.

:

Case Files 2017C–2018C, Selected Case Files, 1929–ca. 1980, Office of the US Attorney for the Judicial District of New Jersey, Record Group 118, National Archives at New York City.

: Art Ronnie,

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 211. Mr. Ronnie’s rollicking and well-researched biography goes a long way toward separating fact from fiction in Duquesne’s story. “He was no hero,” the author concludes, “but his was an incredible life encompassing bizarre exploits of drama, danger, and adventure few people are privileged to live.” Mr. Ronnie was the picture of collegiality in providing archival materials to the author.

: Ibid., 102.

: “Get Tip on Big Game: President Learns How to Shoot Beasts of the Jungle,”

, January 20, 1909.

: Fritz Joubert Duquesne file, KV2/1955, British Archives, Records of the Security Service, Kew, London.

: Ronnie,

136.

: Clement Wood,

(New York: W. Faro, 1932), 13.

: Ritter’s British interrogation.