Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at an 180-year-old house in Queens that preservationists say should be preserved. It’s also the backdrop for a family feud.
Marie Ashley, 62, never imagined that she would file a lawsuit against her father.
She also said she never imagined that he and an older brother of hers would move to have her evicted from the family-owned house in Hollis, Queens, where she had lived for more than 25 years.
But she did, after they did.
Then preservationists waded into the family dispute, seeking to have the home, sometimes described as the most significant mid-19th-century farmhouse still standing in New York City, designated a landmark. That would prevent Ashley’s father and one of her brothers from tearing it down to build two-family houses on the lot.
The Ashleys’ disputes, outlined in court documents, include whether Marie and her sister Grace, who also lived in the house, were tenants and owed rent to their father, 94, (as he says) or were making payments on a mortgage originally taken out by their mother (as they say). Also at issue is whether the sisters had paid more than $1.7 million for repairs over the years (as Marie Ashley says) or whether the house is in poor condition (as their brother Carol, who is 64 and is known as A.J., says).
Marie Ashley said that the house had been “ransacked” since their eviction last month, with furniture overturned, paintings taken from the walls and plumbing fixtures smashed, a heartbreaking turn for a home she had treasured. She moved there in the 1990s, she said, and used the living room as a waiting room for her speech pathology business and the dining room as her office. Grace, who is also in her 60s, moved in later.
The house dates to the 1840s, according to preservationists. “It is — literally — one of the most important historic buildings, if not the most important historic building still standing” in the area, said Paul Graziano, who is a former executive director of the Historic Districts Council and formed a coalition to save it.
“Hollis” — the community that surrounds the house — “was created from this property, the original 40 acres,” he said.
Later it was home to a milk distributor who claimed his company was the first to deliver his products in glass bottles. Later still, it was the home of a woman named Mary Callahan Flores, whose Times obituary in 1953 described her as one of the original Gibson girl models made famous by the artist Charles Dana Gibson as the 19th century gave way to the 20th. The obituary also said she had modeled for two noted sculptors, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French.
‘May merit consideration’ for landmarking
Marie Ashley’s hopes for safeguarding the house soared after she asked the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to evaluate it for landmark designation in 2022. A staff member from the commission told her in a letter in 2023 that the house “may merit consideration.”
But the commission’s staff concluded last month that the house did not really rate. It “was more modest and had been more substantially altered in comparison to other designated 19th-century wood-frame houses,” a spokeswoman said.
Jason Antos, the executive director of the Queens Historical Society, lamented the decision. The house “can compete with any of the historic structures one can find in the Hudson Valley or Cold Spring Harbor in Long Island,” he said.
The Ashleys’ legal wrangling dates to 2021, when the sisters’ father, Jasper Ashley, went to housing court to have them thrown out as tenants. Marie Ashley said that she had never been “a tenant in my own home” and had been making payments on a mortgage her father had refinanced in 2015. Jasper Ashley said in an affidavit that Marie and Grace had stopped paying rent in December 2020 “because they were upset after they learned I was going through with plans to develop the premises” and asked them to move out.
Marie Ashley said her father “hasn’t got the facts straight.” Heath Olnowich, a lawyer who represents Jasper Ashley, dismissed the sisters’ claims as “not accurate” and said that they had been “fully litigated.”
Court records indicate that the sisters agreed to a $200,000 settlement in March. Marie Ashley said last month that they had never received the money; she signed an affidavit in July saying that she had refused to accept an initial payment of $20,000. She said last week that she has gone back to housing court, seeking to reopen the case that led to their eviction, and an appearance date has been set for next week. She said she remained concerned about cats that she had cared for around the house in a registered feral cat colony.
She and her brother Carol both said the family had once been close-knit.
“We went in different directions, as most families do,” Carol Ashley said. “It’s not a complicated thing. Everybody’s saying ‘it’s family, it’s family, it’s family,’ but everyone has to pay bills.”
He added: “It’s not about ‘you threw your sisters out.’ It’s about a man who’s 94 years old” — their father — “taking care of two women who contribute nothing.”
When he was asked what would happen now, he said, “The plan right now is we got them out of the house. We’re going to see what we do next.”
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METROPOLITAN diary
In Sheepshead Bay
Dear Diary:
I sit next to him at the counter at Lundy’s as he scarfs down raw oysters and clams with a zeal beyond my comprehension. They are smelly, slimy and, temporarily, alive.
I drink my water and watch. It is just part of the all-too-regular trip to Aunt Jenny’s to pump out her perennially wet basement.
The rickety wooden house is along the water in Sheepshead Bay and deceptively close to Manhattan Beach’s brick estates. The fishing boats come in loaded with lobster in midafternoon. Uncle Frank’s boat is in the flotilla.
“Go pick up a couple on your way home,” Aunt Jenny shouts to him. “And get me some eels.”
He brings the eels back and dumps them in her half-filled bathtub. I cannot look, nor can I look away.
“Grab me one,” she yells.
I slip back into the kitchen empty-handed. She laughs, grabs an eel, chops it up while it is still alive and tends to the pieces as they jump in the frying pan.
The musty smell of eel cooking and wet walls follows me to the old blue Henry J parked on the tight street.
I sit in the back seat with my sister next to the brown bag rattling with live lobsters with corks on their claws, as they, too, try to escape.
We are going home.
— JoAnna DeCamp
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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