Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about renovations at a house in Upper Manhattan that was a command post for George Washington 250 years ago. We’ll also get details on the 15-year sentence that a judge handed down for the disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
The house had a roof when George Washington took it over. It’s getting a new one, but don’t go by to check it out. The Morris-Jumel Mansion in Upper Manhattan will be closed for a while.
“We can’t have people going in and out of the building when we’re throwing shingles off,” Catherine Hughes, the official in charge, told me.
So the nonprofit that runs the mansion will observe two big anniversaries tonight from a distance. The group will hold its annual George Washington Dinner at Riverside Church.
It is a dinner recalling a dinner. George and Martha Washington invited the members of his cabinet and their wives to the mansion one evening in 1790. Vice President John Adams, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson attended. It was something of a last hurrah for New York as the nation’s capital after five years. Congress and the nascent federal government were moving south, first to Philadelphia, then to Washington.
A house with a view
How different the atmosphere that evening must have been from the other anniversary that will be commemorated tonight — the Battle of Harlem Heights, fought 250 years ago last week. Washington seized the house and turned it into a command post, although “seized” is probably overstating things. No one was home when Washington rode up to it in 1776 — the owner, loyal to the British, had decamped to London. His wife had taken their children to Yonkers.
“That left the house unoccupied when Washington needed a good vantage point,” Hughes said. “You could see down to the southernmost point of Manhattan. It was a great place for him to be at that moment.”
It was a moment when the colonials needed a lift after their humiliating defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn in August, and they got it.
“It’s not so much that it was a great victory — it wasn’t,” Hughes said. “It did prove that the patriots could make the British retreat. It was the first time that they actually achieved that. It was a huge morale booster.” Or, as Robert Snyder, the former Manhattan borough historian who is to address the dinner tonight, put it: “The battle matters because it was the one place in the entire campaign for New York City that American troops actually bested the British.”
Washington’s encampment stretched south from the mansion, and the battle took place around what is now 125th Street. Washington’s counterattack strategy was clear to the British, and they retreated.
New York’s place in the Revolutionary War is often overlooked because — by contrast — “it was the scene of so many American defeats and was a loyalist stronghold, occupied by the British for most of the war,” Snyder said. There were local rivalries that underscored the idea that the Revolutionary War in New York “was as much a civil war as a war for independence,” he said.
From mansion to museum
The mansion, on Jumel Terrace off Edgecombe Avenue, is the oldest surviving residence in Manhattan. It has been a museum since 1904, a year after the city bought it for $235,000 (more than $8 million today).
Kurt Thometz, a longtime resident of the neighborhood, knows its history and that of the house: He said that Aaron Burr, then an aide-de-camp to one of the generals under Washington, “was the one who motivated everyone to come up here” after the Battle of Kip’s Bay, which began when British warships sailed up the East River, anchoring off what is now the East 30s.
Thometz and his wife, Camilla Huey, a dressmaker and costume designer, watched in despair as the Morris-Jumel Mansion deteriorated. He posted photographs on Instagram several years ago, showing “how badly dilapidated” it had become.
Now, he said, it is “unbelievable that after all these years we are actually seeing work done.”
The Historic House Trust of New York City, a public-private partnership that works with the 23 municipally owned history-oriented museums in the city, said in March that “what began in 2021 as a smaller, $2.7 million effort” had grown into a $10 million “two-phase restoration.” The windows will be restored, the wood siding will be repaired and other “critical preservation and accessibility needs” will be addressed.
Thometz, with an eye on the calendar, said that just replacing the roof was a complicated job. “They’ve got a heavy work schedule if they’re going to get it done before winter sets in,” Thometz said.
Weather
Expect a mostly sunny day with a high near 68. It will be mostly cloudy tonight, with a low around 57.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Saturday (Sukkot).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“They are watching the cost of groceries, rent, gas and health care climb while their pay falls behind.” — Yvonne Armstrong, the president of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, on caregivers who care for people at home. The union is petitioning to hold an election for them to vote on whether to unionize.
The latest Metro news
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School bus transition slows: As costs mount and logistical and mechanical headaches persist, some school districts in New York and across the country have stepped back from their commitments to transition from diesel to electric school buses.
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Washington Square Park drug ring: A Manhattan jury convicted a man who prosecutors said had been a leader of a network that sold millions of doses of crack cocaine and opioids in Washington Square Park. Prosecutors said the operation led to two deaths and involved 19 other defendants, 18 of whom have pleaded guilty.
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A brewing storm: An unusually early nor’easter could bring heavy rain, strong winds and coastal flooding to the New York region later this week.
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New York to Australia, nonstop: Qantas Airways announced it would begin operating the first-ever direct flight between New York and Sydney, Australia, in 2028. Qantas will fly long-range Airbus jets with additional fuel capacity — roughly 5,280 gallons.
A 15-year sentence in Harvey Weinstein’s New York case
Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul whose downfall fueled the #MeToo movement, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for a felony sex crime.
The sentence — for assaulting a former production assistant, Miriam Haley, in his SoHo apartment in 2006 — was the last chapter in a nearly decade-long legal saga in New York. Weinstein, 74, was found guilty in 2020, but that conviction was overturned by the state’s highest court. He was found guilty again after a second trial last year. Weinstein also faces resentencing in a separate case in California.
Justice Curtis Farber of State Supreme Court in Manhattan noted that Weinstein — whose hits included “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare in Love” — had once played an outsize role as a star-maker, determining whose dreams came true and whose were crushed. But Farber said that “recognition for these achievements will pale in comparison to what you did.”
Nicole Blumberg, an assistant district attorney, said Weinstein had “never shown an ounce of remorse and refuses to accept responsibility for the crime.”
Instead, she said, he had targeted Haley and other witnesses with online harassment and cast himself as the victim. Blumberg said that he had continued his campaign while he was being held at the Rikers Island jail complex, offering $1.75 million to a podcaster to release stories that were aimed at contaminating the jury pool before and after a trial.
Weinstein countered that he had apologized to those he might have hurt through his actions. ”I do have remorse for Miriam Haley’s pain,” he told the judge. “But I have to reiterate my innocence.”
Haley, who also addressed the court, said at a news conference after the hearing that she viewed the sentence as fair.
Still, she said, “For me, personally, it’s never going to be fair.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Painful move
Dear Diary:
It was April 1982. We were packing to move out of our floor-through apartment in a Park Slope brownstone. I decided that it was time to clean the oven but soon got a painful drop of oven cleaner in my eye.
Holding a towel against my eye, I trudged off to the emergency room.
On my way, I passed a woman sweeping her stoop.
“You have to pray to St. Lucy!” she said. “She’s for the eyes!”
On the next block, an older man looked at me.
“What?” he said with a smile. “Did you forget to duck?”
When I got to the E.R., the admitting nurse listened to my woes and then reprimanded me.
“You don’t clean the oven because you’re moving,” she said. “You move because your oven’s dirty!”
— Lea Carmichael Richardson
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.
Luke Caramanico and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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