Kimberly Bender - Greater Greater Washington

The other Schneider: Q Street builder's murderous brother

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:21:00 EDT

No discussion or debate about DC's Height Act is complete without mention of T.F. Schneider's Cairo Apartment Building on Q Street NW. The 1894 construction of the gorgeous building was the catalyst for the building height restrictions we know and love today.

The Cairo. Photo by the author.

It is fortuitous for Schneider that the building caused such an impression. He's lucky that we remember him for this lovely building and for the fantastic tree-lined block of Q Street row-houses between 17th and 18th Streets that he built as a speculative venture for well-to-do families when the area began to thrive.

Because we could instead remember T.F. for the chilly murders committed by his crazy brother Howard in 1892 on that same Q Street block or for Howard's subsequent sensational trial and execution. The Washington Post reported:

It was at 8 o'clock on the evening of Sunday, January 31, 1892, that [Howard J.] Schneider shot his wife, Amanda Hamlink Schneider, and his brother-in-law, Frank Hamlink, almost in front of their father's door, on [1733] Q Street between Seventeenth and Eighteenth. Schneider was a young electrician when he met Amanda Hamlink, in the summer of 1891.
He was of good family, not a bad-looking young fellow, who dressed well and drove fast horses. He made love to the young lady, became engaged to her, and one day in June when they were out driving he produced a marriage license and threatened to shoot himself unless she married him at once. Miss Hamlink yielded, and a minister in Hyattsville performed the ceremony.

The marriage was kept a secret until fall, when the young woman's father discovered it. Then there was a scene, the father suspecting at first that the marriage had been a fraud, and requiring Schneider to produce the certificate. After that Schneider went to the Hamlink house to live. His cruelties made the life of his wife an unhappy one. More than once he threatened to shoot her. Finally he began staying out late at night, and after due warning was locked out from the Hamlink house.

About this time, a few weeks before the tragedy, he became enamored of a young girl from Virginia who was visiting [her sister who also lived on that same Q Street block]. He determined to secure a divorce from his wife, and made preparations to go to Chicago. On the Sunday evening of the tragedy he had sent a colored man to the house with a note asking if his wife intended to live with him.
While he was waiting for an answer across the street from the house, his wife, with her brother and sister, walked down Q Street from Eighteenth. Schneider crossed over to them, leaving his chum, Marion Appleby on the south side of the street.
Grasping at his wife roughly by the wrist, he told her he wanted to speak to her. The brother interfered. Schneider drew a revolver and fired five shots. Three of them entered the body of his wife, whom he still held by the hand, one pierced Frank Hamlink's breast, and the fifth crashed through the window of the Hamlink house.

Frank Hamlink fell into the street, dying almost instantly. Mrs. Schneider was able to walk into the house. She languised until the 6th of February, and left a dying declaration detailing the circumstances of the crime.

Howard Schneider threw down his revolver by the body of Frank Hamlink and fled. Within a half hour he walked into the nearest police station and gave himself up, saying he did the deed in self-defense.

The Hamlink House, 1733 Q Street NW. Photo by the author.

Although most of us have never heard a thing about it, Howard Schneider's trial was one of the most infamous the city has ever experienced. The Washington Post's April 10, 1892 edition (the day after the verdict) was the largest edition it had ever published up to that time. 10,000 additional copies and an extra came off the presses.

Many witnesses were called, and in a dramatic twist, most of them lived on T.F.'s block of Q Street row houses. This meant that they knew both the Hamlink and Schneider families and some were still indebted to T.F. for the property.

When T.F. took the stand, he was accused of intimidating some of his neighbors. In one instance, he had sold a Q Street row house to a Mr. Bean and still held 2 notes for $2000 against him. Before Mrs. Bean testified at trial, T.F. had told the Beans that he could renew the note. After she testified, T.F. wrote Mr. Bean that he would no longer do so because he was unsatisfied with his wife's testimony.

Howard and his friends did their best to plant evidence that he acted in self-defense, but the prosecution was able to debunk most of these details. They proved that Howard stole Hamlink's gun, shot him with it, and then threw it by his body. They showed that Howard planted a second gun and that he created fake bullet holes in his own clothing.

Perhaps the most telling and dramatically sad testimony of the trial came from Mrs. Schneider, Howard and T.F.'s mother, who was forced to describe the mental instability of her son. Of Howard, she said:

He was always talking to himself in his room…and would swear at me or some imaginary person. When I went upstairs to remonstrate with him he would slam the door and swear. He would leave the house after breakfast in pleasant spirits, and would return to lunch out of temper. Often he would break out at the table violently. He had trouble with everyone with whom he had dealings, and always complained that they were against him. He was constantly making appointments and failing to keep them.

Photo from the Washington Post archives.

Howard's important family bought him good lawyers, but that was all they could do to help him. For the year after he was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death, his attorneys appealed to overturn the conviction on insanity grounds. They brought the case as high as the US Supreme Court, which refused to step in. On March 17, 1893, after President Cleveland denied clemency, Howard J. Schneider was hanged in the DC District jail.

Cross-posted at The Location.

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Meet me down in Pipetown: DC's neighborhoods in 1877

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:22:00 EDT

by Kimberly Bender

By now, most Washingtonians have heard of Swampoodle, the historic Irish neighborhood that was destroyed by the construction of Union Station. But what about The Island? Pipetown? Bloody Hill and Bloodfield ("the ancient feudal ground of the southwest")?

These were all names of Washington, DC neighborhoods during the decades of the 1800s following the end of the Civil War.

Map of Washington as the city appeared in 1877 when the Washington Post was founded, with the old nicknames for various portions of the city. Photo from the Washington Post.

Post-war DC was a rough place. According to one government official interviewed in the Post in 1902, "Washington passed through its period of lawlessness and disorder fully as bad, if not worse, than that which prevailed in Cripple Creek, Colo. or Tombstone, Ariz."

Small fields of corn and cabbage gardens were scattered about everywhere, many of them within a stone's throw of the Capitol, while cows had the run of the town from Georgetown to Anacostia Creek, grazing on the pavements, breaking into front yards, disturbing the slumbers of the citizens by their incessant lowing, and making themselves generally obnoxious. I recollect there use to be a brick yard at Ninth and O streets northwest and not far distant was a cornfield inclosed [sic] by a stake and rider fence. ...

The war had ended, leaving stranded in this city a vast horde of enfranchised slaves, discharged soldiers, and a cloud of riffraff, bummers, and camp followers... and their arrival soon made this city one of the most disorderly places in America. Fights, murders, stabbing, and shooting scrapes were of daily occurrence.

The neighborhoods with the most infamous conditions had nicknames that were never shown on any official plat. But the Washington Post put together the amazing map above on its 50th anniversary, to show the neighborhoods that existed when the paper was founded in 1877.

Hell's Bottom, a former "contraband camp" extending irregularly from 7th to 14th Streets NW, and from O Street to the Boundary (now Florida Avenue), was one of the most notorious sections of the city. Living conditions were poor and crime was high.

According to a Post article from 1897, some Hell's Bottom residents lived in shanties the size of a "hall-room," with roofs so low that an average person could only stand upright on one side. These homes, which could house up to 3 families, were of "the rudest possible construction, few having any sashes in the window aperture, a board shutter closing out the cold winds, light and ventilation together, when shut. The only salvation from suffocation lies in the gaping cracks existing round the doors and windows, without which many a family would doubtless be found dead in the morning of cold nights."

Keith Sutherland, an old Hell's Bottom inhabitant, said this about the neighborhood in a 1900 Post article:

"Money was scarce and whisky [sic] was cheap—a certain sort of whisky—and the combination resulted in giving the place the name which it held for so many years. The police force was small. There was no police court, and the magistrates before whom offenders were brought rarely fixed the penalty at more than $2. Crime and lawlessness grew terribly, and a man had to fight, whenever he went into the "Bottom."

The police were unable to control the crime and violence in Hell's Bottom, and so in 1891, the city refused to renew any of the neighborhood's liquor licenses. It was this act that finally led to the neighborhood's improvement.

Murder Bay: The area east of the White House across Pennsylvania Avenue was known for its brothels, gambling, and crime. It was sometimes called "Hooker's Department," after Civil War General Joseph Hooker, who hoped to concentrate the city's brothels in the area.

The "red light district" known as Murder Bay at the corner of C Street NW and 13th Street NW, April 1912. Griffin Veatch, a "night messenger" or child laborer who directed customers to brothels, is leaning against the tree at left. Photograph by Lewis W. Hine for the US National Child Labor Committee.

White Chapel: A dirty alley between 24th and 25th Streets, and M and N Streets, NW. During the 1880s, there was almost constant warfare between the residents of this area and the police.

Pipetown: East of 11th Street SE to the Anacostia River, this neighborhood was made famous by Pipetown Sandy (1905), John Philip Sousa's semi-autobiographical young adult novel about the neighborhood where he grew up. One Post article described Pipetown as "a community of extensive commons, of ash dumps, of tumble-down houses and shacks of nondescript architecture, a place where goats browsed among the tomato cans and the travelling fair pitched its weather-beaten tent."

Bloodfield: This neighborhood was "a vague name for the entire region around the James Creek Canal" (in today's SW near the Navy Yard), and one of the most dangerous and notorious slums in the city. Arrest attempts by police (who would only walk their beat in pairs) resulted in injury or worse to the officer or the resident:

Policeman Muller was attracted to the Shears house by the shooting, and when he arrived there he found Shears lying dead on the floor of the kitchen having been shot in the left temple. Curry was covered with blood from head to foot and gave evidence of having had a terrible struggle. His badge was smeared with blood and his coat was saturated with it.

Brothels, illegal speakeasies, and tough characters filled the neighborhood:

A steel corset stay, pointed and sharpened into a dangerous weapon, was used in an affray early yesterday evening...

Sergt. Daley, of the Fourth Precinct, was abroad in Bloodfield with his raiding clothes on last night, and, as a result, a number of alleged disorderly houses were closed up.

As the city and police force grew, the neighborhood calmed, but it retained its name up to the '20s.

Cowtown: A neighborhood located north of Hell's Bottom and west of 7th Street, NW.

The Island: This swath of land south of the Mall was so called because the canal cut it off from the rest of mainland DC.

I'd much rather live in Hell's Bottom than Logan Circle, wouldn't you?

Cross-posted at The Location.

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A river of slime runs under Constitution Avenue

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:47:00 EDT

by Kimberly Bender

How is Washington, DC like this scene from Ghostbusters 2?

Like the fictionalized residents of New York City in 1989, most present-day Washingtonians are unaware that an unusual river of slime runs beneath their city. (But ours is not paranormal). Here's the story.

Constitution Avenue was once a river

Back when DC was born, water was integral to the development of commerce. Roads were unreliable, and other technologies didn't yet exist. Why else would the city's founders have placed it at the intersection of two swampy, humid, mosquito-filled waterways, the Potomac and the Eastern Branch (now called the Anacostia)?

In fact, Pierre L'Enfant's original 1792 plan for DC shows us that their city was far more watery than the one we know today. If the Washington Monument had been built then, it would have sat on the shores of the Potomac, and the Lincoln Memorial would be underwater. From the foot of Capitol Hill out to the Potomac, there ran a body of water called Tiber Creek (whose name had been changed from Goose Creek when it was decided that DC would become America's capital, because they were emulating Rome).

L'Enfant Plan. Image from Wikipedia.

DC's founders and business leaders believed that the city's economic development would be vastly enhanced if only there was a canal connecting the Anacostia River (navigable to Maryland) to the Potomac (the gateway to the west) through the city. The Washington City Canal, completed in 1815, flowed up north from the Anacostia, passed west of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, and then headed due west along the Tiber River whose path is today's Constitution Ave. In other words, Constitution Avenue was once a river.

The Tiber Creek/Washington City Canal is visible to the north. Photo by Civil-War-Photos.com.

Ever wonder what that random tiny stone house is on the Mall?

In 1828, construction began on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, another dream waterway which would connect commerce up to Pittsburgh and through all areas in between. In the original plans, the C&O system was supposed to end in Georgetown, but that idea made DC leaders nervous. They imagined that the canal would help Georgetown outshine the capital, so they ransomed their $1M investment in the project and had that changed. The C&O would now end at the Washington City Canal.

Thus completed in 1833 and known as the C&O Branch Extension, DC's canal connection into the C&O began at the Rock Creek Basin and followed 27th Street down until it connected into the Washington City Canal at 17th and Constitution Avenues.

Image from the National Park Service.

Someone was going to have to collect the tolls and keep the records, so a Lockkeeper's House was built at 17th and Constitution. Owned today by the National Park Service, the Lockkeeper's House is one of the last reminders that a canal ever flowed through DC.

A small federal style house built of fieldstone and measuring 30 feet wide and 18 feet deep, the Lockkeeper's House originally sat 40 feet west and 10 feet north of its current location, but was moved in the 1930′s to widen 17th Street.

According to some reports, the lockkeeper and his 13 children lived in the building. Otho Swain, a man born on a canal boat in 1901, whose father was a boatman and locktender and whose grandfather helped build the C&O, related this story:

My grandfather, he had boated coal down Constitution Avenue. There used to be a canal that crossed the Potomac there, and there's a little stone house still standing on the corner of 17th and Constitution Avenue. It was a lock house. My grandmother lived in that lock house, and that's where my grandfather met her.

The Lockkeeper's House was given to the National Park Service at the beginning of the 20th century during the construction of Potomac Park. For a time it was used as a "public comfort station", but today NPS uses it as storage.

Decline to slime

Although DC's founders believed that waterways would bring commerce, we know better today—railroads were the technology of the future. As the rail was developed, the canal system fell into disuse. (Plus, the Washington City Canal had always been a bit of a mess. The water was shallow and so could only handle boats drawing less than 3 feet of water.)

The canal system was completely abandoned by the end of the 1850′s. The C&O Canal only made it as far as Cumberland, MD before it went under. What did DC's residents do with this body of water running through its middle? Throughout the Civil War and after, they turned the Washington City Canal into an open sewer.

Drawing of the sewer in 1894 from SewerHistory.org via the Affordable Housing Institute.

Luckily, when Boss Shepard came into power in the 1870′s, he added this smelly problem to his list of public improvements. A young German immigrant engineer, Adolph Cluss, was enlisted to move the body of water underground. He apparently built a tunnel from Capitol Hill down to the Potomac that is "wide enough for a bus to drive through to put Tiber Creek underground."

A river runs under it

Filling in the canal created B Street, which was subsequently renamed Constitution Avenue. Although the massive undertaking solved public health problems, the federal government apparently did not contemplate the potential engineering dilemmas that might result from building on top of an underground creek/sewer From Wikipedia:

Many of the buildings on the north side of Constitution apparently are built on top of the creek, including the Internal Revenue Service Building, part of which is built on wooden piers sunk into the wet ground along the creek course. The low-lying topography there contributed to the flooding of the National Archives Building (Archives I in Washington, DC), IRS, and Ariel Rios buildings that forced their temporary closure beginning in late June 2006.
In fact, until the mid 1990s, that part of Washington around the intersection of 14th Street and Constitution was an open parking lot because the underground water was too difficult to deal with. During construction of the Ronald Reagan Building (1990—98), the engineers figured out how to divert the water. But that dewatering then reduced the water level underneath the IRS building which caused the wooden piers to lose stability and part of the IRS building foundation to sink.

More information is in a Northwest Current article from 1997 about reports to the National Capital Planning Commission on the flooding issues, and this photo from BMS CAT shows flooding at the National Archives.

Maybe DC doesn't have real ghosts flowing under our feet, but that doesn't mean we aren't haunted by underground things from the city's past.

Cross-posted at The Location.

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Hidden tunnels, bugs, and bigamy

Sun, 29 May 2011 12:37:00 EDT

by Kimberly Bender

One of my favorite things about historic research is that no matter how strange or intriguing a story is at first, I really have no idea where a little digging might take me. Sometimes a lead just fizzles out. But sometimes what I discover is more bizarre and ridiculous than I could have imagined...

Photo via Shorpy.

In May of 1917, while working on the foundation for the luxurious Pelham Courts apartments in Dupont Circle, workers made an unusual discovery:

A mysterious subterranean tunnel built of brick, and 22 feet in circumference, was uncovered yesterday by workmen who are excavating for the new building being erected at 2115 P street northwest by Harry Wardman.
Oldest inhabitants in that section say they did not know of the existence of the passage. It is presumed that it was used by Union forces in the civil war or by English forces in the war of 1812. The passage is more than 100 feet long. (Washington Post, 5/19/1917)

With that quick newspaper blurb, a story was born and died, receiving no other attention at the time. There were more important things going on—only a month earlier, the US had officially entered World Ward I, and the Selective Service Act was passed just the day before the article was published. No one had time to care about old hidden tunnels.

But for a couple of days in 1924, when the war was over and life was calmer, the tunnels were uncovered again and "Washington was alive with stories of mystery, intrigue, romance, and adventure." (Post, 3/4/1942)

While driving behind Pelham Courts in mid-September of 1924, a truck's tires sank into the ground, revealing the entrance to a hidden underground shaft. The manager and janitor of the building decided to explore, and called up some newspapermen to report.

Photo via Shorpy.

What they found was this:

Photo via Shorpy.

Descending through the opening made by the wheels of the truck, the searchers stood in a passageway high enough and broad enough for a man to walk with ease. The tunnel was perfectly constructed and an architect who viewed it said its proportions were correct. One of the most astounding features of the place was the fact that the walls were carefully, even artistically formed of white enameled brick, pronounced valuable by builders.

On the ceiling were pasted numerous copies of German newspapers dated during the summer of 1917 and 1918. Dimly seen in the feeble rays of the electric torches, it was possible to discern in the newspaper articles frequent references to submarine activities then employed by the imperial government of Germany. Cryptic signs and engravings in cipher defaced the papers to some extent.

Other German periodicals and scores of empty bottles were brought to light by the investigators. (Post, 9/26/1924)

Reports indicated that the tunnels were long and extensive—that they may have reached as far as Rock Creek Park. Some electric lighting was discovered inside. For days, wild theories abounded. Was it a Confederate soldier hideout? A stop on the Underground Railroad? A liquor depot for bootleggers? A counterfeiter's lair? Or maybe a secret laboratory for "Dr. Otto von Golph's" experiments?

None of the above.

The Smithsonian Institute's mosquito-expert entomologist, Harrison G. Dyar, let the public spectacle go on for a couple of days before admitting to city newspapers that he himself had dug the tunnels from about 1906 until 1916, at which time he moved away to California. Why? "I did it for exercise," he said, "Digging tunnels after work is my hobby. There's nothing really mysterious about it." (Post, 9/27/24)

Harrison Gray Dyar. Photo from the Washington Post archives.

Dyar told the Washington Star that the urge started when he dug a flowerbed for his wife around 1906. "When I was down perhaps 6 or 7 feet, surrounded only by the damp brown walls of old Mother Earth, I was seized by an undeniable fancy to keep on going."

Sound implausible? Consider that Mr. Dyar's tunnels were not limited to the area surrounding the property he had owned at 1510 21st Street. When he moved to 804 B Street, SW (now Independence Ave.), his digging habit continued. There, his tunnels were equipped with electric lighting, stone stairways, and cement walls, and went as deep as 24 feet. (Post, 3/4/1942)

Consider also that Mr. Dyar's eccentricities didn't end with his tunnel digging:

Midway through his career, Dyar encountered problems in his personal life that had serious effects on his professional life. His marriage to Zella Peabody ended in 1915 amid charges of bigamy, and he was dismissed from the USDA for conduct unbecoming a government employee. It became known that in 1906 Dyar, using the alias Wilfred Allen, had married Wellesca Pollock, an educator and ardent disciple of the Bahá'í faith. They had three sons, whom Dyar legally adopted after he and Allen married legally in 1921.
He became active in the Bahá'í faith, a movement that accepts the divine inspiration of all religions and seeks to reconcile science with religion. Dyar edited Reality, an independent Bahá'í journal, from 1922 until his death, but his unorthodox opinions, voiced in the magazine, were rejected by mainstream Bahá'ís. In Reality Dyar published a fascinating series of short stories replaying central themes in his life—including bigamy.

(For an even deeper look into the craziness of Dyar's personal life, check out this court case filed by his second wife, in which she attempts to divorce the fake husband created to hide her relationship with Dyar: Allen v. Allen, 193 P. 539 (1970).

Of course, Mr. Dyar's story doesn't explain all of the mysteries surrounding the tunnels. Where did the German newspapers dated from 1917 and 1918 come from? What about the liquor bottles? Mr. Dyar told the Post that he didn't know anything about those things, and that he was in California during those years.

Maybe during the early days of WWI, someone read the little news blurb about Harry Wardman's discovery, and bootleggers or German spies actually did move in for a while. Maybe strange old Mr. Dyar's weird life was really hiding a double life as a spy. He certainly had the ability to keep a secret.

The Pelham Courts of Dupont Circle are long gone, and the property now houses the Hotel Palomar. Apparently, the tunnels there have been sealed off in concrete.

The property where Mr. Dyar lived in SW now houses the FAA. There's no telling what they may have done to that labyrinth.

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