Dr Lewis A W Alleman - One More on Morton Manor

In the previous post, we mentioned that a large parcel of land that came to be known as Morton Manor was the sole remnant of an estate that remained intact during the development that occurred on the Willets Farm in the 1920s and 1930s. It is also the reason why Oak St. is a dead-end road that does not run through to Maplewood St. The estate once belonged to one of the most prominent opthamologists in the country, Dr. Lewis Arthur Welles Alleman (left).

Dr. Alleman a native of Geneva, NY in Seneca County, was born in 1862 during the Civil War to the son of a Union army surgeon. In 1888 he received a medical degree from Jefferson Medical College (now part of Thomas Jefferson University) in Philadelphia and soon after moved to Brooklyn and opened up a practice that specialized in opthamology.

He then went on to publish numerous articles in medical journals and wrote a book entitled Optics as Related to Evolution (D. Appleton, 1891). Among his many achievments, he refined and patented a medical instument called an opthalmo-dynamometer (below) that measures the strength and behavior of eye muscles during convergence.

That same year he married Miss Frances Dudley, a descendant of Thomas Dudley, co-founder of Harvard College and former Governor of the Massachussetts Bay Colony. In 1892 he became chairman of the eye dept. at Long Island Medical College in Brooklyn (now part of SUNY Downstate).

Though his primary residence was in Brooklyn and he retained a summer residence in Seneca County, as can be seen from the 1906 E. Belcher Hyde map (below), he purchased a house and a parcel of land on Maple Ave. (now Maplewood Ave), just south of Hempstead Turnpike. Though it is unclear how extensively Alleman and his family lived at their country place in Hempstead, given the fact that his two daughters, Marion and Elizabeth, attended St. Mary's School for Girls in nearby Garden City, they must have spent some time there.

According to the Nassau County property records, their home (below) was built in 1888.
















Then, in 1908, we find the following notice below in the July 2 edition of the Hempstead Sentinel:

Dr. Alleman eventually moved back to Geneva and, after suffering from an illness, died at the young age of 56. His only son, Dudley (d. 1966), was a WWI veteran who was an ambulance driver and was injured in combat. He eventually married and moved to Massachussetts. Dudley had a daughter, Frances D. A. Luce (d. 2001), who became a prominent child psychologist in Boston. Her son, Jim Luce, is founder and president of Orphans International Worldwide.

The new owner of the property on Maple Ave, Henry Rickmeyer, moved the home just to the north to its present location, and by that fall, moved in with the rest of his family. It wasn't until the early 1950s that the rear of their property was subdivided and the homes built around the Oak St. cul-de-sac.

Morton Manor II and the WH-Trump Connection

As a follow up to a previous post, the two photos above compare a then and now look of Oak St. in the Morton Manor section of West Hempstead, looking west from the intersection of Morton Ave. The "then" shot c. 1928 comes from an advertisement in the Brooklyn Eagle by Preferred Homes, Inc. who purchased lots at auction and then began building houses on neatly arranged 40x100 plots of land. The sellers touted the prime location of the development, a mere stones-throw away from West Hempstead's brand new LIRR station aside a newly electrified line that offered daily service to NYC. Single family 3 bedroom houses went on the market in July 1928 with a price tag of $7,350 ($4,750 down), and after three months, 40 homes had been sold. By October 1929, around 70 had been sold.

Then, in the Fall of that year, the stock market crashed.

Banks went under, credit dried up and people lost their jobs. The Great Depression was well under way and the nation would suffer its effects for the next decade. By the following year, Preferred Homes, Inc. had only 10 homes remaining on the market but understandably had a heck of a time finding buyers. Their answer was to resort to sales gimmicks, such as offering a Chrysler automobile with every remaining home sold.

As the Great Depression wore on, many of the original homebuyers in the Morton Manor development lost their homes to foreclosure. In 1934, the federal government created the Federal Housing Administration to help out the lagging housing market by facilitating more favorable lending terms to home buyers and by insuring the mortgages. In those very early days of the FHA, one of the companies that took advantage of this new entity was a firm called Metropolitan Investors, that proceeded to rehabilitate the homes and put them back on the market. By November, 1935, the New York Times reported that Metropolitan Investors had sold all but three of the homes that they renovated. Credit for the success of this transaction can be given to the head of the company, a young, enterprising 30 year-old real estate developer from Woodhaven named Fred C. Trump. His keen eye for a good business deal would eventually make him one of the wealthiest real estate moguls in the New York area, and would pave the road for the success of his famous son, Donald J. Trump.

The images above show a block that has been left relatively unchanged for over 80 years. Oak St. is curiously the only block in the development that does not run through to Maplewood but terminates as a dead-end. That's because the cul-de-sac portion of the block was once the location of a large property called "Morton Manor" that was not subdivided until around 1950.

More about the original Morton Manor property will come in a follow up post.

The Rasweiler Farm in Dogwood

The 1949 photo above is of a West Hempstead farmer named George Rasweiler who, along with his brothers, ran a large farm in the Dogwood section of WH & Malverne. They inherited the farm from their father John Jacob Rasweiler who immigrated from Germany. The photo most likely looks north, with Dogwood Ave along the right side of the image and it was part of a feature article in the New York Times about how some Long Island farmers were unaffected by a severe drought that plagued farmers in 1949. These farmers, the Rasweilers included, learned how to tap into Long Island's seemingly boundless water table by installing hydraulic well-water pumps on their property which fed into their spray pipes.

The Rasweiler family literally planted roots straddling three local communities - West Hempstead, Malverne and Franklin Square. When Robert Moses laid out the meandering route for the Southern State Parkway through south shore farmland in 1927, most farmers accepted the state's offer for compensation; but not the Rasweilers. In The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro's seminal book on the life of Robert Moses and the alleged strong-arm tactics he used to accomplish his massive civil works projects, the author relates a fascinating account of the confrontation he had with the Rasweilers. As retold by one of John Jacob's sons, Phillip, the family had just spent enormous effort clearing a part of their property to make it suitable for farming, when along came Moses and his men with his proposal for a highway through that property and threatening a defiant John Jacob with eminent domain. A subsequent visit by state surveyors ended up with John Jacob chasing them off his farm with a shotgun. The Southern State was eventually built, effectively splitting the Rasweiler farm in two.

The Rasweilers farmed in WH for another 23 years before selling their land, along with four other local farm owners, to developer Emil Morton in 1950. Morton then went on to build a massive 700-home, post-war development along Dogwood Ave., which also included the shopping center below that still serves as the major business cluster for the Dogwood section of WH and Morton neighborhood of Franklin Square (Best Yet is now the anchor supermarket where Food Fair is shown in the picture) .

The Rasweiler farm was developed as Dogwood Park and the photo below, taken at the corner of Willow Ave., approximates the scene depicted at the top of this blog post.
The Rasweiler legacy in WH & Franklin Square includes the name of Rasweiler Blvd. and their old hundred year-old farm house, which still stands at the corner of their namesake street and Dogwood Ave, shown below.
A couple months ago, Warren Rasweiler, a life-long resident of Malverne and a member of the Malverne Volunteer Fire Dept. for an astonishing 71 years, passed away at age 89. He was, I believe, a grandson of John Jacob Rasweiler. May his memory be for a blessing.

The Willets Homestead and Morton Manor

The photo to the left, which appeared in the late 1920s edition of the Brooklyn Eagle, is of Willets Avenue in West Hempstead, looking east, with a row of freshly built homes. The name Willets is one of the earliest and most popular surnames throughout Long Island. Anyone who does a little driving around the Island (or listens to traffic reports) has no doubt come across references to I U Willets Rd, or Old Willets Path or Willets Point in Queens.


Here's what I've been able to uncover about the namesake of West Hempstead's Willets Avenue. We pick up the story with a Platt Willets, who moved to from Huntington to Hempstead in 1805 and established a tannery there. Platt Willets acquired his given name probably to honor his mother's family, Mary (Platt) Willets, whose great, great grandfather, Isaac Platt, was among the very first English settlers of Huntington in the 1660s, and Isaac's father, Richard Platt, was counted among the pioneer settlers of New Haven in 1639.

Platt Willets was a prominent citizen who served as Hempstead Town Clerk in 1817-1818 and was elected Queens County Treasurer in 1836. One of his sons, George Willets, was born in 1820 who went on to become a liquor dealer in Hempstead. George was a defendant in a court case in 1873 that went all the way to the NY State Court of Appeals. The case involved an acquaintance from Hempstead, a scam artist who arranged the sale and delivery of 5 barrels of whiskey from a distillery in Brooklyn. The barrels arrived via the LIRR and, Willets, thinking the acquaintance was an agent of the distillery, met him at the station and paid him for the sale. When the distillery sent Willets a fresh invoice for the goods, George refused to pay, claiming that the agent already collected the payment. By that time, the scam artist skipped town and the distillery promptly sued Willets. The court ultimately held Willets liable for payment, invoking the principle of caveat emptor.

George was married in 1846 to Phoebe Gildersleeve. Some time after he married, he purchased a farm just west of Hempstead Village, on the south side of the Hempstead & Jamaica Plank Road.

In 1852, they had a son, Sylvester Woodbridge, the same year that Platt Willets died. Sylvester was ostensibly named after the Rev. Sylvester Woodbridge Jr. , minister of St. George's church who officiated at his parents' wedding. Sylvester became a stone mason and feed dealer in Hempstead. At one time he was a foreman in the Hempstead Fire Dept. He was also a director in the Hempstead & Jamaica Plank Road Co., as was his father. (The Hempstead & Jamaica Plank Road, now Hempstead Turnpike, was a private toll road until it was purchased by Queens County in the 1895. The easternmost toll house on the road was located in West Hempstead, approximately across the street from when the WH Fire house is now located). He also served as president of the Hempstead Rod & Gun Club.

When George died in 1892, Sylvester inherited the farm in West Hempstead. The farm was bounded by Hempstead Tpke to the North, Hempstead Ave to the south, and Maple Ave (Maplewood) and Westminster Rd. to the west and east, respectively. Some time in the early 20s, Sylvester sold the farm to a developer who laid out streets for a planned community called "Morton Manor". One of the streets would be called Morton Ave. Another street, Willets Ave., paid tribute to the original owner of the property. Shortly after the streets were platted the property went into foreclosure and the plots auctioned in 1925. Preferred Homes, Inc. then built the homes shown in the photo above. In the '30s the depression took a big toll on property values, as homes that were originally built to sell at close to $8,000 were being liquidated at half that amount.



To the left is a "now" shot of the same view at the top of the post. Note the same tree in front of the second home and its growth over an 80 year span. Aside from the trees, as you can see, not much has changed on this block.