Map bounded by Bowling Green Row, Marketfield Street, Beaver Street, William Street, Old Slip, South Street, Whitehall Street, State Street, Plate 1, 1852. William Perris, civil engineer and surveyor. Courtesy New York Public Library.
The name Herman Melville may conjure visions of adventures on the high seas, the “watery part of the world” in the author’s parlance, but Melville was very much a New Yorker for most of his life. He was born Herman Melvill in 1819 in a rooming house at 6 Pearl Street, the third of eight children. The house is long gone, but an illustration of Pearl Street found in D.T. Valentine’s manuals shows the house in 1858. His mother, Maria Gansevoort, had him baptized in the Calvinist Dutch Reformed church she attended. The Gansevoorts were a long-established Dutch family and Maria’s father, Peter Gansevoort, had been a decorated colonel in the Continental Army. In 1777, Peter Gansevoort at the age of only 28, took command of Fort Stanwix and led it through a siege by British forces. It was the only American fort not to surrender to the British during the American Revolution. In 1812, a new fort was named in honor of him, at the foot of today’s Gansevoort Street.
View of Pearl Street looking from State Street, 1858. A. Weingartner’s Lithography, for D.T. Valentine's Manual of 1859. NYC Municipal Library. Herman Melville was born in a rooming house at 6 Pearl Street in 1819, the third of eight children. It still stood in 1858, the 2nd house from the right.
Meville’s father, Alvin Melvill (the family added the “e” after Alvin’s death), was a merchant in the bustling New York-to-Europe trade boom following the War of 1812. Mercantile New York offered great rewards and great risk, and the family fortunes soon rose and fell. Alvin borrowed money heavily from the Gansevoorts for his trading ventures and to raise the family’s standard of living. In quick succession he moved his family to their own house at 55 Cortlandt Street in 1821, then to 33 Bleecker Street in 1824, and then to the fashionable address of 675 Broadway in 1828. There is scant record of this house, but it probably resembled the Merchant’s House Museum, which still stands nearby on East 4th Street. It is hard to over-estimate the exclusiveness of the neighborhood at this time, centered around Lafayette Street, one block over. Their neighbors in the 9th Ward would have included Stuyvesants, Astors, Roosevelts, Delanos, and Vanderbilts.
Record of Assessments, 9th Ward, 1829. NYC Municipal Archives. This assessment (which incorrectly has Allen instead of Alvin Melvill) shows that Alvin did not own his house at 675 Broadway, it was his personal estate that was valued at $4,000. Alvin was living above his means to be close to New York’s gentry.
Melvill was very devoted to his children and especially concerned with giving the boys a good education, but he was financially over-extended—the household was lavish, and they employed many servants. In 1825 Herman attended the New York Male High School and then in 1829 he transferred to the more prestigious Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School. After the last of Herman’s seven siblings was born in 1830, the Gansevoorts cut off Melvill financially. He quickly went bankrupt and was briefly placed in a debtor’s prison. Going into the fur business, he relocated the family to Albany. Enrolled in the Albany Academy, Herman was praised as a bright scholar, but he withdrew in the fall of 1831, perhaps because of the family finances.
South from Maiden Lane, 1828. George Hayward lithographer, for D.T. Valentine’s Manual of 1854. NYC Municipal Library.
“Added to these reminiscences my father, now dead, had several times crossed the Atlantic on business affairs, for he had been an importer in Broad-street. And of winter evenings in New York, by the well-remembered sea-coal fire in old Greenwich-street, he used to tell my brother and me of the monstrous waves at sea, mountain high; of the masts bending like twigs...”
In December 1831, Alvin fell ill with a high fever after traveling in an open carriage during a winter storm and died on January 28, 1832. His death again threw the family into a desperate situation. Oldest son Gansevoort Melvill took over the fur business and Herman, age 14, found a job as a bank clerk. In 1834, Gansevoort took him from the bank to run his fur store, as he could not afford staff, but by 1835 Herman was again able to return to his studies of the classics. The Panic of 1837 shattered the family’s fortunes once again, and Gansevoort filed for bankruptcy. He moved back to New York City to study law and Herman took a job as a schoolteacher for a semester. By 1839, Herman, always entranced by his father’s tales of Europe and stories from relatives who had taken to the sea, decided to ship out. He signed on to the St. Lawrence, a merchant ship out of New York, as a “boy” (an untrained hand) for a voyage to Liverpool and back. This brief introduction to the sea and the experience of the slums of 19th-century England would become the basis of his fourth novel, Redburn: His First Voyage.
Coffee House Slip and New York Coffee House. George Hayward, lithographer for D.T. Valentine’s Manual of 1856. NYC Municipal Library. “...somewhere near ranges of grim-looking warehouses, with rusty iron doors and shutters, and tiled roofs; and old anchors and chain-cables piled on the walk. Old-fashioned coffee-houses, also, much abound in that neighborhood, with sun-burnt sea-captains going in and out, smoking cigars, and talking about Havana, London, and Calcutta.” -Herman Melville, Redburn
Upon his return, Herman again tried teaching but left when the school failed to pay his salary. His eyes turned to the sea once more. Gansevoort suggested he try his hand on a whaler and took him to New Bedford. There they found a whaling boat, the Acushnet, that would take him on as a green hand. They set sail on January 3, 1841, for what could be a four-year voyage. It was not entirely unusual for a young middle-class American man to go to sea and Melville might have been inspired by the memoir Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, which was published in 1840. After hunting whales in the Bahamas and docking in Rio de Janeiro, they rounded Cape Horn and explored the South Pacific. Off the coast of Chile, they met up with a boat from Nantucket, where William Henry Chase gave Melville a copy of his father Owen’s account of the sinking of the ship Essex by a sperm whale.
Peck Slip, New York, 1850. George Hayward lithographer, for D.T. Valentine’s Manual of 1857. NYC Municipal Library.
““Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see? – Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep.” ”
By the summer of 1842, Melville had tired of the whaling life, and he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. For four weeks he lived with a tribe in the Typee Valley on the island of Nukahiva just as it was falling under French rule. The Nuka Hiva still practiced cannibalism, but they treated Melville warmly and he was fascinated by their customs including communal ownership of property. Melville left the island on another whaling boat out of Australia but was thrown in jail in Tahiti for his role in a mutiny. He escaped in short order and wandered the Tahitian islands as a beachcomber until climbing aboard another whaler for a six-month cruise that ended in the Hawaii Islands. There he signed onto a US Navy ship that rounded the Horn again and returned him to Boston in 1844.
He came home bubbling with stories and a changed man. An educated young man from New York’s genteel classes, he had lived and worked amongst common seamen, from all races and parts of the globe, had lived amongst the people of Polynesia and had seen what colonization was doing to their cultures. At the urging of his family, he started writing. He stretched his month on Nukahiva into Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. Although presented as a true memoir, in his romantic retelling the narrator spends four months amongst the cannibals. Gansevoort Melville, by this time a successful orator and lawyer, was on his way to London in the diplomatic service. On the advice of a literary agent, he took Herman’s manuscript to London and arranged for the publication of simultaneous English and American editions of the book in early 1846. Herman Melville became an overnight literary sensation, but his success was soured by the sudden death of Gansevoort in London. Their brother Allen, who had worked with Gansevoort in their firm at 16 Pine Street, now took over as his literary agent.
Record of Assessments, 17th Ward, 1848. NYC Municipal Archives. Herman Melville was able to purchase his and Lizzie’s first house at 103 Fourth Avenue with the proceeds from his first two books.
In 1847, Melville published a sequel, Omoo, which did well enough that he felt confident to marry Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of a prominent Massachusetts Judge, Lemuel Shaw. They started their marriage in New York City, in a house he purchased at 103 Fourth Avenue, valued at $6,000. But after a series of literary gatherings in Pittsfield, Massachusetts with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes, amongst others, they borrowed money from Judge Shaw in 1850 to build their own house there, Arrowhead. By 1850, Melville was already at work on his magnum opus Moby Dick, which he finished at Arrowhead and published in 1851. Hawthorne thought the book showed depths to Melville’s writing not previously displayed, but most reviewers were unkind, and the book was a commercial failure. After his next book Pierre again left reviewers perplexed, some began to question his sanity. After more commercial and critical failures, he published his final book, The Confidence-Man, in 1857 and took off for a tour of Europe and the Holy Land. On his return he tried the lecture circuit and started writing poetry. Finally, in 1863 he swapped his Pittsfield house for his brother’s house at 104 East 26th Street and the Melvilles returned to New York for good.
Fort Gansevoort or old White Fort. George Hayward lithographer, for D.T. Valentine’s Manual of 1850. NYC Municipal Library. Fort Gansevoort, named after Melville’s maternal grand-father Peter Gansevoort, was located by the Hudson River where the Whitney Museum now sits.
In 1866 he found a government job as a customs inspector. Stationed at a dock at the end of Gansevoort Street, he stayed for 19 years, perhaps protected in his position by an admirer of his writing, future president Chester A. Arthur, then a customs official. Melville was honest in his job but suffered from both physical and mental ailments. He had nervous breakdowns, drank heavily, and may have been abusive to his wife Lizzie. In May 1867, Lizzie’s brother arranged for her to leave Melville, but she refused. In September, their son Malcolm, aged 18, went to his bedroom after quarreling with his father and shot himself in the head. Although some contemporaneous accounts reported the death as accidental, the coroner inquest ruled it a suicide. The Melvilles somehow moved on.
Death certificate for Malcolm Melville, 1867. NYC Municipal Archives.
Herman Melville outlived all but one of his siblings. His brother Allan died in 1872, but he would visit with his youngest brother Thomas, a retired ship captain who was now the Governor of the Seaman’s Snug Harbor in Staten Island. Thomas died in 1884, their sister Frances the following year. Around this time, Lizzie received enough of an inheritance that Herman was able finally to retire in 1886. That same year, their remaining son Stanwix died of tuberculosis in San Francisco.
1890 Police Census, 104 E. 26th Street, 11th AD, First ED. NYC Municipal Archives. Herman Melville is shown living with his daughter Elizabeth “Bessie” Melville, wife Elizabeth (curiously called here Emilie although she was known by Lizzie), and presumably an Irish maid, Mary Brennan. Even more curious are the ages given of the occupants, in 1890 Melville would have been 71, not 59 and the rest of the ages of the Melville household all seem to be from ca. 1880 too.
Melville may have found some kind of peace in his final years. He collected artwork, an interest since childhood, visited book shops and joined the New York Society Library. He remained somewhat detached from the world. He apparently never voted, there being no record of him in voter registration books in the Municipal Archives. He showed up in the 1890 census living at home with his wife and their daughter Elizabeth (Bessie), and a single maid. In July 1891, he saw a doctor for trouble with his heart. He died of a heart attack on September 28, 1891, and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. His wife was buried beside him in 1905.
Contrary to some popular belief, the New York Times obituary did not misspell his name, it misspelled the name of what became his most famous book. It reads in its entirety: “Herman Melville died yesterday at his residence, 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, this city, of heart failure, aged seventy-two. He was the author of Typee, Omoo, Mobie Dick, and other sea-faring tales, written in earlier years. He leaves a wife and two daughters, Mrs. M. B. Thomas and Miss Melville.” As embarrassingly brief as this September 29th notice was, it was followed up on October 2nd with a more appreciative article: “There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigor of life that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was but of three or four lines. Yet forty years ago the appearance of a new book by Herman Melville was esteemed a literary event, not only throughout his own country, but so far as the English-speaking race extended.”
Death certificate for Herman Melville, September 28, 1891. NYC Municipal Archives. He was 72 years old, and was listed as being a resident for 28 years at 104 E. 26th Street. Although for most of that time he made his living as a customs inspector, he retired in 1885 and returned to writing, his occupation was given as “Author.”
A century after his birth Melville’s works were rediscovered and in the 1920s a new work, Billy Budd, was published from a manuscript Lizzie had saved in a breadbox. By the 1930s he was part of the American literary canon. So much so that, in 1938, the WPA Federal Writers’ Project book New York Panorama called him a giant along with Walt Whitman: “These men—Whitman and Melville—were of another breed, another stature; and they proclaimed themselves men of Manhattan. They came from the same Dutch-English Stock, bred by that Empire State.... they were archetypes of the city’s character-to-be.”