AbandonedNYC
murder
Ghosts of Kreischerville
Kreischer Mansion
At Kreischer Street, Arthur Kill Road verges sharply right and branches into a tangle of dead-ends, hemmed in by woods and wetlands. The route winds into the heart of Charleston, Staten Island, a sensible industrial district given to sudden flights of fancy. Out here, stables and shooting ranges rub elbows with haunted mansions and sunken ships. It’s equal parts Wild West and Gothic Horror.
In this corner of the borough, street names and gravestones echo with the same few family names, but one name—Kreischer—rises above the rest. It’s written on the very building blocks of the oldest structures, etched into the walls of the local tavern and stamped into the sidewalks. Because the town was built of Kreisher bricks, by Kreischer bricks, and for Kreischer bricks. And before it was Charleston, it was Kreischerville.
The Kreischer Fire-Brick Works, pictured in the late 19th century.
Born in a small Bavarian village, Balthasar Kreischer emigrated to New York City in 1836, a year after a great fire destroyed much of Lower Manhattan. He quickly found employment rebuilding the burned district, taking a special interest in the construction of baker’s ovens. With a business partner he opened a brick works on the Lower East Side in 1845. His fire-proof bricks were made to withstand high temperatures in chimneys and furnaces, and required a specific type of raw material known as “fire clay.” Following the discovery of rich clay deposits in southwest Staten Island in the 1850s, he relocated his business to be close to the source.
The new location was a secluded section of the borough called Androvetteville, after a prominent local family. Balthasar bought up the clay pits and the waterfront on which to build his factory, and within a few decades the sleepy community of oystermen and mariners grew into an industrial boomtown, producing 20,000 bricks a day. As the brick works prospered, the neighborhood came to be known as Kreischerville.
A row of worker’s houses sits frozen in time on Kreischer Street
Kreischer took a paternalistic approach to leadership, providing housing for his workers and monetary aid during periods of sickness or financial distress. In return, he expected his employees to maintain appearances, keeping their yards and houses tidy for the benefit of all. Four of the original worker’s houses are still standing today, designated New York City landmarks in 1994. Some appear to be unoccupied, with rusted out cars from a bygone era parked in the driveway. The scene is startlingly out of step with the present, right down to the sidewalks. (They were paved with Kreischer bricks over a century ago.)
Kreischer retired in 1878, ceding control of the company to his three sons. Edward and Charles stayed in Staten Island and a third brother took the helm of the company’s headquarters in Manhattan. Shortly before his death in 1886, Balthasar gifted the town a new church edifice, which is still in existence, and commissioned a pair of mirror-image Victorian mansions on a hilltop overlooking the factory, intended as residences for Charles and Edward. Only Charles’ house remains today—a fire claimed Edward’s in the 1930s.
The church was a gift to the community from Balthasar before his death.
Edward himself met a tragic end in 1894, when he was found dead not far from the factory of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Publicly, his brother George was at a loss for what had led to Edward’s decision. But friends of the deceased told a different story, pointing to friction between the two brothers. After Balthasar’s death, the business was divided equally between his five children, but Charles had moved quickly to acquire a controlling stake in the company by purchasing the interest of his two sisters.
Diminishing returns at Kreischer and Sons may have been another factor. The factory was sold in foreclosure in 1899 and closed in 1906. (Many workers found employment at the nearby Atlantic Terra Cotta Works, outlined in a previous post.) As time wore on, “Kreischerville” was renamed “Charleston” in response to anti-German sentiment during World War I. Nature gradually reclaimed the old clay quarries, transforming them into small ponds which became the namesake of Clay Pit Ponds State Park. Meanwhile, Kreischer House stood watch on Kreischer Hill, becoming a New York City landmark in 1968.
Only one Kreischer Mansion is extant today. Edward’s (on the left) was destroyed by fire.
As the building aged and a gulf of time distanced Edward’s untimely end, the house gradually ripened into the “haunted mansion” it was always destined to be. But it wasn’t until 2005 that its status was cemented into the public consciousness. That year, Kreischer Mansion gained notoriety as the setting of a real-life horror story—a gruesome mob murder perpetrated by none other than the house’s caretaker.
The man was paid $8000 to carry out a Sopranos-style hit of a Bannano crime family associate who’d run afoul of the group. The New York Times reported the grisly details in 2006: “The victim was lured to a secluded landmark, a Victorian mansion on a hilltop on Staten Island, but he proved hard to kill. When an effort to strangle him failed, he was stabbed, then dragged to a nearby pond and drowned. His body was dismembered with hacksaws and incinerated in the mansion’s furnace.”
The drowning actually occurred not in a pond, but in a small reflecting pool in front of the mansion, lined with yellow Kreischer bricks.
Kreischer Mansion
Unaware of the incident, the estate’s owner moved forward with renovations that were already underway at the time of the murder. By the time the F.B.I. got wind of the killing and moved to search the mansion for evidence, the furnace had been replaced. The Ohio-based developer had planned to build a community for the elderly called “Kreischerville” with the mansion as its centerpiece. But the plans were scrapped in 2012 and the property was put on the market for $11.5 million, with the house accounting for $1.6 million of the overall value. The 5-acre property is currently back on the market for $12 million.
For now, the house sits empty as ghost stories swirl around it, concentrating on Edward’s grieving widow, despite the fact that she never actually lived in the house. There are signs that the mansion is starting to embrace its reputation. In 2015, it opened its doors on Halloween night for an interactive theater piece. Last year, the house closed out the first season of a ghost hunting show called “Paranormal Lockdown”. The claims are dubious, but ultimately harmless. After all, a sordid history is a remembered history. Kreischer Mansion may stand for another hundred years, or longer, as one of Staten Island’s most compelling links to its 19th century past.
End of Androvette Street
Murder in Mariner’s Marsh
Mariner’s Marsh, on Staten Island’s North Shore.
At a bend in Staten Island’s North Shore where the Arthur Kill gives way to the Kill van Kull, there’s a strange, desolate landscape that’s equal parts industrial wasteland and pristine wilderness. Here, an array of factories and freight lines are enveloped by a network of streams, swamps, ponds, and salt marshes, with place names like “Howland Hook” and “Old Place Creek” that wouldn’t feel out of place in a pirate story.
Mariner’s Marsh makes up 107 acres of the area, buffering a dense residential neighborhood from the sprawling New York Container Terminal with a wide expanse of green. Having endured a brief period of industrial use followed by 75 years of abandonment, the resulting wilderness is characterized by the vine-covered relics of factories that thrived on the spot 100 years ago. Even the Parks Department’s official signage describes the landscape as “eerie.” But the text rightfully avoids its darkest chapter, when in 1976 the tragic final act of a forbidden teenage love affair played out among the ruins of Mariner’s Marsh.
A trail leads walkers under an old concrete structure.
The ruins date back to the early 20th century, when the land was occupied by the Milliken Brother’s Structural Iron Works. Later, the foundry was converted to Downey’s Shipyard, which manufactured war ships, among other vessels. The factories closed down in the 1940s and have sat abandoned to this day. Wood components of the buildings have completely rotted away, but concrete pylons, pits, and passages remain. As the buildings deteriorated, the landscape transformed. Today, the former shipyard’s ten man-made basins function as reedy freshwater ponds. Elsewhere, the topography varies from pine and poplar forests to vine-gnarled swamps where wildlife and rare plants thrive.
A weathered birdwatching blind.
The requisite creepy doll head.
Mariner’s Marsh was acquired by the Parks Department in 1997, but it’s been “closed to the public during environmental investigation” for nearly a decade. The investigation in question took place in 2006 under the direction of the EPA, which found that a small area of the park contained a high concentration of hazardous materials stemming from its industrial age. Though it appears that some work has been done on the spot, it’s not clear when the park will reopen. In the meantime, warning signs haven’t stopped neighbors and dedicated bird watchers from enjoying it. Trails are well-defined and the area is relatively free of garbage, despite the presence of some larger debris. The east side of Downey Pond is dotted with abandoned hot rods from another era.
One of the park’s many abandoned cars.
An overturned vehicle marooned in a swamp east of Downey Pond.
Long before Staten Island’s industrial boom, the Lenape Indians camped here to take advantage of the nearby wetlands, where shellfish were plentiful. Remnants of the wetlands are still visible across Forest Avenue in Arlington Marsh, which is home to some of the last stretches of healthy salt marsh in New York City. Acquiring it was a major coup for the Parks Department, which plans to keep the 55 acres wild. Here, ghostly remnants of long-forgotten piers and burned out vessels seem oddly in sync with the tidal rhythms of the natural world. At low tide, a boat graveyard comes to the surface in an adjacent cove, where native cordgrass and mussel beds take root in the old hulls of 19th century sailing ships.
An expanse of pilings that once supported massive factory docks.
Oyster beds in the hull of a long-abandoned ship.
Fragment of a sailboat at Arlington Marsh.
This post would’ve ended there if I hadn’t come upon a mention of the 1976 murder of Susan Jacobson in connection with the area. Though the scene of the crime is never referred to as Mariner’s Marsh, the description is unmistakable in a New York Times article published in 2011, which begins:
“The 16-year-old boy had settled on a plan on how to kill his girlfriend. There was a blighted section on the north shore of Staten Island called Port Ivory, overgrown coastline facing the industrial banks of New Jersey. The land was pocked with holes leading to small underground rooms, like bunkers.
This abandoned lot was the last thing a 14-year-old girl named Susan Jacobson ever saw as she climbed down into one of those holes with her boyfriend, Dempsey Hawkins, on May 15, 1976. “
Ruins of a system of rails that closely match a description of the murder site.
Included in the article is a scan of a handwritten letter from Hawkins to the reporter in which he details an idyllic romance with Jacobson that ends abruptly following an abortion. In the final paragraph, he goes on, “In came 1976 and the insanity and the whole painful mess I am about to relate succinctly simply because it’s disturbing. I strangled Susan and concealed her body in a metal barrel in a wooded area across from a Proctor and Gamble factory on Staten Island.”
Two years passed before her remains were discovered by a boy playing in the tunnels. He had assumed they were dog bones until a friend spotted Susan’s tennis shoes. Hawkins, now 55, was denied parole for the eighth time in 2012 despite a history of good behavior behind bars. Parole commissioners have repeatedly taken issue with what occurred immediately after the crime. On multiple occasions, Hawkins himself participated in search parties for the missing girl, knowing all the while precisely where the body was hidden.
Icicles stretch into the darkness of the tunnel as vines spiral toward the light.
An arched passageway near the scene of the crime.
Book-Related Events Coming Up:
Brooklyn Brainery, April 15th 8:30-10:00, $7(Sold Out)- Dead Horse Bay, May 2nd, @ 12:45 I’ll be leading a walking tour of one of my favorite places in NYC with Untapped Cities
- Mid-Manhattan Library, May 7th, 6:30-8:00 PM, Free!
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