Jackson Heights Life

Memories of a mansion: Meet to lament loss of home in Jackson Heights
BY Nicholas Hirshon
DAILY NEWS WRITER

Friday, August 26th 2011, 4:00 AM

 
Todd Maisel/NewsSusan Smolin and Peter Mariotti spent yesterday poring over photos and floorplans of a mansion (below) at 74th St. and 34th Ave., recently demolished to make way for a junior high school. On the buffet line at a bustling Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights, Susan Smolin and Peter Mariotti walked past trays of tandoori chicken and samosas, smiling and laughing.

Sitting at their table minutes later, they pored over photos of a fallen friend and swapped memories.

"Do you remember the bathrooms?" Mariotti asked Smolin, describing elaborate tile murals of flamingos and ships. "Spectacular bathrooms!"

Smolin responded with a grin, "We weren't allowed to go into the bathrooms!"

They were talking yesterday as if at the wake for a mansion at 74th St. and 34th Ave., recently demolished to make way for a junior high school.

The lunch seemed cathartic for Smolin, whose relatives lived in the home during her childhood, and Mariotti, who long dreamed of making the house his own.

Mariotti, 68, agreed to purchase the home for about $1.8million in 2007, hoping to preserve it. But a confusing series of events put it in city hands instead.

Smolin's family, meanwhile, didn't know the home was endangered until reading a Daily News article in June.

But Smolin, 62, is clearly interested in the mansion's history: She drove two hours yesterday from her home in Pennington, N.J. - partly in the rain - to learn of its downfall from Mariotti.

The neo-Tudor home was erected in 1941 and 1942 for Smolin's great-uncle, Dr. Tobias Watson, and his wife, Lillian, who wrote a fairly successful etiquette book.

As a child, Smolin packed into the basement of the grand house with relatives to watch the Watsons' slideshows of trips across Africa, Europe and Russia.

She described Lillian as aloof and snooty - so much that she didn't allow Smolin and her young siblings and cousins into those fancy bathrooms.

Mariotti hung on every word.

He had placed only one condition on their meeting. He did not want to go by the vacant lot where the mansion had stood, fearing an onset of emotional pain.

"I'm angry at how beautiful things are treated," he said.

For Smolin and her relatives, the destruction of the house has had some positive impact, drawing relatives who had fallen out of touch back into contact.

Smolin's cousin, Alan Eichler, said he was sad the family did not organize a few years earlier and help Mariotti.

"I didn't know anything about the house being in danger," said Eichler, who was delivered by Dr. Watson at a hospital that once stood across the street from the mansion.

At the restaurant yesterday, Mariotti gave Smolin his copies of the home's original blueprints and negatives of photos he took there between 1997 and 2006.

He groaned that he wanted to get rid of them, anyway.

"It's a period of my life that's finished and over," Mariotti said. "I can put it to bed and, hopefully not think about it anymore



Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/queens/2011/08/26/2011-08-26_memories_of_a_mansion_two_meet_to_lament_loss_of_home_in_jackson_heights.html#ixzz1W9jnvzgE

I graduated from 145 (Joseph Pulitzer JH) in 1958.  Then we moved out to L.I. and I began the 10th grade at Syosset High School.

One other interesting thing is Aunt Lillian (who was my father's sister) was the daughter of Hungarian immigrants and grew up over my grandfather's cigar factory in East Harlem, alongside the Third Ave. "el" train.   She worked her way through college and became a very successful writer, back in the 20's when women were still new at careers.  She married Tobias Watson and together they built their "dream" mansion in Jackson Heights, across from his hospital, where they lived an elegant lifestyle.  The office for his private practice was also part of the house, with a separate street entrance.  He kept an office nurse on duty, complete with white starched uniform and cap.  As a child, whenever I visited the home, I was always intrigued by the private doorway that would lead from the main house into the doctor's office.   A local pediatrician, Dr. Borah, also shared the office and was my family doctor.