{"id":4068,"date":"2015-07-01T06:38:04","date_gmt":"2015-07-01T12:38:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/?p=4068"},"modified":"2023-09-01T17:38:14","modified_gmt":"2023-09-01T23:38:14","slug":"eloise-lawrence-breese-bachelorette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/eloise-lawrence-breese-bachelorette-4068.htm","title":{"rendered":"Eloise Lawrence Breese, Bachelorette"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Eloise<\/a>There were two Eloise Breeses, an aunt and a niece, and they were conflated both by the newspapers and by researches on the internet. I think I have disentangled them.<\/p>\n

\"Eloise<\/a><\/p>\n

Eloise Lawrence Breese (1857-1921), usually known as E. L. Breese, was the daughter of Josiah Salisbury\u00a0 Breese (1812-1865) \u00a0and Augusta Eloise Lawrence (1828-1907). Eloise was the seventh cousin three times removed of my wife.<\/p>\n

She had a 9 bedroom house, Nundao<\/em>, in Tuxedo Park. This<\/p>\n

summer cottage in Tuxedo Park faces Tuxedo Lake and is directly across from her brother James Lawrence Breese’s large Tudor Style home that fronted the lake. \u00a0James was as engineer befriended\u00a0Stanford White, yet his true passion was photography. It is believed James introduced Eloise to the Architectural firm of Mckim, Mead & White to design her summer cottage in 1889\u00a0and Mead and Taft constructed it.\u00a0The\u00a0\u00a02 1\/2 story cottage has an interesting combination of roof styles, including a Queen Anne Tower.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Eloise<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Eloise<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Eloise<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In Tuxedo Park her French car made on the news in June, 1904.\u00a0\u00a0 Her chauffeur drove her and five friends around the countryside. They were driving up a hill when a boy, Joseph Mutzs, came over the hill on his bicycle and started making wide swerves. The driver tried to avoid him, but they collided and the boy was killed. The chauffeur took the body to the police. The police chief<\/p>\n

told Miss Breese to leave at once, as the friends of the Italian boy might get excited when they heard of the accident and, in spite of the fact that it was the lad\u2019s own fault, make some kind of demonstration. Miss Breese took the advice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She was known as a bachelorette. She was the only female member of the New York Yacht Club. Her steam yacht, the Elsa, had a swan shaped prow, like the boat in Lohengrin, because Eloise was also a devotee of the opera. She sailed the\u00a0Elsa<\/em>\u00a0to Newport to participate in the July 30, 1901 harbor fete in honor of the North Atlantic squadron.\u00a0 Admiral Higginson\u2019s fleet was assembled in the harbor and a full day of activities\u2014including a exhibition of the submarine torpedo boat\u00a0Holland<\/em>\u2014was planned.<\/p>\n

Her box was number 45 at the old Metropolitan Opera.\"Old<\/p>\n

\"Old<\/a><\/p>\n

(I was there once, for a Go0d Friday performance of Parzifal (1966?) with James Ramsey. We had seats with les dieux<\/em> (it has a ruder name); I could see\u00a0some<\/em> of\u00a0the stage, and could also see the light bulb in the chalice when it was raised. But the music was great.)<\/p>\n

Her town house was at 35 East Twenty-Second Street.\u00a0There she had a long-standing conflict with a neighbor at No 33.<\/p>\n

The unmarried Eloise-she preferred that the press referred to her as Miss E. L. Breese-inherited her mother’s unconventional Independence and was a true socialite that entertained lavishly, often arranging concerts in her Tuxedo Park ballroom. Her fashions of the time were also rather scandalous as she preferred off the shoulder evening gowns with plunging necklines, the french fashion was shocking\u00a0 to most Victorian minds.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Elizabeth B. Grannis, a self-appointed combatant against sin.\u00a0 Mrs. Grannis was president of the Woman\u2019s Social Purity League as well as president of the National League for the Protection of Purity.\u00a0 In December 1894 her search for sin would place her squarely in the social territory of Eloise Breese.<\/p>\n

The Evening World<\/em>\u00a0reported on December 1, 1894 that Mrs. Grannis lately \u201chas been engaged in seeing for herself just how wicked New York really is.\u201d\u00a0 Having visited (escorted by her brother, Dr. Bartlett) \u201cnearly all the dance and concert halls, theatres, joints, missions and dives in this city,\u201d she turned her focus to the Metropolitan Opera and its wealthy patrons.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Grannis took an\u00a0Evening World<\/em>\u00a0reporter in tow and explained the Purity League\u2019s plans to abolish the d\u00e9collet\u00e9 dress.\u00a0 \u201cWhat we want to do is to call public attention to the evil, and by this means to shame people into dressing differently.\u201d\u00a0 She admitted,when the reporter said that judging from the Metropolitan audience \u201cMrs. Grannis\u2019s idea cannot be said to have borne much fruit,\u201d that it would take time.\u00a0 She blamed the absence of social purity on two forces.\u00a0 \u201cOne reason is the d\u00e9collet\u00e9 dress; the other and greater is the round dance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mrs. Grannis approved of \u201ca modest square dance like the lanciers or the minuet,\u201d but waltzing \u201cand every other form of round dance is, per se, sinful.\u201d<\/p>\n

The equally strong-minded Eloise Breese disagreed.\u00a0 And the two women would make their differences known repeatedly.\u00a0\u00a0 While the social reformer railed against the high fashion of the young socialite and her wealthy friends, Eloise frequently complained to authorities about \u201csmells\u201d coming from the Grannis home.<\/p>\n

In 1902 Eloise L. Breese had had enough of her pious next-door neighbor and she purchased the Grannis house \u201cwith the understanding that it was to be pulled down,\u201d said\u00a0The Sun<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 But she had second thoughts and once the social reformer had moved out \u201cthe temple of social reform and universal peace has been turned into a boarding house,\u201d reported the newspaper later.<\/p>\n

The rooms where Mrs. Grannis had held meetings of other virtuous women and church leaders were now decorated by Eloise \u201cin the highest form of boarding-house art with bows and arrows of primitive peoples and the heads of savages in war paint.\u201d<\/p>\n

But she wasn\u2019t done yet.<\/p>\n

In May 1903 Eloise sued Elizabeth Grannis for $249 saying that \u201cwhen she moved out, [she] took with her a bathtub and the chandeliers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mrs. Grannis appeared baffled and unruffled.\u00a0 \u201cHow silly,\u201d she told reporters.\u00a0 \u201cThink of going to court for just one little bathtub.\u00a0 It is my personal, individual tub.\u00a0 Of course I took it with me.\u00a0 I told\u00a0 them I was going to, but offered to sell it to them with the chandeliers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reformer complained that the Breese family had always been a problem.\u00a0 \u201cWhat a flibberty-gibberty commotion it is.\u00a0 I lived beside the Breeses eighteen years and never met them, but they were forever sending in to complain of smells they thought they smelled and to see if there wasn\u2019t a fire or a leak or something in my house.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The town house does not survive, but the carriage house that Eloise built exists in a glorified state.<\/p>\n

\"Eloise<\/a><\/p>\n

150 East 22nd Street<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

She married late, in 1907 when she was fifty, to Adam Gorman Norrie, a widower.<\/p>\n

Her nephew, William Lawrence Breese, had become a naturalized British subject and died in battle in 1915. She gave an ambulance in his memory.<\/p>\n

\"Eloise<\/a><\/p>\n

She made an important bequest to the Metropolitan Museum:<\/p>\n

Upon her death on January 28, 1921 she added significantly to the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by bequeathing two important paintings, one by Rousseau and another by Corot (his \u201cThe Wheelwright\u2019s Yard on the Bank of the Seine\u201d).\u00a0 Even more importantly, she left the museum the incomparable 17th<\/sup>\u00a0century Audenarde tapestries representing the history of the Sabines.<\/p>\n

\"Eloise<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Wheelwright\u2019s Yard on the Bank of the Seine<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There were two Eloise Breeses, an aunt and a niece, and they were conflated both by the newspapers and by researches on the internet. I think I have disentangled them. Eloise Lawrence Breese (1857-1921), usually known as E. L. Breese, was the daughter of Josiah Salisbury\u00a0 Breese (1812-1865) \u00a0and Augusta Eloise Lawrence (1828-1907). Eloise was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[803],"tags":[1086,1187,1087],"class_list":["post-4068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lawrence-family","tag-eloise-lawrence-breese","tag-genealogy","tag-mrs-grannis","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4068"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4226,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4068\/revisions\/4226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}