New York City financier Russell Sage, aka Uncle Russell, had a reputation on Wall Street as being a spendthrift, a workaholic, and a ruthless money lender without emotion. So when he failed to show up at work after offering a $10 reward for the return of his missing cat, his financial cronies thought he’d gone mad.
“Groups of excited men argued on the curbs of Wall and Broad Streets,” one newspaper noted after Russell announced the reward. “He’s sick,” exclaimed one man. “The market will go to pieces,” another bemoaned.
One news reporter snidely noted that the $10 reward would come from Russell Sage’s $80 million rainy-day fund. Another paper pointed out that finding Russell’s cat would be the only way the average citizen could get hold of his money.
Malta, a large Maltese cat that Russell and his wife, Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage, had owned for 12 years, disappeared from their Fifth Avenue home one day in August 1905. Russell grieved deeply, unable to report to his Nassau Street office as he had done every workday for so many years.
Malto and his sibling Melita were gifted to the Sages by a country friend when they were just kittens. For 12 years they had full run of the house, first in their townhouse at 506 5th Avenue, just north of 42nd Street, and then at 632 Fifth Avenue when the Sages moved into that home in 1903.
Although everyone thought that the cats belonged to Margaret, it was Russell who cared for them the most. In fact, one of the few ways that Uncle Russell Sage de-stressed after a long day of work was to play with his two kitties after dinner. So when Malto took to the back fences of Fifth Avenue and didn’t come home within hours as he’d always done, Russell was heartbroken.
Thankfully for Russell and Malta, the grief was short lived. A few days after the cat wandered away, he snuck back into the home through a back door, like a prodigal son. As one newspaper reported, once the cat was safely home again, “an air of peace settled down upon his offices again.”
A Brief History of 632 Fifth Avenue
If you enjoy the history of New York City, you may be interested to learn the history of the Russell Sage home at 632 Fifth Avenue, and of the land that it occupied. Before I get into it, I will tell you that today this site is occupied by the Art Deco brass statue of Atlas at Rockefeller Center, directly across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
The land now occupied by Rockefeller Center was once the site of the Elgin Botanic Garden, the first botanical garden in New York State. The 20-acre gardens were established in 1801 by Dr. David Hosack, Columbia professor of botany (he was also the doctor who attended to Alexander Hamilton after his fatal duel with Aaron Burr). He purchased the land between Middle Road (Fifth Avenue), Sixth Avenue, 47th Street and 51st Street from the city for $4,807.
The gardens featured a conservatory for the preservation of green house plants, two hot-houses, and a pond for aquatic species. The whole establishment was surrounded by trees and shrubs and a 7-foot stone wall.
Ten years after they opened, the gardens were turned over to the Regents of the University (now known as SUNY Board of Regents). They were eventually abandoned and fell into decay. Then in 1814, New York State held a lottery to benefit a number of state colleges. Because Columbia was left out of this lottery, its “consolation prize” was this rural and remote midtown land upon which the college could use for its campus.
“Whoop-de-doo,” was the school’s board of trustees’ initial reaction, not realizing that they were sitting on a gold mine that included the garden as well as 260 building lots.
In October 1816, the trustees agreed to officially take possession of the Botanic Garden. Three years later, Governor DeWitt Clinton and the state legislature permitted the college to lease the former gardens, dropping a requirement that it be a future college site. One of the first leaseholders was a gardener named William Shaw, who leased the land for $400 a year for a period of 21 years.
Over the years, Columbia leased the land to several people, including John Ward and Simeon Draper. By the 1890’s, Columbia’s annual income from the property had soared to more than $280,000 annually. Nice consolation prize.
One of the Fifth Avenue lots on Columbia’s land was leased to an eccentric merchant named Charles “Broadway” Rouss, who had worked his way up from poverty to become the owner of a successful chain of retail stores throughout the United States. From the 1870s until 1902, Rouss made his home on this leasehold, in a four-story brownstone across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Russell Sage Reluctantly Moves
When Rouss died in 1902, he sold the home and lease at 632 Fifth Avenue to Mrs. Jeannette P. Goin, who in turn sold it the Sages for $100,000. Russell Sage was reluctant to leave his old home at 506 5th Avenue, where he had lived for almost 50 years, but Margaret Sage was anxious to move 10 blocks north to escape the hustle and bustle of midtown Manhattan.
I could not find any photographs of the Sage home during the time that the couple lived there, but below are photos of the building in 1914 and 1920, after the building had been expanded (fifth floor added) and renovated into lofts for commercial use.
Russell Sage died in his home at the age of 89 on July 22, 1906. He was buried in a steel, burglar-proof vault in the Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, NY.
Margaret Sage, who was now one of the wealthiest women in the country, sold the lease to Joseph, Inc., a milliner, in 1909 and moved to the former Draper estate at 604 Fifth Avenue. In her last nine years of life, she used her large inheritance (about $75 million) to found and support numerous educational institutions. She died at the age of 90 and was buried in the vault at Oakwood Cemetery.
By the way, you know that consolation prize? Well, in 1931, the Rockefellers became the largest leaseholder of Columbia’s land. In 1985, Columbia sold the 11.7 acres of land under Rockefeller Center to the Rockefeller Group for $400 million.
