The Loudest Quiet Block on the Upper West Side

By Yvonne Vávra

The block on Riverside Drive between 105th and 106th streets is a place where not much happens. My ears didn’t quite know what to do with all that quiet. They clung to the sound of only four cars that passed during the half hour I spent there, as reassurance that the city was still out there, breathing.

It’s the perfect place for Shinran Shonin to keep watch. He was a Buddhist monk who lived in the 12th and 13th centuries and is regarded as the founder of Shin Buddhism. Today, as a 15-foot bronze statue, he stands on the stoop of the New York Buddhist Church, and he absolutely deserves the peacefulness that surrounds him. Because, in bronze, Shinran has seen a lot. He has witnessed one of history’s darkest days: the first nuclear attack on August 6, 1945.

He stood outside a temple on a hill overlooking Hiroshima when the bomb detonated just a mile and a half away. The statue witnessed the blast at close range, well within the zone of destruction. Yet miraculously, it remained intact. A few red streaks on Shinran’s robe are the only visible signs of what he has been through.

The people of Hiroshima sent the statue to New York in the 1950s, hoping to offer it to the United Nations as a gesture of peace. But the UN couldn’t accommodate it, and that’s how Shinran found his way onto the stoop of the New York Buddhist Church and became an Upper West Sider.

After spending some time on the block on the anniversary of the nuclear attack—and then even more time digging through everything the internet knows about this row of townhouses—I discovered that Shinran’s block isn’t as serene as it seems. Not even close. He’s probably listening all day to the wild stories the walls around him have to tell. A lot went down behind these beautiful façades.

Next to the New York Buddhist Church stands 330 Riverside Drive, a stunning corner mansion that was once home to the baking powder king, Robert Benson Davis. You probably have one of his red-and-yellow cans in your kitchen cabinet. When Robert was in his forties and Parisian-mansion-on-Riverside-Drive rich, he decided it was time to marry and chose a teenager, Jennie Weed, as his bride.

At the turn of the century, they moved into the mansion, and who knows if they ever had any good times there together. What we do know, according to historian and Upper West Side expert Tom Miller, is that Jennie had her eyes on the baking powder fortune. When Robert reached his sixties, she tried to have him declared insane. A few years later, when he fell ill, she attempted to take control of both him and his company. As Robert told a divorce judge in 1911, Jennie had usurped his business and locked him up in his fourth-floor bedroom under the watch of nurses.

Not with the baking powder king! From his window, he dropped a letter addressed to a friend, hoping someone would find and deliver it. And someone actually did. The friend sent a car to the mansion, where the nearly 70-year-old waited for servants to clear the dishes from his room so he could make his grand escape disguised as a physician.

The story ends with Jennie dying unexpectedly in 1915, five years before her husband, who was thirty years her senior. She didn’t live to inherit a single cent of the baking powder fortune. Both of their funerals were held in the mansion.

Then there’s the story of Bennie the Bum and his sawed-off leg. He lost it two houses to Shinran’s right, at 334 Riverside Drive. Well, actually, he lost not one but two legs. Upper West Sider Daniel J. Wakin wrote a whole book about it that also tells all the other stories this block holds.

So, in 1934, Bennie the Bum, or Bernard McMahon, was one of the masterminds behind the largest armored car heist the U.S. had ever seen. The gang included men with nicknames like Fats, One Arm, and Angel Face, and their plan was to rob an armored money transporter at the Rubel Ice Corporation in Brooklyn, near Gravesend Bay, and escape by boat. And that’s exactly what they did, making off with $427,950 in cash.

But on the boat, Bennie the Bum accidentally shot himself in the left knee with a shotgun. The gang brought him to 334 Riverside Drive, then a seedy rooming house, where an “underworld surgeon,” as Wakin writes, amputated his leg. But Bennie had lost too much blood and died. What to do? Where to put him? In a steamer trunk, naturally. But the body didn’t fit, so the surgeon sawed off Bennie’s right leg too.

There are so many more stories. Duke Ellington’s family also lived on the block, as did Shakespearean actress Julia Marlowe and Marion Davies, movie starlet and mistress of publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst. The Fabers of No. 2 pencil fame lived at No. 335, and No. 334, where Bennie lost his legs, was originally home to Jokichi Takamine, a Japanese chemist who made a breakthrough in medicine by isolating and purifying adrenaline.

And here is Shinran at No. 332, a survivor of Hiroshima, with scars of mass destruction, now living among stories of ambition and scandal, tragedy and comedy, genius and crime. He watches over a place that is not quiet at all, but full of humanity and very much alive. The next time I visit him, my ears won’t be fooled by the silence. This block is breathing loudly.

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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