Grantham, a nurse, with whom she occasionally traveled
to Santa Barbara. Colonel Sanger died in 1921, leaving
his sister life residency at the Brooklyn house, where she
continued to oversee a number of social events in the
genteel style expected of her clan. These soirees included
various entertainments given for her two nieces, the colonel’s
daughters, including a reception for the elder, Mary,
when she married in 1923.
Such entertainments would become increasingly rare
on Montague Terrace; the arrival of the subway in 1908
had changed the exclusive character of the Heights, and
listings for furnished apartments in the row opposite the
Sanger House began to appear as early as 1912. Apartment
buildings sprouted up and the grand villas began to
be demolished or cut up into rooming houses. By 1925,
literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote disparagingly of
what he saw as the physical and social decay affecting the
Heights: “The pleasant red and pink brick houses…seem
sunk in a final silence. In the streets one may catch a
glimpse of a solitary well-dressed old gentleman moving
slowly a long way off; but in general, the respectable have
disappeared and only the vulgar survive.”
Miss Sanger surely would have argued otherwise, but she
was an increasingly isolated holdout. When she died in
1932, the house was advertised the following year under
“Rooms for Rent – No Board” as providing “immense
studios, bath, overlooking harbor.” The address was
still thought a respectable one; the Brooklyn Eagle was
happy to report the 1940 betrothal of Miss Eileen Lovett
to Mr. John M. P. Wallach “of 10 Montague Terrace” —
but from the ‘30s through the ‘50s the neighborhood
acquired an air of decline.
Along with this, however, came a new popularity with
artists and writers — particularly those seeking cheap
rents. Opposite 10 Montague, the British poet W.H.
Auden lived at No. 1 Montague Terrace, author Thomas
Wolfe at No. 5 (misidentified as No. 10 in a memoir by
his secretary), and playwright Henry Miller at 92 Remsen
Street. The infamous “February House” stood at 7 Middagh
Street, and Norman Mailer, Marilyn Monroe, Hart
Crane, Truman Capote, Richard Wright, and Gypsy Rose
Lee were among those who frequented or lived in the
neighborhood.
10 Montague itself lays a claim to this era of what Capote
called “splendid contradictions” in the works of George
Cory, a composer who lived in relative obscurity but who
wrote the music for the ballad “I Left My Heart in San
Francisco.” Later made famous by Tony Bennett, the song
was composed in 1953 when Cory lived at 10 Montague
Terrace with his boyfriend Douglass Cross, who wrote
the lyrics. Cory and Cross were desperately unhappy in
Brooklyn and Cory was homesick for life in California.
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