In an earlier post (See: V. Everit Macy Grave Site) I mentioned that I had been surprised to find not only that the Speyer grave site was right next to it, but also that I had already taken a picture of it. The gravesite contains the graves of James Speyer, Ellin Prince Speyer (his wife), Herbert Beit von Speyer (his nephew, his obituary can be found here) and Ellin Beit von Speyer (his niece). For more on the Speyer family see here.
One of the reasons I might have missed this grave site may be that back in 2020 when I was last there it didn’t look the way it does now. You can see from this picture that it was rather dirty. The picture at the top of this post shows it as it looks today. It’s obviously been cleaned recently. Another reason might have been that I was rather taken by the impressive carving and didn’t think to look down at the grave.
I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that I’m particularly interested in the Speyer Family because my house is on the site of Waldheim, the mansion built by James Speyer in Briarcliff Manor, NY. I even have some vestiges of former estate buildings in and around my garden (See: Some Ruins). Because of this interest I recently acquired a copy of “The Fall of the House of Speyer. The Story of a Banking Dynasty” by George W. Liebmann. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks interesting. The book sleeve describes it as follows:
The dramatic story of the last fifty years of the Speyer investment banking family, a Jewish family of German descent, is surprisingly little known today, yet at the turn of the twentieth century, Speyer was the third largest investment banking firm in the United States, behind only Morgan and Kuhn, Loeb. It had branches in London, Frankfurt and New York, and the projects it financed included the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Los Angelese Aqueduct, the London Underground, the infrastructure of the new Cuban Republic, and the major railroads of Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and the Philippines. Later, it was the first major banking firm to finance Germany’s Weimar Republic, as well as providing the League of Nations loans to Hungary, Greece and Bulgaria and the newly invented revenue bonds for the Port of New York Authority.
Equally remarkable were the philanthropy achievements of the two brothers who ran the firm – James Speyer in New York and Edgar Speyer in London – and their families. These included sponsorship of the London Proms, the King Edward VII and Poplar Hospitals and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in England; The University Settlement, the Speyer Animal Hospital, the Speyer School for Gifted and Talented Children, the Provident Loan Society and the Museum of the City of New York in the United States and the University of Frankfurt and the sulfa drug research of Paul Ehrlich in Germany.
Yet, the firm was doomed by the nationalist passions aroused by World War I. Its English partner was denaturalised and exiled; its American partner enjoyed reduced standing because of its German ancestry; and the firm’s Frankfurt branch withered from want of capital and closed with the coming of the Third Reich, its German partner fleeing into exile. The firm was dissolved in 1939, just before the outbreak of war, and a surprisingly anticlimactic end to one of the great international banking houses of modern times.
Once I’ve finished it I’ll donate it to the Briarcliff Manor-Scarborough Historical Society.
First three pictures taken with a Sony RX100 M3, fourth picture with a Sony A6000 with Sony E 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 OSS.
