The Johnston Brothers Monument

Simply stated, one of the grandest 19th century buildings in Queens is a monument found in First Calvary Cemetery which is dedicated to the Johnston Brothers.

The Johnston Brothers were the proprietors of the J. & C. Johnston company, located ultimately at the corner of Broadway and 22nd Street in Manhattan. They sold lady’s novelties, ribbons, parasols and other fripperies from their prestigious “Ladies’ Mile” location. Ladies’ Mile was anchored on the busy industrial side by Union Square and Tammany Hall, and on the swank side by 23rd Street with its new “department stores.”

Theodore Roosevelt was born a few blocks away from the storefront, and the prestigious townhouses that still line the surrounding area speak to the former exclusivity and standing of the Manhattan neighborhood.

There were three Johnston brothers — John, Robert, and Charles. Charles died in 1864, John in 1887 (possibly of a suicide). Robert — renowned as an unlettered yet expert scholar in the fields of literature, mathematics, and history — was so consumed by grief and longing for his siblings that he lost the family business in 1888 and then retired to a country house at Mount St. Vincent on the Hudson, nearby a convent.

During a later foreclosure on his properties — which he had financially mismanaged due to his grief — a fire broke out at the country house and nearly claimed Robert’s life.

In the end he was found dying of pneumonia, and suffering from madness, in a Riverdale barn.

Like other immigrant industrialists and mercantile princes, the Johnstons often reached out to contacts in their country of origin to recruit trustworthy laborers. Robert’s name appears as the principal donor to The Fermangh Relief Society, offering to aid deserving persons in destitute circumstance with the costs of emigration and freedom from the terror of their foreign landlords.

The Johnstons were also Tammany men.

Such is the story of the storied and somewhat forgotten Johnston Brothers who lie in the grandest of all the mausoleums in the Calvary Cemetery. The Johnston store would have been in the building that currently houses “Restoration Hardware” across the street from the Flatiron (or Fuller Brush) Building.

The largest funerary structure in First Calvary Cemetery was erected in 1873, and cost an outlandish $200,000.

That’s $200,000 in 1873 dollars, mind you.

According to an online tool designed to calculate monetary inflation over time, $200,000 1873 dollars would be worth just shy of $4,000,000 today.

A shattered white bronze gate adorns the entrance to the vault, a doorway which is blocked by a large and roughly hewn block of marble. This is one tomb not intended for the inspection of passerby, unfortunately. The quality of the external sculptural elements speak to a high level of craftsmanship and developed skill, but the identity of the tomb’s architect and artisans eludes.

One can only imagine what splendors adorn the central cavity of the building, wherein lie the brothers.

Newtown Creek Alliance Historian Mitch Waxman lives in Astoria and blogs at Newtown Pentacle.