Walkabout: The Amazing Professor Mac Levy, Part 6

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 of this story.

We Americans love “Trials of the Century.” From time to time, heinous crimes are committed that cause the entire country to sit up and take notice of the deeds of a notorious criminal, usually a murderer or a thief of enormous proportions.

Those trials are hyped up in the papers and media, and usually by the time the case actually comes to the trial phase, rare is the person who doesn’t already know every detail of the crime and the criminal already. Such was the case in 1903 when the murder case against William Hooper Young took place.

He was accused of killing a pretty young woman of dubious reputation in 1902. Her name was Anna Pulitzer. It was said that he picked her up on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, took her back to his father’s apartment near the Plaza Hotel, and killed her.

He then took the body out of the apartment in a trunk, rented a horse and wagon, and dumped her body into the Hudson River in New Jersey. Her body washed ashore a couple of days later.

The motive seemed unclear until it was revealed that William Hooper Young was the black sheep grandson of the late Brigham Young, the powerful Mormon leader who founded Salt Lake City. The Mormons were a secretive and mysterious group, as far as much of America was concerned.

They had a long history of persecution and death that ran from NY State, where they were founded, across the country to their haven in Utah. Up until it was outlawed, and even beyond, they practiced polygamy, which both repelled and fascinated Americans. They were also insular and as a group, extremely rich.

William Hooper Young was the son of Brigham Young’s second son, John. John had taken three wives, and William was the son of his first wife, which would have made him quite important in the family.

But his mother had left her husband after he took two more wives, and she raised her son hating her husband and her faith. William grew up estranged from his father, something he tried his entire life to make up for. He left his mother and spent a great deal of his teen years following his father around to Europe and New York, trying to fit into the mold his father wanted him to fit. It never worked.

He was a failure in business, he wasn’t a good Mormon; he chain smoked, drank and womanized, and lived it up on the family wealth. His father allowed him to stay in the suite of apartments he rented in Manhattan, but then cut him off, and gave no other financial support. After a failed stint as a newspaper owner, William decided to open a physical fitness center.

He took a job with Professor Mac Levy, Brooklyn’s most successful physical culturist. Levy had a series of gyms and health clubs in Brooklyn and Long Island, and had become famous for his methods of teaching swimming. He also was a tireless self-promoter and an advocate for exercise and good dietary habits. He had quite a roster of important and well-to-do clients.

Young worked for the Professor for a number of months, ostensibly to learn the business. He became friends with Mac Levy, who had taken the young man under his wing, and was teaching him the business. Unfortunately, Young had a short attention span, and had started to drift away from the good influences of his mentor when he killed Anna Pulitzer.

When the police captured Young, Mac Levy was called in to identify him. This identification thrust Mac Levy into the spotlight in the young century’s first “Crime of the Century.” Even for a dedicated self-promoter like the Professor, this was a dubious kind of publicity.

But on the eve of the trial, all the witnesses disappeared. The press said they were frightened off or paid off by the powerful Mormon Church, which had rallied behind the wayward grandson of their greatest leader.

They talked of “blood atonement” and other conspiracy theories as to the reason for the murder, and the fact that the Mormons would never let New York hang William Young.

Even the brave Mac Levy had disappeared, the man who had singlehandedly beaten up two muggers who tried to rob him one New Year’s Day in Brooklyn. Even Mac Levy was running scared.

But Levy wasn’t the only one running scared. The trial had taken its toll on William Young. Had this happened today, he might have gotten off by pleading insanity. He really wasn’t stable, he was bi-polar at best, and definitely had issues of a psychological nature.

But even he could see it was a lost cause. There was just too much evidence as to his guilt, so halfway through the trial; he changed his plea to guilty. The judge sentenced him to life in prison.

William Young spent the first years of his incarceration at Sing Sing. In 1915, his name turned up in the papers for the first time in a decade. Now 44, William Young had written a winning essay given by the prison on the subject of a morality play put on by the prisoners.

Young’s essay won a $100 prize, which he donated to the prison’s Golden Rule Brotherhood, which helped released prisoners get jobs in the outside world.

By 1921, William Hooper Young had spent 18 years in prison, at Sing Sing and also at Dannamora and Great Meadow prisons. He was paroled that year, and disappeared from history, and was never heard of again.

Not so his mentor, Professor Mac Levy. He came back to New York during the trial, but was never called as a witness. After his name disappeared from the press in connection to the Young trial, it remained because of the expansion of his business.

His was the Bally’s Fitness Center, the New York Sports Club and the Crunch Gym of his day. By 1905, Mac Levy was looking for investors. He placed a very long ad in the New York Sun and other papers looking for people to help him buy real estate in order to open more facilities.

He had his gym and spa facilities in the Hotel St. George, where he had the pool. He also ran summer facilities at Steeplechase Park in Coney Island and the Hotel Averne, in Averne-By-the-Sea, on Long Island.

He had a separate Mac Levy Gymnasium Equipment Company, which manufactured gym equipment, which was sold all across the country, and he had a brisk mail order company, through which he sold his books, diet plans, fitness plans and other health and fitness publications.

By that time, Mac Levy also had purchased the old Kings County Wheelmen’s clubhouse next door to the Union League Club on Bedford Avenue at Dean Street, in the St. Marks District, now Crown Heights North.

The Wheelmen, Brooklyn’s premier cycling club, had disbanded when the bicycle was abandoned for the automobile. Levy wanted to make this facility a state of the art health club. He also wanted to insure income, so he had the building renovated with an automobile showroom on the ground floor, and his health club on the remaining three floors.

The facility had a Turkish bath, exercise rooms, and all of the other necessary accoutrement. It was in a prosperous neighborhood, too, with people who could well afford membership. The St. Marks District was one of Brooklyn’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

But for some reason, the location didn’t work out, and in 1906, it was sold and the entire building became an auto showroom and offices.

Meanwhile, Mac Levy and his wife were enjoying their new baby girl. Clarice Levy was her father’s child. Like him, she was born a sickly child, but the “Hercules of Brooklyn” wasn’t going to accept that. The child had his own nanny as her own, and the three adults were determined to make Clarice a fit child.

The nurse told the papers that she began giving Clarice daily massages after she was four weeks old. The massages were to stimulate the muscles. She was massaged until she was two months old. Then they began to institute a regimen of physical exercise.

Clarice did weight training exercises every day, using little dumbbells her father had made for her. She also performed daily calisthenics. She was soon one well-toned baby. The nanny took her outside for eight hours a day, and she slept all year round with the window slightly opened, even in the winter. As a result, Clarice never had a cold or many other childhood ailments.

When the article was written, in 1904, the baby was just learning how to walk. The nanny and her parents were looking forward to her learning how to do other kinds of exercise, and running. The paper noted that Clarice’s mother was an avid swimmer and fencer, and of course, her father was Professor Mac Levy, once dubbed the “Most Perfect Man in Brooklyn.”

By the 1920s, the Levy’s had left Brooklyn, and were living in Lynbrook, Long Island. In 1922, Clarice, who was now 18, was selected as a Good Will Ambassador to Europe, one of hundreds of teenagers selected to go to France and other countries ravaged by World War I, as representatives of the United States.

The papers noted that Clarice was going to go to college to study physical education, and planned on making it her profession, just like her father.

Also in the early 20s, Professor Mac Levy opened a gymnasium and training center in Madison Square Garden. It soon became well known for its training center for up and coming boxers. In 1925, the center opened a swimming pool one floor below the gym, in the basement of the Garden.

Mac Levy told the newspapers that he expected to have Olympic swimmers train there, including swimmers returning from the upcoming summer Olympics in France. He planned on holding races, as well.

His physical culture empire stayed strong. He sold tons of Mac Levy gym equipment, probably his most lasting legacy. I was not able to find out if he kept his gyms going at the St. George, but the pool and gym facilities there lasted well into the 20th century, even if they were no longer under the Mac Levy name.

One of his employees at the St. George, a fencing instructor, had some drama of his own, but that’s another story. Professor Max “Mac” Levy, the “Hercules of Brooklyn” died in November of 1934 at the age of 62. Ironically, he died of a heart attack.

His obituary in the Brooklyn Eagle noted that he had once trained boxer Jack Dempsey at his Madison Square Garden facility. He died at his home in Lynbrook, and the funeral took place at Riverside Memorial Chapel in Manhattan. He left his wife, Lillian, whom he had saved from drowning those many years ago.

He also left Clarice, who was now Mrs. Clarice Kirschbaum, and his son, Monty, who was the publicity director of a chain of Brooklyn theaters. The Levy kids didn’t fall far from the tree. Professor Mac Levy had done well for a skinny Jewish kid from Brooklyn who refused to ever give up on his dreams.

(Photograph: Mac Levy ad, New York Sun, 1905)

GMAP (Kings County Wheelman club location)

The Entire Story:
The Amazing Professor Mac Levy, Part One
The Amazing Professor Mac Levy, Part Two
The Amazing Professor Mac Levy, Murder Most Foul
The Amazing Professor Mac Levy, More Murder Most Foul
The Amazing Professor Mac Levy, Murder and Beyond