The following is a reprint from the New York Times article about Sosie's attic discoveries and her new pal and her place in history
The letter arrived at the brownstone at 23 West 16th Street on an afternoon in August 2018 addressed to no one. Where a name should have been, only “Resident” was written in ballpoint pen on the front, and “Apartment 3.”
Inside were a sheaf of sepia photographs, the beginnings of what would become, in subsequent letters, a trove of images of men and women in Victorian dress. Taking tea. Posing. Jousting.
In Apartment 3.
A Stranger in the House
The man peering out from the antique photos scattered in the attic of the Ohio property had no business being there. He was not a distant ancestor of the homeowners, or even a family friend. And there was no reason that his name, Leonard Mortimer Thorn, had been inscribed on scores of books on the shelves, like a 1925 guide to New York City restaurants. Or written on the yellowing telegrams, or on receipts for stays in hotels long shuttered.
But Leonard Mortimer Thorn kept turning up, along with images from another time and place hundreds of miles away from Marysville, Ohio. A horse-drawn bus trotting through Manhattan. A brownstone-lined street with snow piled higher than the top hats of passers-by, “Blizzard of 1888” written on the back, along with the cryptic words, “from the steps of 23.”
Solveig Rolfsrud Shearer, a retired writer, found the items in a historic home that her late husband inherited and that she is restoring. Perplexed, she dug in.
“I would flip through a book, and it would be signed by Leonard Thorn, and the big one was why is his 1844 travel journal here? Why is it in this house?” Ms. Shearer, 76, said in an interview. “It’s a very cool thing, but it doesn’t belong here.”
(Solveig is the sister of esteemed journalist Stanley Hiliding Rolfsrud and is a very handsome man about town, who is incredibly proud of his sister’s notice in the New York Times. Ed.)
Some might have tossed out the flotsam of a life — dusty books, yellowed envelopes and receipts — particularly if it was of zero relation to the home’s current inhabitants. Ms. Shearer’s love of history, and a sense that the unknown people in sepia pictures mattered to someone, made that an impossibility.
In that travel journal, she discovered that Mr. Thorn was an entrepreneur of some prominence in the late 1800s who had built his fortune from scratch by trading with Native Americans on land that would become Texas. He spoke 13 Indigenous languages, according to research by Tom Miller, the author of “Seeking New York: The Stories Behind the Historic Architecture of Manhattan — One Building at a Time.”
The Thorns lived richly in Manhattan, as the ephemera of their lives scattered around the Ohio house made clear. Mr. Thorn was featured in an 1892 edition of the American Millionaires list published by the New York Tribune, which described him as having “made a million by the discovery of a fast dye for calico.” He amassed real estate, with buildings and lots from West 35th Street in Midtown to Cornelia Street in the West Village, according to The New York Times’s report on the sale of his estate. When the Thorns gave a party, it was noted the 1882 edition of The Season, a society magazine.
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Photo caption:
Solveig Rolfsrud Shearer couldn’t ignore the mysterious items she found in her house in Ohio, like a 1925 guide to New York City restaurants and hotel receipts.
But this denizen of New York high society was not a cousin or even an acquaintance of the Shearers, as far as they knew. So why were the Thorns all over their house?
The answer lay in another home: 23 West 16th Street, Manhattan, New York — an address Ms. Shearer found engraved on another antique memento, a camera case that belonged to her husband’s great-aunt Rosemary, who died in 1961. Rosemary Shearer was a businesswoman who retired to the Ohio house in the late ’50s to be with her sister. Solveig was sure she had seen the address somewhere.
“I go, wait a minute, wait a minute, and I go back and I find these invoices written in calligraphy for that address,” Solveig said. Her husband, William Otway, had the answer. “I went to my husband and said: ‘Didn’t you say your great-aunt Rosemary had a brownstone in New York City?’”
A Renovation
When Charles Sommer began renovating his apartment at 23 West 16th Street shortly after he bought it over a decade ago, he found crumpled newspapers from the 1950s in the walls as slapdash insulation. But he didn’t think much of who might have read them, or stuffed them under the drywall, or lived in the third-floor apartment long before he did.
He focused on other things, like preserving the ornate marble fireplace in his living room. Downstairs neighbors said it had once been the centerpiece of the parlor floor, back in the Victorian era. Mr. Thorn would have used it to keep the high-ceiling room warm.
At the time, Mr. Sommer had recently stepped away from a marketing agency that he had founded, and was searching for something new to inspire him. He threw himself into the renovation, selecting a zebra-striped solid marble kitchen backsplash that is echoed in the 700-pound marble kitchen island. Both chunks had to be winched through the third story windows into his home, he said.
Mr. Sommer added evocative contemporary art and complemented it with art from Indonesia and Bangladesh, two of the countries of his itinerant upbringing as the son of a renowned epidemiologist whose field studies took the family around the world.
Of particular pleasure was his patio, rimmed by a low brick wall and old chimney that had been incorporated into the glass solarium previous residents erected. It is a New Yorker’s version of a mountain aerie, light and bright amid the low-slung brownstones of the village.
So when the picture-stuffed letters started coming, he recognized his patio immediately.
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A photograph Ms. Shearer found in Ohio showed the patio of an apartment in Manhattan.
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via Charles Sommer
In a Victorian black gown, waist nipped in with a corseted bodice, a woman stands holding a sword in her left hand. She faces a stern woman in a froth of white crinoline, frilled cuffs and bustle, holding a sword outstretched to meet hers at the tip. Between them is a mutton-chopped man in a frock coat and tie, as if to referee.
And behind them all is the low brick wall and chimney of Mr. Sommer’s patio.
They are the Thorn children, dueling over his estate, according to information on the back of the picture, though the photo appears staged and no record of such a battle exists. It portrays the duel as between a reclusive Thorn daughter (in black), versus her sister-in-law (in white), their challenge presided over by her husband, the eldest Thorn son.
These quirky pictures, and the bits and pieces of Victorian life, appear to have intrigued Rosemary when she found them after she purchased the Thorns’ brownstone in the 1950s. They included Mr. Thorn’s extensive travelogues, manuals on how Victorian ladies should dress and what color best suited their complexion, and even the family’s housekeeping bills. She brought these items back to Ohio to delight her sister, who was a history buff, Solveig believes, and in doing so filled the Marysville home with Thorn memorabilia.
As a female building owner (she also owned the brownstone next door, 21 West 16th Street) Rosemary was unusual for her time. She also ran a successful business as an outfitter for private schoolgirls, providing essentials like gym clothes and leather gloves. Solveig found saved stamped letters indicating that Rosemary outfitted the daughters of ambassadors and dignitaries.
As Ms. Shearer parsed the collection more than 60 years later, she became something of an expert in all things 23 West 16th Street. She was able to rattle off details of the Greek Revival style brownstone, with its Corinthian columns flanking the doorway, that she had never seen in person, and the name of the amateur architect who completed it in 1845, Augustus Thomas Cowman. In 1990, it was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission
But who in Marysville would care about these discoveries about New York City?
“I thought, well, if there is a connection, these things are worth something — not money, but something,” she said. “And the people who are living in that space may have interest in who was here before me.”
One afternoon about seven years ago, she stuffed an envelope with some of her finds, a brief explanation and her phone number. On the front she put Rosemary’s old address. In place of a name, she wrote the word “Resident,” and popped it in the mail.
An Invitation to the Past
When Mr. Sommer opened the letter, he called the author without a moment’s hesitation, he said. As the story unspooled over the phone — Mr. Sommer in New York, Ms. Shearer in California, where she lives most of the year — so did a friendship between the coasts. The pair found themselves gabbing for hours about the Thorns, Rosemary, and more.
“We just began this dialogue,” Mr. Sommer said. “It’s just so fascinating.”
In 2019, when Ms. Shearer mentioned she and her husband were coming to New York City for a cruise and would like to meet, Mr. Sommer invited the couple to stay in his apartment. He vacated it himself, in part so Solveig could commune with Rosemary’s spirit unimpeded, something in which she believes.
Today, he considers Ms. Shearer akin to a godmother. Over the years of their friendship, she has returned nearly all of the items that had been brought to Ohio, from Rosemary’s catalogs of schoolgirls’ sundries, to Mr. Thorn’s travelogue.
The slim book sits on the mantel of Mr. Sommer’s fireplace. Once again, the resident of 23 West 16th Street, Apartment 3.
