Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 92, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 April 1915 — HAPPENINGS in the BIG CTIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HAPPENINGS in the BIG CTIES

Rich New York Sisters Who Live Like Hermits NEW TORE. —In the heart of Manhattan Island, on Fifth avenue itself, and within three blocks of Forty-second street, live three women, who, with their one slater who lives on Central Park west, are absolute mistresses of a

fortune variously estimated at from 160,000.000 to 180,000,000. And all are as remote from and alien to the life of the great city around them as they would be on a desert island in the South seas. These four women are the sisters and the heiresses of John Gottlieb Wendel, who died December 11, 1914, at Santa Monica, Cal., and whose fortune, consisting almost entirely of real estate holdings in New York city, is second only to the Astor estate

among landed properties In the United States. The Wendel estate, incidentally, antedates that of the Astors, as the first John Gottlieb Wendel turned from the fur trade to the acquisition of New York real estate several years before the first John Jacob Astor made a similar transition. Of the sisters, only one is married. She has no children. She is Mrs. Luther A. (Rebecca A. G. Wendel) Swope of 249 Central Park west, where she lives alone with her husband. She Is the only one of the family who ever ventures abroad among her bind The other sisters, Mary E. A., Ella E. von E. and Georgiana G. K. Wendel, still ding to the old house on the northwest corner of Thirty-ninth street and Fifth avenue, directly opposite the Union League club. The Wendel house Is a three-story brown stone front, red brick structure. It was built In 1856, and looks every year of its age. Its original cost was about 15,000, and though it stands on a lot now assessed at a value of <1,897,000 it has never been altered or renovated In the slightest degree. Up at Irvington is the Wendel country estate. For a score of years the annual migration to and from Irvington has formed the sole occasion of the public appearance of the four sisters. Every spring they, Mr. Swope and the two old servants leave the house at Thirty-ninth street and walk the three blocks up to Forty-second street and two blocks to the Grand Central terminal to take the train for Irvington. Even this brief excursion is matter for anxious preparation and is undertaken In fear and trembling.