http://www.cooganresearchgroup.com/crg/index.htm

30 September 2009

COOGAN story 

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appearing in "?", [*], PAGE ?
[* note - event took place 16 JUN 1910 - story written years later]:

MANSION LEFT TO ROT FOR 35 YEARS BY WOMAN WHO WAS 
SNUBBED BY NEIGHBORS

[photo]
[caption] MANSION that Mrs. Harriet Coogan bought for $200,000 in
Newport, R.I., during the height of its elegance

By The Rev. WEBB GARRISON

Not one of the 300 bluebloods invited to Jessie Coogan's debutante
party showed up, so her snubbed mother secluded herself in a hotel
suite and let their $200,000 mansion stand empty and rotting for the
next 35 years.

The mother, a descendant of a pioneer New York family, had been born
to wealth and position.  But Harriet Gardiner Lynch stunned her 
family and social set in 1883 by marrying James J. Coogan, a Bowery 
merchant and small-time Democratic politician.

So, when the Coogans bought a mansion that was called Whitehall, in
snooty Newport, R.I., in 1901, they were looked upon as brash 
upstarts.

After nearly a decade had passed, Mrs. Coogan apparently felt the '
social ice had melted sufficiently for the family to make its grand
entrance into capital-S Society by throwing an elaborate coming out
party for daughter Jessie.

On the evening of June 16, 1910, waiters stationed themselves at 
punch bowls while an orchestra tuned its instruments.  The Coogans 
turned out in specially bought finery to await the arrival of 
Newport's finest, all of whom had been invited.

They waited and waited, until by midnight it was clear no one was
going to come.

"What are we going to do?" asked Coogan.

"Do!" retorted his enraged wife.  "We're going to leave and never 
come back.  Whitehall can rot on its foundations for all I care!"

She kept her word.  As the years passed, the empty and crumbling
mansion became Newport's town eyesore - Mrs. Coogan's revenge upon 
the town which had refused her socially.  Mrs. Coogan did nothing 
for the property other than pay its real estate taxes.

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Not until 1945 did her son convince Mrs. Coogan to heed the pleas of
Newport residents and have the mansion razed.

Mrs. Coogan, meanwhile, gradually retreated from the world to the 
point that few of her 15 grandchildren ever saw her after her 
husband's death in 1915.

On Sept. 6, 1931, she left her Fifth Avenue home in New York City 
and moved into a simple apartment at the Biltmore Hotel where she 
was to stay until her death at 86 in 1947.

For the 16 years she lived in the suite, waiters delivered three 
meals a day but were forbidden to enter the rooms.  Mrs. Coogan became 
one of the most famous hotel recluses in the world.

According to her newspaper obituary, the last person to see Mrs. 
Coogan on the street was a hotel doorman who hurried to her with an 
umbrella as she waited for a cab one stormy night in 1940.

"When I took her arm," he said, "she gave me a good scolding.  'Don't
you dare touch me," she said, "I'll go my own way.'"

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