Hot Chocolate in the 19th Century

Riding the Dumbwaiter to Nowhere...

The New York State Capitol in Albany is an acquired taste. Mark Twain was said to have called it “the ugliest public building in America.” I have been unable to confirm that quote, but Twain definitely did say something similar about Louisiana’s old Capitol, a Baton Rouge eyesore which he labelled “pathetic.” And for sure, he said something very similar about the Old Executive Office Building, in Washington, DC.

Is it just possible that America’s greatest author darted furtively from city to city, snarling and gnashing his teeth over homely public architecture at every stop while enjoying his beloved buckwheat pancakes? It makes me very happy to imagine this is true.  

By contrast, Twain would have regarded the residential brownstones on the streets surrounding the Albany Capitol as anything but ugly. Smart and stylish, these 19th century row houses, in a neighborhood now called Center Square, were designed and built by people who believed they knew how to live and could afford to live that way. They also knew where to live, and in Old Albany, State Street was the great street.

By the time my wife and I got to Albany in the 1970s, to take up reporting jobs at a daily newspaper, many of those grand old homes had long since been rabbit-warrened, sliced and diced into small apartments for folks who worked around the Capitol. But their grand facades remained, and inside, many of the original features had been lovingly maintained in the conversions.

Among dedicated preservationists, some of the State Street houses were legendary. Local rumor spoke of one, built in the 1870s by an Albany mayor, that boasted a ballroom large enough to hold a small orchestra.

It was the summer of 1974. Richard Nixon had just declared his mother a saint, waved good-bye to the chumps who elected him, and absquatulated from Washington in disgrace. Barbara and I, relative newcomers to Upstate New York, wanted to live in one of those State Street apartments in the worst way.

We loved the feeling of being surrounded by history, and we were ready for the inevitable compromises. We wanted to walk to the grocery, bakery, butcher shop and cozy restaurants, much as our great grandparents might have done.

I was out of town as our relocation day approached, so It fell to Barbara to conduct the search. When I checked in by phone one sultry August evening, I detected elation in her voice.

"I found us an apartment!"

"Get out of here! Where is it?"

"You will not believe this! You know that brownstone we’ve heard about, the one with the ballroom? We're actually living in that ballroom. It’s our living room!"

“We’re living in a ballroom?”

“Well, it’s part of our apartment. You’ll see. It’s fabulous!”

I had to ask. "Um, how much does it cost to live in a ballroom?"

"You just wait, you’re going to love it!"

Although I don’t dance and probably wouldn’t need live music very often, the apartment offered more than just a handy orchestra pit. It covered the entire ground floor of the original brownstone. There were three marble fireplaces, two bay windows, 12-foot ceilings and a walled garden with a sturdy iron gate.

There was a formal State Street entrance to the house, and a winding, wood-paneled staircase leading upstairs to the other apartments. Inside our actual flat there were an internal stairway, which went nowhere, and a dumbwaiter, also going nowhere. If your destination was nowhere, you certainly came to the right place.

The apartment had everything we could possibly want. Actually, that isn’t completely true. A dishwasher would have been nice. Also, a second bedroom, private parking, and a washer and dryer so we didn’t have to schlep our clothes to Dirty Larry’s Laundromat. The sort of luxuries that young, privileged elites could get just by moving to the suburbs.

No matter. This place was a living legend. You see that living room? There used to be an orchestra playing there. Now, there are just the Baslers, and Rufus, their Old English Sheepdog. The place wasn’t quite what it once was, but it was ours.

We moved in over a weekend, and Barbara took the week off to unpack boxes. I arrived home from work on Monday afternoon to find that she had some news about our landlady, a widow in her 70s who owned the whole house and lived in the second-floor apartment, immediately above us.

“Mrs. Coggeshall came down to see how we were doing,” she said, tentatively.

“That’s nice.”

“She showed me a utility closet with all kinds of ladders and tools we can use.”

“Great.”

“Oh, and she invited us up to her apartment for hot chocolate at 6 o’clock.”

“Hold it. You want to go have hot chocolate with some old lady? I don’t think so.”

“Shut up. It’s just this one time. She seems very nice.”

Before we were married, when we were still feeling each other out, Barbara used to ask me what style of home décor I liked, in the event we ever had enough money to have an actual décor. Knowing nothing of designer terms like English Country, I said, “I like Sherlock Holmesy stuff.”

“Sherlock Holmesy?”

“Right. British-looking places with burgundy-colored oriental rugs, crystal decanters, a lot of brass and wood paneling. Clutter everywhere. Like Sherlock’s rooms at 221B Baker Street always look in the movies.”

I mention this odd detail right here because on that evening, I walked up one flight of stairs and into my dreams. There were rich tapestries. Paisley shawls. Family silver. Gilt frames. Oil portraits - big ones, probably ancestors. A feisty five-barrel pepperbox pistol was casually perched on a walnut table, as if a riverboat gambler had just left in a big hurry.

I had never seen anything like this pearl of a place. I was standing in a room, in a house, on a street that I had pictured in fantasies for years. Best of all, it was totally unexpected. Nobody had built it up in my mind or stoked my anticipation. It had just appeared, like Brigadoon.

The landlady, Mrs. Coggeshall, was elegant, blue-haired and husky-voiced from years of smoking too much. She patiently let me take it all in. I hope at some point I remembered to shut my pie-hole to disguise my unabashed awe.

She seated us in the 19^th century living room. “Barbara,” she rasped, “May I borrow Robert to help make the hot chocolate?” Barbara was fine with that, probably wondering what the hell use I was going to be in the kitchen.

Mrs. Coggeshall and I walked from the 19^th century living room through a 19^thcentury dining room and into a 19^th century kitchen. Copper pots, crystal stemware, enough silver to deplete the Comstock Lode. She retrieved two shiny tin-lined copper saucepans and handed me one of them. I kind of liked my reflection in the polished metal.

“Robert, this one is for heavy cream. All you have to do is scald it, but don’t let it boil. Can you do that?” It was the tone someone might use when asking a puppy if it could shake.

She did the heavy lifting herself, mixing some water, sugar and Droste Cocoa in her saucepan over medium heat. Back in 1974, Droste qualified as upmarket. So did the Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies she shuffled from their package onto a heavy silver platter. While stirring her chocolate mixture, she arranged three teacups and saucers, some spoons and two stunning silver serving pitchers with wrapped bamboo handles, next to the Milanos on the platter.

She poured her chocolate, as thick and sweet as brownie dough, into one pitcher, and my perfectly scalded heavy cream into the other, and nodded for me to follow her back to the 19^th century living room. With grand flair, she filled our teacups. She held the pitcher of chocolate aloft in one hand and the steaming cream in the other and let the two clotting streams swirl together as they oozed into the cups

We sipped and sipped, and we talked and talked. Mrs. Coggeshall knew about travel, politics, architecture, art, literature, antiques, even dinosaurs. She was rereading all of Anthony Trollope, it turned out. Every stick of her furniture, every piece of art, every bit of her clutter had a story worth telling.

I emptied my cup, resisting the urge to lick it clean with my tongue. I began to ponder the proper way to thank our hostess and make our exit. The cookies were gone, the cocoa was gone, the smoke from Mrs. Coggeshall’s cigarette was floating through the wonderful clutter, making the scene seem even less real.

But before I could open my mouth, she made a no-nonsense offer that would set the course of a long and beautiful friendship: “I don’t know about you, Robert and Barbara, but I could use a real drink!”

She gestured toward a 19^th century alcove I hadn’t even noticed, and closer inspection revealed a full bar, complete with an ice bucket that thoughtfully had been filled before our arrival. I made cocktails - vodka and tonic for her - and we just kept talking into the evening.

Mrs. Coggeshall would take us under her wing, helping us to grow into our new life. She lent us a large oval oil portrait of a woman we only knew as “Grandma,” for over the mantel in our living room, and some brass sconces to flank it, so we looked a little less like squatters who had jimmied the lock on the back door.

During our time there she introduced us to her older friends, and we repaid her with our younger journalist colleagues, making the first two floors of that State Street mansion a sanctuary for interesting people.

The bar in the alcove? It never ran dry.

We would know Mrs. Coggeshall as a dear friend and neighbor, remaining close even after we left to make our way to the world outside Albany. She never made us hot chocolate again. She didn’t have to. We had been properly welcomed to State Street, and that gesture was good for life.

Years later, when she died in her sleep, we found that she had left us a watercolor painting of 327 State Street, and one of the silver serving pitchers from that first long-ago evening. It gleams today in our living room, amid our own half-century collection of sentimental globe-trotting clutter. Every piece has a story worth telling, and this is just one of them.