Staten Isand Savings Bank on Beach Street (via); Boardwalk Empire “No Parking” sign (via: the telephone pole outside of our house)
In our previous post about the Bechtel beer bottle collection, we promised there was more to say about a house in our neighborhood that brewery-owner, George Bechtel gave to his daughter, Anna on her wedding day in 1887. (NY Times wedding announcement, on right)
Available as a movie location via Cynthia von Buhler’s CVB Spaces—(see also: Von Buhler’s Prize Capsules)—this house has recently been the site of filming by HBO’s Boardwalk Empire—a show whose credits and theme song, we’ve already covered here. (See: Opening Bottle Credits)
Celebrity Sighting
Last week I was walking down to the bank, when who should I see on my street? Apparently heading to the wardrobe trailer, but already wearing a brown, turn-of-the-century gangster suit? The Atlantic City bootlegger, Chalky White! (played by Michael Kenneth Williams who also played Omar Little from The Wire)
I was delighted to later learn that, in the Boardwalk Empire story line, the big historic house built by George Bechtel is to be Chalky’s house!

“Chalky’s operation takes the whiskey that Nucky has smuggled across the Canadian border, distills it and repackages it, allowing Nucky to get 3000 bottles out of the initial 500.”
BoardwalkEmpire.wikia.com
We had initially guessed that the big house around the corner was being cast as a new residence for Nucky Thompson and Margaret Schroeder (played by Steve Buscemi and Kelly Macdonald). That would have been cool too, but for Chalky White to be our new neighbor, in residence at the Bechtel house is historically more interesting...
The HBO series is based on Nelson Johnson’s book, Boardwalk Empire. His follow up book, “The Northside: African Americans and the Creation of Atlantic City” focuses on the history of Atlantic City’s black community...
“The city’s very existence was dependent on money spent by out-of-towners (and) Atlantic City’s solution was unique for its time. The hotel industry reached out to the Upper South and recruited people… former slaves and their dependents, coaxed to the North during the three generations following the Civil War.” According to Johnson, “African Americans built Atlantic City. Remove them from its history and the town we know today never comes to be.” –LTS Wire
In Boardwalk Empire, Chalky White, himself a recent descendant of former slaves, is the head of Atlantic City’s black community— “the de facto mayor of Chickenbone Beach.”
Staten Island had slavery up until 1827 when it was abolished in NY State. Bechtel, Stapleton’s leading citizen (and largest taxpayer on Staten Island) during the NY City draft riots in 1863, appears to have played an Oskar Schindler type role in helping to hide and protect black people:
Mr. Bechtel has been foremost in all public and benevolent matters. During the negro riots in 1861 he sheltered large numbers of these homeless people in the woods and sent them nourishment daily till the trouble had subsided, a circumstance which the colored people on Staten Island have never forgotten and for which they have been ever grateful.
History of Richmond County
by Richard M. Bayles, 1889
He also appears to have had a hand in founding Staten Island Savings Bank...
During the Civil War, Staten Island was home to abolitionists and pro-Union residents as well as those who bemoaned the loss of trade with the South... It was in the midst of the crisis that Francis Gould Shaw, the abolitionist, Louis H. Meyer, a financier, John Bechtel, the brewer and eighteen other Staten Island business men petitioned the state legislature for incorporation of an institution to be know as the Staten Island Savings Bank.
excerpt from the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s
proposal to landmark the Staten Island Savings Bank building
The very same bank that Chalky White’s dressing room was parked right across the street from. Or course Bechtel’s fingerprints are all over our little neighborhood. His brewery was also within easy walking distance.
Prohibition is what ultimately put Bechtel’s brewery out of business, and it’s also what made Chalky White so prosperous.
Bechtel’s NY Time Obituary, July 18, 1889, appears on right.
(A couple more things, after the fold...)
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