One of America’s favorite tropes is the rags-to-riches story, in which earnest young people pursue their passion, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and are rewarded with material success.
But if supermarket magazine racks and nightly news headlines are any indication, there is also a fascination with stories that flip that narrative. Lord knows that in America, the opportunities for failure are nearly as great as the chances for success – a look at Western ghost towns, Rust Belt industrial centers, and Atlantic City’s abandoned casinos all remind us of this.
And on Staten Island, across from the gleaming skyscrapers of Manhattan and Lady Liberty’s uplifted torch of hope, a centuries-old, vine-covered cottage provides an intimate and poignant tale of one woman’s riches-to-rags downfall.
The Alice Austen House, also known as Clear Comfort, is now open to the public, thanks to decades of work, money and dedication by local preservationists. It is now included on the list of Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios, a coalition of over 40 museums that once were the homes, private sanctuaries, and workplaces of American artists.
Here is the story of this artist and this place:
Born in 1866, Alice Austen never knew her father. He had abandoned his wife during her pregnancy, so Alice’s mother took her infant and went back to live with her parents at Clear Comfort, where Alice grew up to become a prominent member of Staten Island society and a pioneering and prolific photographer. She led a privileged
and independent life for decades and lived most of her life in the family home.
Originally a Dutch farmhouse built in 1690, it had become a tumble-down structure by the time Alice’s well-to-do grandfather bought it in 1844. But over the next quarter-century, John Haggerty Austen restored and expanded the house, transforming it into a cottage in the Victorian Gothic style. His wife Elizabeth – Alice’s grandmother – dubbed the place Clear Comfort.
In Alice’s childhood, the Austen household was a busy one. Not only did she and her mother live there with the older Austens, but so did her mother’s younger siblings – Alice’s Uncle Peter and Aunt Minn.
When Minn married a Danish sea captain, Alice’s newly-minted Uncle Oswald became the one to introduce Alice to photography when he brought home a camera from one of his voyages overseas. Only ten years old at the time, Alice was captivated by the bulky box that was able to create such magic.
Uncle Peter, meanwhile, had become a chemistry professor at Rutgers University, so he was able to show her how to develop and make prints from the glass plates she’d exposed.
Then the doting uncles built a rudimentary darkroom for Alice up in the attic. It wasn’t equipped with running water, so she had to carry her plates down the steep wooden steps and outside, where she rinsed them with water pumped up from the garden well. This became her regular practice, no matter what time of year.
E.A. Austen, Street Sweeper, ©1896. Collection of the Alice Austen House.