Prospect Park attracts interesting characters, and apparently it always has. On this December 4, I missed my park visit, so let's go back 127 years to December 4, 1881, when the Brooklyn Eagle profiled a gentleman named Anton Gerster. To the young lady at left, he was just Uncle Anton the carpenter, and thereby hangs a tale.
An Eagle reporter, strolling in the woods near the Litchfield villa, found "an old tumbledown building" and within, a carpenter shop lit by a red-hot stove over which stooped an aging Hungarian artisan. His supervisor, "jolly-faced Boss Moran," tipped the reporter off that the old fellow "had a history" involving the celebrated diva Etelka Gerster (left), who was even then touring the United States to rave reviews.
Gerster was "busily engaged in perfecting one of those little rustic birdhouses with which the park abound." (A modern reference states that the park started out with some 800 of them; the carpenter shop apparently created all the fanciful woodwork within the park, like the rustic shelter near the waterfall.) A well-educated former lieutenant in the Hungarian army, Gerster had fled Europe for America for political reasons, and found work in Central Park building shelters, bridges and arbors. When the Civil War broke out, he volunteered for the Union and won renown as a civil engineer. After the war, he settled in Brooklyn, in a house on 13th Street and Fifth Avenue, and picked back up his livelihood as a master of rustic park structures.
But the Eagle was more interested in the humble Gerster's celebrity connection to his niece, the diva. "Seated on...a nail keg, surrounded by a playful squirrel, a couple of frisky dogs, numerous planks, boards, benches, soldering irons, furnaces and tin wares," the carpenter gave up some details about his brother's daughter, the "cantatrice," who was only about 26 years old. Gerster's flowery quotes about Etelka's dazzling musical career sound suspiciously like a press release, but his proud recounting of dinners in his "South Brooklyn" house with Etelka during her tours sound more authentic. He recounted that the young songbird had recently married an opera manager some years her senior and had a 15-month-old daughter who loved to sing. He added that Etelka was "quite a housekeeper...and a good cook and can make a pie or cake in first-class style."
Now for a mystery: According to the scant Web references to Etelka Gerster, she suffered a mysterious vocal decline after giving birth to her daughter, and the diva settled for a career as a voice teacher in Europe. And her daughter, who grew up to marry conductor Fritz Reiner, supposedly inherited her mother's gift and its short-lived span. According to Time Magazine in 1923, Etelka didn't tell her daughter of her own history, "but
with a strange anxiety turned the child's bent toward singing,
determined to realize in her the graces of song of which the child had
deprived her. One day, when the girl was half grown, an angry maid
taunted her bitterly with having caused the ruin of her mother's voice.
Still mother and daughter could not bring themselves to speak of the
theme that had been hidden, and the woman died with the silence
unbroken. The daughter became a singer, but did not follow her art for
more than a little while. She renounced it for a home and
family."
It's a great melodrama, but why, then, did the Birdhouse Builder of Prospect Park report cheerfully on his niece's effortless-seeming vocal technique and active touring career more than a year after she became a mother? Could it be that both mother and daughter, in their turn and for their own reasons, chose home over stage, and sought a diva-worthy tale to justify their retirement? The Eagle reporter, while conjuring up a fine yarn in a setting worthy of Disney, gives us no answers.
As for the birdhouses and rustic structures crafted by Mr. Gerster, it is safe to say that none survive, although some, like the waterfall shelter, have been closely reconstructed from photos of the originals, which may well have been his handiwork.
Images: Top: Luminous Lint; middle, Prospect Park archives.