This thread has me feeling guilty, because the Marvins are some of the passengers about whom I've dug up a bunch of info that I've been sitting on for a long time. Not because I wouldn't love to share it, but because I just haven't got round to typing it up (and I've barely been on ET at all this summer).
I may have deprived myself of the opportunity to spill the beans about the crazy kids' secret elopement, but I can enlighten you somewhat about the Farquharson finances. I'm not sure what Frank did, but his wife was a successful businesswoman in her own right. In 1907, she and her sister, Margaret Graham (Mrs William Addison) Wheelock, established the dressmaking business of Farquharson & Wheelock. They must have done quite well. The firm purchased a property at 724 Fifth Avenue in 1911, and in 1920 enlarged the premises by purchasing the Louis P. Hoyt mansion next door for roughly $600,000. The NY Times called this "the highest price ever paid for an inside lot on Fifth Avenue north of Forty-second Street". Shortly afterwards, it was reported that the firm would build a twelve-story building at the site. The Brown, Wheelock Company, Inc was going to be the building's agent, so it was evidently a family affair. In 1928, Jessie Farquharson purchased a duplex apartment at 960 Fifth Avenue, formerly the site of the Clark mansion. The apartment had fourteen rooms, five baths, eleven-foot ceilings, and a private entrance at East 77th Street. She might not have bought it for herself; this was Mary and Horace de Camp's address in the 1941 New York Social Register, while Jessie's 1952 obituary gave her address as 30 West 58th Street. Margaret Wheelock had died eleven days before her sister. Her obituary claimed that she had entered the dressmaking business at the age of 16, when she went to work as a buyer for a London department store.
Riverside Drive was and still is an area of very pricey real estate. And being on Manhattan's West Side, it was and still is an area traditionally favored more by newer moneyed New Yorkers than by the Astor crowd. Last year, I made a list for my own benefit of which New York passengers lived on the West Side as opposed to the East Side:
UPPER WEST SIDE:
Beckwith (“The Wendolyn”, 100th St and Riverside, but I believe they were soon to defect to the East Side)
Taussig (777 West End Av), Mandelbaum (200 W 86th St)
Seward (542 West 112th Street)
Straus (West 105th Street, Broadway and West End Avenue)
Rothschild (753 West End Avenue)
Harry Anderson
Harris (Central Park West)
Margaret Hays (304 W 83rd St)
Farquarson (317 Riverside Drive), Marvin (Riverside Drive)
George Rosenshine’s brother ('Ansonia Hotel', probably the Ansonia Apts)
Meyer (158 West Eighty-sixth Street, though Leila was living at 970 Park Ave by 1915)
EAST SIDE:
Astor (840 Fifth Avenue), Force (18 East 37th St)
Cumings (50 E. 64th St)
Greenfield (1239 Madison Avenue)
Karl Behr (777 Madison Avenue)
I would have expected Margaret Hays and Frederick K. Seward to live on the East Side, but the rules aren't set in stone. Plenty of Social Registered New Yorkers, including Daniel Marvin's parents, lived on the West Side (Mary's parents weren't listed; Mary was listed after her second marriage).
