Quantcast

The DNAinfo archives brought to you by WNYC.
Read the press release here.

MAP: Nancy Reagan's New York

By Nicole Levy | March 7, 2016 5:46pm
 Nancy Reagan died Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94.
Nancy Reagan died Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94.
View Full Caption
Getty/Eric Thayer

On Sunday, Nancy Reagan died congestive heart failure at her Los Angeles home at age 94. Long before she lived in a Tudor house in Sacramento as the first lady of California, or in the White House as the First Lady of the United States, she was a New Yorker.

The Hollywood actress-turned politician's wife was born in a Manhattan hospital and raised in a two-story Flushing home.

While the former first fady's national and international legacies as Ronald Reagan's adviser and an anti-drug and pro-stem cell research activist are well-known, we traced her history with our city. Follow the map below as a guide.

Stop 1: Between 668 and 678 West End Ave., Upper West Side

Reagan's parents, Edith Prescott Luckett and Kenneth Seymour Robbins, met in Pittsfield, Mass., got hitched in Burlington, Vt., and first settled in a farmhouse in Brainard, N.Y., in 1916, according to Kitty Kelly's gossipy, unauthorized biography of the former first lady. Luckett was a plucky actress and Robbins was a salesman for the Berkshire Life Insurance Company from an old New England family.

The couple would move to New York City after Robbins served a few years in the army. The 1920 U.S. Census indicates a Kenneth Robbins and an Edith Robbins lived in a building on West End Avenue, cohabiting with a woman named Henrietta McCaig and her daughter Charlotte.

► Stop 2: Sloane Hospital for Women, 59th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, Upper West Side

Nancy Reagan was born Anne Frances Robbins on July 6, 1921, at the Sloane Hospital for Women, which was at that time located near the intersection of 59th Street and Amsterdam Avenue (contrary to reports that site it in Washington Heights).

The nickname "Nancy" emerged early and stuck.

► Stop 3: 149-40 Roosevelt Ave., Flushing

Reagan lived her first two years in what was then a modest two-story house in Queens.

Biographer Kelly described the neighborhood at the time as a "poor section of Flushing," but Long Island historian Vincent Seyfried contested that pronouncement in 1991. 

"It's malice to say that," he told the New York Times. "It was a good enough neighborhood that the first apartment house in Flushing was built nearby. It was a perfectly nice residential street, like most of the ones in Flushing at that time."

Today, the house is abandoned according to the Daily News, its siding incomplete and its facade covered in overgrown vines.

► Stop 4: 6 W. 49th St., Midtown

By 1923, it was clear the Robbins' marriage wasn't working. Kenneth moved back to Pittsfield to live with his mother and Edith rented out a room on 49th Street, at an address documented in the 1925 New York City directory.

She resumed her stage career and sent her daughter to live with her sister in Bethesda, Md. Later on when Nancy became a professional actress herself, she visited Edith whenever she had a long theater run in town.

It wasn't until 1928 that Edith and her husband officially divorced. The next year Edith married a Chicago neurosurgeon, Loyal Davis, who adopted Nancy and gave her a new home and surname. 

Stop 5: The Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W. 45th St., Midtown

The former first lady starred in the Broadway musical "Lute Song" at this theater, called the Plymouth before it was renamed in 2005. A 1946 New York Times review of the show co-starring Yul Brenner and Mary Martin lists the young aspiring actress as playing the role of a lady-in-waiting named Si-Tchuan. 

She made her way to Hollywood not long after, where she would act in 11 films and meet her future husband, Ronald, who was the president of the Screen Actors Guild at the time.

► Stop 6: The New York Hilton, 1335 Ave. of the Americas, Midtown

When 68-year-old former actor Ronald Reagan announced his run for the presidency in 1979, in a nationally televised speech delivered at the New York Hilton, his wife Nancy was there. She and their two children joined him on stage at the end of his 30-minute speech.

"None of them are looking for jobs in the government," he quipped, the Times reported, although Nancy would exert a significant influence on her husband during his term as president.