William Kingsland, City ‘Gazetteer,’ Is Dead

William M.V. Kingsland, a prodigious researcher and avocational genealogist, died recently of a heart attack. “He was an unending trove of historic facts of the Upper East Side,” a longtime friend, Eliot Rowlands, said.Kingsland was believed to be 62 when he was found on March 21. “He was a walking gazetteer,” a Landmarks Committee member of Manhattan’s Community Board 8, Barry Schneider, said. A co-chair of Defenders of the Historic Upper East Side, Elizabeth Ashby, said, “You couldn’t mention an address that he wouldn’t have known who had ever lived there and what had ever had happened there. Crimes, adultery, elopements, who ran off with the butler, he knew it all.”With a wry Cheshire cat smile, Kingsland cut a striking figure among the interlocking worlds of historic preservationists, gallerists, and the gavel set of New York auction houses. In winter, he sported a scarf and beret. In summer, he wore a plastic visor that made him look somewhat like a card shark, said Teri Slater, who recruited him as a public member for the Landmarks Committee of Community Board 8. With a creased blue blazer over a white Oxford shirt, Kingsland had an “offhand way of dressing,” Chauncey Olinger Jr. said. “It was all proper, but the combinations were slightly original.”He was a staunch fighter for the old way. “The thing about Kingsland,” author Barnaby Conrad III said, “was that he was slightly annoyed that the 20th century had occurred.” David Redden, who as a young cataloger at an auction house first met Kingsland in the 1970s, said Kingsland’s knowledge evoked a “shadow of another world.”At Landmarks meetings, Kingsland would cross his legs, lean back in his chair, and take everything in. “He spoke in a very considered manner and hit the nail on the head,” Ms. Slater said.A Landmarks Committee co-chair, Margery Perlmutter, recalled the time someone at a meeting showed a photo of simply a doorway. Astonishingly, Kingsland identified its street address. He knew prices of townhouses, exteriors of buildings, and types of renovation styles by architect and even the history of window changes on buildings. He collected landmarks violations and reported them.His particular metier was the minutiae of the lives in Upper East Side buildings over generations – the sort of background elements animating novels by Henry James or Edith Wharton. “When you have enough of that information accumulated,” Mr. Redden said, “it’s no longer trivia. You can make connections and suddenly it gains significance.”What Paul Goodman once called “a serviceable soul,” Kingsland put his unusual skills to use on behalf of organizations. The executive director of the Fund for Park Avenue, Margaret Ternes, said he was helpful in pointing one toward people who would be interested in beautifying Park Avenue. He knew whose ancestors had been beer or steel barons or who had been an original partner in Standard Oil.Kingsland helped the restoration committee of the Church of the Holy Trinity on East 88th Street by researching a list of Rhinelander descendants. He was also a volunteer at the New York office of the American Academy in Rome, and was a volunteer room-sitter at the American Hospital of Paris Foundation designer show house.But with the New York Marble Cemetery, he arguably made his greatest contribution by piecing together connections between cemetery vault purchasers and their living descendants. A trustee of the cemetery, Anne Brown, researched the family genealogies mostly in the 19th century, and handed them off to Kingsland, who would generally pick up the trail around 1905 to 1910. Hundreds of yellow memo-size pages were subjected to Kingsland’s pen, as he burrowed in the New York Society Library.He mailed detailed genealogies to Ms. Brown, who was later astonished to learn that Kingsland had been discussing a few thousand descendants from memory without saving copies for himself. “If we had all the money in the world, we couldn’t have hired someone to do what he did,” she said. “You couldn’t design someone with his knowledge and interests. His expertise and the cemetery’s needs were a perfect fit.”This flaneur was known to stop friends on the sidewalk and seemed to have all day to talk. He did not appear to have to be anywhere unless he decided to be there. He had leisure to deliver correspondence personally, too.A frugal man, he recycled envelopes. Close friends periodically received envelopes with no note but annotated newspaper clippings that showed he was thinking of them. Living abroad in England, Mr. Rowlands recalled receiving clippings including news of his landlady’s prep school reunion. Kingsland sent him one clipping of the death of a woman named Mrs. Going. He had wryly added, “Going, going, gone.”He favored Gilbert and Sullivan, and could play classical music at sight. He liked puns: When a woman at a St. James Church fair exclaimed, “Look at the fuschia!” Kingsland retorted, “I prefer the past myself.” A proprietor of Jennings and Rohn Antiques, Fritz Rohn, recalled years ago playing a street game with Kingsland. They would match the faces of passers-by with Old Master painters likely to have painted them.In successive apartments on East 78th and 72nd Streets, friends recalled floor to ceiling paintings, some stacked against each other more for protection than for show. Shelves of books competed for space with folded tapestries, bibelots, objets de vertu, snuffboxes, bronze items, and illuminated manuscripts peering out of boxes. Kenyon Gibson, who now lives in England, recalled three layers of rugs. Reliquaries may have been kept in the dishwasher, and a Giacometti used as a doorstop. 1189 2174 1295 2185He was known to have kept his phone in the closet. While he said his East 72nd Street apartment was for storage, it is unclear where his primary residence was.Kingsland worked at Vito Giallo Antiques on Madison Avenue three days a week from 1986 to 1991. Singer Elton John was so enchanted with Kingsland that he left a blank check for him to fill out for 19th-century statues. Andy Warhol befriended Kingsland for a time. At lunchtime at the store, Kingsland ate two jars of Gerber baby food. Mr. Giallo recalled Kingsland finding photos of Berenice Abbott among street trash.A longtime preservationist, Tony Wood, said there was an “air of delightful mystery around him.” Though he said he had attended Groton, the school has no record of him. The earliest record of him identified in New York is a letter he wrote to the New York Times as a teenager in summer of 1961 about the Elgin Marbles. The University of Vermont records that he took classes in 1964.In the late 1960s, Kingsland conducted research for Henry Hope Reed’s walking tours, particularly on the genealogy of New York families. Around that time a New York real estate attorney, Spencer Compton, and realist painter Joseph Keiffer both met him while volunteering for Eugene Mc-Carthy’s presidential campaign.Artist Ken Rush met him in an elevator in 1972 at an art show on 57th street. Kingsland bought a painting from him around 1973 for about $50, and proceeded to send third-party checks endorsed over to him in $25 and $15 increments until it was fully paid.Kingsland spent the summer of 1976 on East 93rd Street in a limestone-clad brownstone owned by Leslie Larned Gibson. That year, he began to write auction columns for Art/World, a monthly founded by Bruce Duff Hooton and based in the Hotel Wales on 94th Street and Madison Avenue. He later became a contributing editor for Art + Auction. He had a prickly side and may have left a dead pigeon for the journal’s publisher with a note punning on “fowl” and “foul.”He is known to have said his initials stood for Milliken Vanderbilt, that he was once married, and that his parents had lived in Florida. There are no known surviving relatives. A direct descendant of Ambrose Cornelius Kingsland, a 19th-century New York mayor, James Kingsland, said he did not believe William Kingsland was related to him.Kingsland’s legacy is the bond of warm feeling he shared with friends and recipients of his volunteer efforts. “The William we knew,” Ms. Slater said, is the one “whose life we’ll be celebrating.” Mr. Rowlands encapsulated Kingsland by quoting Blake: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.”His graveside service and interment is at 3 p.m. today in the New York City Marble Cemetery at 2nd Street between First and Second Avenues.gshapiro@nysun.com

William Kingsland, City ‘Gazetteer,’ Is Dead

William Kingsland, City ‘Gazetteer,’ Is Dead

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