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The Benevolent Tycoon

At College Point, industrialist Conrad Poppenhusen built a legacy that endures

By Rhoda Amon | Staff Writer

In College Point, Poppenhusen is not just a funny name. This north Queens community has a Poppenhusen Institute, Poppenhusen Avenue, Poppenhusen Library and Poppenhusen Monument. And, a century after his death, every schoolchild here knows who Conrad Poppenhusen was.

Today the institute, where thousands of immigrants learned the arts and a vocation, is the most significant reminder of a benevolent tycoon who came to College Point in 1854 and built a rubber factory -- and a town.

And, most remarkable in that day of public-be-damned robber barons, Poppenhusen built homes for his workers, drained the marshes, paved roads, brought clean running water into the community, and constructed a cobblestone causeway and a railroad.

The German immigrant donated $100,000 and land for the construction of the institute as a gift to the people of College Point on his 50th birthday in 1868. He endowed another $100,000 to pay teachers' salaries and operating costs for the educational-cultural center, where workers and their children studied English, learned a trade and were introduced to art, music, theater, literature, history. It was open to all races and creeds.

That same year Poppenhusen also built the Flushing-Whitestone Railroad. This would lead eventually to his consolidating the Long Island Rail Road and becoming the line's president -- something that would ultimately be his undoing.

In 1868, the Poppenhusen Institute was College Point. It served as the village hall -- Poppenhusen was a justice of the peace and at one time was president of the village trustees. It was the first home of the Congregational Church, the College Point bank, the public library, the firehouse, even the jail (the two cells in the basement can still be seen by visitors). At the institute, Poppenhusen established the nation's first free kindergarten.

The institute was to be run by the Conrad Poppenhusen Association, which was incorporated with this high-minded purpose:

"The protection, care and custody of infants; the advancement of science and art, with such equipment as may be useful for that purpose; and the improvement of the moral and social conditions of the people."

Today, 130 years later, the Poppenhusen Institute is still a communitycultural center. A five-story Victorian edifice with tall arched windows, it towers above the small houses of its working-class neighborhood.

It fell on hard times in the 1970s and came within a razor's edge of being demolished in 1980. But College Point residents formed The Concerned Citizens for the Poppenhusen Institute, and after a three-year court battle worthy of Poppenhusen himself, won the right to continue to exist. It is primarily funded by city and state grants.

"If we lost it, I would have left the community," said Susan K. Brustmann, a leader in the court fight, now the institute's executive director.

Poppenhusen was a 19th-Century Horatio Alger story who started at age 10 doing accounts in German and English for his father, a textile trader in Hamburg. His father died when Conrad was 14, leaving him to support his mother and pay off his father's debts.

When his employer, H.C. Meyer, offered him an opportunity to manage a small business in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, Poppenhusen, then 25, married and penniless, sailed for the new world in 1843. He became a partner in the firm of Meyer and Poppenhusen, manufacturing brushes, combs, buttons and corset stays, all from whalebone, which was becoming scarce. The alternative was natural rubber, which had a tendency to turn sticky, especially in hot weather.

Then Poppenhusen met Charles Goodyear, who had invented a vulcanization process for hardening rubber and needed capital to turn his invention into profit. The two reached a deal in 1854 whereby Poppenhusen would have sole rights for several years to the use of Goodyear's invention. Goodyear would found the company that bears his name.

Searching for a larger manufacturing base, Poppenhusen came upon College Point, a small community on the East River. Waterfront land could be bought cheap.

Poppenhusen's Enterprise Rubber Works was soon swallowing up smaller companies to become the American Hard Rubber Co. College Point became known as the "rubber capital of the Northeast." It also was a lively seaside resort.

Like Henry Ford, Poppenhusen introduced new cost-cutting techniques. Needing ever more workers, he recruited immigrants when they stepped off the ship at New York piers. A cradle-to-the-grave employer, he organized a mutual benefit association to assure workers' sick benefits and even death benefits -- unheard-of practices in those days. The company employed more than 1,500 workers at its peak.

During the Civil War, Poppenhusen's rubber works flourished with war orders for flasks, cups and uniform buttons. Poppenhusen encouraged his workers to enlist and made provision for the families left behind. Their jobs were waiting when they came back and other veterans joined the ranks. After the war, immigrants, particularly German and Irish, poured into town. "Many Irish learned German passably well, so there was no serious language barrier," wrote Robert A. Hecht in his "History of College Point, N.Y." Poppenhusen imported German teachers for his growing kindergarten. He donated $30,000 to build the First Reformed Church, opened a library and took all his employees and their families, 1,000 people, by special trains to the nation's centennial celebration in Philadelphia in 1876.

Fascinated by trains, he bought railroads. In 1870 he acquired the North Shore Railroad, which ran from Long Island City to Flushing, and extended it to College Point. He invested $3 million to $6 million in the consolidation of several existing lines into the Long Island Rail Road. His three sons, lacking their father's business acumen, plunged recklessly into the railroad-buying act. Poppenhusen was stuck with a hodge-podge of stations, rolling stock and tracks, and the recession of 1873-78 made matters worse.

In 1877 the line went into receivership. Poppenhusen was bankrupt.

He returned to Germany in 1878 and tried to recoup his lost fortune, returning several times to his College Point mansion, where he died in 1883. The mansion was demolished in 1905, after the death of his second wife. The factory limped along until the 1930s when it moved to Butler, N.J., and eventually folded. Plastics were replacing hard rubber.

In 1884, the townspeople erected a monument on College Point Boulevard, inscribed "To the memory of the benefactor of College Point." But the Poppenhusen Institute, a national landmark where children come to learn music, dance and karate and view an exhibit of American Indian life 1,000 years ago, remains his most enduring legacy.