Ida Wood had a secret. Born Ida Mayfield in New Orleans, Ida moved to New York in the 1850s and through her marriage to Benjamin Wood, publisher of the New York Daily News, she entered society.

By the 1870s, Ida’s name was regularly found in the social columns of the city’s newspapers. So why, in 1907, did Ida Wood cash in – withdrawing her fortune from the bank and then, along with her sister and daughter, retreat into a suite at the Herald Square Hotel… for decades?

This is the story of a Gilded Age Belle turned recluse, who chose to withdraw from society while still living in the heart of it. It’s also the story of the fortune hunters who circled around her in her final years.

And most incredibly – it’s the story of what happened next.

Check out the Bowery Boys website for photos of Ida, Ben, the Herald Square Hotel, plus the "alternate ending" proposed by Joseph Cox, author of The Recluse of Herald Square.

After listening to this episode, dive into these past shows with similar themes and locations
-- Herald Square
-- Fernando Wood
-- When Longacre Square Became Times Square

This episode is part of the Bowery Boys Season of Mysteries, running through September and October:

-- The Ghosty Men: Inside the Collyer Mansion

This episode was edited by Kieran Gannon

In 2022, Greg received a large box in the mail, containing hundreds of news clippings and documents related to the Collyer Brothers. This expanded, newly edited version of his 2019 show on the Collyer Brothers includes some of this research.

New York City, with over 8 million people, is filled with stories of people who just want to be left alone – recluses, hermits, cloistering themselves from the public eye, closing themselves off from scrutiny.

However, none attempted to seal themselves off so completely in the way that Homer and Langley Collyer attempted in the 1930s and 1940s.

Their story is infamous. In going several steps further to be left alone, these 'ghosty men' drew attention to themselves and to their crumbling Fifth Avenue mansion – dubbed by the press ‘the Harlem house of mystery’.

They were the children of the Gilded Age, clinging to blue-blooded lineage and drawing-room social customs, in a neighborhood about to become the heart of African-American culture. But their unusual retreat inward — off the grid, hidden from view — suggested something more troubling than fear and isolation. And in the end, their house consumed them.

Visit the website for images of people and places from this show

What was Times Square before the electric billboards, before the Broadway theaters and theme restaurants, before the thousands and thousands of tourists?

What was Times Square before it was Times Square? Today it’s virtually impossible to find traces of the area’s 18th and 19th century past. But in this episode, Tom and Greg will peel away the glamour and chaos — evict the Elmos and the pedicabs — to explore a far different world — of colonial estates, rolling farms, horse stables, and beer-themed hotels.

They’ll be ENDING their story today on the date December 31, 1904, when the very first New Year’s Eve celebration was held here – in the plaza newly christened as Times Square. But if you had walked through here fifty years earlier, you certainly would not have called it ‘the crossroads of the world.’

FEATURING: The Vanderbilts, the Pabsts, the Ochs, and the biggest musical of the 1900s! And a few connections in Times Square where you can still find these 19th-century traces of the past.

This show was edited by Kieran Gannon

Visit the website for images and other information, including recommendations of other Bowery Boys podcasts