I had pretty much given up when two faded baby-blue tickets to the Smith College graduation of June 15, 1914, fluttered down from behind the old oak kitchen cabinets and landed at my feet.  My wife, Erin, and I had been living as rental tenants in the Cornwall since 1978. As earnest young gentrifiers, we helped take the 1910 building co-op in 1981. That was also the year we moved from 3A to 11A, a four-bedroom apartment with a paneled dining room, an onyx fireplace, stained glass, a wall safe, figured tile in a bathroom — all the accouterments of top-of-the-middle-line apartment living of 1910.  We even had the brass outlet for the central vacuum cleaning system, and boy, did I waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to get that back in operation.  Yes, 11A was sinfully large for only four souls (two of whom were cats), but it had a view of Citicorp, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, so we suffered our guilty consciences in comfortable silence. At a cost of $150,000, it was not really a hardship. Such, dear reader, was West Side life long, long ago.  In the four years we lived in 3A, I had combed the earth looking for the original tenants.  I had telephoned the unfriendly son of one of the original developers (slam!).  I had found someone who had worked for the original architects, Neville & Bagge (dementia).  I had located the original building plans, and early photographs of the exterior, and interiors of other buildings in the same style by the same architects.  I had pulled the 1915 New York State census returns for our building, which yielded tenants like Alfred H. Post, in the shipping business, Richard Spencer, comptroller for the United States Rubber Company, and even the super of the building, James Harris.  But although the corresponding city directory for 1915 will tell you that Mr. Spencer, for instance, worked on the 20th floor of the U. S. Rubber building at Broadway and 58th, it was utterly silent as to apartment numbers.  It was also possible to compile, from directories and other sources, a list of tenants from the early 1930s, and then check them against the massive two-volume Polk’s New York Directory of 1933-1934. This directory is alone among all others in giving apartment numbers, albeit erratically. But for a 1910 building, it’s a quarter-century late.  By the time we took over 11A, I had no hope. Meanwhile, the restoration crusades were sweeping the West Side — buildings were rediscovering their old names, people were stripping the paint from the old paneling, all the World War I-era apartments were springing back from the awful accumulated weight of coats and coats of landlord paint and general neglect.  As certified yuppies, we decided to have the best Old House Journal-approved solid oak kitchen cabinets custom-sawn with special blades to match the exact profiles of the originals. Surely we would also have made them sustainable, organic and free range, had anyone mentioned it.  But first the old cabinets had to come down. I took a crowbar to them, lifting out the shelves one by one. One shelf resisted my efforts, but then broke free — and that’s when two little flashes of blue, mislaid for decades, dropped to the kitchen floor: “Smith College Commencement 1914 President’s Reception.”  The archivist of Smith College was most cordial, informing me that it had a graduate, Class of ’14, who had lived at our address: Dorothy Spencer.  Returning to the 1915 census, I discovered her there with her father, the Richard Spencer of U. S. Rubber, and mother, Lillian; the family had moved in when the building opened. Through Smith, I also found out that she had married and become a teacher at the Bush School in Seattle, where she died in 1973. An acquaintance there vaguely recalled that she had had a son, Joseph Miller, who lived “around Washington, D.C.”  There are a whole lot of Joseph Millers in the 202 area code, but I finally found the right one, Joseph S. Miller, who vividly recalled Apartment 11A, occupied by his grandparents until the 1920s.  Mr. Miller came to visit. He gave us some interior photographs and a copy of The New York Times marked “11A,” delivered to the door on Nov. 11, 1918, and preserved because it announced the end of the war.  Contemplatively moving our heavy mahogany dining room door back and forth, he recounted his horror at the bloody end a kitten had met trying to sneak in while it was closing.  And so a little bit of history was restored to our apartment as well as those obsessively accurate cabinets. There were so many links where the chain could have been interrupted — if the Spencers had pasted the tickets in a scrapbook instead of losing them, if the cabinets had been removed before we moved in, if I had hired a wrecking crew to take them out instead of pulling them down myself. ...  We stayed at the Cornwall another 10 years, and I can’t say I slept any better at night knowing about the Spencers, but it makes a good story. Hey, did I ever tell you how I found the first people to live in my next apartment?
As a young architectural historian, Christopher Gray was determined to find out who had first slept in his 1910 apartment.