TRUST ME, I’M A…SHOEMAKER? (1900)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
Do you know the history of YOUR house?
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If you stepped into the doctor’s office at 635 Herkimer Street early in 1900, you would have been greeted with the kindly smile of Dr. Walter C. Falk.
Dr. Falk would have listened to your heartbeat, asked you a number of questions in a slight German accent, charged you an office visit fee, and then, after disappearing and the reappearing from a back room, prescribed you any number of medications – which he would, of course, sell to you directly.
Over the coming weeks, your ailment may or may have not gone away. If it did, it was most certainly not due to the medication for which you paid and took faithfully.
For you see, it was very soon discovered that “Dr.” Falk, who had only been in town for approximately eight months, was not a doctor at all.
He was a “shoe cutter.”
“DR.” FALK, I PRESUME?
Falk noted on the 1900 Federal Census that he had been born in Germany in 1848. He was 51 years old at the time and was currently a lodger at the boarding house at 635 Herkimer Street, where he lived with seven other men and a small family.
An 1892 New York State Census record, though, showed him living in the town of Peninton, NY, where he shared a house with his wife, Emma, and their three children, Edith, Elsie, and William. The family lived in an enclave where shoemakers and shoe cutters of the town lived.
What had happened to the Falk family by the time 1900 had come around is not immediately known, but it can be guessed at from the following biographical account.
Apparently, Falk had become discontent with the “shoe cutting” business, or perhaps he simply fancied himself the doctor “type.” Either way, he began in Brooklyn to represent himself as a doctor.
Allegations, though, soon began to come in that Falk was no doctor, but had been passing for one now since he had arrived in the city.
While the 1900 Federal Census notes that he had been a “shoe cutter,” it also noted that he had been out of work for the past six months.
It seemed that Falk was using his shadow profession to pay the rent and make some pocket money for himself.
WAS FALK RUN OUT OF TOWN?
Perhaps the tip came from the physicians of Auburn, NY, who had, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of 22 May 1900, warned him “to leave that town” when they “discovered that he had been practicing without a license.”
The immediate charges, though, were made by a man who lived on Atlantic Avenue who went by the name of Joseph Brandes, who said that he had been treated by Falk. Brandes – also, according to city directories, a German shoemaker – may have had some interior knowledge or an ulterior motive for fingering Falk.
Either way, detectives who made the arrest noted that they had “a list of half a dozen or more persons who said that Falk had represented himself to them as being a physician.”
Although, Falk “asserted that he was graduated from a medical college in Paris,” he stipulated that “his diploma was in Havre, France,” which did not allow him to produce it.
Detectives subsequently found in Falk’s room “a chest full of bottles, containing compounds supposed to be drugs.” The article did not state whether those “drugs” were tested or what they were presumed to be.
In the end, Falk must have given in. He pleaded that “he did not know that he was violating the law,” and that he had thought that “what practicing he had done had been done in a friendly way.”
The judge who heard the case, though, thought otherwise, finding the “doctor” guilty and holding him for the “Special Sessions.”
It is assumed that he did not serve much time – if any at all – possibly let go with the promise to no longer represent himself as a physician, for he was found at his home, 635 Herkimer Street, when the census takers came around a week later on 4 June.
And when they asked Falk his profession, he told them.
“I am a shoe cutter.”
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