He started as an errand boy for Chester A. Arthur and went on to preside twice over Advance Lodge, lead the Long Island City aldermen, and set up the first jury office in Queens County. He was a man who took every seat he held seriously.
Advance Lodge No. 635: Lodge History · The Lodges That Built Queens: Series Overview · Related: How Long Island City Was Created
The chair came first. Years before Edward J. Knauer presided over Advance Lodge No. 635, which he served as Worshipful Master in 1886 and again in 1889, he was handed the office chair of Chester A. Arthur, the New York lawyer who had hired him as an errand boy and later made him a partner. Arthur passed it to him on leaving for the vice presidency.
Knauer spent the rest of his life collecting seats of a different kind: the Master's chair in the East of an Astoria lodge, the president's chair of the Long Island City Board of Aldermen, and a county office he built from nothing and once defended by changing the locks. Of all of them, the lodge was the steadiest, and the one that tells most about the man.
The Errand Boy on Arthur's Staff
Knauer was born in Manhattan on December 7, 1855. His parents, Oscar and Catherine (Yost) Knauer, had come from Germany in 1837, and his father became one of the principal workmen of Steinway & Sons, the piano makers whose factory town would later anchor the northern edge of Astoria. The son finished Grammar School No. 18 in 1871 and went straight to work running errands in Arthur's law office.
The arrangement became an education. Arthur encouraged the boy to read law, and Knauer was admitted to the bar at Poughkeepsie in May 1877. He stayed on with Arthur and his successors and became a partner in 1882, in the firm later known as Knevals & Perry. From 1882 to 1890 he was also associated with Rastus S. Ransom, a former Surrogate of New York County. Both partnerships gave him a training in Manhattan courtrooms and a style of public speech that later made Queens Republicans take notice.
Astoria by Marriage
He crossed the river in August 1876, soon after marrying Matilda Leonhard, a New York-born daughter of the merchant Frederick W. Leonhard. The family made its home at the corner of Woolsey and Franklin Streets, and Knauer threw himself into the local life of the place.
The Astoria Athletic Club made him its president. When the club opened its new clubhouse with a ball in December 1889, the grand march was led by President Knauer and his wife, and he accepted, with a gallant little speech, a secretary's table and chair presented by the young women who had worked the club's fair.
Among the guests that night was Assemblyman-elect Henry C. Johnson, whose son served as the club's treasurer and who would himself sit in the East of Advance Lodge a few years later. Astoria's clubs, councils and lodges were drawn from overlapping circles of men.
The Chair in the East
Advance Lodge, chartered in 1867, met in its hall at 165 Fulton Avenue, and by the 1880s it counted many of Astoria's leading men among its past masters. When the Brooklyn Eagle printed the full succession in 1913, as the lodge raised money for its new temple on Grand Avenue, Knauer's name sat between those of Hemsen Taylor and John Henshaw, with his years given as 1886 and 1889.
A second Knauer, Oscar C., held the gavel in 1892. He shared the family name and Edward's father's first name, although the records at hand do not say how the two were related.
Knauer's service did not end when he left the East. At the installation of January 1894, conducted by District Deputy Townsend Scudder, the past master was again on the floor, serving as Master of Ceremonies while Alexander S. Williams was installed for another year and a young newspaperman, E. N. Dodson, took his place among the officers.
Outside the lodge room, Knauer's memberships ran in a wide circle: New York Consistory of the Scottish Rite, Mecca Temple of the Mystic Shrine, John Allen Lodge of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, and Queensboro Lodge No. 878 of the Elks.
A Hundred Ballots
Politics drew him in early. In 1888 he sought the Republican nomination for Civil Justice of Long Island City and lost it to Lucius N. Manley, twenty votes to five. It would not be the last time those two names met on a ballot. A few years later he won election as alderman from the Fifth Ward, and in the spring of 1892 he declined to stand again for the athletic club's presidency because his new public duties left no room for it.
His second term opened in January 1894 with a deadlock that ran past midnight and through more than a hundred ballots. When it broke, the new president of the Board of Aldermen was Edward J. Knauer, a Republican chosen as a compromise over Joseph McGee and Mayor Horatio Sanford's own candidate.
He was not a quiet presiding officer. He pressed the mystery of the city's missing official maps, and he took on the Commissioner of Public Works so sharply in 1895 that the commissioner, refused the floor, was left to give his opinion of the alderman in private.
That autumn Knauer made an active run for the Republican nomination for mayor, and the Times described him as a man very popular in the city. The nomination went elsewhere. That fall Mayor Horatio Sanford lost at the polls, and Patrick J. Gleason took the office back for Long Island City's final years.
Knauer remained a fixture of the opposition, and his obituaries remembered him as one of the principals in the long effort to unseat Gleason. In 1897, speaking for a Republican committee on the city's water supply, he called the board's treatment of visiting officials “gag rule” and very nearly came to blows with an alderman.
Possession Is Nine Points
Consolidation into Greater New York brought him his largest seat. A new state law, Chapter 441 of the Laws of 1899, created the office of Commissioner of Jurors for Queens and Richmond counties, and that year Knauer was appointed the first to hold it in Queens, a six-year post.
The appointments he made in turn, a brother of the County Judge as deputy and a son of the County Clerk as clerk, led the Eagle to call the office a family affair.
The old Board of Supervisors, a county body living out its last months, fought him at every turn. It named his process server for him; he refused to recognize the man. It withheld the December payroll; he obtained a court order and the board gave way.
In July 1900, judging that the supervisors no longer had legal standing, he moved his office into their handsomely furnished rooms in the Court House, ordered new locks for the doors, and announced that possession was nine points of the law.
The work itself earned steadier praise. Rather than make every citizen travel to Long Island City, Knauer held sittings in the villages, from Jamaica to Far Rockaway, examining some ten thousand people in a single year. Judges complimented his lists term after term.
The Judge and the Jury List
He was mentioned for District Attorney in 1902 and fought for the Surrogate nomination in 1904, losing to Manley once more, forty-three to thirty-two. Knauer himself moved to make the nomination unanimous. That November the Court House burned, scattering his office along with the courts, and at year's end his term expired.
The blow came afterward. In 1905 Justice William J. Gaynor publicly attacked the administration of the Queens jury lists. A grand jury cleared Knauer, placing the fault on an outdated law, and he answered the justice in print, calling the remarks unwarranted and demanding that Gaynor prove his assertion. He was not reappointed. The newspapers later wrote that he never stopped feeling the sting.
An Office on the Plaza
The later years were quieter. He kept a practice in Long Island City, served as a bankruptcy trustee and referee, chaired the Queens branch of the Citizens' Union in 1909, and sat with the county bar. A failed investment in puncture-proof bicycle tires had cost him a fortune, and the family moved from Astoria to Bowne Avenue in Flushing.
On April 9, 1914, at fifty-eight, Edward J. Knauer died by suicide in his office in the Corn Exchange Bank Building on Bridge Plaza. He left letters to his wife and son that referred to financial difficulties and persistent illness. Among his last wishes was that Arthur's chair go to his colleague Charles A. Tipling.
Some of the chairs in his life were given to him, and at least one he took by force of will and a locksmith. The East of Advance Lodge belonged to neither kind. It was offered twice by the votes of Astoria men who knew him at the club, in the council chamber and on the street. In the list of past masters printed the year before his death, his name stands in its proper place, preserving a record of service beyond the offices he won and lost outside the lodge room.
Endnotes
Lodge and Fraternal Records
- Advance Lodge No. 635, F. & A.M., succession of past masters as printed in the Brooklyn Eagle, November 30, 1913, p. 63, “Masons of Astoria to Build New Home.”
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, January 11, 1894, p. 6: installation of officers of Advance Lodge.
- Fraternal memberships—New York Consistory; Mecca Temple, A.A.O.N.M.S.; John Allen Lodge, A.O.U.W.; Queensboro Lodge No. 878, B.P.O.E.—as given in The Brooklyn Daily Times, April 10, 1914, p. 1.
Newspapers
- The Evening World, October 25, 1888, p. 4: Long Island City Republican city convention.
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, December 21, 1889, p. 3: Astoria Athletic Club ball.
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, April 1, 1890, p. 5: Long Island City notaries.
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, April 2, 1892, p. 2: “Long Island City Topics.”
- Times Union, May 4, 1893, p. 1: “Maps Missing.”
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, January 3, 1894, p. 1, and The Evening World, January 3, 1894, p. 1: election of the president of the Board of Aldermen.
- Brooklyn Eagle, September 4, 1895, p. 7: “Officials at Loggerheads.”
- The New York Times, October 7, 1895, p. 9: “Many Want to Be Mayor.”
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, October 19, 1895, p. 3.
- Brooklyn Eagle, February 3, 1897, p. 14: “Long Island City Aldermen.”
- Brooklyn Eagle, August 18 and 19, 1899; The Brooklyn Daily Times, December 15, 1899; New York Herald, December 31, 1899: the Commissioner of Jurors appointments and the dispute with the Board of Supervisors.
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, March 21, 1900; Brooklyn Eagle, March 26, 1900; New-York Tribune, July 12, 1900; The Brooklyn Citizen, July 13, 1900: the payroll order and the Supervisors' rooms.
- Brooklyn Eagle, December 26, 1901; The Brooklyn Daily Times, April 9, 1902, and April 24, 1903: jury examinations and lists.
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, August 9, 1902; August 8 and 27, 1904; Brooklyn Eagle, September 9 and October 4, 1904: candidacies for District Attorney and Surrogate.
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, November 28, 1904, p. 11: Queens County Court House fire.
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, January 5, 1905, and April 28, 1905, p. 10: end of term and reply to Justice Gaynor.
- Brooklyn Eagle, January 6, 1908; The Brooklyn Daily Times, September 29, 1909; The Brooklyn Citizen, February 7, 1914: trusteeships, Citizens' Union, references.
- Obituaries and death reports, April 10 and 11, 1914: Brooklyn Eagle, Times Union, The Brooklyn Daily Times, The Evening World, New York Herald.
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, April 25, 1914, p. 10: probate of the will.
Organizational Records
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, July 28, 1906, p. 11: “History of Queens County Bar Association,” membership roll.
Published Histories and Web Sources
- J. S. Kelsey, History of Long Island City, New York: A Record of Its Early Settlement and Corporate Progress (Long Island Star Publishing Company, 1896), biographical sketch of Edward J. Knauer, p. 183. Online transcription: ldsgenealogy.com.
- Chapter 441, Laws of New York, 1899, concerning the office of Commissioner of Jurors for Queens and Richmond counties, as summarized in a New York court decision reproduced at syfert.com.
- Mayors of Long Island City, 1870 to 1897: Wikipedia, “Long Island City,” citing The Encyclopedia of New York City.
Continue Reading
- Advance Lodge No. 635: Lodge History
- Ezra Newton Dodson of Advance Lodge No. 635
- Steinway: How a Piano Factory Built a Village in Queens
- How Long Island City Was Created in 1870
- The Other Brotherhoods
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