A civil engineer raised in Long Island City in 1898 went on to oversee New York's roads and canals, face a grand larceny indictment, and end his career as a college dean.
On November 15, 1898, a young civil engineer living at 329 Broadway in Long Island City was raised to Master Mason in Advance Lodge No. 635. Frederick Skene became the lodge's 253rd member, and for a while he was just another name on a growing roll. His Masonic life did not stay there. The same hands that signed the lodge's book went on to sign off on borough highways, then to direct the state's engineering office in Albany, and the man who started as a neighbor on Broadway ended up in the public record of Queens and New York in ways few of his brethren did. (1, 2, 3)
Number 253
Skene was twenty-four, a Long Island City product through and through. Born at Garrison-on-Hudson on July 25, 1874, he went to the public schools in Long Island City, then to New York University, where he took a Bachelor of Science in 1896 and a civil engineering degree in 1897. By the time of his raising he had already been working for a few months as an assistant engineer in the Bureau of Highways for the Borough of Queens, appointed that March. (1, 2)
The lodge roll did not mention any of that. It recorded a name, a number, an address, and an occupation: civil engineer. What the entry could not show was how fast the occupation was about to grow. (1)
The Man Who Graded Queens
The borough was new in those years, and a good deal of it was still unpaved. Skene was made acting engineer in charge of the Highways Bureau in 1899 and engineer in charge in 1902, a post he held until the first day of 1907. Roads, grades, drainage, and street improvements are rarely the stuff of heroic narrative. They are, however, what decides whether a fast-growing place functions, and Skene spent nearly a decade keeping Queens functioning. (2)
His Masonic life ran in parallel. The Brooklyn papers that reported Advance Lodge's December 1903 election listed trustees, among them a Worshipful Brother Fred Skene. That is not a distinction a lodge hands to a man who only passes through. He stayed on the lodge's side of the ledger even as his day job grew heavier. (4)
His circle, too, kept brushing up against Advance Lodge. Wolcott Noble, who served for a time as Skene's secretary and later worked in the Queens engineering department, appears in the same 1908 biographical volume as a member of the same lodge. The overlap between the borough's engineering offices and Advance Lodge's roll is the sort of thing that shows how small and tightly woven the world of Queens civic life could be. (2)
A State in Motion
In 1907, Skene took office as New York State Engineer and Surveyor, serving through 1908 under Governor Charles Evans Hughes. The Barge Canal, which the voters had approved in 1903, was just beginning. Whitford's history of the canal calls Skene's administration the shortest of any during its construction, a mere two years that came after the main questions of policy were settled and before the heavy construction began. Even so, it left marks. He was the first State Engineer to put the need for terminals prominently before the public and to urge that they be made part of the plan. He backed the Deeper Hudson advocates, and pressed the earlier effort to win federal help for the Troy-Waterford section. During his time the Barge Canal Bulletin began to appear, and studies were carried out for harbor work at Syracuse, movable dams at Rochester and Phoenix, and the tangled route through Rome. (3)
The job was bigger than canals. Skene's office also had charge of state highway construction, and Whitford reckons a poll of the engineers working under him on both highways and canals would have counted about eighteen hundred men. It was during his term that action was taken to move the highways out of the State Engineer's department and into a special commission. In February 1907, a Cornell newspaper found him setting out for Ithaca with his deputy and a division engineer to look into a proposed enlargement of the Inlet, a small reminder that the office was as much about walking a shoreline as sitting in Albany. (3, 6)
Seventeen Counts
Public works in that era invited suspicion, and Skene's name did not escape it. During and after his tenure, there were allegations of graft and fraudulent road contracts. In 1910 he was indicted on seventeen counts of grand larceny in office. (7)
He hired the prominent lawyer William Travers Jerome, and on one of the indictments he went to trial in September 1910, with The New York Times covering the proceedings daily. The jury acquitted him. His accuser, Charles H. O'Neil, who had been his confidential assistant, was arrested on a perjury charge, and the sixteen other indictments were quashed in 1912. (7)
The affair belongs in any honest account of his life. The record also shows what happened after: he did not leave public life, and he did not leave the fraternity or the borough. When the Times was still reporting developments from the case in 1913, Skene's career was already moving in another direction. (5, 7)
What the Biographer Counted
A 1908 history of Queens gives a picture of how the borough saw him at the height of his public career. He lived in the borough, the writer says, and had for twenty-eight years. He was a Democrat. He belonged to Advance Lodge No. 635, and was a Royal Arch Mason, a Knight Templar, a thirty-second degree Mason, and a Shriner, as well as a member of the Odd Fellows, the Elks, the Municipal Engineering Society, and the Democratic Club of Queens. In February 1902, he had married Minnie C. Weinholz of New Rochelle, and they later had a daughter, Dorothy. (2, 10)
The same book is a reminder that “joiner” was a serious civic description in 1908. Memberships told a man's neighbors where he could be found and whom he answered to. Advance Lodge sits on that list between a profession and a politics, a place where an engineer could also be a brother.
Advance Lodge's own paperwork carries him further. When the lodge laid the cornerstone of its Grand Avenue temple in November 1915, the Brooklyn Eagle listed a Frederick Skene on the Reception Committee. By then he had been a member for seventeen years, and more than one kind of builder was welcome at the ceremony. (5)
A Dean and a Bell
His later career turned to teaching. Skene became dean of the School of Technology at the College of the City of New York. The sources disagree on how long he held the title. One reference gives his term as 1940 to 1943, while the same source's text, and a November 1939 Times notice of faculty retirements, point to his stepping down around the start of 1940. Whatever the exact span, it was a second career devoted to training the engineers who would build what he had planned. (7, 10)
He died in Queens on August 22, 1943, at sixty-nine. His funeral was held in Astoria, and at noon the bell at City College was rung in his honor. (7, 10)
A Boat on the Hudson
More than eighty years later, his name went back on the water. In 2024, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dedicated a new vessel, the Frederick Skene, at the Albany Field Office in Troy. The Corps described him as a strong supporter of federal construction of the Troy Lock and Dam, and said the forty-five-foot tow boat would push barges and clear hazards from upstate waterways. Public radio reported that it would collect debris from Lake Champlain down to the Cuomo Bridge. (8, 9)
A small working boat is an honest memorial for an engineer. Frederick Skene came into Advance Lodge No. 635 as the 253rd name on a roll, an engineer with an address on Broadway. He went on to leave his mark on roads, canals, and a courtroom record, while the lodge kept him on its trustee list and, years later, its committee lists. The lodge got a builder, and so did the rest of the state.
Endnotes
Lodge Records
- Advance Lodge No. 635 membership records: Frederick Skene, 253rd member, raised to Master Mason November 15, 1898; listed as civil engineer, residing at 329 Broadway, Long Island City. Return to text
Books and Histories
- George Von Skal, Illustrated History of the Borough of Queens, New York City (Flushing Journal/F. T. Smiley Publishing Co., 1908), biographical sketches of Hon. Frederick Skene and Wolcott Noble. Return to text
- Noble E. Whitford, History of the Barge Canal of New York State, Chapter XXI, “The Chief Builders and Their Assistants.” Return to text
Newspapers and Periodicals
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, January 2 and January 9, 1904 (Advance Lodge election and trustees). Return to text
- Brooklyn Eagle, November 21, 1915, “Lay Cornerstone for Masonic Temple” (Reception Committee). Return to text
- The Cornell Daily Sun, February 5, 1907, “Inlet May Be Enlarged.” Return to text
- The New York Times, December 30, 1906 (appointments); September 3, 6, 8, and 9, 1910 (trial and acquittal); August 29, 1913 (further developments); November 6, 1939 (retirement notice); August 28, 1943 (obituary and City College memorial). Return to text
Modern Sources
- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New York District, dedication materials and press coverage for DCV Frederick Skene, 2024. Return to text
- WAMC Northeast Public Radio, Samantha Simmons, “Debris Collection Vessel sets sail on the Hudson River,” August 5, 2024. Return to text
Public and Genealogical Records
- Public biographical and vital record summaries for Frederick Skene (born July 25, 1874, Garrison, New York; died August 22, 1943, Queens, New York). Return to text
Double-click to edit...
