By Dan Murphy
In 1901, in the hills of Southwest Yonkers, a hotel for the weathly was built, overlooking the Hudson River. Construction was completed on The Hotel Hendrik Hudson in 1901, but weeks before its official opening, the resort burned to the ground.
An insurance policy covered the $125,000 cost of the hotel, and plans to rebuild a new hotel never happened, nor did a plan to build a Yonkers Public School at the site.
Nothing was ever constructed at the site, but the City of Yonkers did create a park, in 1946, named after the 11th Mayor of Yonkers, Leslie Sutherland Memorial Park, which still exists today.
After the fire, the only remnants of the hotel was an elevator shaft. And one tale of Prohibition and the City of Yonkers is that Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer used the elevator shaft to store his beer and other booze during the 1920’s and 30’s.
Dutch became familiar with Yonkers after he ‘purchased’ the Yonkers brewery from its owner by putting a gun to his head and demanding his signature or his brains on the contract of sale. During prohibition, the brewery made two kinds of beer. ‘Near Beer’ with little alcoholic content, was permitted and sold to the public out the front door, while illegal ‘real beer’ was smuggled out underground, through a series of pipes created to run through the sewer lines to locations where the Feds weren’t looking.
Eventually, in September 1930 one of the beer pipes burst, and beer was flowing out onto a few Yonkers streets. Several investigations were held, but
no arrests were ever made. And while Dutch and his wife Frances, called Yonkers home for a period of time, in a few short years Dutch was shot to death by Murder Inc.
But the Dutchman left behind a treasure chest filled with Gold, Diamonds, Cash, and Bonds. It was his getaway money, but nobody is quite sure where he buried it.
A recent PBS documentary “Secrets of the Dead-Gangster Gold” tried to find out where the gangster had buried the treasure. “It is widely believed that notorious Bronx-based gangster and bootlegger Dutch Schultz buried a fortune estimated to be worth more than $50 million somewhere in New York’s Catskill Mountains prior to his death in 1935. Schultz was gunned down and died without revealing where the treasure was buried, spawning a mystery that has endured for nearly a century,” writes PBS.
One of the possible locations in the documentary was in Yonkers, at the site of the Hendrick Hudson Hotel, in the elevator shafts where he also stores his illegal booze. We have heard about several interested parties with metal detectors looking for the treasure in and around Leslile Sutherland Park. We will be spending more time at this location with our friends in Yonkers who love this story and will report back.
Most intelligent guesses as to where Dutch buried his treasure was in upstate NY, in the town of Phoenicia, where Dutch had spent some time during his bootlegging. But even if Dutch buried his millions near Phoenicia, it was in the thousands of acres of forest that make up the Catskill mountains, and despite hundreds of search parties, nobody has found it.
In January of 2021, we printed a story about Yonkers native Avram Davidson, who was a famous science-fiction author. In addition to his sci-fi works, Davidson also printed a short story called Beer Like Water, which tell the story of the beer bursting pipes in Yonkers.
During prohibition, Avram was a young, seven-year-old boy in Yonkers when DPW workers and police found a mile-long hose filled with beer running under the streets of the City. In that story, Avram asks the same questions that we have been asking for years. How come nobody was ever charged, and who benefitted from the bootlegging in Yonkers?
We will reprint parts of Avram’s Beer Like Water with the permission of his family soon.
And one final twist to this story, involves former FBI Director James Comey, who told an Irish newspaper two years ago that his grandfather was the one who uncovered the beer pipes in Yonkers. While it is true that Deputy Public Safety Commissioner William Comey served in the YPD for four decades, other historians in the YPD do not agree with the former FBI Directors claims of his grandfather. Email at dmurphy@risingmediagroup.com, if you have more to add to this tale.
