Some few years after the Civil War a Swede named Ebbe Petersen emigrated to this country to better his condition.  Fortune smiled upon him and he amassed a modest bank account, which, with considerable foresight, he invested in a large tract of unimproved land in the region known as “The Bronx,” New York City.

In the summer of 1888 Petersen determined to take a vacation and revisit Sweden, and accordingly deeded all his real estate to his wife.  Just before starting he decided to take his wife and only child, a little girl of ten or twelve, with him.  Accordingly they set sail from Hoboken Saturday, August 11, upon the steamer Geiser, of the Thingvalla Line, bound for Copenhagen.  At four o’clock Tuesday morning, at a point thirty miles south of Sable Island and two hundred miles out of Halifax, the Geiser, in the midst of a thick fog, crashed suddenly into a sister ship, the Thingvalla, of the same line, and sank.  The Thingvalla was herself badly crippled, but, after picking up thirty-one survivors, managed to limp into Halifax, from which port the rescued were brought to New York.  Only fourteen of the Geiser’s passengers had been saved and the Petersens were not among them.  They were never heard of again, and no relatives came forward to claim their property, which, happening to be in the direct line of the city’s development, was in course of time mapped out into streets and house lots and became exceedingly valuable.  Gradually houses were built upon it, various people bought it for investment, and it took on the look of other semi-developed suburban property.

In the month of December, 1905, over seventeen years after the sinking of the Geiser, a lawyer named H. Huffman Browne, offered to sell “at a bargain” to a young architect named Benjamin Levitan two house lots adjacent to the southwest corner of One Hundred and Seventy-fourth Street and Monroe Avenue, New York City.  It so happened that Browne had, not long before, induced Levitan to go into another real-estate deal, in which the architect’s suspicions had been aroused by finding that the property alleged by the lawyer to be “improved” was, in fact, unbuilt upon.  He had lost no money in the original transaction, but he determined that no such mistake should occur a second time, and he accordingly visited the property, and also had a search made of the title, which revealed the fact that Browne was not the record owner, as he had stated, but that, on the contrary, the land stood in the name of “William R. Hubert.”

It should be borne in mind that both the parties to this proposed transaction were men well known in their own professions.  Browne, particularly, was a real-estate lawyer of some distinction, and an editor of what were known as the old “New York Civil Procedure Reports.”  He was a middle-aged man, careful in his dress, particular in his speech, modest and quiet in his demeanor, by reputation a gentleman and a scholar, and had practised at the New York bar some twenty-five years.