“The Church Would Look Foolish Without Them”: Mary Magdalena Henning, Bronx, New York

Miss Mary M. Henning, the only lady that is a representative and active real estate, fire and plate glass insurance broker in the Borough of the Bronx, with office and residence on Avenue C, between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, Unionport, was born in New York City, February 15, 1861, attended the sisters schools, and is an undergraduate of the Ursuline Academy. The daughter of Henry and Mary Magdalena Henning, old and highly respected residents of the Bronx, she was carefully raised and received the constant attention of her parents as to her educational affairs, which covered the entire curriculum of classical and business knowledge.

So thoroughly was the latter accomplished, that in 1903, Miss Henning, ambitious to test her abilities, chose the real estate business as her profession, and with confidence in herself to succeed, she announced to the community that she was ready and open for business. In a very short time she made herself manifest among the property owners, managers of estates and investors; with more than unusual ability she soon had a roster of choice properties in the best locations that she could offer to her clients at prices that invited immediate and profitable investment. At the end of the three years, she was delighted to discover that her labors had not been in vain, that she had built up a solid and substantial foundation for her business in the future, and that her greatest hopes had been realized, she was a success, and had become known throughout the Bronx Borough and Manhattan, as one of the most active, industrious and successful brokers north of the Harlem River.

Her clientage increased rapidly until at the present time her office is a hive of industry and her sales far exceed many of the older firms in the borough, who have from four to five assistants engaged with them to carry on the business. Single-headed and alone, Miss Henning manages and directs her own affairs, except when obliged to be absent from her office to look after important details, her mother, a lady of culture and refinement, assumes charge of her office affairs and with the same business methods employed by her daughter. In property values, Miss Henning has become an expert, and has that wonderful faculty of locating and securing houses and plots, that appeal to the investor or purchaser as such that will rapidly advance in value, either for improvement or investment.

Remunerative properties is what Miss Henning carries upon her books, and for this reason her clients are so numerous, and they have absolute confidence in her judgment. Owners of estates and individual property owners are in constant consultation with her, and are only too willing to entrust the sale of their holdings to her excellent care. Miss Henning has been a resident of Unionport for the past 13 years and is highly respected and honored by the whole community for her culture and refinement, her great business qualifications, and her strict integrity in all of her business transactions. Beside her large real estate business, she is actively engaged in the fire and plate glass insurance, representing the very best and leading companies in the country, is a notary public, attends to the execution of legal and pension papers.

The lady is a member of the Church of the Holy Family, Companion of the Foresters of America, the Legion of the Sacred Heart, and was treasurer for three years of the St. Rose of Lima Sodality of St. Joseph’s Church on Eighty-seventh Street, Manhattan. Her father, Henry Henning, is a native of New York City, and her mother, Mary Magdalena Henning, was born in Bavaria, Germany. Miss Henning is also a member of the Catholic Women’s Benevolent Legion.

Randall Comfort, Charles D. Steurer, and Charles A.D. Meyerhoff, History of Bronx Borough, City of New York (1906).

NOTE
During the mid-1800’s, the two largest immigrant groups coming to America were the Germans and the Irish. Between 1850 and 1890, some 1.2 million German immigrants came to the United States. At the turn of the last century, the Bronx neighborhoods of Melrose and Morrisania were predominantly German. Cortlandt Avenue was once called the “Dutch Broadway” (“Dutch” comes from the German word for German, Deutsch).

Many German immigrants arriving in New York settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, then an unhealthy and overcrowded area. As they gathered some money, they moved out to Brooklyn on one hand and the Bronx on the other. Holy Family Church was founded in the Bronx in 1896 for German Catholics. Other Bronx parishes that were originally founded for Germans include Immaculate Conception, Melrose (1853); St. Joseph, Tremont (1873); St. Anthony of Padua, Morrisania (1901); St. Anselm, also in Morrisania, founded in 1891.

In 1855, the Academy of Mount St. Ursula High School was founded by the Ursuline Sisters in the Bronx’s East Morrisania section. It is the oldest Catholic girls’ high school in New York State. (When the Ursulines arrived in the Bronx, before their convent was built, they stayed with the Henning family.) Today the school is located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx.