From Montréal, Cobb sent word to his secretary to go to Sing Sing and make arrangements for a visit. . . . A few years earlier, Chapin had refused a visit from Cobb. This time he accepted. Perhaps, Chapin wrote to a friend after the secretary departed, the visit will be “a chance for Cobb to get even for the hard knocks he had when I was his boss.”

Rose Man-related images from another NYCHS presentation: XXX

NYCHS' excepts from Guy Cheli's Sing Sing Prison in the Arcadia Images of America book series include from "Chapter 4: The Rose Man" six related photos. Above are two of those images: The Sing Sing in-take record for Charles Chapin, then 60, "occupation: editor," convicted Jan 14, 1919, for the murder of his wife. The Rose Man's greenhouses located behind the old warden's residence toward the river. The other images in the NYCHS presentation of excerpts from Guy Cheli'sSing Sing Prison include his prison yard landscapes and bird sanctuary. .

Although it was an overcast day, by the time Cobb set out in the late morning of October 28, 1924, it was already ten degrees above average, certainly pleasant enough to spend the day outside. Most who made the trip to the New York State Penitentiary at Ossining took the train from Grand Central Station a few blocks south of Cobb’s apartment.

For a destination as grim as it was, the trip was breathtakingly beautiful. The prison was built on the banks of the Hudson River thirty-four miles north of New York City, giving rise to the expression “being sent up the river.” The train tracks follow the contours of the river for miles, offering the passenger on the left side of the compartment an unfettered view of the Hudson, a river that inspired artists and gave rise to a school of painters . . . .

. . . . approaching Sing Sing was like coming to a medieval fortification. Erected in the 1820s with stone quarried on the spot, Sing Sing was America’s best-known and most-feared prison. Its massive stone walls, round stone towers, and heavy doors made its line of business clear to all comers. New York’s most notorious criminals were, if lucky, confined here for life or else executed on Thursdays.

Only in the prior decade had the prison begun to shed the last of its nineteenth-century practices under the rule of a new warden, Lewis Lawes. Rising from the ranks of prison guards, Lawes had been appointed by Governor Al Smith four years earlier during a wave of reform that saw many modernizations in prison life. Lawes, who dressed for the role of the enlightened reformer in tailored New York suits, enjoyed immensely showing off his fiefdom. He was publicity savvy. He knew the city’s literati—even had hopes of joining its set someday—and never missed a chance to increase his visibility and promote his reforms.

Cobb’s visit could be a boon. It also pleased Lawes that Cobb was coming to do a story about Chapin. Of all his prisoners, Chapin was one of his favorites. The two had been immediately attracted to each other when they met in 1919, and an unusual friendship had evolved. In fact, over time, Lawes had given Chapin virtual free run of the prison. On many an afternoon, the inmate could be found reading magazines in a wicker rocker on the warden’s porch overlooking the river, with the warden’s daughter playing at his feet.

. . . .Lawes escorted the writer down into the prison yard, where they found Chapin. “Dear Chief,” said the corpulent Cobb, who immediately took his old boss in his arms. Even though Chapin had gained thirty pounds and his five-foot-eight frame now held nearly 160 pounds, he was momentarily eclipsed by Cobb’s embrace. When they separated, Cobb examined his former slave master whom he had not seen since a few days before that baleful day in September 1918.

He seemed unchanged, thought Cobb. “Only he was white now when he used to be gray, with the same quick, decisive movements, the same bony, projecting chin upheld at a combative angle, the same flashes of stern and mordant humor, the same trick of chewing on a pipe stem or cigar butt, the same imperious gestures, the same air of being a creature unbendable and uncrushable.”

A Rose Man-related image from yet another NYCHS presentation: XXX

NYCHS' excepts from Mark Gado's Stone Upon Stone: Sing Sing Prison on Court TV's Crime Library web site include from "Chapter 9: The Rose Man" the above image of Chapin's Bird House at Sing Sing, circa 1929. (Courtesy of Ossining Historical Society) Chapin had asked Warden Lawes for permission to build a birdhouse for hundreds of birds with room for prisoners to sit and admire them. With support from his newspaper friends and labor by inmate volunteers, Chapin guided construction to completion in three years. The result: A magnificent structure with a huge dome and hundreds of flowers and bushes for birds to come and add to the beauty . . . all a short distance from the death house . . . .

But further consideration of Chapin would have to wait because what stretched out in front of Cobb were Chapin’s gardens, a certain conversation stopper.

Only a few years before, the yard—nearly as long and wide as two football fields joined end to end—had consisted of hard pack, covering decades of strewn construction debris and refuse. Only tiny of patches of struggling grass and even tinier flower beds previously broke the monotony of the gray soil surrounded on all sides by gray stone edifices. Cobb knew this landscape well because he had used the setting for one of his short stories, written eight years earlier. Now what lay before him stunned Cobb.

“There were spaces of lawns, soft and luxuriant, with flagged walks brocading them likes strips of gray lace laid down on green velvet,” he wrote. Along the walks stood soft, puffy arborvitae trees and masses of neatly trimmed ornamental shrubs. Green vines, like veins, wove their way up the walls of heavy stone, quarried by the hands of those the state had confined here for more than a century. And everywhere Cobb looked were flowers, familiar and unfamiliar, some in full bloom and others done for the year. . . .

Cobb and Chapin made their way down one of the flagstone paths. To their right, lining the bed along the six-story-tall old cellblock, was a herbaceous border 469 feet long, with more than 1,000 iris plants, 150 peonies, hundreds of other perennials, and 6,000 bulbs waiting for spring. The long narrow bed, however, served only as a complement to the massive rectangular garden running the length of the yard’s center.

At its midpoint was a fountain rising from a ten-foot-wide pool, upon the surface of which floated white and yellow water lilies. Leading to it were paths, lined with large, blue hydrangeas and benches for the inmates. And there, set in beds framed by narrow strips of lawn, were the rose bushes. They were so many as to defy counting. Chapin said they numbered about 2,000, and almost 3,000 if one counted the new arrivals in the greenhouses. . . .

Chapin’s handicraft had not stopped with the main yard. “Not an odd-shaped scrap of earth, nor a tucked-in corner behind a building or within a recess in the walls but was brilliant with flowers and grass. The eye strayed downward from wattled windows and guarded watchtowers to rest on zinnias and cannas and asters and all manner of autumnal blooms. It was like bridging two separate worlds of misery and despair, the other a world of sweetness and gentleness and hope and high intent.”

From the center, Cobb and Chapin turned and proceeded down a secondary yard. It was the only open space in the prison without a wall on every side. It gave out onto the Hudson below and was planted in solid colorful blocks. At the end of this boulevard, Cobb and Chapin turned left again and came to the most macabre building of the compound, a low-lying brick structure that contained the electric chair. Chapin’s touch was visible even here.

Another Correction-related book by the same author: XXX

James McGrath Morris also authored Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars published in cloth cover by McFarland & Company and in paperback by Transaction Publishers. The dramatic history of prison journalism has included many famous, notorious, and unique personalities such as Robert Morris, the “financier of the America Revolution”; the Younger Brothers of the Jesse James gang; Julian Hawthorne, the only son of Nathaniel Hawthorne; men of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); Charles Chapin, famed city editor of New York’s Evening World until he murdered his wife; Dr. Frederick Cook, North Pole explorer whose claim to have been the first to reach the pole is still debated today; Tom Runyon, who won a place for himself in history with an Underwood; and Wilbert Rideau, an illiterate teenaged murderer who raised prison journalism to the pinnacle of achievement.

“I saw how the approach to the new death house had been planted, so that the last outdoor thing a condemned man sees as he is marched into the barred corridor from which he does not issue again ever, is the loveliness of green grass and fair flowers,” wrote Cobb.

Next they toured a former garbage depot, now the site of Sing Sing’s prized tulip beds. In May and June, after the jonquils and hyacinths that hedged the beds quit blooming, thousands of tulips would rise in a sea of color. (The sight had become so noted that even white-gloved ladies from Westchester garden clubs braved entering this den of criminals to gaze upon it.) They traveled through three greenhouses opposite the entrance to the death house, only yards from the lapping water of the river. They were built twenty years before, when prison officials had made an attempt to have the inmates raise vegetables, and had fallen into disrepair before Chapin restored them. In winter, flowers from the greenhouse would be brought daily to the prison chapel and hospital.

Returning to the center of the prison yard, Cobb made his last stop in a fourth greenhouse abutting the old death house, in which several cells had been converted into living quarters for Chapin. Prior to its new life, the glassed-in space had been the prison’s morgue. Here, after an electrocution, the corpse was brought to be examined by state medical officials before being surrendered to the family.

After lawmakers heard of two cases in which men had been accidentally electrocuted and later revived by physicians, they passed a law requiring that the brain of execution victims be opened and examined. “On the slab where a hundred autopsies had been performed,” wrote Cobb, “potted flowers stood very thick, and in the sink where anatomists washed their tools when the job was done, sheaves of cut flowers were lying in cool clear running water.” The fragrance of the potting soil and moist plant life and the sounds of the canaries chirping in gilded cages eliminated all trace of the building’s past.

. . . . Warden Lawes, who had rejoined the party, [said of Chapin:] “He’s up every morning at five o’clock and out here among these flowers and I guess he’d stay out here with ‘em all night if he could. And he’s got a whole library of books on flowers and knows ‘em all by heart.”

. . . . As they walked back toward the entrance to the yard, completing their inspection tour, Chapin continued to fill in Cobb on his new life. “Mostly we talked about his flowers, or rather he did, larding his speech with technical terms and Latin names,” wrote Cobb. “Nothing was said by either of us about repentance or atonement or regeneration or recapturing a man’s self respect. Nothing much was said about the past. Nor about the future.” But as Cobb contemplated, there wasn’t much future to talk about in the case of a sixty-five-year-old man who was serving no less than twenty years, with little prospect for parole or pardon. “He didn’t invite sympathy and I didn’t bestow it,” said Cobb. . . .

As Cobb departed, George McManus, another colleague of Chapin’s newspaper past, arrived for a visit. . . . McManus had worked on the World with Chapin a dozen years earlier. He had renounced the drudgery of Park Row when he created “Bringing Up Father,” an immensely popular comic strip starring the unflappable Maggie and her up-to-no-good husband Jiggs, whom she often chased after with a rolling pin. The strip had been nationally syndicated and recently had been turned into a Broadway play . . . . The two reminisced for a while.

Finally done with his visitors, Chapin returned to his office for the first time since the morning. There was probably no inmate anywhere in the United States, or the world for that matter, who had an office like Chapin’s. With three windows overlooking the Hudson, his carpeted, draped, and book-lined hideaway was more luxurious than any workplace he had had on the outside. There he found nine letters waiting. A prodigious correspondent, Chapin received and sent in one day the amount of mail that many inmates could hope to see in a month.

After examining the envelopes, Chapin set them all aside except for one from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. The return address alone was enough to set his old heart racing. As he already knew, it contained another installment of his newest prison-romance-by-mail begun eight months earlier with Constance R. Nelson, a young editorial worker at the bank. He feverishly read all four closely written pages . . . .

After eating supper, prepared for him by Larry, his private inmate-cook, and closing the greenhouses for the night, Chapin sat in his office as darkness and quiet fell over the prison. The other inmates were confined to their tiny, damp cells, but not Chapin. He was free to roam the dark prison all night if he wanted to. . . . He went to bed in his cell in the old death house. In the morning, he would turn 66.

Though he enjoyed unheard-of privileges for a prisoner, he was continually reminded of his descent from the life he had so relished. . . . Gone, most of all, was his power. His only remaining dominion was his rose garden. . . . .

Chapin had written earlier that year . . . “Park Row would never recognize me. I don’t even know myself, and to think I have so changed in so short a time.”