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PICTURES EMAILED TO THE PHOTO DESK AT ABOUT 10 AM SUNDAY. GERSH IS BEEPABLE


It's sort of hard to picture it when you're standing at the corner of Viele Avenue and Tiffany Street in the South Bronx, but David Leggett can see it all clearly.

Instead of auto body shops, petroleum depots and a city sewage pelletization plant, David Leggett sees a large, Monticello-like mansion, stables, orchards, fields, forests and meadows that covered the entire area from Hunts Point to Boston Road.

He sees it because it once was there -- and his family owned it. And earlier this month, Leggett, a regulator with the Department of Agriculture, returned to Hunts Point to make sure it is not forgotten.

Leggett's trip was the last phase of a multi-year project aimed at identifying and resanctifying the final resting places of his once-prominent family, which included the 63rd mayor of New York Isaac Leggett Varian and assorted other rich people who once controlled a massive section of the South Bronx. The events of Sept. 11 added a special poignancy to the project.

"I guess I'm obsessed about marking and remembering things before they're lost forever," Leggett said, as he laid new tombstones on several family graves. "And this area has so little of its history left."

The day began at St. Peter's Church in the Westchester section of The Bronx, where, in 1891, nine members of the Leggett family, who had been buried on the estate almost two hundred years earlier, were relocated. 

The graves should not have been disturbed at all, but the Leggett family had lost its fortune -- and the Rose Bank mansion that had been its centerpiece -- by the end of the 19th century under mysterious circumstances. The new owner, J.L. Spofford, wanted the Leggetts banished. (The joke's on Spofford, though: His name now adorns a juvenile detention center.)

By the time David Leggett reconstructed this part of his family's history, the gravestones at St. Peter's and the family's other burial ground in Drake Park, a small patch of green that is almost entirely subsumed by the Hunts Point food market, were almost completely unreadable.

He ordered four new tombstones from a stone cutter in his native Virginia, loaded them into a Ryder truck, and left them in both cemeteries, ensuring that his family would be remembered for another century or so.

While he has solved the mystery of his family's final resting places, David Leggett still has not figured out what social or economic forces drove the Leggetts from The Bronx and forced the sale of the family's massive holdings at the dawn of the 20th century.

"The only clue is a letter we have in the family that cites `financial difficulties,' " Leggett said. "I'd like to think that they got a good offer and sold out to irresistible economic forces."

That would follow a pattern, said Bronx historian Lloyd Ultan. When the city expanded -- and annexed the Bronx in 1874 -- large landowners sold their farms to reinvest in the booming manufacturing, railroad or steel industries.

"Some invested it badly, though," Ultan said. "It's like I always say, `the first generation makes the money, the second generation preserves it and the third generation squanders it."

Perhaps, but does any generation willingly tear down a mansion like Rose Bank, with its commanding view of the East River and hundreds of acres of grounds?

"The idea of historic preservation is very new," Ultan said. "In the early 1900s, people would tear down a house of that magnitude and think nothing of it because it was on the path of `progress.'"

For Paul Lipson, whose non-profit Point Community Development Corporation nurtures a sense of neighborhood amid some of the worst excesses of urban blight, Leggett's quest to put a final stamp on his family history has a particularly backwards appeal.

"Most people in this neighborhood come from far away and have left behind centuries of family history, but this guy comes to the Bronx to literally reconnect with his roots," said Lipson, as he accompanied Leggett to Drake Park. "Very few New Yorkers can do that."

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email: gershny@yahoo.com