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A Davenport Returns to Broadway LbNA #69512

Owner:Adoptable
Plant date:Dec 25, 2015
Location: Isham Park
City:Upper Manhattan
County:New York
State:New York
Boxes:1
Planted by:Nippy & Peewee's Helper
Found by: paper trail
Last found:Apr 21, 2017
Status:FFFOF
Last edited:Nov 14, 2016
It's back! After a lengthy hiatus, we've replaced the box and put it in a bit of a different spot than before. We also included a stamp pad (yay!) but please let us know if anything's missing.

Note: This box will be unavailable from sometime in December to April 1, since the area that it's in is closed.

Joan Davenport Field was born in 1919 in Princeton, New Jersey, the daughter of a prominent New York theatre family that included theatre producer William Seymour and noted actors Fanny Davenport and Harry Davenport.
After graduating from Wellesley, Joan moved to New York in 1941, where she lived for 20 years, starring and co-starring in off-Broadway productions and performing 150 weeks in summer and winter stock (including touring with Sylvia Sydney in Auntie Mame) all along the east coast and Pennsylvania/Ohio. Her productions included The Bald Soprano, The Madwoman of Chaillot, The Follies of 1910, Our Town, and a host of others.
Friends and co-stars included Margaret Hamilton, Raymond Burr, Sudy Bond and Fred Gwynne, and playwright/composer Al Moritz. Some of these stars as well as others lived with Joan in a converted funeral home in the East 20’s that they fondly referred to as “Chez Morgue.”
Just as she was beginning to make a name for herself (in 1960 the renowned theatre critic Judith Christ called her “the most promising comedienne on the New York stage”) she gave it all up to marry a fisherman and move to Connecticut, where she transferred her passion for the stage to the classroom, teaching Drama at the Williams School in New London, CT for 10 years. She also started an arena repertory theatre company in southeastern Connecticut.
Joan was the consummate humanitarian, continually supporting human rights issues and using her public speaking skills to protect historic places and open space which could be used for the enjoyment of the public. She would have loved that there was a park on Broadway that honored one of the city’s heroes—Bruce Reynolds—whose family had devoted so much time and energy into preserving Isham Park and established “Bruce’s Garden” in their son’s memory. Bruce was a Port Authority police office who died rescuing people from the World Trade center on 9/11/2001.
So we thought it would be fitting to make a letterbox in our mother’s name, and bring her finally to Broadway, albeit uptown a bit, but in a spot we’re sure she would have enjoyed, among the memories of people with whom she definitely had much in common.

Clues
Go up Broadway to Isham Park, and by all means enjoy it! It has lovely gardens, a variety of large old deciduous specimen trees, interesting cobbled pathways and large expanses of green. In the northern corner of the park is Bruce’s Garden. It's open daily 10am to 6pm April through December. The entrance is to the right. Take the right hand path that winds around and eds up at the gazebo. before you get to the gazebo there's a large evergreen tree on the right. The box is under a cleverly disguised "log" made of tree bark behind the tree. Please be discreet when searching for this box and try to do it when no one is looking. Make sure you hide the box completely when you are done, using the bark, leaves, and whatever else looks natural.



Hike length: 0.5 miles