Virginia O’Hanlon’s Name Still Resonates at the Address Where She Wrote Her Famous Letter

In all the long history of New York journalism, from John Peter Zenger to Jimmy Breslin, no words are more memorable, and perhaps more meaningful, than these.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

We still recite them, long after the author and the paper he wrote them in departed the Great City of real things for the land of memory.

“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.”

Perhaps our own age of skepticism, even cynicism, sees some distant mirror in this exchange between a little girl living on the UWS and the famous newspaper her father told her to write to.

“How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.”

Or perhaps the innocence, and hopefulness, of the exchange offers an antidote to the commercialization (even every Chinese restaurant on the West Side is booked Christmas Eve) and monetization (have you completed your tips?) of our modern holiday season.

“Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.”

It is hard to imagine modern day editorial writers, where they still exist, writing such reverie. Modern opinionists are made of sterner stuff, and answer to hard bitten followings.

But Francis P. Church of the New York Sun had a moment in 1897 when he received, and decided to respond to, the letter from Laura Virginia O’Hanlon of 115 West 95th street (as she said).

“Dear Editor,” she wrote, “I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘if you see it in the Sun it’s so’. Please tell me the truth; Is there a Santa Claus?”

Papa wasn’t just anybody. He was Dr. Phillip F. O’Hanlon, of the city coroner’s office, whose name, as historian Tom Miller writes, had become “a household word” because of his testimony in several titillating murder cases (and of course the coverage in the Sun and other newspapers).

Perhaps Dr. O’Hanlon was just a frazzled dad trying to divert his inquisitive child. Even so, we are in a different world from our own when a government official sends his offspring to the mainstream media for reliable information.

Francis Pharcellus Church, for his part, most likely understood that his young correspondent was a nepo-baby, a child of a well-connected parent, though they would not have described that way at the time.

“You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down what would that prove?”

Not withstanding Virginia’s impressive lineage, Church put great effort into his legendary response.

“No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

This editorial was such a sensation that the Sun, in its day the largest circulation paper in the United States, re-published it every Christmas until its last in 1949. In more recent years, the Daily News, which inherited a good bit of the Sun’s place as “the newspaperman’s newspaper,” has reprinted the exchange every Christmas Eve.

It is a very New York thing to remember not only the people who made our history but also the places they passed through, which often remain long after they are gone. So it is this Christmas for Tom Miller, the historian, who wrote for Landmark West a long and lucid portrait of the O’Hanlon’s and their home at 115 West 95th street.

The house, like the neighborhood (and dare we add the newspaper industry) suffered serious decline in the 20th century. But the building overcame periods as a boarding house and even abandoned property (re-possessed by the city). Comeback it did. In 2001 it went on the market for $2.7 million. Then in 2009 a private school, the Studio School, bought 115 and the adjacent building and converted them to classrooms.

“Although the original interiors are gone,” Tom Miller reported, “the quirky late Victorian façade of No. 115 survives–a vestige of a time when a childless newspaper editor assured little girls and boys worldwide that, indeed, Santa Claus ‘exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist’.”

The school did not realize the connection when it bought the property but now embraces Virginia O’Hanlon as one of its own. It offers a scholarship in her name and every December stages a reading of her query and the response in Sun, attended by students, staff and descendants of Virginia.

“The Studio School, which from its inception has celebrated the promise and curiosity of every child, is proud that its school building was once the home of a famously curious child...”

Happy Holidays to every curious child!