Members of one of the city’s oldest veterans groups are battling new enemies — each other.
Infighting and mounting financial pressure has infested the once-venerated Old Guard of the City of New York, a group with roots reaching to the early 19th century, when local militias were the order of the day.
The unit was born from competing militias. Col. William W. Tompkins created a unit in 1826, eventually dubbed the New York Light Guard. A few years later Capt. William M. McArdle created the New York City Guard. The rival units competed in drills and at parades, and soldiers from both fought in the Civil War.
The competitors became brothers in arms in 1868, when the state Legislature merged them and renamed the new unit the Old Guard, which transitioned to largely ceremonial duties. Honorary members included Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh.
The tall, bearskin hats, gold-buttoned white tunics and navy trousers of the Old Guard were welcome sights in parades, inaugurations and memorial events, and for decades the group’s annual ball was a stalwart of New York’s social scene.
“It’s a piece of old New York,” said past commandant Arthur Gallagher.
But today’s Old Guard is embroiled by petty disputes and division over whether they should sell the five-story Upper West Side headquarters. “If Donald Trump decided he wanted to be a friend to the Old Guard and give $4 million so we could renovate our building, that would be great,” said member Robert Sikorski. “We’d love to be able to keep the building, but we need to have the money to keep it.”
Chock-full of historic items, the West 91st Street building needs an elevator to accommodate aging members, Sikorski says, as well as new wiring, climate-control systems and broken plaster and floors repaired.
“Stuff is rotting,” he said of old photos, letters from Eleanor Roosevelt, military medals and muskets.
The current leadership, including Commandant Howard Haider, has discussed selling the town house. But Gallagher insists the building should not be sold and that “there’s no crisis.”
He believes his opposition to the sale led to his ouster from the Old Guard. “They want to sell the building so they trumped up the charges against me,” he said. A member claimed Gallagher bullied him for being out of uniform at last year’s ball.
Gallagher, an attorney who is representing himself, is now suing the group he once led, claiming it broke all of its own rules to unfairly expel him.
Sikorski called Gallagher’s claims about trumped-up charges baseless. “It wasn’t just one incident,” he said of Gallagher.