Otto Spengler Residence & Argus Pressclipping Bureau

History

Otto Spengler (1873-1946), who was assigned male at birth but might identify today as transgender, was featured in the earliest known discussion of “transvestites” in the U.S. medical community. In a 1913 lecture and 1914 article, Dr. Bernard S. Talmey — Spengler’s longtime friend — presented anonymized case histories of Spengler and four gender-nonconforming individuals with whom Spengler had corresponded. Later, Spengler appeared (as “Rudolph H.”) in another monumental study, Dr. George W. Henry’s Sex Variants (1941), derived from Jan Gay’s interviews. Together, these works offer valuable insight into Spengler’s life.

Born in Strasburg, Prussia (now Germany), and raised in Berlin, Spengler wore earrings, high-heeled shoes, and dresses throughout childhood. Around age 12, Spengler first experienced gender incongruence, which intensified after immigrating to New York in 1892. Although Spengler might also identify today on the asexual spectrum and never willingly wanted to marry, Spengler married Helene Wasbutzky in 1898. They moved to the third floor of 352 Third Avenue, at East 26th Street, in 1904, where they raised three children: Valerie, Hildegard, and Alfred.

Spengler eventually became estranged, but the family initially treated Spengler’s gender variance with a degree of normalcy. Helene sewed dresses and shared her lingerie, while Hildegard gifted Spengler feminine items and affectionately called Spengler “papa-lady.” Also, desiring “to dress as a woman at every opportunity,” Spengler habitually did so at home. This freedom likely informed Spengler’s decision to become a home-based business owner; “before that,” Spengler noted, “I thought I [had] to be more manly.”

Spengler worked in press clipping — a service that compiles newspaper clippings mentioning customers’ names, products, or subjects — for decades before independently establishing the Argus Pressclipping Bureau in 1902. After 1904, Spengler worked in a second-floor office at 352 Third Avenue — and, later, in the basement — with a rotation of female assistants manually clipping articles for subscribers. Spengler specialized in assembling scrapbooks, including Argus’s crowning achievement: a 400-volume, 80,000-page collection of World War I clippings. The New-York Historical Society (now New York Historical) acquired it in 1928, emphasizing that “The importance of the collection cannot be overestimated…it will make the best contemporary record of the World War to which future historians can turn.” Besides press clipping, Spengler held positions in numerous German-American organizations and, in 1913, compiled an expansive biographical dictionary of New York’s notable German immigrants.

After Helene moved out in the 1910s, Spengler remained in the apartment, which became “cluttered with figures and portraits of women, and with forms” displaying Spengler’s dress collection. Although, in 1906, Spengler may have delivered a lecture on gender transition to the German Scientific Society of New York, Spengler’s engagement with sexological circles deepened after Helene left. As Henry noted:

Spengler attended, and was reportedly presented as “a typical transvestite,” at Magnus Hirschfeld’s lectures and shared private photos with the German magazine Das 3. Geschlecht (“The Third Sex”). Defending crossdressing in letters to newspaper editors, Spengler lauded the German police’s “transvestite passes” permitting individuals to dress in accordance with their gender identity (and had separately requested similar permits from the New York Police Department, to no avail). Spengler’s clearest defense of gender expression appeared in a letter praising the dismissed charges against Civil War surgeon and suffragist Dr. Mary Walker for “masquerading in male attire”:

Spengler’s articulation of authentic gender expression as a matter of survival was rooted in personal experience. As Talmey observed, Spengler suffered “absentmindedness” and suicidal thoughts when wearing masculine clothing but became more mentally acute, cheerful, and restful in feminine attire. This emotional distress deepened Spengler’s “desire…to live as a woman absolutely,” leading Spengler to seek gender-affirming care — including X-ray sterilization in 1926 and, later, hormone therapy — from Dr. Harry Benjamin, who didn’t begin focusing on this care until the late 1940s.

Despite publicly appearing in feminine attire rarely and always veiled, Spengler remained vulnerable to discrimination. During the 1915 New York Ripper murder investigations, police targeted and surveilled Spengler for weeks “as a man seen masquerading in woman’s graments [sic]” after five-year-old Leonore Cohn was found murdered in the building at 350 Third Avenue, next to where Spengler lived. Police also reportedly attempted to bribe Spengler’s alibi witness (the family’s servant) to provide false testimony.

By 1937, Spengler was “nearly blind and feeble, antisocial in great measures,” and living “next to the starvation point” due to declining business. The Argus Pressclipping Bureau moved to 132 East 26th Street in 1938, but its fate thereafter remains uncertain. By the 1940s, Spengler resided at 49-12 39th Avenue in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. However, for extensive periods from at least 1940 until Spengler died in 1946, Spengler was hospitalized for psychosis at Metropolitan Hospital on Welfare Island (demolished except for the tower), Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane (demolished) on Wards Island, and Brooklyn State Hospital (now Kingsboro Psychiatric Center) in East Flatbush.

Entry by Ethan Brown, project consultant (November 2025).

NOTE: Names above in bold indicate LGBT people.