Santa’s Manhattan Homes

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Santa Claus has a home in New York, in a colonnaded building across from Pennsylvania Station that is the city’s main post office. It must be his home, because that’s where letters addressed to him wind up. The letters come from all over, tens of thousands of them each year, sent by the needy and the hopeful, the luckless and the guileless. Every Christmas season, kindhearted New Yorkers enlist as surrogate Santas. They go to the post office and sift through the mail in search of people to help.

Santa has another home of sorts in New York, in a brick building on the Upper West Side that houses a small school with about 110 students in pre-high school grades. The Studio School, as it is called, has an official address of 117 West 95th Street, but its building also encompasses No. 115. Long ago, No. 115 was home to Dr. Philip O’Hanlon, a Police Department surgeon and deputy coroner.

Dr. O’Hanlon had an 8-year-old daughter who, troubled by the skepticism of her “little friends,” asked about Santa’s existence. He suggested that she put the question in a letter to The New York Sun, a popular daily in its time. You’ve no doubt figured out where this is going. On Sept. 21, 1897, in what is surely the most oft-quoted (and oft-parodied) line from an American newspaper editorial, The Sun wrote, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

“He exists,” the editorial continued, “as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.”

The florid prose was the work of Francis Pharcellus Church, described in some accounts as having in general been quite the curmudgeon (a not unfamiliar type in editorial-writing circles). But with this essay of 415 words or so, he went into sentimental overdrive, and entered American lore.

In 2011 the website of Smithsonian magazine ranked it No. 1 on a list of “top 10 unforgettable editorials.” (No. 2, for the curious, was an 1845 article in The New York Morning News that firmly planted the phrase “manifest destiny” in the national consciousness.) T. A. Frail, who compiled the Smithsonian list, called the Church editorial “a masterpiece of decisiveness” — the Yes, Virginia section — but also of “evasion” — the part about Santa existing as certainly as love et al. exist.

The head of the Studio School, Janet Rotter, said Virginia was “part of our school spirit.” Indeed, Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas, her name upon marriage, might well have felt at home there, having been a teacher and principal in the New York public school system for 47 years. She died at age 81 in 1971, the same year that the Studio School was founded.

The school established a scholarship in her name. Just before students left last week on their Christmas break, Virginia’s question and Church’s reply were read aloud to them. A plaque in her memory on an outside wall draws visitors curious to know more about her, Ms. Rotter said.

A few years ago, students were asked how they would have responded to that inquiring 8-year-old girl. Their thoughts, in essays, showed an appreciation for life’s imponderables. “If you only believe what you see,” a 13-year-old girl wrote, “then you are missing a whole world out there full of wonderful mystical mysteries.” Another girl, also 13, wrote: “We must trust what we cannot see and put our faith in the unknown. If we abandon what is unknown to our senses, how can we truly know anything?”

“They don’t take it so literally,” Ms. Rotter said of how her students interpret the Santa Claus editorial. “They have a deep respect for the ideal.”

What “Yes, Virginia” reflects for them is a human longing for something loftier than what Church described 120 years ago as “the skepticism of a skeptical age.” Skepticism unquestionably endures. So does that yearning.