More Checking Up

All my life, I have had recurrent dreams in which I find myself walking through northern Manhattan during its rural-suburban period. This would have been around 1880 to 1900. I remember one in particular which was so vivid I was convinced I was looking at a house in the woods at 181st Street for a specific and mysterious reason. I actually made an appointment at the New York Historical Society to see if I could find a picture of it. (No luck, alas). The drawing above is a newspaper illustration from the period of my dreams showing the Grange, Alexander Hamilton's country place in the Harlem Heights. When built in 1802, it stood at what is today the intersection of 143rd Street and Hamilton Place. The same year this house was finished its architect, John McComb Jr., and his partner Joseph Mangin, won a competition to design New York's new City Hall. Hamilton loved his house but didn't enjoy it for long. Aaron Burr shot him dead in 1804.





Hamilton bought thirty-two craggy, largely un-farmable rural Manhattan acres in 1799. His architect gave him a delicate, not-very-big, Federal style retreat notable for fine proportions, welcoming porches, and an elegant roof-line railing. Quite a number of these graceful old places once commanded fine river views from woodsy heights on old Manhattan. By the time the photo above was taken, however, Hamilton's Grange had been encircled by the booming city.





By 1889, St. Luke's Episcopal Church had despaired of staying in its longtime West Village neighborhood. The old streets were suddenly awash with new immigrants and increasingly disfigured with tenement houses. The wholesale collapse of northern Manhattan country estates was simultaneously under way, so the church jumped in, purchased the Hamilton property, and subdivided it into lots on which they encouraged a better class of dwelling. The result was Convent Avenue, a beautiful street to this day. In 1895 the new St. Luke's rose on the corner of Convent and 141st. Until it did, however, the congregation held services in the Hamilton house, which they had relocated to a skinny lot on the east side of Convent just north of 141st. The image above shows the old house squashed between the new church on the south and a lot line on the north.





When Hamilton Grange was first moved, its front door faced south onto an empty lot that soon would be the site of the new St. Luke's. When that building went up, the Grange's original entry porch was shaved off and the front door blocked. What faced Convent Avenue for over a century was the side wall of the Grange, whose porch in 1802 no doubt gazed across the glittering Hudson to the virgin cliffs of New Jersey. The view above shows the house in the 1960s, looking about as battered as the rest of the neighborhood did then. Note the disappearance of the roof-line railing and how that changes the look of the place.





For most of the last century, everybody involved with - or living near - the Grange knew its location was perfectly terrible. The decision to move it into nearby (a half block away) St. Nicholas Park seems so obvious one wonders why it didn't happen generations ago. This shot shows the house approaching its new foundation, located just below 141st St. on the north side of the park. That's St. Luke's in the left background. The bow window with the ghost of the missing porch is on the facade that faced Convent Avenue. The original front door will be reconstructed on the right side facade, which was pressed against the wall of the church for over a century.





Here's what the house looked like last March, settled on its new foundation, original front door back in operation, but much work remaining.






Here it is before last week's blizzard. Pretty remarkable, no?








They're paving the drives....





...which need it.





The house last March.





The house today.

Gates

Compare the image above, being the lawn to the west of Daheim as seen from my bedroom window, to the first photo in the post below. Same lawn, same angle, but what a difference a week makes. I was going to dress up this evening - fake whiskers, bandanna on my head, loud shirt, beach bum shorts - for a Halloween bash at the Mashomack, a club in not-so-far-away Pine Plains. That plan's in the toilet since there's already a foot of snow on the ground. I read in some accounts that we face a future of increasingly frigid winters due to ocean currents altered by global warming.





This is a post about the necklace of estate gates that surrounds little Millbrook. The village was developed in the early years of the Gilded Age as a service center for surrounding estates, and to a great extent it remains so today. We're surrounded not just by gates, but by gates to real estates. I love reading real estate ads about two- and three-acre "estates." I mean, who is kidding whom? You want to talk estates? You need not just a house, but a farm, cottages, serious gardens, acreage in fields and woods, ornamental drives and a gate with presence, and preferably a gateman's lodge attached. The image above is the gate to Thorndale, home of the Thornes of Millbrook, who have occupied the house beyond for almost two centuries.





Here's the gate and gate lodge at Altamont, located on the other side of the village. The original main house was a Victorian pile that went up in the 1880s, burned down in 1929, and was replaced with a restrained Georgian manse in white painted brick. Altamont, which has had a spotty history, is now owned by a low profile financial mogul who has restored house and estate to a level that substantially exceeds the original.





Here's the entrance to Brookside, practically next door to Altamont. This property never exceeded 20-odd acres, but it is so elegantly laid out with fine drives, cottages and stables that it qualifies in my book as a proper estate. Brookside's main house is a roomy stone, stucco and half-timber affair that would be at home in Tuxedo Park. (It's also for sale).





The gate lodge to Thorncrest, pictured above, is now the home of the Dutchess Land Conservancy. More Thornes lived here at one time, on land located just across the Dutchess Turnpike from Thorndale. Thorncrest's main house was pulled down over sixty years ago, a great shame as it was Millbrook's original gentleman's country estate, once grander even than Thorndale. The acreage remains essentially intact, traversed by barely passable roads, the house site buried in underbrush.





The gate and lodge for Sandanona is at the top of Millbrook's main street. The present owners of the old gate lodge have doubled its size, which does not detract from the sense of drama one would have got on entering this place back in the day. The main house was torn down in the 1960s, a bad era for big old houses. Evocative remnants - stone walled drives, garden ruins, and a quite grand secondary residence built for the original owner's son - survive alongside new suburban houses and a condominium complex near the main gate called Millbrook Hollow.





The drive behind these gates leads to a charming old house called Breeze Hill. This driveway was originally part of the Dover branch of the Dutchess Turnpike, which was paved, straightened and slightly relocated in 1926. The relocation presented Breeze Hill's owner at the time, Mrs. Miles Standish, with the opportunity to turn the old roadbed into a new driveway, and to ornament it with fine gates. She was a fussy old lady, we are told, and insisted all the stones be exactly the same color. Local mason Rodrigo Ciferri located an enormous boulder on a nearby farm from which he chiselled every identically colored stone on the posts in this view. The original iron gates seem to have been a casualty of the passing years. The standard on the left has been leaning, Pisa-like, for all thirty of the years that I've been in Millbrook.




The big house at Edgewood, owned for many years by Harry Harkness Flagler, son of Rockefeller partner Henry Morrison Flagler, was also a victim of the 1960s. The property itself, however, survives in the hands of just two owners, each of whom owns approximately half. The sweeping drive to the house site is still intact, still well maintained and singularly impressive. One owner lives in a Frenchified 1980s pavilion on the west side of the original estate; the other lives in a cleverly converted garage on the east. An immense walled garden survives, evocative of another time.





Of the eight gates in this post, five still guard grand surviving estates. The grandest of these is probably Daheim, located immediately north of the village. My house, the original main house at Daheim and the subject of many posts below, lies about three quarters of a mile beyond this gatehouse. To pass through the portcullis, cross the artificial lake beyond via a fine stone bridge, then penetrate ever deeper along maple lined drives is to truly enter another world. This is the true purpose of a country estate, to transport one to a more perfect world. Alas, the Daheim gatehouse is so prominent my landlords elect to keep it closed lest we be besieged by tourists.

A Golden Moment

When I woke up this morning, I looked out at treetops gilded with beautiful golden early morning light, and felt lucky to be alive.





The moment passed quickly, but for an instant the drive towards the gatehouse was heart-stoppingly beautiful.

Checking Up

Last February, searching for something esoteric to blog about, I hit on big old free standing houses still extant on crowded Manhattan. Why settle for boring Gracie Mansion, thought I, when the exotic James A. Bailey house - as in "the Greatest Show on Earth!" - was still standing on 150th St. and St. Nicholas Place. Designed by the totally unknown (at least to me) Samuel B. Reed in 1888, the Bailey house speaks to a once ubiquitous architectural aesthetic that has been practically wiped off the face of America's cities. Be honest, it looks like a funeral home, right? That's because so many of these old piles survived as exactly that - including this one. Then it caught fire in 2000.





The fire wasn't catastrophic, but the fire department broke windows and probably compromised the roof. All you need is a pinhole in the shingles to bring down a mansion, and by 2007 interior water damage was becoming substantial. The owners belatedly put it on the market for an ambitious $10 million. It sold 2 years later for $1.4 million - still big money for what most of us would call a white elephant. Having not been back since last winter, I decided to head uptown to see what's been happening.




Here's what it looked like last week - clearly a work in progress, but you may note that there has been a first class restoration of the corner conical tower.





Here's a closeup of the roof. I see typical Victorian design patterns plus copper valleys, intricate cresting, and an excellent period finial. This costs bucks. After I snapped these photos, I noticed an elderly Oriental lady - she could have either been an amah or a billionairess - pulling weeds out front. I crossed the street just as she was joined by a younger Asian woman, who smilingly confirmed that the house was again a private residence. The genteel reticence that has cursed me throughout my life forbade me from asking probing questions - even though I was dying to know everything about her and what she and the rest of them were doing.





The next three interior shots were taken after the fire and before the sale.





If roof leaks were doing this to the main floor, one wonders what it looked like above.





This kind of house is not everybody's ideal but it is, in its way, an architectural tour de force that evokes an era. Bailey was a self-made man who built a showy house in a smart new neighborhood full of arrivistes like himself. Interestingly, almost as soon as he finished the house, apartment buildings began to invade the neighborhood, prompting his evacuation in 1904 to Mt. Vernon.





I love this old photo, looking north on St. Nicholas Place, taken in its heydey, ca. 1895. The tower on the Bailey house is clearly visible a little to the left of center. What I found as interesting as the Bailey house itself, was the wholly unexpected survival of a small group of neighboring houses. Note the high 1880s manse immediately to the right of Bailey's, located on the southeast corner of 150th and St. Nicholas Place. It's also still with us.





Here's what that house on the southeast corner looked like last week. The unusual hipped gable overlooking the street survives - barely - in spite of a lot of cheap repairs.




I've learned in my life that as far as old houses go, there is nothing that can't be fixed - if you have enough money. Unfortunately, not everybody does, to which these "repairs" so eloquently testify.





The Bailey house is such an overshadowing presence on the corner that it's easy to overlook what's immediately to the north.





Probably built as one big house - at least, I think so - this building has been divided into two residences. Sandwiched between drab early twentieth century apartment blocks to the north and architectural fireworks on the south, most people don't even see it.




Here's a closer view of the southern half. That wild Russian dome is clearly visible in the vintage street view above.





I'm pretty sure that first floor window, the one with the suspicious infill under the sash, was once the front door. Today's double house has two separate entrances. I'm dying to know what the interiors of these places look like.





Here's the northern house. Cute, no? Even has its own driveway.





There are only two houses on West 150th Street between St. Nicholas Place and Edgecombe Avenue: the Bailey house, and that of Nicholas Benziger, who was, according to the plaque out front, a purveyor of religious books. Built in 1890, the Benziger house spoke exactly to Bailey's (soon to be dashed) hopes for the neighborhood. Today it is owned by the city and operated as a permanent residence for homeless people, who I guess aren't homeless any more.





Decades would pass before Harlem Heights' apartment house invasion reached the fevered peak that Bailey feared, but eventually it did.

The Tennis House

Once upon a time, there used to be a tennis court on the lawn in front of Daheim. Frankly, from an aesthetic point of view, this was a pretty loony place to put it. However, there it sat, spang in the middle of the view, surrounded by statues and boxed trees and flower-lined graveled paths, none of which was particularly enhanced by its presence. Then came many (many) years of desolation and lack of maintenance, during which the lawns around the court - indeed, around the whole place - turned into fields. Those fields crept across the old clay court obscuring it completely, and by the time I arrived in 1981 the tennis court had vanished under a lawn. What hadn't vanished was a charming, if very down at heel, tennis pavilion.




Here's a glimpse of Daheim from the porch of the tennis house, giving a sense of the buildings' relationship to one another.





In the 1960s, Tim Leary's hippies rechristened it the "meditation house," although I doubt much clear thinking went on here. By the time I arrived, the windows were mostly broken out, the roof leaked like a sieve, and the woodwork was gray with water damage. My landlords put a quick budget roof on the place, I scrubbed down the oak paneling with linseed oil and turpentine, had the windows reglazed, and turned it into a writing house. I wrote "The Vanderbilts and the Gilded Age" at this desk.





Here's the view in the other direction. I've never dared to actually light a fire in that fireplace. The chimney is surrounded by the huge limbs of towering evergreens and God only knows what shy fur bearing creatures of the forest live in the flue.





All the stained glass panels were smashed with the exception of this one. Not sure what cricket bats had to do with tennis, but they are a decorative motif. Back in the day, the tennis house would have provided storage for racquets and nets, cushions for outdoor seating, a marble basin (still in the closet) for washing up, and a place to sit inside and maybe even change.





Here's a detail of the ceiling. I haven't used the tennis house in almost twenty years, but every few months I have Antonia trek across the lawn - actually, she drives her Jeep across the lawn - and gives it a thorough cleaning. I have a book project I've been thinking about for years and since I've resigned from writing "Old House" articles for the Millbrook Independent, I think I'm going to start writing it out here.





Daheim was the subject of many postcard views in the early twentieth century. This framed collection is by the door.





This detail shows the door hardware, which was originally painted shiney black. The oxidized surface is now covered with clear varnish.





Immediately to the south of the tennis house is this stair which descends from the tennis lawn to a walled orchard below. The bulging stonework, sadly, has been like that for years.





Here's the other side of the building, seen from the walled orchard below.





The gable ends were once elaborately painted, but not many traces remain.





The orchard itself was once a hugely elaborate millionaire's garden, with an extensive range of greenhouses facing the tennis house across two acres of closely cultivated flowers and vegetables. Those two acres today are just a lawn, planted with fruit trees and surrounded with an immense palisade of century old evergreens.