Walking Tour

Ingleside, an American country house overlooking the Hudson River, is one of only three survivors of the Gothic Revival “Hudson River castles” built in the mid-nineteenth century. Ingleside was built in 1854-57 for the English immigrant Edwin B. Strange, a silk importer in New York City, who commissioned its design from Alexander Jackson Davis, the pre-eminent American architect of picturesque villas with Gothic Revival detailing. Much of the original crenellations have been removed over the years, but the stuccoed villa still stands, housing St. Christopher’s School.

This riverfront has been central to the development of Dobbs Ferry, a village even named after the early river crossing. The Dobbs family, tenant farmers on the Philipse estate, began the ferry in 1698. A periauger, a flat bottomed boat propelled by oars, ferried people west, across the Hudson River, to Sneden’s Landing. This ferry service ended in 1938 after a hurricane sank the ferry vessel. Now, a10 acre recreation area overlooking the Hudson River stands where the ferry landing was. This newly updated park contains a playground, covered stage, fishing pier, bathroom facilities, exercise equipment, boat dock and picnic area.

The most elegant of the Italian houses is a palazzo on Main Street, built in 1923 by Dominick Altieri. According to his daughter, there was a house in Italy like it, and her father’s dream was to copy it in the local stone found in Westchester. The inside is faced with marble. Note the classical forms , flat and round-arched lintels, the variety of stones and bricks and the decorative balcony panels. The building is unfinished and was to have extended north the distance of its current width. Mr. Altieri was also the builder of Our Lady of Pompei, the Roman Catholic Church on Palisades Avenue, which is a copy of the cathedral in Calitri. It has 2,300 parishioners and one of its four Sunday Masses is said in Italian.

The Dobbs Ferry Free Library & Reading Room was organized by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. It was set up in the parlor of a house on Main Street, adjacent to the current library, and kept open every day by Mrs. Pearce who lived there with her family. In 1909, the library was chartered by the New York Board of Regents as the Dobbs Ferry Free Library and was moved to 153 Main Street, at the corner of Cedar, a building that also housed the William McKinley Free Kindergarten. The building was owned by Colonel & Mrs. Franklin Q. Brown who gave it to the library in 1951 when Mrs. Brown died. The library was re-chartered in 1957 as the Dobbs Ferry Public Library, making it eligible for further public funding. In 2003 the library moved into a new building at 55 Main Street designed by Peter Gisolfi Associates.

The Diamond Lodge, founded in 1864 met in the hay and feed store located at 75 Main Street. The store was owned by Charles G. Storms, then president of the Village. By 1893, the building had become the Nathaniel and John W. Lawrence grain elevators and mill. In later years, it would be a shoe factory and publishing house.

Our Lady of Pompeii Catholic Church at 95 Palisade Street was built in 1925 by a congregation founded in 1922, reflecting the influx of Italian immigrants. The building was constructed by Dominic Altieri, whose family home at 10 Main Street is known as the Palazzo.

Built by M.K Couzens, a local engineer and mapmaker, it was purchased in 1864 by Thomas J. Jewell. It remained in the family until 1964.

The current building, replaced the original 1855 home of the church which was destroyed by a fire in 1894. It was named for John Summerfield, a popular preacher of the 19th century. The congregation left the building in 1927. Since 2003, it has been the home of Chabad of the Rivertowns.

Built in 1855 by Abram Willsea, by 1920 it was owned by the Herbert Mead family. In 1991, Clara Mead left the home to the Society. Ms. Mead, a 1926 graduate of Wellesley College, had a lively interest in local history.

The United States Post Office in Dobbs Ferry, New York serves the ZIP Code 10522, which covers the village of Dobbs Ferry. It is a brick Colonial Revival structure located at the corner of Main and Oak streets, in the downtown section.

It was built in 1936, as part of a massive postal construction effort. Its architecture features a high level of detail and ornament for the Colonial Revival style. Only two other post offices in New York in that style share the same level of detail. For this reason it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

Building

The post office is a one-story, five-by-five-bay steel frame building occupying the corner lot. The ground slopes slightly from the rear to the west-facing front facade . Thus it was built on a raised foundation. From the rear a three-bay wing projects, giving access to the parking lot.

The foundation and exteriors are faced with red brick laid in common bond. The front section, one bay deep, has a roof done in copper with parapeted gables on the end walls. The remainder of the roof is flat. Cast-stone coping outlines the entire roof, and the front has a boxed wood cornice. Bronze lettering above the entrance identifies it as the Dobbs Ferry post office.

The entrance centers the entire main facade. It is arched, with flanking wooden pilasters topped with dosserets and a denticulated broken-bed pediment. The windows feature splayed brick lintels and capping keystones. Two iron lantern-style lamps frame the door.

Inside, the lobby takes an L-shaped form through four of the five bays. It features orange quarry tile and a counter-height dado. The plaster ceiling is coved, and the original wood frames on the bulletin boards and windows, as well as iron grilles on the screenline, remain.

History

Dobbs Ferry had had a post office under its earlier names of Wickquaequeeck and Greenburgh prior to its incorporation in 1872 and change to its current name a decade later. In 1915 the U.S. Post Office, then under the auspices of the Treasury Department, began to standardize its local branches across the country. This trend reached Dobbs Ferry when it became one of 136 new post offices authorized for New York State under an amendment to the Public Buildings Act of 1931.

Congress did not get around to appropriating the money for a new Dobbs Ferry post office until 1934. In November of that year the current property was acquired for $11,700, and an existing store and residence condemned to make way for the new building. Congress then made $95,000 available for construction, and the Summit Brothers firm began work the next year. The new post office opened for business in 1936.

The design, by Treasury supervising architect Louis Simon, used a Colonial Revival style, common for many post offices in and out of New York from 1905 onward. Most of these were simple, somewhat spartan structures, and the level of ornamentation at Dobbs Ferry is a departure from the norm. In New York, only the Granville and Hudson Falls post offices share the parapeted gables and window keystones.

It has remained largely intact since its construction. Modern aluminum doors have been installed at the entrance, as well as modern lighting inside. The most significant alteration was the replacement of the original double staircase to the front entrance with a wheelchair-accessible ramp, mandated in federal buildings by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Zion Episcopal Church was organized in 1833 and the building contructed the following year.. Among the early vestrymen were Washington Irving, and James & Alexander Hamilton, Jr., sons of Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. In 1853 and 1870 the church building was enlarged. A bell was added to the church steeple in 1922 commemorating those who served in the armed forces in World War I. In 1977, Zion was the site of the ordination of Barbara Schlachter, one of the first women to be ordained priest in the Episcopal Church.

The original headquarters of the Resolute Hook and Ladder Company. It later held the Dobbs Ferry Register, a building and loan cooperative, synagogue, realty and insurance business. It is now a restaurant and wine bar.

South Presbyterian Church, usually just referred to as South Church, is located along Broadway in Dobbs Ferry, New York, United States. Founded in 1820, it is currently in its second building, a stone Gothic Revival style structure dating to 1869. Members of the church have done much of the work on both buildings, and the church itself is actively involved in the community.

The main church building is the only known extant work of architect Julius Munckowitz. Two outbuildings, a manse and a house built by a former parishioner, were built around the same time and of similar materials but show traces of the Second Empire style, such as mansard roofs. They have changed very little since they were first opened, despite the conversion of one into a day care center. All three were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000 as a well-preserved example of an urban Gothic Revival church.

Buildings

The property has three buildings: the church, a manse and the Second Empire-style house of Robert Wilde, an early congregant and owner of the property. All three are considered contributing resources to the National Register listing. The church and Wilde’s house are connected by a more modern wing which is not.

The church is rectangular with a gabled nave, smaller narthex and an engaged bell tower. Its central section, faced with granite trimmed with limestone, is three bays wide by five deep. In addition to the non-contributing connecting wing, it has another one, polygonal in shape, that is original to the building although greatly modified since then.

South Presbyterian’s exterior has lancet windows with wood tracery, limestone hoods and diamond-shaped bosses. The main entrance features Gothic-carved wood doors beneath a carved tympanum. The bell tower features a lancet window of its own, with four smaller tabernacle windows on its octagonal spire separated from the lower level by a wooden frieze.

Inside, the church’s sanctuary features a ribbed plaster ceiling and its original pews and wainscoting. Pew number 49 is marked with a brass plaque noting its use by Theodore Roosevelt while he was vacationing in Dobbs Ferry in summer 1871. The second floor of the original wing has heavy molded plaster cornices.

The Wilde House dates to 1870. It is a six-by-three-bay two-story granite structure with brick window trim and a convex mansard roof. The second-story windows are also paired, separated by wood colonettes with stylized capitals. Polygonal bays flank the entrance and a stone course separates the two main stories. A wood front porch has chamfered posts and carved balusters.

Its interior has been modified for its present use as a day care center, but still retains original woodwork such as the banister on the stairway. The hearth of one of the fireplaces still has its original tiling.

The manse, probably built in 1869, is likewise a granite building with a mansard roof, in its case a bracketed one topped by red slate. It is two stories high and three bays square. The roof dormers have bargeboards with Gothic Revival detailing, as does the wooden porch in the rear. There is a one-story two-bay extension on the north side with a flat bracketed roof.

Some of its fenestration also uses Gothic Revival detailing. A front bay window is surrounded with decorative wood carving, and in the rear there is a lancet window in the middle of the second story.

History

As a congregation, South Presbyterian Church dates to 1820. At that time Dobbs Ferry was merely a small cluster of buildings around a junction on the Albany Post Road, and there were no churches. On Sundays devout locals met in the largest building then in town, the barn on Peter Van Brugh Livingston’s estate, to attend services conducted by travelling Presbyterian or Methodist ministers. Three years later, the group formally incorporated as South Presbyterian Church, to distinguish themselves from a North Presbyterian Church in the nearby hamlet of Halls Corners.

In August 1823, six congregants bought a 1-acre triangle of land at the present junction of Storm Street and Ashford Road. The small church built on the property was made of local timber and painted white in the style of New England rural churches. It was known as the Little White Church for years afterwards. Today it is gone and a Lutheran church stands on the site, but the original cemetery, known as the Little White Cemetery, remains.

Two years later, in 1825, the church was officially received by the Presbytery of New York. That body censured the church six years later when discord broke out after Van Brugh Livingston, its original benefactor, tried to require that anyone joining the church sign a temperance pledge agreeing to abstain from distilled beverages. He resigned as an elder afterwards.

The church continued to grow over the next few decades, and by the 1860s it had 140 members. All agreed it was time for a new church building. James Wilde, one of the wealthier members, located and bought for the church the current property, closer to the center of the growing village, in 1864. Julius Munckowitz, an architect about whom little is known outside South Presbyterian Church save his early membership in the American Society of Architects and his later tenure as supervising architect of the New York City Department of Public Parks, designed the church, and the cornerstone was laid in 1868.

As with the original church, construction was done by congregants using local materials. The granite was supposedly quarried and cut near the old church. Local firms also did the carpentry and masonry. Individual members donated their labor, money or both. When the new church was dedicated on the last Sunday in 1869, it had every modern convenience of the day, including gas lighting. The manse, begun that year

Wilde had originally built the stone house as a retirement home, but never used it for that purpose. He instead conveyed it to the Misses Masters, founders of the nearby Masters School. In 1916 the school turned it over to the church, which began using it as a parish hall.

The church has been improved twice with the addition of stained glass in the sanctuary lancet windows. In 1914, it was J. Gordon Guthrie, a congregant, who also did the rose window in the rear. He used as his models for the women depicted three fellow congregants. Fifty years later, in 1964, it was J.M. Baransky of nearby Yonkers who did the non-figurative pastel stained glass in the central section.

The original pipe organ was replaced in 1928, on a new balcony, by the current model, formerly in use at Manhattan’s Central Presbyterian Church. The bell dates to 1876, when it was cast by the Troy foundry of Meneely & Kimberly. The connecting wing between the church and Wilde House was erected in 1954, but attempts were made to keep it architecturally sympathetic to the older buildings.

Today

South Presbyterian continues an activist tradition that dates to Livingston’s stand against liquor. During Reconstruction, it raised money to help freedmen in the South. The church congregation works to help the homeless and poor in New York City and Yonkers. It supports gay rights, raises money for AIDS-related causes and holds an annual Martin Luther King breakfast.

Some of its space is rented out to programs that benefit the community. One room of the church is rented to an art school for children, and the first floor of the Wilde House is home to the Days of Wonder day care center. The original connection between Wilde and the Masters School continues in one of its afterschool clubs and activities, where students volunteer at Days of Wonder.

Built when the McComb estate was owned by Philip J. Armour. The McCombs were close friends with Fanny Howell Masters and her daughters Sarah and Eliza who founded the Masters School in 1877.

Estherwood is a late 19th-century mansion located on the campus of The Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, United States. It was the home of industrial tycoon James Jenning McComb, who supported Masters financially in its early years when his daughters attended. The house’s octagonal library was the first section built. It had been attached to McComb’s previous home, but he had felt it deserved a house more in keeping with its style and so had architect Albert Buchman design Estherwood built around it.

The interior features lavish decoration and detail, with generous use of marble and gold leaf. As the only significant châteauesque building in Westchester County, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 as Estherwood and Carriage House.

Buildings

The Estherwood NRHP listing recognizes both the mansion and its carriage house as contributing resources. Both are located on a 10-acre parcel just east of the main Masters buildings.

The house is three and a half stories high, with a varying number of bays on each of its sides. It is faced in white pressed brick with granite trim and terra-cotta detailing. Its roof is black and red ceramic tile, with copper cresting and stone filials, from which four red brick chimneys rise. A copper-clad cupola caps the east facade’s tower. The porte-cochère on the west facade, the house’s main entrance, is supported by granite piers and Doric order columns. It has a Guastavino tile ceiling to match the one on the veranda that encircles the rest of the house. The irregular fenestration includes fifteen dormer windows and a second-story oriel window.

From the entrance, there is a vestibule with mosaic flooring, marble baseboards, classical molding and bronze light fixtures. It leads to 65-foot-long Great Hall that rises two stories to a coffered ceiling and skylights. A divided staircase of pink marble rises to a gallery that overlooks the hall. The balcony is supported by Ionic columns on high plinths. The hall also features a green marble fireplace with limestone trim. The oak parquet floor has a carved Greek key-patterned border repeated on the underside of the gallery.

Six rooms are located off the Great Hall, also with lavish decoration. The dining room has dark oak walls with carved Northern European motifs such as boars’ and rams’ heads, broken by copper and bronze medieval sconces. Built-in service units are supported by caryatids. The north wall is broken by the fireplace, with a mosaic wall and surround. The adjacent plaster wall is painted Pompeii red. The shallow vaulted ceiling is, like that of the Great Hall, coffered.

The Music Room – known as the “Red Room” – features an alcove flanked by red marble columns and pilasters, both with capitals highlighted in gold leaf. Adamesque swags and garlands, also highlighted in gold, are carved into the wall and ceiling along with musical motifs such as lyres, horns and Pan flutes. These motifs recur in the stained glass window transoms. The south wall is of mahogany with brass trim; it features the Music Room’s fireplace, flanked by carved Corinthian pilasters.

The Reception Room features intricately patterned plaster walls and ceilings. Two of its windows have gold-stained panels, and an original crystal chandelier still hangs. The drawing room at the house’s northwest corner features scrolled brackets and marble Composite columns on high plinths. Its marble fireplace has wood surrounds.

The large octagonal library has a central octagonal stained-glass skylight. Stained glass, with a rich floral motif, is also found in the transoms of the two large windows in the north wall. Other ornament includes the plaster molding with gold leaf. The shelving is made of dark Honduran mahogany. Of the six major rooms on the main floor, the Billiards Room is the least decorated, with oak wainscoting and eared windows and doors. The plaster ceiling likewise has a simple molding and a central medallion.

Upstairs, the house has been remodeled somewhat by the school, but the bird’s-eye maple and golden oak woodwork have been retained, as well as the frosted glass closet-door panels and sliding doors off the gallery. The attic also features its original arched doorways, water tanks, and unusual floor-to-ceiling diagonal braces in the center.

This fine mansion is currently being used as teacher housing for The Masters School. Because of this some of the rooms have been connected and furnished so that it can accommodate their needs.

Estherwood houses a Steinway and Sons piano that is often used for student recitals and performances.

The carriage house is located to the east of the main house, downhill from it. It was built to take advantage of the slope, in a massed Queen Anne style with Stick-style porte-cochére. Its interior features wrought-iron columnar supports and sliding doors between every space.

History

Ohio native James Jenning McComb’s wealth came from his invention of the ties that secured cotton as it emerged from balers. In the 1860s he came to Dobbs Ferry, where he sent his three daughters to the Misses’ Masters School, named for its founding sisters in 1877. He bought the current property and eventually moved his family to the small Park Cottage near the school’s Clinton Avenue location to shorten his daughters’ walk to school.

The octagonal library was first built as an addition to Park Cottage, to complement an octagonal library desk McComb had bought in Europe. He was soon dissatisfied with how poorly the new room integrated with the rest of the house, and hired the New York firm of Buchman & Deisler to design a new house connected to the library that would better match it.

McComb and his family lived in Estherwood from its completion in 1895 to his death in 1901. He had continued to acquire nearby property and rent it to the school, and in 1910 the school bought it all, including Estherwood and the carriage house, from his heirs. It has made few changes to the building, primarily adding an elevator in 1949. Estherwood was used as a dormitory for many years; today its upper floors serve as faculty apartments and the main floor is used for special events and school functions.

Aesthetics

Estherwood is a rare residential commission for Albert Buchman, better known for commercial and institutional structures such as the New York World Tower and the Student Building at Barnard College. He brought to the commission a breadth of architectural knowledge and an awareness of the ostentatious tastes of the new rich of the Gilded Age. In its lavish use of materials and elements that would be characterized as conspicuous consumption, Estherwood has been compared to Richard Morris Hunt’s The Breakers – the Vanderbilt family summer home in Newport, Rhode Island – that had been completed only three years before, attracting much notice as the most expensive house ever built at that time.

Built before 1870, the original section of this now private residence is in the French Second Empire style. The conical tower was added in 1890 as was the Queen Anne-style carriage house. For many years, it served as a Masters School dormitory.

Built by Harry Z. Suchin, a liquor dealer who became famous for refusing to evict Depression-era tenants who could not pay their rent. The building was named for his daughter and noted for its rose gardens.

In the 1830’s, NYC’s explosive population growth could not satisfy its need for fresh potable water for consumption, agriculture, sanitation and firefighting. In 1837 a monumental engineering project was undertaken to bring fresh water from Croton to two reservoirs in Manhattan. Due to the expense and limited capabilities of steam engines of the day, it was decided that the waters would flow those 41 miles by gravity! Water flowed through the Old Croton Aqueduct until 1965. More than 4000 workers, mostly Irish immigrants earning up to $1.00 per day, completed the complex masonry marvel in just 5 years and in October 1842 the water began to flow. While at peak capacity, 6 men were tasked with monitoring and assuring this system ran efficiently. These “Aqueduct Keepers” had the all-encompassing job to insure their section of the aqueduct was kept in prime working order. On Walnut street you will find the last surviving “Aqueduct Keeper’s House”. Built in 1857, this classic Italiante style brick structure, housed the principal superintendent of the trail north of NYC, Mr. James Bremner and his family. It’s our village gem, and a National Historic Landmark, and now serves as a visitor and education center that tells the story of the Old Croton Aqueduct.

The Brewery was constructed on the Hudson River at 145 Palisade Street. The complex included a pool, waterfall, and underground storage area for beer. Founded in 1853, the Biegen Brewery shipped beer up and down the Hudson River, even driving sleds of beer kegs to Nyack in winter when the river was frozen over. It became one of the major employers in Dobbs Ferry, employing many German immigrants who lived in rooming houses along Palisade Street. A dance pavilion attracted many visitors from nearby towns. In 1886, Anchor Brewing Company took over ownership and expanded the brewing facilities further. In 1900, Selig Manilla bought into the business and the name changed again to Manilla Anchor Brewing Company.

The historic high school in Dobbs Ferry, New York was constructed using federal Public Works Administration funds during the 1930s with a total cost of $832,335. Construction occurred between May 1934 and June 1936. The building, designed by architects Knappe & Morris, is still in use today. The school serves over 400 students in grades 9-12.

The land adjacent to the Little White Church was used as a burial ground beginning in 1785. Martin Lefurgy, who owned the land, donated it to the Presbyterian congregation in 1823. In 1962, the church deeded it to the Village. It has recently been cleaned of years of overgrowth and some of the headstones have been repaired.

Since colonial times, Route 9 was a main thoroughfare for travel and communications between NYC, Albany and beyond. When Benjamin Franklin was the British Postmaster General – he standardized a system of mile markers to aid colonists with the sending of communications along this “Albany Post Road”. These stones were marked, numbered and placed a mile apart from each other starting at City Hall in NYC. Although many stones have been lost to time – protected within a wall at the entrance to Mercy College – Mile Marker #26 still remains. It appears on maps as far back as the late 1700s – even on one made by George Washington’s mapmaker Robert Erskine. It is likely that George himself used this mile marker to navigate during the summer of 1781 when he had an encampment in our village.

Since colonial times, Route 9 was a main thoroughfare for travel and communications between NYC, Albany and beyond. When Benjamin Franklin was the British Postmaster General – he standardized a system of mile markers to aid colonists with the sending of communications along this “Albany Post Road”. These stones were marked, numbered and placed a mile apart from each other starting at City Hall in NYC. Although many stones have been lost to time – protected within a wall at the entrance to Mercy College – Mile Marker #26 still remains. It appears on maps as far back as the late 1700s – even on one made by George Washington’s mapmaker Robert Erskine. It is likely that George himself used this mile marker to navigate during the summer of 1781 when he had an encampment in our village.