User:Beyond My Ken/Irvington places re-structure

Points of interest

 * Ardsley-on-Hudson Station House – The station house on the northbound side, which houses the waiting room and the Ardsley-on-Hudson post office, is all that is left of the McKim, Mead & White-designed Tudor style buildings associated with the Ardsley Casino which was located there. The casino, established with the support of Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. Pierpont Morgan, William Rockefeller, and Amzi Lorenzo Barber, had a golf course, tennis courts, stables, a private dock of the New York Yacht Club, and daily stagecoach service to the Hotel Brunswick on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The casino was torn down in 1936 and was replaced by the Hudson House apartment building, designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, which still stands. The station was used as a location for the 2016 film The Girl on the Train, with the addition of a portico to recreate the feel of the station as it existed in 1890. (110 West Ardsley Avenue)


 * Armour-Stiner House (also known as the Carmer Octagon House) (1860) - Built by financier Paul J. Armour according to the ideas of Orson Fowler, and expanded and refurbished by Joseph Stiner in 1872, the Armour-Stiner House is said to be one of the most lavish octagon houses built in the period, and is now one of only perhaps a hundred still extant.  The house was later occupied by historian Carl Carmer, who maintained that it was haunted. In 1976, the house was briefly owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to prevent it from being demolished. The Trust was unable to fund the amount of renovation the property required, and sold it to a preservationist architect, Joseph Pell Lombardi, who has conserved the house, interiors, grounds and outbuildings. The house is a National Historic Landmark.  (West Clinton Avenue, west of the Old Croton Trail)


 * Church of St. Barnabas (1853) - A stone Gothic building listed on the National Register of Historic Places (2000), the cornerstone of St. Barnabas was laid on May 29, 1853. It was originally intended as a chapel and school, and was designed by the Reverend Dr. John McVickar, a professor at Columbia College and the General Theological Seminary and friend of Washington Irving – his son, William McVickar, was the church's first rector. The building was constructed from stone quarried on the former Rutter estate across Broadway, where the "Fieldpoint" development is now located. In the early 1860s the building was enlarged to become a parish church, to plans produced by the firm of Renwick and Sands. (James Renwick, Jr. was the architect who would design the Irvington Presbyterian Church which stands next to St. Barnabas.)  The "Lich Gate" entryway dates from circa 1896, and was designed by A. J. Manning, who later designed the Irvington Town Hall. The gate is made of solid oak on a stone foundation, and was a memorial to Mrs. H. B. Worthington.  (North Broadway, north of Main Street)


 * Irvington Presbyterian Church (1869) - A Romanesque church designed by James Renwick, Jr., who also designed St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York; the stained-glass windows were designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, who had once been an Irvington resident. The cost of construction was $53,0000. (North Broadway, north of Main Street)


 * Cosmopolitan Building (1895) - This three-story stone neo-Classical revival building topped by three small domes was designed by Stanford White as the headquarters for Cosmopolitan when the magazine moved from New York to Irvington. John Brisben Walker, who had bought the general interest magazine in 1889, had a mansion in Irvington only a short walk away. In 1897 Walker started a free correspondence school, the Cosmopolitan Educational University Extension. When 20,000 people enrolled, Walker was unable to keep to its offer of a no-cost education for all, and had to ask the students to pay $20 per year. Nevertheless, the venture attracted well-known academics to its staff, and public lectures and other events associated with the school were held in the headquarters building. The magazine also sponsored several automobile races from New York to Irvington to promote the automobile. Cosmopolitan left Irvington shortly after William Randolph Hearst bought the magazine in 1905 and moved it back to New York. Afterwards, the building was used as a silent movie studio for some period of time, but for most of its subsequent history has primarily housed manufacturing concerns of various types, including one that made radio oscillators used by the U.S. Army in World War II, and a company that made looseleaf binders and other paper products.The Cosmopolitan Building still stands, although it is known as the "Trent Building" after the family that owns it, but it is quite run down, and its visage has suffered from pedestrian industrial buildings which were stuck onto its rear, obscuring the eastern facade. The building houses manufacturers, offices, a video production facility, a publisher of art books, interior design firms, a yoga studio, a chapel, photographers, a spa, a florist and event space and at least one restaurant.  (50 South Buckhout Street)


 * East Irvington Public School (1898, 1925) - Built as a one-story school house for the community of East Irvington, the building was expanded to two stories in 1925, and remained in active use as a school until 1970. East Irvington, an unincorporated area of the town of Greenburgh which is part of the Irvington School District, but not of the Village of Irvington, had been known as "Dublin" due to the number of Irish immigrant workers living there, many of whom worked at the nearby quarry. The building was converted to condominiums in 1983, when it was also placed on the National Register of Historic Places. A similar school is located in the section of Tarrytown known as "Pennybridge", which is also part of the Irvington School District.


 * Halsey Teahouse (1905) - A. J. Manning was commissioned by oil and cotton magnate Melchior Beltzhoover to build an exact replica of a Rhineland castle. The building, called "Rochroane", was sold to Benjamin Halsey in 1927 and renamed "Grey Towers", but was abandoned in 1976, and it burned down the next year (the exterior was stone, but the interior was wood). The "Halsey Playhouse" or "Teahouse", which was restored in 1997, is the last remnant of the forty-four room castle, except for a Tiffany landscape window now in the Corning Museum of Glass. It has two floors, and an open hexagonal tower with gothic-arched windows, and there is a walkway and stone bridge around Halsey Pond, which the structure overlooks. Vestiges of a fountain, dam, and other structures can be seen in the nearby woods.


 * Odell's Tavern (1693) - The main part of the Odell-Conklin-Harmse Tavern, the oldest house extant in Irvington, is constructed of fieldstone, with walls that are four feet thick. It was built by Jan Harmse after he moved to the area from Long Island, and was converted to a tavern in 1742 Mathius and Sophia Conklin, a function it served until sometime in the 19th century. The "Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York" stopped there in April 1776, when Jonathan Odell was the proprietor, on their way out of New York City when the British occupied it, and discussed General Washington's defeat at the Battle of Long Island. In 1989, the Village of Irvington had the opportunity to purchase for $5.5 million the 10.5 acre Murray-Griffin property that includes the Tavern, as well as 19th century barn and carriage house and a 23-room four-story Bedford stone house built in 1938, but did not. The Tavern, which in 2006 was reported as having undergone a recent restoration using artisans from Lyndhurst, is now part of a private residence and is not open to the public.   (South Broadway at West Clinton Avenue)


 * Shadowbrook (1895), is a 9-acre estate built for banker Henry Graves, located at the corner of West Sunnyside Lane and Broadway just over the border in Tarrytown. It has been the home of Irving Berlin, the noted American songwriter, and jazz musician Stan Getz. It was designed by noted architect R. H. Robertson in the Tudor Revival style. Robertson also designed Richmond Hill, an estate located at the corner of Broadway and Harriman Road in Irvington, which was later utilized as a laboratory for the North American Philips Company and then the Yeshiva Ohel Shmuel, a boarding school for high school and college students, before being torn down in 1979-80 to be replaced by condominiums. Shadowbrook has been converted into multiple private residences, and is not open to the public, although the mansion is sometimes used for weddings and other events.  (821 South Broadway, Tarrytown)


 * Station Road Tunnel (1837–1842) - At Station Road, west of Broadway, the Old Croton Aqueduct passes overhead iniside a large stone and earthwork viaduct which spans what was the Jewel's Brook Viaduct. Through the viaduct passes a single-lane tunnel to allow the road to pass through, and another tunnel to allow Jewel's Brook – now known as Barney Brook – through as well. The tunnel plays a major part in the 2016 film The Girl on the Train. (Station Road west of South Broadway)


 * Strawberry Hill (1855, expanded c.1870s) - This stone mansion in Norman Victorian Gothic style was built by John Thomas and expanded by Edward Delano Lindsay for John Williams. Still a private residence as of 1995, it has pointed gables, turrets and large shuttered windows. (North Broadway)


 * Sunnyside (1656/1835) - In 1835 Washington Irving bought for $1,800 a two-room pitched-roofed Dutch farm house built in 1656 from the property that was William Ecker's, and spent 15 years expanding and redesigning the house with the help of his friend and neighbor George Harvey, a landscape painter. Ten years later Irving continued, adding a tower his friends called "The Pagoda". Today, the house is owned and operated as a museum by Historic Hudson Valley. (West Sunnyside Lane at the river)


 * Washington Irving Memorial (1927) - Designed by Daniel Chester French, America's leading sculptor at the time and the designer of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Irving memorial, which is on the National Register of Historic Places (2000), shows a bust of Irving flanked by two of his characters, Boabdil from The Alhambra and Rip van Winkle, all set against polished pink Vermont granite.  (North Broadway at West Sunnyside Lane)


 * Town Hall (1902) - The Irvington Town Hall, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, is built on land deeded to the village before the turn of the 20th century by the Mental and Moral Improvement Society of Irvington, of which Charles Lewis Tiffany – founder of Tiffany & Co. and the father of Louis Comfort Tiffany – was the president. The Society required that the building must have in perpetuity a reading room, and also specified that it have a public hall. The brick, stone and terra cotta building, which is called a "Town Hall" despite Irvington being only a village, was designed by Alfred J. Manning and cost $150,000 to build. The library was to replace the short-lived Irvington Free Library (later the "Atheneum") which began in the local "little red schoolhouse". The new library, which opened in 1902, was designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, with Tiffany-glass lighting fixtures. The furnishings were donated by Helen Gould, the daughter of Jay Gould, and Frederick W. Guiteau – uncle of Charles J. Guiteau, who assassinated President James Garfield – paid for the books with a $10,000 endowment which he originally intended to bequeath to it in his will. Although in 2000 the library moved into the Burnham Building, a reading room, the "Tiffany Room", remains in the Town Hall, to fulfill the requirements of the deed. The reading room was restored in 2004. In front of the Town Hall is a stone fountain memorial to Dr. Isaiah Ashton, the village physician who died in 1889. It was originally located on Broadway, where it was intended to be used to water horses. A recently installed statue of Rip Van Winkle stands next to the Town Hall, on the grounds of the Main Street School. Beginning on August 1, 2016, restoration of the exterior began. Although the project was held up by a work stoppage and contractual disputes with the contractor. The work, which will provide new windows, masonry and terra-cotta tiles specifically produced for the building, is projected to be completed by April 2017. (Main Street at North Ferris Street)


 * Town Hall Theater (1902, restored 1979-80) - The theatre was designed to be a replica of Ford's Theatre in Washington, where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and when completed in 1902 it was widely thought to be one of the best "opera houses" in the Hudson Valley. For decades the social life of Irvington revolved around the theatre, which hosted concerts, recitals, balls, cotillions, graduations, minstrel shows, auditions, political rallies and public meetings. However, it gradually fell into disuse and disrepair by the 1960s, being used only for occasional exhibitions and overnight "camping" by the local Boy Scout troops. In 1978 concerted citizen action started the ball rolling to completely renovate and revitalize the theater, and it re-opened in 1980, run by Irvington Town Hall Theater, Inc., a non-profit corporation under the auspices of the Town Hall Theater Commission, whose members are appointed by the mayor. Today, the Town Hall Theater presents a wide variety of events, including concerts, plays and musicals – as well as the "Best of Film" series begun in 2007 and an "All Shorts" film festival started in 2015 – in its 432-seat facility. In 2016, the village received community revitalization funding as part of New NY Bridge, which it will use to create a street-level plaza for the theater. (Main Street at North Ferris Street)


 * Villa Lewaro (1917) - Among Irvington's famous residents was Madam C. J. Walker, America's first female millionaire. An African American woman, she made her fortune by developing a line of hair care products, creating a company with 20,000 sales agents, and by investing in real estate. In 1917, Madam Walker had a $250,000 country home built on Broadway in Irvington, designed by Vertner Woodson Tandy, the first registered African-American architect in New York State. She wanted the home to be an example for her people, "to see what could be accomplished, no matter what their background." The name Villa Lewaro was coined by Enrico Caruso, from the first two letters of each word in Lelia Walker Robinson, the name of her daughter, who later went by the name of A'Lelia Walker. A'Lelia Walker inherited the house, and occupied it until her death in 1931, when it was bequeathed to the NAACP which opted to take the proceeds from the sale of the house rather than assume the cost of taxes and upkeep during the Great Depression. The house became the Annie E. Poth Home, a retirement home for seniors operated by the Companions of the Forest, until the 1970s. The neo-Palladian-style mansion still stands today, and is again a private residence. Villa Lewaro is a National Historic Landmark.  (North Broadway at Fargo Lane)