Area 67 acres (27 ha) Website www.lyndhurst.org Opened 1838 Architect Alexander Jackson Davis | Built 1838 NRHP Reference # 66000582 Phone +1 914-631-4481 | |
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Location Tarrytown, New York, U.S. Nearest city White Plains, New York, U.S. Address 635 S Broadway, Tarrytown, NY 10591, USA Architectural style Gothic Revival architecture Profiles | ||
Lyndhurst, also known as the Jay Gould estate, is a Gothic Revival country house that sits in its own 67-acre (27 ha) park beside the Hudson River in Tarrytown, New York, about a half mile south of the Tappan Zee Bridge on US 9. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966.
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History
Designed in 1838 by Alexander Jackson Davis, the house was owned in succession by New York City mayor William Paulding, Jr., merchant George Merritt, and railroad tycoon Jay Gould. In 1961, Gould's daughter Anna Gould donated it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is now open to the public.
The house was first named "Knoll", although critics quickly dubbed it "Paulding's Folly" because of its unusual design that includes fanciful turrets and asymmetrical outline. Its limestone exterior was quarried at Sing Sing in present day Ossining, New York.
The second owner, Merritt, doubled the house's size in 1864-1865 and renamed it "Lyndenhurst" for the estate's linden trees. His new north wing added an imposing four-story tower, new porte-cochere (the old one was reworked as a glass-walled vestibule) and a new dining room, two bedrooms, and servants' quarters.
Gould purchased the property in 1880 for use as a country house, shortened its name to "Lyndhurst" and occupied it until his death in 1892.
Architecture
Unlike later mansions along the Hudson River, Lyndhurst's rooms are few and of a more modest scale, and strongly Gothic in character. Hallways are narrow, windows small and sharply arched, and ceilings are fantastically peaked, vaulted, and ornamented. The effect is at once gloomy, somber, and highly romantic; the large, double-height art gallery provides a contrast of light and space.
The house sits within a park, designed in the English naturalistic style by Ferdinand Mangold, whom Merritt hired. He drained the surrounding swamps, created lawns, planted specimen trees, and built the conservatory. The resultant landscape was the first such park along the Hudson River. It provides an outstanding example of 19th-century landscape design, with rolling lawns accented with shrubs and specimen trees, a curving entrance drive that reveals "surprise" views, and a remarkably large (390-foot-long (120 m)) steel-framed conservatory, the first in the United States.