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SUNNYSIDE, WASHINGTON IRVING RESIDENCE
National Register of Historic Places, 1966
"About five-and-twenty miles from the ancient and renowned city of
Manhattan, formerly called New-Amsterdam, and vulgarly called New-York, on the eastern bank of that expansion of the Hudson, known among
Dutch mariners of yore, as the Tappan Zee, being in fact the great Mediterranean Sea of the New-Netherlands, stands a little old-fashioned
stone mansion, all made up of gable-ends, and as full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat. Though but of small dimensions,
yet, like many small people, it is of mighty spirit, and values itself greatly on
its antiquity, being one of the oldest edifices, for its size, in the whole country. It claims to be an ancient seat of empire, I may rather
say an empire in itself, and like all empires, great and small, has had its grand historical epochs. In speaking of this doughty and valorous
little pile, I shall call it by its usual appellation of "The
Roost."
- Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies,
Washington Irving
From The Hudson, from the Wilderness to the Sea
(Published 1866), Benson J. Lossing
Although it is located within the
village limits of Tarrytown, Sunnyside, one of
America's most famous literary haunts, demands obvious inclusion here as
Washington Irving was the village namesake. Even decades after the
village of Tarrytown
incorporated in 1870 with the inclusion of Irving's riverfront estate
within its boundary,
the area was still considered by many to be part of Irvington (which was
known as Dearman until renamed in Irving's honor in 1854).
Irving was a product of New York City
and wrote some of his most-cherished Hudson Valley tales while
living in Europe, but after settling here in the 1830s he helped pioneer
the suburban movement out of New York northward into the Hudson Valley.
Irving's purchase down the street from his nephew's estate included an
18th-century tenant farmhouse that he remodeled, with the help of artist
George Harvey as architect, into a fanciful embodiment of an old Dutch
mansion. Irving playfully referred to it as "Wolfert's Roost,"
in homage to
Dutch tenant farmer Wolfert Acker who built the stone farmhouse. Although
evocative of the region's earliest domestic dwellings, Irving's home
perhaps drew as much inspiration from Scotland's Gothic and Tudor
Revival buildings such as Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter
Scott, a friend
who helped start Irving's career in Europe. In 1847, Irving added a
tower based on Spanish monastic architecture, which Irving was familiar
with from his time spent living at the Alhambra in Grenada and
later as Minister to Spain.
Sunnyside also played a key role in the
Romantic Movement and Hudson River school of writers, artists,
architects and others who helped forge a national identity through art
and letters and buildings, conjoined to the Hudson River and Catskill
Mountains landscape. Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, William Cullen Bryant
and other luminaries no doubt walked among the stepped gables and rustic landscape
that defined Sunnyside. Irving died in 1859, but his home continued to
attract journalists and, to the consternation of
Irving's family, unwelcome tourists. Sunnyside frequently appeared in the likes of Harper's
Weekly, Currier and Ives prints, and guidebooks such as Benson
Lossing's The Hudson, from the Wilderness to
the Sea.
The property remained in possession of the
Irving family until 1945. Addiitons to the house, although sympathetic
in style, greatly enlarged the home. Although long an unofficial tourist attraction,
Sunnyside at last was opened to the public
in 1947, two years after Louis Irving sold the property to John D. Rockefeller
(through the Sealantic Fund). Today, Historic Hudson Valley owns and operates
Sunnyside as a historic house museum, which has been restored to its
appearance of Washington Irving's time..
Sunnyisde-On-Hudson, a
print by Currier and Ives.
LINKS::
Historic
Hudson Valley
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