Good things come in green patches.
A skinny strip of woods and playgrounds, Riverside Park stretches five miles from 59th St. to 155th St. Riverside Drive, the avenue that borders it, runs from 72nd St. to Dyckman St. in the Inwood section.
True, the park isn’t as sprawling as Central Park. But both (at least the original stretch of Riverside Park) were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. This urban gem and its neighborhood are chronicled in longtime resident Stephanie Azzarone’s “Mansions, Monuments and Marvels of Riverside Park: Heaven on the Hudson.” Her husband, Robert F. Rodriguez, contributed the photographs.
And, it’s a salute to their beloved neighborhood.
“There is so much that has always been the same and little that is new or modern,” Azzarone writes of the area. “On the facades of buildings large and small, intricately carved details above doors and windows speak to character formed a century or more ago. Here the houses are more grande dame than debutante.”
Originally, the area was the hunting grounds of the indigenous Lenape, whose territory ranged from New York City to Delaware. After Dutch colonists forced out the Lenape in the 1600s, they found “a wild region where game abounded and over whose hills they roamed with dog and gun.” Soon, they were replaced by the British, some of whom built sprawling country homes.
The new residents remained a mix. There were Revolutionary heroes, like Lt. Colonel Henry Brockholst Livingston, later a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. There were also loyal-to-the-crown plutocrats like Oliver De Lancey, whose family occupied a mansion at 87th St. and Riverside Drive. At least they did until angry New York patriots broke into his house in November 1777 and put it to the torch. His family escaped into the swamps of what would later become Central Park.
In quieter times, the rural area attracted writers. Edgar Allan Poe called a few places in the city home. He briefly settled in Greenwich Village and the Bronx, yet his happiest times might have been in the summer of 1843. Then he, his wife Virginia Clemm, and his mother-in-law rented a farmhouse on W. 84th St., where he’s said to have written “The Raven.”
Within three years, the sickly Clemm would die of consumption. Poe, found incoherent in a Baltimore gutter three years later, followed her to the grave.
The pastoral neighborhood they had loved would barely outlive them. New York was expanding, and City Parks Commissioner William R. Martin was soon urging increased urban development, including a scenic carriage drive along the Hudson River and stately homes for the city’s growing upper class. Riverside Drive, he wrote in 1865, would become “the city’s preeminent residential street, expected to eclipse Fifth Avenue with ease.”
Over the next few years, a building boom gained force. Real estate developers, encouraged by the expansion of the elevated railway above 59th St., started buying huge tracts of land. Construction crews worked the uneven terrain constantly and noisily, leveling hills and blasting boulders out of the way.
“The west side of the city presents just now a sense of building activity such as was never before witnessed,” the New York Times observed in 1886. “Thousands of carpenters and masons are engaged in rearing substantial buildings where a year ago nothing was seen but market gardens or barren rocky fields.”
Initially, many of these stately new Riverside Drive buildings were private homes. George Noakes, a restauranteur, built a three-story stone mansion between 113th and 114th Sts. Peter Doelger, a brewer, constructed a four-story brick home at 100th St. Both buildings were later torn down and replaced by apartment houses, but other monumental structures remain.
The stately building on W. 89th St., now home to the Yeshiva Ketana, was once the Rice Mansion, built by corporate lawyer Isaac Rice. He and his wife, Dr. Julia Rice, lived there but not always contentedly. Julia was so bothered by the sound of nearby tugboats in 1906 she formed the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise.
Although outraged skippers demonstrated outside her home, she persisted and helped pass perhaps the nation’s first anti-noise legislation. The house still wasn’t quiet enough for her. The following year, the Rices moved.
Business titan Philip Kleeberg’s mansion between 72nd and 73rd Sts. made headlines, too, although of a more gruesome sort. His wife killed herself there in 1903 by drinking acid. Later, the building became a medical facility. Its controversial owner eased patients through childbirth by giving them morphine. Fed-up neighbors finally closed down the operation. By the ’50s, the building was cut up into apartments.
Since, It’s been turned back into a private residence and sold several times. The last time it was listed, in March 2021, the asking price was $25 million.
Riverside Drive has always been a millionaire’s playground, although its apartment houses also provided homes for the merely wealthy. Still, “Individual apartments for the affluent could have up to twenty rooms,” Azzarone writes of the luxurious accommodations offered. “Interiors often featured a full forest of woods – hardwood and parquet floors, dining rooms with mahogany-beamed ceilings and wainscoting, parlors and libraries bedecked in quartered oak.”
As expected, none of this came cheap. In the 1900s, when six-room apartments in other Manhattan neighborhoods might rent for $50 a month, these places went for eight times that. But it was worth it – especially to the artistic types who could afford to live anywhere but appreciated the elegantly eclectic Upper West Side.
After fleeing the Russian Revolution, composer Sergei Rachmaninoff purchased a home at 33 Riverside Drive. The apartment building that later took its place housed George and Ira Gershwin in adjoining penthouses.
Over the years, neighborhood residents included actress Marion Davies who entertained the married W.R. Hearst at 331 Riverside Drive. Author Saul Bellow lived next door at 333. Singer-songwriter Carole King’s home was at 390 Riverside Drive, and movie mogul David O. Selznick lived at 449 Riverside Drive.
Today, Samantha Bee and Amy Schneider have homes in the neighborhood. (Azzarone politely declines to provide their exact addresses.)
And although celebrities come and go, some attractions remain eternal. Like the tiny, enclosed grave at 124th St. in Riverside Park, its 1797 marker is dedicated to the late St. Claire Pollock, “an Amiable Child.” Or the statue of Joan of Arc at Riverside Drive Island and 93rd St., the first Manhattan monument honoring a real woman.
At Riverside Drive Island at 122nd St., there is also a presidential monument – and the opportunity to win an easy bet. Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? The correct answer: “Nobody.” True, the bodies of Grant and his wife lie within this crypt. But they’re in sarcophagi and were never put under the earth.
This Hudson River neighborhood naturally evolved over the years, seeing graffiti and street crime in the ’70s and ’80s and skyrocketing prices today. But for long-time residents like Azzarone, one thing about it remains eternal: It is home.
“It’s where, as I’ve informed my friends and family, I’m staying put – genes, fate, and medical intervention not withstanding – until it’s time to leave behind this temporary place of power for a permanent one,” she writes. “They already know where to scatter my ashes.”
