Hudson Valley by Marc Zakian

I boarded an upstate train from Grand Central Station to visit the legacy of the men who made America.

The king of the valley is Kykuit - the country home of the Rockefellers. An apprentice clerk at sixteen, by forty JD Rockefeller was the richest man on the planet. As well as controlling most of the world’s oil, JDR’s passions were carriage riding and golf. In 1913 he bought a two-thousand acres estate to enjoy his hobbies.  

But his honey-coloured house in sea of green parkland was more modest manor than a millionaire’s playground. JDR was a  frugal Baptist; the family motto  was ‘wanton waste makes woeful want’.   Every year he celebrated ‘job day’ by assembling his staff on front lawn to watch the Stars and Stripes go up flagpole, to mark the anniversary of his  first day at work.

The man who changed Kykuit into a manor from heaven was the landscaper and architect William Bosworth. While his thrifty father  was away,  JDR Junior paid Bosworth to remodel the house and garden. Kykuit became Bosworth’s life work:  he removed roads to liberate the rapturous vista which sweeps from the house to Hudson, and created inspired natural settings for the Rockefeller’s sculpture collection.

JDR Junior and his son Nelson were art collectors par excellence.   Kykuit’s  basement was turned into  a gallery for artwork by  Rodin, Miro and Warhol and Picasso.  Nelson would fly his helicopter across the estate to find the best location for sculptures:   “I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t draw,” he said, “so I became an environmental artist.”  The gardens are an outdoor gallery:  a Henry Moore here, a Giacometti there.  

The Rockefellers were the American aristocracy dynasty. They held court with the world. Guests around the great oak table at family dinners  included Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, and a pantheon of US presidents.  But for the most telling detail is the room where JDR invented Scientific Philanthropy: on a tiny desk in the corner of his office, the richest man in the world spent his last years giving away half his fortune.

If money talks at Kykuit, at Lyndhurst it shouts.  A mile up the valley from the Rockefeller mansion, this extraordinary Gothic pile was built in 1840 as the retirement home for local-boy-made-good William Paulding. Paulding left Tarrytown for the New York, where he rose to the rank of Mayor.

Paulding thought a house should represent the owner. A Tudor Gothic Castle would show him a “man of imagination.”  He was obsessed  with detail: “If you see anything offensive to your gothick eye,” he demanded of his architect, “put your veto on it”.  So wheel-back oak chairs cluster around baronial tables,  vaulted frescoes adorn the ceilings,   while  “job lot” of 18th century Teutonic art bought at auction fills the picture gallery. 

In 1880 Jay Gould bought Lyndhurst.  While JD Rockefeller was giving money to the people, Gould was busy swindling them by having the civil war news secretly cabled to him, and using the information to beat the stock exchange.   He swindled his Hudson Valley neighbour Cornelius Vanderbilt out of millions.  When Gould died, his children made amends for their robber baron father by willing Lyndhurst to the nation. 

The valley’s most whimsical residence is Washington Irving’s Sunnyside.   Irving spent a boyhood summer at Tarrytown; a memory which inspired  The Legend Sleepy Hollow  - the horror novel which made him famous.   Irving spent most of his life in Europe, but in 1835 he bought a tiny farm by the Hudson river to convert into “a nookery, quaint but unpretending”.  But pretending was Irving’s trade: he turned the farmhouse into a fairytale-style mansion, re-named it Sunnyside, and carved the fantastical date 1656 over the entrance.

Sunnyside’s interior tells the story of America’s first novelist. A picture of his friend and hero Sir Walter Scott hangs in his office.    A portrait of his fiancé  - who died before they could marry –  shows a solitary life tinged with  sadness. Toys and games show how happy he was spending time with a young niece who lived in at Sunnyside - you can imagine her  having Rip Van Winkle as a bedtime story, right from the authors mouth..

Irving is the spirit of the Hudson Valley.  It was his inspiration. And just as his fictional detective Ichobod Crane returned to the bosom of Sleepy Hollow, Irving also came back to live under -   what he called - the valley’s ‘drowsy, dreamy influence’