Gillett-Tyler House
103 Circle Road | Todt Hill | built 1846
Open on the map4 entries
The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1846
A Greek Revival house goes up in Enfield, Massachusetts, for Daniel B. Gillett
The house began life around 1846 in Enfield, Massachusetts, built for Daniel B. Gillett, more than 200 miles from where it stands now. It is a plain two-story box under a low hipped roof, with Greek Revival trim: a broad cornice banded with wide trim, two-story Doric pilasters, and fluted Ionic columns and sidelights at a recessed entry porch. In Enfield it had a metal roof; the slate likely dates from its 1931 rebuilding, and the story-and-a-half wing was added in 1932.
- 1931
The Gillett house is taken apart ahead of the Quabbin Reservoir and rebuilt on Todt Hill
About a year earlier, Massachusetts had bought the house from Alice Gillett Philps as the Swift River Valley was cleared for the Quabbin Reservoir, and resold it to be moved. Dorset, Vermont, builder Charles A. Wade was hired to relocate it, and in 1931 it was taken apart in Enfield; unlike his other moves, the pieces went most of the way by train to St. George, then by truck to Todt Hill. It was the farthest of the more than thirty houses Wade's crew moved, and city records name Jacob A. Johnsen as builder.
- 1931
Chewing-gum-base executive Walter A. Tyler and his wife Carolyn move in
Walter Arnold Tyler, a Brooklyn Heights native and World War I naval aviator, worked for the L.A. Dreyfus Company, a maker of chewing-gum base, and later served as its president from the mid-1930s into the 1960s. His wife, Carolyn Rodgers Averbeck Tyler, a Vassar graduate active in the Girl Scouts, died of pneumonia in 1940 at 41. The Tylers held the house from its reconstruction in 1931 until 1953, by which time Walter had remarried and moved to Plainfield, New Jersey.
“The Tyler family owned the house from the time of its reconstruction on Staten Island in 1931 until 1953.”
- 1965
Resident Gretta Moulton helps win parkland status for High Rock
Gretta S. Moulton, whose family owned the house from 1954, was a camping consultant for the Girl Scouts at Camp High Rock. When the Scouts sold the camp to a developer in 1964, she joined Borough President Albert Maniscalco, Robert Moses, Nelson Rockefeller and others in a push that made High Rock parkland in 1965. Her ashes were spread in the park after she died in 1971, and a trail and a 1995 gate in the park bear her name.
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