Greyston Gatehouse

4695 Independence Avenue | Riverdale | built 1868

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

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.

  1. 1868

    A board-and-batten gatehouse rises at the entrance to the Dodge family's Greyston estate

    This one-and-a-half-story frame cottage appears on a map of Yonkers published in 1868, so it was built between about 1863 and 1868 for William E. and Sarah Dodge's estate, Greyston. Likely home to a caretaker's family, it is credited to Renwick & Sands, who designed the stone villa, and follows the rural cottage style promoted by Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux, with jerkinhead roofs of patterned slate.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1977

    The Paper Chase author John Jay Osborn Jr. buys the gatehouse from the Dodge family

    The Dodges kept the gatehouse parcel until 1977, when the parcel owned by Cleveland E. Dodge was subdivided and the cottage went to John Jay Osborn Jr. and his wife, Emilie Heffron Sisson Osborn. A lawyer and law professor, Osborn wrote The Paper Chase (1971), a novel set at Harvard Law School that became a film and a television series, and later The Associates (1979).

    “…the Gatehouse was acquired by John Jay and Emilie Heffron Sisson Osborn, Jr. An attorney and professor of law, Mr. Osborn was the author…”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1981

    Pediatrician and public health leader Jo Ivey Boufford takes ownership of the gatehouse

    In 1981 the property passed to Dr. Jo Ivey Boufford, a pediatrician married to physician Timothy Peter Boufford. She went on to lead the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation as president from 1985 to 1989, served in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the 1990s, and became dean of NYU's Wagner School and head of the New York Academy of Medicine.

    “In 1981, the Gatehouse property was conveyed to Dr. Melville Elizabeth (Jo) Ivey Boufford…”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  4. 2011

    March 22

    The gatehouse becomes a city landmark over its owner's objection

    The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Greyston Gatehouse on March 22, 2011. At the December 2009 hearing the head of the Cleveland H. Dodge Foundation, which had owned the property since 1999, opposed designation, and Bronx Community Board 8 voted against it in February 2010; two speakers, including one from the Historic Districts Council, supported it.

    “The president of the Cleveland H. Dodge Foundation, the property's owner, opposed designation.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

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