Alderbrook

4715 Independence Avenue | Riverdale | built 1859

Open on the map5 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. 1858

    Oscar and Ada Ferris build a brick villa overlooking the Hudson in The Park-Riverdale

    Oscar C. Ferris paid $25,000 in 1857 for nearly six acres in The Park-Riverdale, and he and his wife Ada, daughter of developer William Woodworth, likely built Alderbrook in 1858-59. Its architect is unknown. The red brick house, now painted buff, mixes Italianate and Gothic touches, with flared eaves, a wraparound veranda and tall chimneys with niches, and faces west toward the river.

    “The Ferrises likely constructed the Alderbrook House in 1858-59, as an 1860 directory is the first to show Oscar's home address as "Riverdale…”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1871

    July 4

    Teenage Moses Taylor Pyne's diary records a Fourth of July party with the Roosevelts

    Percy R. Pyne's family summered at Alderbrook from 1864, and in 1871 his 15-year-old son Moses kept a diary of life there. He wrote of rowing to Mount St. Vincent with his brother Percy and Cleve Dodge and seeing the future President, then called "Teedie" Roosevelt, whose family was summering at Wave Hill. On Independence Day he set off firecrackers at 5:30 a.m., and that night the Pynes hosted neighbors including the Harrimans and Roosevelts.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1890

    January

    A fire guts part of Alderbrook and destroys the Pynes' art collection

    In January 1890, while the Pyne family was in Manhattan, fire struck Alderbrook. The New York Times reported that the main wing lost two floors and a staircase, and that the paintings, statues and other art in the house were destroyed. Percy Pyne then hired architect Benjamin Sillman to repair and renovate the interior.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  4. 1921

    Viola Nadelman buys the derelict villa as a summer home for sculptor Elie Nadelman

    After Percy Pyne's death in 1895 the house sat unused, and when Viola Nadelman bought it in 1921 it had no heat or plumbing and holes through three stories of ceilings. She and her husband, the Polish-born sculptor Elie Nadelman, restored it and turned the carriage house into his studio. In 1926 the couple opened the nation's first folk art museum in a new building at a corner of the then much larger estate.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  5. 1946

    December 28

    Elie Nadelman dies by suicide at Alderbrook, leaving hundreds of plaster figures

    After the estate was subdivided in 1933, Nadelman moved his studio into the house's east wing, making small cast-plaster figures inspired by ancient Greek terra-cotta votive figures. Despondent over relatives killed by the Nazis and suffering heart disease, he took his own life at Alderbrook on December 28, 1946. Lincoln Kirstein found hundreds of the figures in the attic and studio, which Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed in 1947.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

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