page_title: Delavan Terrace Historic District
section_title: 1904–1926: Suburbanization
hierarchical_section_title: Delavan Terrace Historic District / History / 1904–1926: Suburbanization
caption_attribution_description: English: Original publicity photo of Billie Burke.
context_page_description: The Delavan Terrace Historic District is located along the street of that name in Northwest Yonkers, New York, United States. It consists of 10 buildings, all houses. In 1983 it was recognized as a historic district and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
  The houses were home to a number of prominent industrialists in Yonkers at the time, since they enjoyed an excellent view over the Hudson River. They are built in Late Victorian and other turn of the 20th century revival architectural styles. One has one of the few remaining Eastlake interiors in the city. The earliest house in the district, the Smith-Collins House, dated to 1854 with an 1875 renovation, has since been demolished, spurring historic preservation efforts throughout Yonkers. Most of the district was built after 1900.
  Originally it was home to affluent residents, such as local business executives at the Otis Elevator Company and the Alexander Smith Carpet Mills.
context_section_description: By the end of the new century's first decade, most of the new street had been developed. Like their predecessors, the houses reflected the latest architectural trends, largely built in the Tudor Revival or Queen Anne styles. With the exception of the house at 5 Delavan, built by Charles Otis, grandson of company founder Elisha Otis, they embraced the latter's asymmetrical massing. But their ornamentation was more restrained than the early Queen Annes of the 1880s, reflecting the new century's slow embrace of minimalism and functionalism. The house at 10 Delavan, built by Reuben Borland, who had worked his way to the presidency of the Smith Mills from his start as a bobbin boy, is an excellent example of a typical middle-class home from this period.
  In 1910, the Smith-Collins House, which had been owned by Collins' son, changed hands again. Isidore Beaudrias, a prominent local lawyer, bought it and renovated it, giving it the appearance it would have for the remainder of its days. He refaced it in stucco and removed much of its porches and decorative trim. These changes brought it into line with the same trends in architecture that were evident in the newer houses. Its basic form, however, remained unchanged from its original construction.
  Two more of those early houses introduced new styles associated with the West Coast into the district. The Knap House used the Western Stick Style, developed in response to California's sunny climate and rarely used in Yonkers. Similarly, 147 Park Avenue used the Mission Revival style, also known at the time for its popularity in California. The next house to be built in the district, the Littel House of 1915 at 149 Park Avenue, marked a return to its architectural roots in its spare application of the Tudor Revival style, keeping its forms and massing but dropping the half-timber from its stucco exterior.
  In the years after World War I, due to the growth in automobile ownership, suburban neighborhoods like Delavan Terrace multiplied. One famous resident for the time, actress Billie Burke, best known to modern audiences for her later role as Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, found the lifestyle offered by Delavan Terrace to her liking. She had originally made her name as a silent-film star, but after marrying producer Florenz Ziegfeld, chose to concentrate on stage work and settled in the Borland House, continuing a lifelong pattern of living at some remove from the places she worked, in this case the theaters of Broadway in Manhattan.
  She reportedly liked the neighborhood, and the Borland House in particular, because it reminded her of the cottage in the London neighborhood of St John's Wood where she had lived while growing up. "She seems ... to have warmed to its very ordinariness," observed one biographer. A reporter who visited the house to interview her described it as "a homey one and a half story red granite and wood structure built upon a still green terrace ... About it hangs an air of quaintness and quiet." She preferred simple interior decoration, eschewing pictures of herself in favor of modest furniture, paintings and Native American handicraft.
  The district's last house was built in 1926. Like its predecessors, the A. Doty House at 4 Delavan Terrace used a contemporary style, in its case the neo-Georgian mode, a substyle of the Colonial Revival style that evolved from the Queen Anne Style at the end of the 19th century and has remained popular in the U.S. ever since. The Doty House's signature features of that style are its symmetrical facade, Adamesque interior detailing, and balustraded deck atop its hipped roof. Like the other revival-styled houses on the street, it testifies to its owners' quest for stability and legitimacy regardless of the geographical or historical appropriateness of the style.
caption: Bille Burke around the time she lived on Delavan Terrace
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