page_title: Glenview Mansion
section_title: 1861–1876: Background and construction
hierarchical_section_title: Glenview Mansion / History / 1861–1876: Background and construction
caption_attribution_description: English: Engraving of Glenview Mansion, Yonkers, NY, USA, ca. 1886
context_page_description: Glenview Mansion, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the John Bond Trevor House, is located on Warburton Avenue in Yonkers, New York, United States. It is a stone house erected during the 1870s in an eclectic Late Victorian architectural style from a design by Charles W. Clinton. It was listed on the Register in 1972.
  It is one of the few remaining buildings in Yonkers made of locally quarried greystone. Inside there is fine Eastlake cabinetry by the prominent Philadelphia cabinetmaker Daniel Pabst and other decorations and finishes; it is considered one of the finest interiors in that style in an American building open to the public.
  Financier John Bond Trevor built the house as a small country estate that was nevertheless close enough to New York City to allow him to commute to his job in the city by rail. At the time he and his family moved in, it was surrounded by similar houses. By the time Trevor's second wife died in the early 1920s, Glenview had become the center of a suburban neighborhood. The design of the house and the way the Trevors lived there epitomizes the transition between country living and the modern suburb.
context_section_description: Philadelphia native John Bond Trevor, son of former Pennsylvania State Treasurer John B. Trevor, came to work on Wall Street in the 1850s. His career as a banker and stockbroker went well enough for him to move to Yonkers when he married in 1861. At the time the community was becoming attractive as a residence for wealthy financiers who wanted to live on Hudson Valley estates yet remain within commuting distance of their jobs in Manhattan via rail—the beginnings of suburbanization.
  Upon first moving to Northwest Yonkers, the Trevors lived at a house on the northwest corner of Glenwood and Ravine avenues, near where the Glenwood train station is today. James B. Colgate, Trevor's business partner, owned the land. There were few other neighbors, as most of the land between Warburton and North Broadway was open and undeveloped, making it attractive to Trevor and businessmen like him.
  In 1867 his wife died. After remarrying, he bought the 23 acres (9.3 ha) to the north for $150,000 ($3.53 million in modern dollars) and commissioned Charles W. Clinton, an architect with offices near his in what is today Lower Manhattan, to design a house. Clinton, who had worked under Richard Upjohn earlier in his career, produced a building described even at the time as "not strictly confined to any one style." For the interior finishes he hired some of the accomplished craftsmen of the age, particularly Philadelphia cabinetmaker Daniel Pabst, whose work Trevor or Clinton may have seen at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where he won an award for a sideboard. Local builders, some of whom had also attended the exposition, where the newest construction techniques and materials had been exhibited and demonstrated, handled the framing, plumbing and painting. The carpet came from the nearby Alexander Smith Carpet Mills. The house was finished in 1877.
  Before building the house, Trevor, who had acquired an interest in horticulture upon his move to Yonkers, developed greenhouses and stables. His choice of land differs from that of most estates in Yonkers at the time, such as his friends the Shonnards to the north, which were built higher up the hill with all the land straight down to the river, rather than at its edge, where the railroad cut off direct river access and passing trains occasionally spoiled the view and created a fire hazard. Trevor's theoretical second parcel just offshore could have been developed, but again the railroad's presence made that unlikely. He may have preferred to remain near his partner, the station and the facilities he had already built. Indeed, he put the property's gates on Ravine to the south, rather than Warburton, which was closest to the house but unpaved, since Ravine was a short distance from the station.
  Trevor had been active in the community, serving as a presidential elector  and chairing meetings of the local Republican Party. Therefore, the house attracted much notice in the local newspapers, as one of the first large houses built in the area since the Panic of 1873 had depressed the economy. It was called a "showplace" for Yonkers, incorporated as a city just five years earlier, in 1872. In 1886 it was one of 12 Yonkers homes selected for engraved illustrations in Thomas Scharf's History of Westchester County, which has since become a standard reference work for historians.
caption: Engraving of Glenview in History of Westchester County
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