# Bronxville

New York. William Van Duzer Lawrence, developer. William A Bates, architect. 1892

Bronxville was developed by William Van Duzer Lawrence, a chemical manufacturer and financier who first visited the area in 1888. Four years later he bought the Prescott Farm, a hillside tract of 100 acres, and hired the architect William A Bates to lay out the streets and design the houses for a development he was to call Lawrence Park. By 1898 Lawrence Park and its surroundings, largely owned by Lawrence, were incorporated with the village of Bronxville.

Lawrence Park was built to a pedestrian scale dictated by easy walking distance to the railroad station. Bates laid out the roads in an irregular and picturesque manner, with entrances marked by stone gates, and houses closely spaced along the winding, hilly roads. At first alone, but later in collaboration with Kenneth G How, Bates also designed many of the early single-family houses, as well as the majority of other types of accommodation built by the Lawrence family. Though the work of the firm is not well known today, it was well documented in the periodicals of the day.¹ In 1897 he completed the Hotel Gramatan and the Lawrence Arcade, a complex of stores and offices. Both buildings were adjacent to the railroad station and were the cornerstones of Bronxville's commercial centre. The Hotel Gramatan introduced many people from New York City on a day's or weekend's outing to Bronxville, where they eventually bought houses.

Theodore R Tuttle, writing in 1904, was impressed by the informality of Bronxville: 'The park may indeed be termed a colony. The houses of artists and men of letters, as well as architects, are here.... It may ... be said that there is a prevailing type of dwelling, the English timber frame house, though the so-called free Colonial, the Norman French and the shingle cottage styles are represented.'²

By 1914 Lawrence was developing less attractive properties (principally those adjacent to railroad tracks or commercial properties) as

rental apartments. Large apartment houses, terrace houses, and group houses were built, usually in a picturesque English style reminiscent of country village architecture.³ They shared a nostalgia for that pre-industrial style with similar developments at Letchworth, Hampstead Garden Suburb, Roland Park, Forest Hills Gardens and Chestnut Hill, a town with several parallels to Bronxville.

Both suburbs were decisively influenced by the work of one family developing land around a small town newly connected to a city by the railroad, and both evolved into communities with distinctive architectural styles and clear boundaries often marked by gates. Where they differ the most, is in the quality of the architects employed by development companies - while Chestnut Hill had the advantage of being able to draw on the domestic work of Frank Furness, Mellor, Meigs & Howe, Wilson Eyre, Robert Rodes McGoodwin and Edmund Gilchrist, Bronxville's most prolific architects after the retirement of Bates & How were Lewis Bowman and Penrose Stout, Bowman, who designed numerous Norman houses in the 1920s and 1930s, and Stout, a more eclectic architect of the same period who had the advantage of marrying a Lawrence, were competent historicists, but lacked the inventiveness and boldness of the Philadelphia architects.⁴

Only in a comparison of Bates & How to their contemporaries Duhring, Okie & Ziegler, does Bronxville come out on top: Bates & How's modest but comfortable group houses such as Kensington Terrace, Oak Court Terrace and Beach Tree Terrace are more successful solutions to the problem of the inexpensive house than the carefully planned but dull rowhouses which Duhring and his partners built on Lincoln Drive and elsewhere in Chestnut Hill.

## Notes

1. See, for example, 'Gray Arches, Lawrence Park, Bronxville, New York', *American Architect and Building News* 69, September 22 1900, p 95, plate 1291; 'House of

2 Bates and How, Northgate and Southgate, 1914

Will H Low, Esq. Lawrence Park, Bronxville, NY. American Architect and Building News 70, October 27 1900, p 31, plate 1296; 'House of Will H Low, Esq. Lawrence Park, Bronxville, NY'. American Architect and Building News 70, December 8 1900, p 79, plate 1369, 'Two Houses in Lawrence Park, Bronxville, NY'. Architectural Record 14, July 1903, pp 137-139; 'Hotel Gramatan, Bronxville, NY'. American Architect and Building News 91, June 1 1907, plates; 'House of Wallace Graham, Esq. Lawrence Park, Bronxville, NY'. American Architect and Building News 96, October 13 1909, plates. 'House for C Rushton, Jr, Esq. Lawrence Park, NY'. American Architect and Building News 99, April 12 1911, plates. 'House at Lawrence Park, NY'. American Architect and Building News 99, June 7 1911, plates. 'Two Bronxville Residences and Another in Lawrence Park West'. Architectural Record 32, October 1912, pp 366-369; 'House of Mr Ward Leonard, Bronxville, NY'. American Architect 103, June 11 1913, plate 1955. 'House, Chas Ruston, Jr, Lawrence Park, Bronxville, NY'. Architecture 29, March 1914, pp 68-69; 'House of Robert O Hayward, Esq. Bronxville, NY'. American Architect 107, May 12 1915, plates; 'Houses at Lawrence Park, Bronxville, NY'. American Architect 108, August 25 1915, plates; 'House of Mr Chapin S Pratt, Lawrence Park, Bronxville, NY'. American Architect 119, April 20 1921, plate; 'House of Chapin S Pratt, Lawrence Park, NY'. American Architect 120, October 12 1921, p 277. Also see note 3, below.

2. In his article 'A Picturesque American Suburb', Architectural Record 16, September 1904, pp 167-177.

3. See, for example, Kenneth G How, 'Gramatan Court, A Fire Proof Suburban Apartment', Architectural Record 35, February 1914, pp 140-150. 'The Garden Cottage Group, Bates & How, Architects', Architecture 32, August 1915, pp 200-201; 'Alger Court, Lawrence Park, Bronxville, New York, American Architect 109, January 5 1916, plates, and Kenneth G How, 'Housing Problems in Small Suburban Developments', American Architect, 110, August 16 1916, pp 91-97, plates; 'Oak Court Terrace, Bronxville, NY. Architectural Forum 43, September 1925, pp 161-162. The second article by How illustrates Bates & How's Alger Court, Beach Tree Terrace, Kensington Terrace, Meadowdale, and Oak Court Terrace.

4. The Bronxville library has monographs published for publicity by Bowman, Stout, and R H Scannell, another local architect. Also see 'Grassy Spryn Manor, A Proposed Apartment Group at Bronxville, NY, Carrere & Hastings', Architects - Shreve, Lamb & Blake, Associated, Architectural Review 12, January 1921, pp 1-6; Frank Chouteau Brown, 'Some Recent Apartment Buildings', Architectural Record 63, March 1928, pp 193-278. The Colonnade Apartment, Bronxville, NY. Architectural Record 65, March 1929, p 278, and Arthur C Holden, 'Realty Developments, and the Architect', Architectural Record 69, April 1931, pp 331-358.

1 Bates and How, plot plan, 1914

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Rochelle Park

New Rochelle, New York. Nathan F. Barrett, landscape architect. c. 1885

Samuel Swift, the author of a pioneering series in *House and Garden* on American suburbs, observed that 'if Llewellyn Park be an expression of the idealistic aims of a wise dreamer, then Rochelle Park may be declared an embodiment of commercial expediency... The case of Rochelle Park might be matched within the land tributary to any one of a dozen American cities; while Llewellyn Park and our exclusive and fashionable communities are the products of exceptional conditions'.¹ Both Rochelle Park and Llewellyn Park, however, were developments with identifiable images and boundaries which relied on the surrounding neighbourhoods for their commercial and cultural needs.

New Rochelle, a small city in Westchester County 'just 45 minutes from Broadway' as George M Cohan put it in a popular song of the pre-World War I era, contains many subdivisions similar to Rochelle Park. These include a group of four houses built by A J Davis in a section called Lather's Hill, named for its developer Richard Lather.² But Rochelle Park is more characteristic of New Rochelle, and also one of the first racially integrated suburban developments in America. Its site, former farmland which had fallen into the possession of an insurance company, was bounded on one side by the tracks of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, and had a varied and largely inhospitable topography including swampland and craggy rock outcroppings. The landscape architect Nathan F Barrett, who had, according to Swift, had as his 'watchword ... the commercial value of sentiment', and

who had participated in the planning of Pullman, was retained in association with the civil engineer Horace Crosby to turn that land into a middle-class community.³

Nearly one-third of the site was devoted to roads and lawns: six acres for parkland, including an open meadow called the Lawn, and 15 or more acres for the streets, sidewalks, and planting borders, leaving some 115 building plots averaging a scant half-acre each. The location of the New Rochelle train station, a ten-minute walk to the southwest, dictated the diagonal boulevard of the Rochelle Park plan, which was lent a formal balanced note by the Serpentine Avenue.

Although there are no gates as grand as those found at Llewellyn Park or Tuxedo Park, stone walls with terminal posts designed by E A Sargent, an English architect, define Rochelle Park's borders. Within, the Rochelle Park Community Association maintained a tennis court on the Lawn and lawn bowls on the long rectilinear space at the end of the boulevard

known as the Court. Although the community Association still exists, the tennis court and the bowling green are gone, and the Lawn and the Court are somewhat dilapidated, the latter having been shortened by the construction of the high wall of the elevated New England Thruway which runs parallel to the railroad. Still, the sloping topography, abundant trees and double lots that some of the houses were built on continue to lend an air of spaciousness to Rochelle Park. Though Nathan Barrett's own house at the end of the Court has been replaced, one of the lovelier houses remains: it is a long, low composition in shingles and local stone designed by Wilson Eyre for Ernest Albert.

### Notes

1. In his article 'Community Life at Rochelle Park: American Suburban Communities IV, House and Garden 4, May 1904, pp 235-243.

2. Anonymous (Montgomery Schuyler?). 'Study of a New York Suburb, New Rochelle', Architectural Record 25, April 1909, pp 235-248.

3. p 236.

1. Nathan F. Barrett, plot plan, c. 1885

2. Wilson Eyre, Ernest Albert house, c. 1890

3. Typical house (ph. JMM)

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