The Tarrytowns

Author: By Ralph Jimenez, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 9, 1996

Page: B1

Section: Travel

Save for the nation's capital and its environs, New York's Tarrytowns are the only place in the nation where it is possible to visit two National Historic Trust sites in one day, Lyndhurst and Kykuit, the estate still inhabited at least seasonally by scores of John D.'s heirs.

Drive up to the gate unescorted by a tour guide or uninvited by a Rockefeller and you will be oh-so-politely helped, in my case by a British gentleman of late middle age and impeccable manners who directed me to Historic Hudson Valley, the organization that manages most of the tourist attractions in these adjacent small villages of Tarrytown and North Tarrytown. Both are just a long morning's drive from Boston and some 25 miles north of Manhattan.

This area's most famous resident was not, however, one of the many millionaires who built seasonal homes along the Hudson but a humble schoolmaster named Ichabod Crane. This is Sleepy Hollow country, and the Old Dutch Church thatCrane passed before meeting the headless horseman still stands, although the famous bridge over the Pocantico River has been replaced.

Ichabod's creator, Washington Irving, is buried nearby in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Irving, who died in 1859, was the first American to make his living solely by writing. Works such as ``The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'' and ``Rip Van Winkle'' provided the bachelor author with the means to build Sunnyside, his delightful estate adjacent to Lyndhurst, which the Trust describes as the best example of a Gothic Revival castle in the nation.

While it is theoretically possible to visit Sunnyside, Lyndhurst and Kykuit (the name, pronounced KYE-cut, is Dutch for ``lookout'') in one day, a tour of all that the Tarrytowns have to offer takes at least a weekend. There are stained-glass windows by Matisse and Chagall to admire in the Union Church of Pocantico Hills. The windows were Matisse's last work before his death in 1954. Like the Chagall windows, they were commissioned by the Rockefeller family.

Touring the Rockefeller estate, which is also known as Pocantico Hills, involves preparation. Since this spring marks only the third season that the family compound has been open to the public, reservations for the two-hour tour must be booked months in advance. There is a way around that, however. A visit to the estate is included in both rail tours and scenic boat cruises up the historic Hudson. Slots on both were still avaiable as of mid-April.

If you have two days, begin what will become a crescendo of castles with Philipsburg Manor, an 18th-century farm and grist mill once operated with slave labor, or Sunnyside. Both were preserved largely with Rockefeller money and are managed by Historic Hudson Valley

Because Sunnyside remained in the Irving family until John D. Rockefeller Jr. turned it into a museum, Washington Irving's own books line his study. The tools of his writer's craft sit atop his desk, and the broad Hudson River can be seen through tree openings pruned by the author. The estate itself is quiet, whimsical and without ostentation, at least compared with what's in store next.

Our tour began with Lyndhurst, a mansion designed in 1838 by Alexander Jackson Davis, the most renowned architect of his day. It was built for Gen. William Paulding, doubled in size by Davis for its next owner, George Merritt, the inventor of a shock absorber for railroad cars, and finally purchased by Jay Gould, a financier with a reputation as the era's most ruthless robber baron.

The castle, a crenelated fairy tale of gray stone with blond highlights, sits at the end of a long park filled with enormously twisted Baroque trees once tended by a crew of 100 gardeners. In fact, it was these trees that a young visitor remembered most of all -- weeping beeches whose sweeping limbs create bowers big enough to play tag under, maples, magnolias, lindens, larches, sycamores and hickories. In a nearby greenhouse, once the largest in the nation, the gardeners tended Gould's collection of 8,000 orchids.

Long drives open to the public for walking and picnicking cross the estate. Near the bowling alley -- most men of real substance apparently had their own bowling alley in those days -- the rusting shell of a tall bridge arcs over railroad tracks paralleling the Hudson.

The railroad was owned by Gould's rivals, the Vanderbilts, whose estate was an hour farther upriver. Gould, who owned railroads of his own, refused to take a Vanderbilt train, so he commuted to Wall Street from Lyndhurst by boat. The boat was the 298-foot steam cruiser Atalanta. He used the bridge over the railroad to get to the boat, which eventually became the first ship in the Venezuelan navy. Tours like these leave one's head filled with facts of questionable value.

Though willed to the National Historical Trust by Gould's youngest daughter, who built her first husband a chateau in France and bought her second a castle, Lyndhurst came without an endowment. The insufficiency of funds is apparent in the peeling paint in the entryway, which like many of the surfaces, is trompe l'oeil, paint artfully applied to mimic stone, metal or exotic woods. Both the bowling alley, now being restored, and the building sheltering a swimming pool so large it was patrolled by a lifeguard in a rowboat are closed to the public.

``The property now has 67 acres,'' said Lyndhurst guide Ira Stein. ``It came with 500-plus, but the Trust sold some of the land to create an endowment. I'm from the Bronx and have no humility, so I'll be asking you for money all day. If any of you are very rich, I wanted you to know that. Anything you could do in your will will be appreciated.''

As Stein pointed out, vast wealth had its risks. Armed guards patrolled the estate in Gould's day. Iron bars in the pocket doors and barred windows were installed to protect him and his family from employees who lost their jobs when the financier bought and downsized their companies.

As Lyndhurst's host, Stein took great pleasure in helping children experience both sides of life in one of America's great homes. In the scullery, he asked them to stand next to a low sink. Scullery maids, he explained, were always girls of 10 or 11 who spent their whole day scrubbing pots.

Upstairs, he explained what happened when one of the Gould children woke up thirsty. ``A lot of people would suffer,'' Stein said. ``The child would wake up his mother who would wake up a servant who would wake up the cook who would ask the girl who slept in the kitchen to pour a glass of milk, which would then be brought up to the mother who would give it to the child,'' Stein said. Children who earlier frowned at the thought of being scullery maids now smiled. ``I get thirsty every night,'' one boy said with a wicked little grin.

Maryanne Miller and her husband, Bill Garvin, had come from Toronto to see New York City. They were making a side trip to Sunnyside and Lyndhurst.

``We see this as one of the great castles in America,'' Garvin said. ``It's amazing what you can do if you have a tremendous amount of money.''

At the close of the tour, which lasts about an hour, Maryanne Miller took the hand of their 8-year-old daughter, Sarah, and walked to a spot overlooking the Hudson. ``Let's sit down on the lawn and pretend that we live here.'' Virtually everyone who visits these estates does the same thing.

Sitting on the lawn, however, is not allowed at Kykuit. Neither is smoking, drinking or eating. Bathrooms are not available, and photographs may only be taken outdoors, the guide advises those who board the bus to take the short ride to what is both home to one of America's imperial families and one enormous art museum.

The Rockefeller estate comprises some 3,500 acres on a hilltop with views of Manhattan, Long Island Sound, the Hudson River Valley and New Jersey's Palisades. ``Junior purchased the Palisades to protect the view primarily from The Cloisters, though it had the same effect for Kykuit,'' said guide John Page, an artist and art historian. Junior was John D. Rockefeller's only son. It was Junior who donated the Palisades for use as a park, saved The Cloisters and donated the famed Unicorn Tapestries. He also led the preservation efforts at Sunnyside and Philipsburg Manor.

We passed the family's reversible nine-hole golf course and its ``playhouse'' en route to the manse's front walk. The enormous playhouse boasts not just the obligatory bowling alleys but indoor-outdoor pools, tennis courts and squash courts and dining facilities that seat 300. Like the golf course, it is currently used only by Rockefeller family members and guests. That's probably wise, since an errant drive on the course could send a ball ricocheting off one of the 70 sculptures, including works by including works by Alexander Calder and Henry Moore.

Perhaps to salve anger at so few having so much -- these are, after all, properties owned not by dead kings but of people currently active in communities throughout New England -- the guide recites a litany of the Rockefeller family philanthropies, among them, Nelson Rockefeller's gift of Kykuit to the American people. That list includes all of Colonial Williamsburg, nearby Van Cortland Manor, much of Acadia, Grand Teton, Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountain and Virgin Islands national parks, chunks of the New York's Museum of Modern Art and Rockefeller University. It worked. I did feel better.

Junior Rockefeller supervised the building of Kykuit for his parents, who were in their 70s at the time. The first version of the house was completed in 1908. But after spending a few weeks in the house, the senior Rockefellers decided it needed redesigning. The servants' rooms were too small. Delivery trucks unloaded beneath John D.'s window. It must have been awful.

The family moved out, the facade was changed, the roof lifted and other alterations made to what became a six-story, 40-room structure. Nelson Rockefeller had the home declared a national historic landmark in 1976, and he left it to the trust upon his death in 1979, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund set up a $40 million trust to maintain the property.

On entering Kykuit, visitors are reminded by the guide that this was, after all, a house, one reflecting the tastes of three generations. Nelson Rockefeller's children kept their hockey sticks in the vestibule, which is why the Chinese porcelain statues there are encased in plexiglass. There are 200 Chinese porcelains on the first floor alone.

The tour is limited to Kykuit's first floor and those beneath it, though so humble a word as ``basement'' seems ridiculous to describe the estate's subterranean art galleries. Former bowling alleys and passageways, they were transformed by Nelson Rockefeller, New York's governor and vice president under Gerald Ford, into a private museum of modern art.

``There is no information published on the Picasso tapestries,'' Page said. ``There are 11 here and we know of only one other. It's in the lobby of the McGraw Hill Building in Rockefeller Center.''

The enormous tapestries, copies of paintings owned by Rockefeller, were designed by Pablo Picasso and woven at the rate of one per year by a family in France. In this magical cellar, tapestries designed by Alexander Calder hang at the other end of the hall. In between are large Andy Warhol portraits of Nelson, who looks as if he's about to veto legislation he loathes, and his wife, Happy, who looks, well, happy. In a homey touch, a glass case holds blue and green glassware embossed with writing. The sign on the case says, ``Bottles dug by Nelson and his sons.''

Like most of the tour members, I was now nearly giddy with the excess of it all. But if anything, the grounds of Kykuit are even more marvelous. Not all people have their own water garden, Italiante tea house and temple of Venus.

Maybe it was Page's tales of how Nelson Rockefeller would bring in a crane to move an enormous statue one inch or the tunnel through an artificial mountain built to keep the delivery trucks from disturbing John Sr.'s sleep. But by the time our small group -- tours are limited to a maximum of 18 -- made it halfway around the house, we had given up our museum whispers for outright laughter.

I was standing with one knee touching a Tiffany balustrade. It surrounds a stone-slabbed swimming pool, one of a series of three blasted out of the rock overlooking the Hudson River skyline.

Brass tubing around the pool sprays mist that bathes swimmers in rainbows of light. Behind me in a grotto was a statue of a girl and some geese. The stalactites and stalagmites in the grotto were real, Page said. Junior Rockefeller had them removed from a cave in Genoa, Italy.

Maybe that's why when I saw Max Bill's sculpture, ``Triangular Surface in Space,'' it looked like nothing so much as a taco chip. I dubbed it ``Homage to Dorito.'' Page said my opinion would change when I viewed the work in the proper light.

Viewing it from inside the 100-foot pergula, a structure found usually in short form and called an arbor, the eye is funneled into the hole in the center of Bill's ``Triangular Surface'' and out onto a Hudson River that was beginning to glow in the sunset. It was obvious. These people knew how to live.

A bus tour of Kykuit costs $18. All the 1996 tours are booked, however, and the wait when calling the reservation office number (800-533-3779) can last a half-hour. As of this writing, New York Waterway (800-53-FERRY) was still offering Hudson River cruises that include visits to Kykuit, Sunnyside and Lyndhurst. The seven-hour excursion is $35 for adults and $17.50 for children ages 6 to 11. Children under 6 are free, and gourmet box lunches are available.

MTA Metro North (914-631-8200) offers a weekend rail tour that includes Kykuit. Tours take between three and four hours and cost $31. Less expensive tours include visits to Sunnyside and Lyndhurst. Most attractions are open between 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. Lunch opportunities in the area are ample, although on splendid days a box lunch made by a Tarrytown deli and eaten on Lyndhurst's lawn is the way to go. On a chilly day, we chose Isabel's, a dark and kitschy tavern in one of Tarrytown's restored Victorian downtown buildings. The food was good, a burger and fries cost $3.95, and a Reuben and Manhattan clam chowder cost just $6.95.