Thursday, June 7, 2012

The Gen. A.D. Andrews Estate

 The General A.D. Andrews estate designed by James Brown Lord c. 1900 in Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York.  Andrews, a former Adjutant General, was head of the Asphalt Trust and president of the Barber Asphalt Paving Company.  I do not know if the house is extant.


Photos from Architecture, 1901.

8 comments:

John J. Tackett said...

We tend to forget how common inter-connecting bedrooms were at the time, the doors all lining up, and possibly with transoms, too.

The Ancient said...

Avery DeLano Andrews

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/adandrews.htm

(Life and career. The spelling of "DeLano" above is per his tombstone at Arlington.)


http://www.ebay.com/itm/1920-Rotogravure-WWI-U-S-High-Command-Military-Officers-Portrait-Pershing-Fiske-/310402963983

(Andrews is in the back row on the far left.)

Anonymous said...

I've been trying for a while to figure out if this house is still standing, but I'm stumped. The lot that General Andrews bought to build the house was supposedly on Hudson Road and Hancock Place. In 1903 the house was sold to William Evarts Benjamin, who hired an architect from the office of the late James Lord Brown to make additions and improvements to the house. EIther the house is gone, or it's been remodeled to the point of being unrecognizable....to me at least. Maybe someone else can find it using bing or google.

The Ancient said...

This is as much as I can find.

From a bio of Dallas Pratt:

A glimpse of the style of Dallas's life as a child, as well as an indication of the early formation of his bibliographic interests is given in his account of his visits with his sister to the house of his grandfather, William Everest Benjamin, at Ardsley-on-Hudson.There, on the balcony of the Renaissance-style library with its impressive folios on lecterns and antique Florentine tables', they found a set of Dickens. He relates: We would visit this balcony, then flee to the veranda, my sister with the Old Curiosity Shop, I with Dombey and Son, sharing between us bottles of Cantrell and Cochran ginger ale, a box of Lorna Doones, and much ice to counteract the languor's of a Hudson Valley summer afternoon. On this veranda, overlooking a lawn gently sloping toward the river, we would read until the shadows of the big trees lengthened on the grass, and the voice of our governess called us back to the mundane ritual of tea with grandma: 'Children! Come in; you` re reading your eyes out. Grandma's in the drawing room."

http://www.freshford.com/pratt.htm

The Ancient said...

BTW, some of you might be interested in this, a collection of buildings in Ardsley Park built by Cyrus Field:

http://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fardsleypark

The Ancient said...
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The Ancient said...

The Ancient said...

Anon 10:06 --

I think it's very possible that the house was torn down for the construction of the new Mercy College campus.

To the north of Hudson Rd and just west of Clifton Place, closer to the river and just above those tennis courts, there's this --

http://openbuildings.com/buildings/nuits-profile-23214?_show_description=1

[Astor's] heirs sold the house to Manhattan College, which spent the next few years trying to clear Field's restrictions from the deed and convert the home to institutional use. Failing, the college sold to Amzi Lorenzo Barber, the "Asphalt King", a pioneer in paving as well as other businesses that would become prominent in the coming century. He sold off most of the surrounding acreage, clearing the way for the development of Ardsley-on-Hudson.

Perhaps General Andrews built a house just to the south of his business partner.

The Ancient said...

Up above, I linked to "Nuits," a well-known house designed by the German-born architect, Detlef Lienau.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detlef_Lienau

(His bio, which notes "It was Lienau, not Richard Morris Hunt, who was the first to bring to the United States a mind and a hand that was shaped, through contact with Henri Labrouste, by the French Beaux-Arts tradition.")


http://image1.findagrave.com/photos/2008/191/28168508_121569813851.jpg

(A photograph of Lienau.)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuits_%28Ardsley-on-Hudson,_New_York%29

("Nuits" has its own wiki page. It was recently on the market for the oddly precise figure of $12.285 million.)


http://openbuildings.com/buildings/lockwood-mathews-mansion-profile-20528

(Another well-known Lienau design, the Lockwood-Mathews house in Nowrwalk, CT.)