Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
When my father started The Riverdale Press in 1950, he mailed vol. 1, no. 1 to 4,000 families, using Riverdale Neighborhood House’s mailing list.
I’m an alumnus of the Spuyten Duyvil Infantry. In 1944-45, we met in a large room in the basement of Greystone Manor, 3900 Greystone Avenue. (My parents and I moved to Apartment 63 A in July, 1944.) I suspect, but don’t really know, that the school moved to the building as a precaution against air raids.
As part of its December 3, 1998 issue, The Riverdale Press published a special section, a 24-page booklet to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Fieldston Property Association, whose ownership of the streets and sewers makes Fieldston the only neighborhood in the Riverdale-Kingsbridge community that has legal boundaries. I wrote the text; most of the photographs were provided by Peter Ostrander, then president of the Kingsbridge Historical Society, from the society’s archives.
As far as I was able to determine from a search of the Delafield family papers at Princeton University, the name Fieldston entered our neighborhood’s lexicon in 1865 when Maturin Delafield built a mansion on today’s 246th Street near Independence Avenue and named it “Fieldston Hill,” the name Fieldston taken, according to family lore, from the Delafield’s estate in England.
The neighborhood we now know as Fieldston began in rebellion. Just as Frederick Law Olmsted opposed the city’s effort to impose its street grid on the area overlooking the Hudson River, the Delafield family sought to sabotage plans to flatten the land and lay out the grid on its extensive property by creating and developing the winding and hilly streets we know today—streets that followed the contour of the land.
Speaking to the Property Association’s annual meeting in 1931, Edward Delafield, who spearheaded Fieldston’s development as a planned suburb, recalled, “The men who as boys had played among the towering crags and giant trees could not bear to have them destroyed.” Influenced by the pioneer designers of romantic suburbs, Olmsted, Andrew Jackson Downing, and Alexander Jackson Davis, in 1911 he and his brothers hired surveyor Alfred Wheeler to lay out Fieldston’s streets and broad boulevards. Instead of the usual practice of building homes on one street at a time, they built a single home on each new street to thwart City Hall’s plans by presenting it with a fait accompli.
Spuyten Duyvil resident Tom Bird conceived and spearheaded the effort to preserve the property as a park and name it for Wallenberg. His tireless work deserves to be remembered.
There was a demolition permit issued in 2006, since expired and no new applications. However, the property was subdivided into two lots in October 2023.
In fact, Gil Kerlin split from Friends of the Greenbelt, the organization that was leading the battle against the proposed development. As you can discern from The Times article (though the writing is not as clearl as it might be) he favored the developer’s plan to build 72 units in the kind of condominium development typical at the time in Westchester, arguing that since development was inevitable, low-rise condos of this sort would be preferable to apartment buildings. The Friends organization, which won the fight, favored single-family homes on larger lots.
The late Gilbert Kerlin, who in 1954 championed the effort to preserve the area west of the parkway for private homes when developers sought to build highrises and who founded the Riverdale Nature Preservance 50 years or so later saw mapped but unbuilt streets as part of the arsenal of those who sought to block out-of-character development. They can’t be built on. So many preservationists want them to remain on the city map, not to be removed.
I have a decorative plate depicting the Henry Hudson statue that the bank gave to customers, though I don’t know if it was an opening-day gift or just a premium for opening an account at any time.
My parents bought our first television at Progress. It was a Hoffman, and it had a green screen. I’m not sure of the year, but it was no later than 1953, because neighbors who had no tvs watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth at our apartment. The owner at the time was a family friend, Irving Schilian. When he sold the store, he became the advertising manager of The Riverdale Press, a position he filled with distinction for decades. When I was the editor of The Press, the store’s owner was Tom Travis. A founder, I believe, and certainly the leader, of the Kingsbridge Chamber of Commerce, he was one of the leaders of the boycott and picket lines at the Dale Theater on W. 231st St. when the movie house began showing porn. Tom was a zealous advocate for the neighborhood and its businesses–an overzealous one, I often thought, as I fended off his demands for favorable coverage, accompanied by threats of withholding advertising. I’m not sure any of this is helpful to the person who made the inquiry about her family history, but perhaps it will stir other memories from old-timers.
Does this summary of the archeology project in the park help? https://archaeology.cityofnewyork.us/collection/map/riverdale-park-archaeological-project/borough/bronx
Great find, but your description of Jim hardly does him justice. He was a great reporter and one of our finest writers. His Times obit included this: “In prose that might have leapt from best-selling novels, Mr. Dwyer portrayed the last minutes of thousands who perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001; detailed the terrors of innocent Black youths pulled over and shot by racial-profiling state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike; and told of the coronavirus besieging a New York City hospital.” You can read his Pulitzer-winners here: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/jim-dwyer And he was one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.
I’m pretty sure I recall Riverdale Press coverage of 6 Ploughman’s Bush. If memory serves, whether the current home was the Delafield hunting lodge or a later building was in dispute. However, Gilbert Kerlin, founder of the Riverdale Nature Preservancy and an intimate of Edward Delafield, the last of the family to live on the Delafield estate, told me that Delafield told him it was the hunting lodge. There’s also this: https://6tocelebrate.org/site/6-ploughmans-bush-building/
Here’s the correct link: https://blstein718.wordpress.com/2006/09/21/celebrate-a-celebrated-voyage/
The Riverdale Press tried to drum up interest in a similar celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Half Moon’s voyage. https://blstein718.wordpress.com/?s=Henry+Hudson Not for the first or the last time, it did not succeed.
In the 1950s when I was a boy, I thought Madame Chiang lived at 3900 Greystone Avenue, the apartment building where I grew up. She certainly visited there, and gave my parents an ornate bowl from China, which my mom proudly displayed in the living room for as long as she lived.
Incidentally, The Riverdale Press of the 1940s was a short-lived publication that had no relationship with today’s Riverdale Press, founded by my father David Stein in April 1950. Ah Ping was an early advertiser, and Tom Hsu and my father became friends. Mr. Hsu traveled to China frequently, and claimed to be working with U.S. intelligence. On one of his trips, he brought back a bolt of silk brocade fabric for my mom.
Their friendship ended when Mr. Hsu fell afoul of the law. In 1968, he was convicted of defrauding eight victims of $250,000 by claiming to be an aide to Madame Chiang’s husband Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. He was furious that The Press reported his conviction. My father never ceased to regret the story and its consequences, but he always remained convinced of the necessity of reporting the news.
