Ardsley Casino: Playground of Gilded Age robber barons

The Ardsley Casino (rear) and Ardsley-on-Hudson train station (front) were part of the same private club for the elite of New York society. At left, front, is part of the New York Yacht Club dock that accommodated members’ boats and yachts. (Westchester County Historical Society)

If Irvington’s estates and manor houses were the summer retreats of the rich and famous, the Ardsley Casino was the playground for New York’s richest and most famous.

The Ardsley-on-Hudson Station House on the northbound side of the Metro North rail line today houses the railroad waiting room and the Ardsley-on-Hudson post office. It recalls what is left of the McKim, Mead & White-designed Tudor-style buildings associated with the iconic Ardsley Casino which was built directly behind it in 1895.

The casino was established by 19th century luminaries that included Gilded Age robber barons John D. Rockefeller, William A. Rockefeller Jr., J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Amzi Lorenzo Barber and members of the uber wealthy Gould and Whitney families.

Its first president was Philip Schuyler, owner of the Nevis estate next door and a great-grandson of both Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler and General George Washington’s top aide and later the first president’s Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton.

The casino had its origins in the 1892 purchase of a 400-acre tract of Cyrus West Field’s 780-acre estate “Ardsley” and the mansion “Ardsley Towers” that was built for Field’s son Cyrus Jr. Under financial duress, Cyrus Jr. sold the property to Barber, the so-called “asphalt king” of New York, who had made a fortune paving streets and developing real estate.

Barber was to move into Ardsley Towers, subdivide part of the property as a development to be called Ardsley Park east and west of South Broadway adjacent to Dobbs Ferry, and establish the Ardsley Casino on the property primarily east across South Broadway down to the Hudson River.

Members and their guests are pictured in turn-of-the-century garb at what was the new Ardsley Casino clubhouse, ca. 1896. (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

The idea was that the upper class would purchase homes in Ardsley Park because of its proximity to Ardsley Casino. Several holes of what is now the Ardsley Country Club remain strewn throughout residential Ardsley Park east of South Broadway. The part of the course that was originally on the river side of South Broadway was by the clubhouse.

Ardsley Casino was built on the eastern bank of the Hudson River at the site of what is today Hudson House co-op apartments. It was roughly bounded to the north by the Nevis estate owned by Columbia University and to the south by Dobbs Ferry.

The original Casino facilities featured a private dock of the New York Yacht Club for Casino members and their guests who traveled to the site by private yachts from Manhattan.

It also included a golf course, six grass and six clay tennis courts, an indoor swimming pool, stables housing up to 100 horses, a polo ground, a steeplechase course, pigeon traps for shooting and a baseball diamond.

This is the Victorian stables complex of the Ardsley Club, formerly Ardsley Casino, ca. 1920. The stables had to house polo ponies for members along with horses for riding and carriage horses, up to 100 horses in all at a time. After the original Ardsley Casino clubhouse burned in 1926, the stables were renovated and repurposed as a new clubhouse with a large outdoor pool, two squash courts and three bowling alleys. The buildings still stand, but are two separate private residences. (Westchester County Historical Society)

In its heyday, weekday service via the Casino-owned stagecoach “Tally Ho!” was offered to the residential Hotel Brunswick on Fifth Avenue between 26th and 27th streets at Madison Square Park in Manhattan in addition to express service from the Casino-owned private Ardsley-on-Hudson train station to Grand Central Terminal.

The golf links were designed by premier English course architect Willie Dunn who also designed the famed Shinnecock Hills Golf Club (Southampton) and The Apawamis Club (Rye) courses. Dunn’s 1896 construction cost $1 million, at the time making it the most expensive golf course ever built.

The club included top-floor hotel accommodations for up to as many as 50 to 60 guests as well as card and billiard rooms.

It’s unclear why the new club was called a casino, but the term casino has an Italian origin -- the word “casa” or house -- and was sometimes used in the 19th century to refer to a social club where pastimes including sports, gambling, live entertainment, dancing and dining took place.

It would not be a stretch to believe some gambling -- which was illegal then -- took place at the club since it was a widespread underground pastime for the rich in New York City at the time.

A 1927 offshoot known as the Ardsley Racquet and Swim Club inherited the financially strapped Ardsley Casino, renamed the Ardsley Club after about its 10th anniversary, in 1935. The golf course underwent the first of two major renovations at the time, being redesigned by Alister MacKenzie of Augusta National Golf Club -- the Augusta, Ga., home of the Masters -- and Cypress Point Club, in Pebble Beach, Calif.

In 1936, the clubhouse, heavily damaged in a 1926 fire, was sold to Frank Jay Gould, son of the late railroad magnate Jay Gould. The ARSC and the defunct Casino properties remaining merged to form the Ardsley Country Club.

Gould razed the old Casino in 1936 and used the land to build the Hudson House complex. The Ardsley Club had already renovated and repurposed its former Victorian stables complex as its new clubhouse after the 1926 fire. The new clubhouse hosted a large outdoor pool, two squash courts and three bowling alleys.

In the mid-1960s, Ardsley Country Club sold the 27 acres of land -- including three golf holes -- and buildings it still owned on the river side of Broadway after it purchased the 20-acre former Frank Jay Gould estate on North Mountain Drive above Ardsley Park from New York University. NYU alumnus Gould had given the property to his alma mater in 1955.

The club, which remains an Irvington landmark today, repurposed Gould’s 27-room mansion as its new clubhouse, built new golf holes designed by Robert Trent Jones and added a curling facility. The earlier stables/clubhouse were sold and repurposed as private homes and the golf course eliminated its final two holes on the river (west) side of Broadway.

It’s interesting to look back at the Irvington Gazette newspaper’s July 3, 1936 musings on the demise of the Casino and the advent of the Hudson House complex.

"A few brick foundation walls and the smoldering embers of rubbish remain today as a silent reminder of the once famous Ardsley Casino where the wealthiest of the wealthy used to gather for recreation before the turn of the century and for a period of years ending in 1934,” Gazette editors wrote.

"The shaded hillside that once graced the site for the Casino was for years one of nature's most talked about beauty spots. The scenery and the setting all combined to make Ardsley Casino a rendezvous which furnished material or novels, poetry and for tongue-wagging from coast to coast.

"That this both historic and grand spot on the shores of America's ‘Rhine’ will again speak to the Metropolitan world as the home of not only Westchester's, but the nation's, most exclusive and fashionable garden apartments is a tribute to Irvington, a land of rolling hills, trees and the fullest expression of nature's loveliness.”

A view of the Ardsley Casino clubhouse looking north and west over the Hudson River in 1902. (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

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