Woodland Cottage: Home to eccentric banker, blueblood idealist, tobacco lawyer

This 1891 map shows both of Henry R. Parish’s estates off East Sunnyside Lane (called Sunnyside Avenue at the time, and earlier called East Irvington Road). The vertical road in pink is Broadway, the roughly horizontal road across the top of the map is Sunnyside Lane and the vertical blue line to the left (west) of Broadway is the Croton Aqueduct. Parish, listed here as H. Parish, lived in the eight-acre property at the southwest corner of North Broadway and East Sunnyside. His other estate of 21 acres appears to have been used as farmland and was separated from the Broadway property by the land of Frank Cunningham, now the HyoJeong East Garden estate, 50 E. Sunnyside Lane, Irvington, of the Unification Church. (Frederick W. Beers, 1891. Watson & Co., New York)

For nearly three-quarters of a century, 140 North Broadway, Irvington, has been the home of Woodbrook Gardens a co-op apartment complex. But the eight-acre property was earlier the site of Henry R. Parish's Gilded Age estate, eventually known as Woodland Cottage.

Parish was a renowned eccentric and alleged cheapskate who served 44 years as president of New York Life Insurance and Trust Co., retiring in 1915. The company later changed its name to Bank of New York and Trust Co.

Parish's son, who grew up on his father's Irvington estate and was also named Henry was vice president of his father's old company for his last 42 years, capping 65 years with the company. The younger Parish died in 1942 at age 82 without ever retiring.

The younger Parish's wife, Susan Ludlow Parish, was godmother to Eleanor Roosevelt, her second cousin. Eleanor and future U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt married at the younger Parishes' Manhattan home at 8 East 76th St. on March 17, 1905. The families remained close through most of FDR's White House years.

The senior Parish died at age 88 two years after retiring.

Henry Parish lived on his eight-acre estate on the south side of East Sunnyside Lane at North Broadway at least as early as 1868 and likely earlier. He also owned another 21 acres just east of his estate farther up East Sunnyside Lane on the Irvington side likely used for farming. He sold his small estate in 1892 to George Hope Mairs and Mairs in turn sold it to Ambrose Hammett Burroughs Sr. in 1913.

Mairs eventually leased the property to educators Edith Malcolm Tewksbury and her older sister Louise who ran it as a country school for young girls. The Misses Tewksbury's School was forced to leave the property when the estate was sold to Burroughs.

The Tewksburys took over the failed Ingleside School in New Milford, Conn., in 1914 and moved it under the new name The Misses Tewksbury’s School for Girls, Ingleside, to Scarsdale a year later.

Parish’s larger 21-acre property farther east off Sunnyside Lane was sold at auction at the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains in 1922.

A map in 1868 shows the main Parish estate included a main house, a greenhouse, a barn and another building, quite possibly a stable or carriage house or both. It also included a pond and had a stream running through the property.

Parish was a man stuck in a time warp. He refused to install a telephone in his office at 52 Wall Street and for years banned typewriters from the office as well, only backing down when promised the machines would not be operated within earshot of him — none of that infernal racket near him.The eccentric businessman’s obituary in The Irvington Gazette newspaper included this anecdote: “Wall Street's favorite story of the distinguished old financier recounts how he once counted a million peas and packed them into jars to win a $2.50 bet.”

Pictured in 1893 is the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company building at 42 Wall Street where Henry R. Parish worked. Just to the west (left, pictured) is the spire of historic Trinity Episcopal Church at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street. (Scanned from King’s Handbook of New York City by Moses King, 1893. Mechanical Curator Collection of Flickr Commons photos from out-of-copyright publications)

Parish led New York Life Insurance & Trust in the 1890s when it began insuring disabled people and charging women the same amount as men for life insurance, breakthrough advances of that age — to put it in perspective, women were still decades away from winning the right to vote.

Mairs was the polar opposite of Parish, a young man with deep ties to Irvington and a very public persona. His family was directly linked by marriage and/or blood to the owners of least six of Irvington’s Gilded Age estates.

He was the son of John Dows Mairs and Mary (St. John) Mairs, owners of the Lynwood estate next door to their brother-in-law David Dows’ Charlton Hall estate. Today’s Dows Lane Elementary School and Half Moon Co-op Apartments occupy parts of both estates. He was also related by marriage to several members of the Dunham and Jaffray families, fellow village Gilded Age estate owners.

An American ambulance drives past a large bell used to sound the alarm in the event of a gas attack on the Tranchée de Calonne, a road linking Verdun to the village of Hattonchâtel, in September 1916, well before U.S. entry into World War I. Estate owner George Hope Mairs volunteered and served with the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, but waited until August 2017 after the U.S. had entered the war. (Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, Paris Nanterre University archives)

George Mairs was born in 1866 and graduated Harvard in 1889, promptly joining his father’s Thompson & Mairs brokerage on Wall Street. He rose to become a partner in the firm and married fellow Irvington resident Carolina Elise “Elise” Jaffray Hurst in 1894. Jaffray’s mother’s family owned estates in Irvington and Tarrytown including what would become Jaffray Park in the second half of the 20th century and the 19th century Edward Summerville Jaffray estate “Willowbrook” now called “Shadowbrook” on the Tarrytown side of West Sunnyside Lane at Broadway today.

Elise’s mother, also Caroline Elise but nicknamed Daisy, died at age 29 and dry goods merchant E.S. Jaffray and his wife basically raised Elise and her two sisters at Willowbrook. The girls’ father, F.W.J. Hurst, a British steamship operator and Civil War blockade runner, spent a lot of time at Willowbrook as well while away from his Manhattan office and home.

George Mairs, a Republican, tried his hand at politics, running for state assembly in 1897 and later state senate. He failed in both bids, but the results were relatively close for the heavily Democrat region in which he ran.

In 1912 he became affiliated with the New Cornelia Mining Company in Ajo, Arizona, sold his Irvington property and moved to the West.

In World War I, the 51-year-old Mairs joined the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in August 1917 and served in France. The corps had 600 American volunteers and 300 ambulances. Acclaimed poet e.e. cummings was a volunteer in Mairs’ unit.

Ambrose Hammett Burroughs Sr., the estate’s third owner, was a prominent Manhattan lawyer and counsel to the American Tobacco Company through 1911. His family remained on the property longer than any other owner. When he died on June 19, 1929 just before the onset of the Great Depression, he left an estate valued at $4.3 million. And his investments, including the Irvington estate, were sound — a revaluation reported in The New York Times in 1934 in the depths of the economic collapse — saw its value climb to $4.8 million, $91.8 million today.

The estate was sold to the father-son development team of Morris and David Bogdanoff at the dawn of the 1950s and redeveloped as the rental Woodbrook Gardens Apartments, now Woodbrook Gardens, a co-op community, at 140 North Broadway in 1953.

The Bogdanoffs had just developed Half Moon Apartments on the former Dows and Mairs estates.

This 1868 map shows the original Henry R. Parish estate (marked “H. Parish”) at the southeast corner of North Broadway and East Sunnyside Lane. Broadway runs vertically through the map and Sunnyside Lane diagonally from top right to bottom left. To orient you, the Hudson River (not pictured) would be at far left. All four buildings on the estate are brick or stone, the building marked GreenHo is the greenhouse and the largest building (center of estate on loop drive) was the main house. The other two buildings likely involve a stables and a carriage house or a combination of the two and another utility building or cottage for estate workers. (Frederick W. Beers, 1868. David Rumsey Map Collection)

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