Belvedere: Home to the greatest collector of American western art

The Zeeview estate of industrialist, physician and renowned collector of American western art Philip Gillett Cole, M.D., is shown in this aerial photo taken ca. 1932. (Robert Yarnall Richie Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University)

Belvedere's 25 acres at 723 South Broadway, Tarrytown (just north of Irvington), have housed arguably the greatest collection of American western art, a renowned early 20th century sportsman, a philanthropist who cared for the families of prison inmates and one of 'the great distillery families.

What might really have set the Westechester, N.Y., estate apart was the 1970s dalliance of Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione with the prospect of buying the estate to make it the East Coast's iteration of rival publisher Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion. Instead, the estate became the property of the Unification Church and its founder, Sun Myung Moon.

It all began in the 1850s in what was then considered Irvington on the land of gentleman farmer Oliver Prescott "O.P." Woodford, a retired educational book publisher (Pratt, Woodford & Co.) who'd owned the land since the sale of his publishing house in about 1854.

The Belvedere estate was originally two estates between the Old Croton Aqueduct (vertical broken line) and South Broadway in Tarrytown, the side-by-side Roswell Skeel and Henry Rossiter Worthington estates. The estates to the immediate south and north of those estates still exist. Shadowbrook, owned by late jazz great Stan Getz's ex-wife Monica Getz, was known as Willowbrook during the Gilded Age and was the property of retail giant Edward Somerville (E.S.) Jaffray. The estate to the immediate north, Lyndhurst, was owned by Gilded Age financial lion Jay Gould and remained in the Gould family until the 1960s. It's a museum today. (1893 map by Joseph R. Bien, Atlas of Westchester County, Julius Bien & Co., New York)

The property lies several blocks north of today's West Sunnyside Lane -- then known as Irving Lane after renowned author Washington Irving. Irving, who died in 1859, lived on his Sunnyside estate off the eponymous lane on the east bank of the Hudson River. 

The Skeel family bought Woodford's farm and turned it into one of the great Hudson Valley estates, residing on it for half a century.

Roswell B. Skeel Sr. (1828-1893), the scion of Hudson River shipping merchant Theron Skeel, established the family's country estate in about 1870. 

Theron Skeel (1786-1844) in 1829 began operating the region's first regular passenger steamship service with his ship Congress from the upper Hudson River where it intersects Rondout Creek near Kingston, some 50 miles south of Albany, to Manhattan. 

Rondout in 1828 became the Hudson River terminus of the Delaware and Hudson Canal which allowed coal from Pennsylvania to be brought directly to the Hudson  and became another cash cow for Skeel's shipping interests.

The elder Skeel operated a total of five ships to and from New York City at any given time, shipping agricultural, coal, ice and building products to the city.

His son, tea importer Roswell Sr., partnered with Henry B. Greenwood in 1844 to form Greenwood & Skeel, a grocery and commission import/export firm at 119 West Street at West Houston Street in Manhattan. The building no longer exists, but it lay directly opposite today's Hudson River Park at Pier 40 off the West Side Highway (once West Street).

The newly named Zeeview estate of physician, industrialist and art collector Philip Cole and his wife Katherine is shown in an aerial photo c. 1932. The main house is at center right. The main drive runs from South Broadway far right, hidden, to the main house. At top left is the estate’s carriage house and stable and chauffeur residence. At bottom left is the estate’s greenhouse and gardens complex.(Robert Yarnall Richie Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University)

Roswell's only child, Roswell Jr. (1866-1922), born when his father was 45 and his mother 43, inherited the estate and family fortune and is not recorded as ever having held a paying job. 

He was well known, however, for his philanthropy, notably work helping the families of prisoners make ends meet while their breadwinners were imprisoned through the Prison Association of New York. 

Contemporaries remarked that Skeel Jr. worked with the families of about 100 prisoners at a time, providing health care, rent and food assistance for their dependents. He also regularly visited those client families and was said to have known all their members by name.

Skeel Jr. was also involved with environmental causes and always associated himself with Irvington as opposed to Tarrytown. He served several terms as an elected Irvington school board member and was known for his educational presentations for students involving expert guest speakers and stereopticon presentations at the Irvington Town Hall after its 1902 opening.

Skeel Jr.'s independently weathly wife, Emily Ellsworth Ford Skeel (1871-1958), was the granddaughter of Noah Webster of dictionary fame and daughter of railroad and real estate magnate Gordon Lester Ford and poet and writer Emily Ellsworth (Fowler) Ford. Mrs. Skeea suffragette well known for fighting for women's voting rights. She sold the family's estate after her husband's death and moved to Martha's Vineyard.

Today's Belvedere mansion was remodeled and expanded around 1922 by new owners Caspar William Whitney and his third wife Florence Canfield, a founder of the League of Women Voters.

The Whitneys purchased the longtime William Lanman Bull estate -- since 1915 in the hands of Margaret Bathgate Becker -- next to the former Skeel estate, and combined the two into what is the 25-acre Belvedere estate today. They razed the former Bull/Becker mansion, Lincluden, which had earlier been owned by Henry Rossiter Worthington, father of Sarah Worthington Bull, wife of William Lanman Bull Sr. At the time of the Worthington/Bull ownership, the estate was known as The Homestead.

Whitney (1864-1929) was a well-known American author, editor, explorer, outdoorsman and war correspondent. He originated the concept of the college football all-America team in 1889 while writing for Harper’s Magazine and founder Fletcher Harper, owner of the Beechlawn estate (now part of the Nevis estate) at West Clinton Avenue and South Broadway in Irvington.

Florence, whom Caspar married in 1909, was the daughter of miner and industrialist Charles A. Canfield, about whom Whitney had written a biography. Mrs. Whitney participated in founding the League of Women Voters and remained active politically until her death in a car accident in 1941.

In addition to his writing, Caspar owned and edited magazines and was heavily involved in the International Olympic movement in its infancy. He was a member of the International Olympic Committee and president of the American Olympic Committee from 1906-1910. He was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1910.

The Whitneys sold the estate in 1928 to physician Philip Gillette Cole, a Princeton- and Columbia-educated gynecologist from Montana who had assumed control from his father of the family-owned business A. Schrader's Son Inc. of Brooklyn, which he would sell in 1929.

Cole was a volunteer physician with the U.S. Army Medical Corps of the 16th Infantry of the newly formed First Division (today known as the "Big Red One") of the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1917 at the outset of America's entry into World War I. He was wounded on the Western Front and mustered out as a captain in 1919. 

Schrader manufactured auto parts involving air flow, specifically patented valves and gauges, including a lucrative tire valve.

Cole’s father, Charles Knox "C.K." Cole, was an Illinois-born physician who married Harriet Gillette and established his practice, along with a ranch, business interests and a political career in what was the Territory of Montana in the early 1880s. C.K. Cole was the final speaker of the Montana Territorial Senate before the territory became a state in 1891.

C.K. moved to New York City in 1900 and invested in German immigrant inventor George Schrader’s family company, backing Schrader’s newest invention, the bicycle tire valve, eventually used for car tires.

Charles M. Russell's When Sioux and Blackfeet Meet, 1903, watercolor on board, was part of the Philip Cole collection at Zeeview. (Gilcrease Museum of Art)

Assuming control of A. Schrader's Son after his father's 1920 death, Dr. Philip Gillett Cole had the cash to buy the Hudson Valley estate which he named Zeeview for its view of the Tappan Zee, a name that honored the native Tappan sub-group of the Delaware/Lenape tribe and the Dutch word “Zee” or “Sea” which recognized the area of widening of the Hudson River to its most extensive three miles across a 10-mile stretch from Irvington north to Croton Point.

The Coles added buildings to the property, according to the Belvedere website, “including the Agora House and the Studio, and displayed their extensive collection of American western art, later placed in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

Cole was a private man and few ever saw the collection of some 1,100 works of extraordinary western art, sculpture and literature by the likes of Charles Marion "C.M." Russell, Frederic Remington, Olaf Carl Seltzer and Newell Convers "N.C." Wyeth among many others. 

This ca. 1940 photo of a room at Zeeview offers a glimpse
of the breadth of the collection of American western art collected
 and owned by Philip Cole. (Gilrease Museum of Art collection)

Russell's wife and agent, Nancy, became a close friend of Cole's and visited Zeeview, as did other artists, including Seltzer, who brought his family to the estate and lived and worked in the studio there for upwards of two years. Humorist Will Rogers was a fan of Cole's collection and also visited Zeeview.

Cole died of a massive stroke at 57 in 1941 and his wife remarried soon after to advertising executive Dwight McCabe Mills (Kenyon & Eckardt) and the extended family lived on the estate until 1951 when it was sold to an unnamed buyer. 

The estate was vacant until 1960 when it was purchased by Samuel Bronfman of Seagram’s distillery fame who used it as a company retreat and conference center. The property was renamed Belvedere -- “Beautiful View” in Italian -- to honor Bronfman’s Toronto home.

A New York Times real estate ad published on June 17, 1951 described the estate at that time: "The property includes a 25-room brick, stone andd stucco residence built about 1908, a small lake, swimming pool, garage, stable and superintendent's cottage."

According to the Regina Leader-Post newspaper of Saskatchewan, Canada, in 2017, Bronfman (1889-1971) was born in today’s Moldova, then part of the Empire of Russia, in 1889, and as an infant he and his wealthy family fled to Canada to escape anti-Semitic progroms in their homeland.

To give an idea of the family’s financial strength, they came to Canada with their rabbi and a pair of servants.

Pictured is the Belvedere estate carriage house including stable and coachman/chauffeur residence, left and right, pictured in the early 1960s when the estate was owned by Samuel Bronfman. The carriage house was turned into a garage for automobiles in the 1920s.

The family bought a hotel in Manitoba, British Columbia in 1903 and Samuel Bronfman saw the money-making potential of alcohol and founded Distillers Corporation, which sold low-quality alcoholic beverages, particularly across the border to U.S. customers during Prohibition.

By 1928, he bought out rival distiller Joseph E. Seagram and Sons and the new Bronfman-owned firm became the Seagram Company with its wide array of high quality whiskeys that includes brands Seagram's, Chivas Regal, Crown Royal, Absolut and Captain Morgan.

Samuel’s son Edgar replaced him as CEO after his death in 1971 and Edgar Jr. replaced Edgar Sr. at the Seagram’s helm in 1994.

By the 1990s, Seagram’s was the largest owner of alcoholic beverage lines in the world. It eventually bought MCA Inc., owner of Universal Studios and its theme parks, before eventually selling off its lines to Coca-Cola, Barry Diller, Diageo, Pernod Ricard and Vivendi.

Samuel Bronfman never lived on the estate, choosing instead to use it for business meetings and conferences. It was sold by his heirs after his death in 1971.

Among the prospective buyers was racy Penthouse magazine. Penthouse founder Bob Guccione forecast the estate as his answer to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in California.

Pictured are the front gates at 723 South Broadway, Tarrytown, N.Y., today of the Belvedere estate and sweeping entry drive. (Google Maps)

In the end, it was the Unification Church, founded by South Korean Sun Myung Moon in 1954, that bought the estate. Since then, the church has run the estate as an event and meeting space, hosting receptions, wedding ceremonies, office parties, location and film shoots and more.

According to the estate’s website -- thebelvedereestate.com -- Belvedere today “is comprised of a main house and several smaller buildings scattered across the grounds. A wooded area and bluff overlooking the broad Hudson River and Tappan Zee Bridge offer a variety of beautiful and idyllic views.”

The view includes the new Tappan Zee Bridge, officially named the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, which replaced the original 1955 Tappan Zee Bridge in 2017. From the construction of the George Washington Bridge in 1931 and the Bear Mountain Bridge in 1924 until the 1955 debut of the Tappan Zee Bridge, Hudson River crossings between Westchester and Rockland counties were by ferry, most prominently between Tarrytown and Nyack. Irvington briefly had a pair of ferries that crossed the river to Piermont. Earlier still, Dobbs Ferry had a ferry that crossed to what is now Palisades.

The Cole Collection at the Gilcrease Museum

Click here for a look at the complete works of art and the story behind the Philip Gillett Cole collection of American western art at the Gilcrease Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The collection was once housed at Zeeview.