Shadowbrook: Estate hosted greats in business, music and medicine

Pictured is the 27-room “Shadowbrook” mansion that’s been home for decades to Monica Getz, widow of the late Grammy Award-winning jazz saxophone icon Stan Getz. Getz was called “The Sound” for his warm, lyrical sound. (Photo courtesy Monica Getz)

Shadowbrook has ties to perhaps the nation’s greatest songwriter -- Irving Berlin -- and jazz saxophone great Stan Getz. It is one of the few Gilded Age estates in the Hudson Valley that remains in private hands today.

Shadowbrook landed in the Village of Tarrytown despite a long association with the Village of Irvington. Like other estates located between Sunnyside Lane to the south and Sheldon Avenue to the north, Shadowbrook was commonly -- and incorrectly -- referred to as being located in Irvington-on-Hudson, not Tarrytown. Shadowbrook and those other estates were absorbed by Tarrytown when it beat Irvington to incorporation by two years, 1870 vs. 1872.

The estate was established in 1816 by Ireland-born industrialist Thomas Thornton. Thornton sold it in 1818 to Russian-born Charles Pindar and his wife, Susannah Shannon Pindar. Pindar was a former Russian consul in Florida, later turned grocer, who called the then 126-acre estate “Pindar’s Vale” before selling it in 1826.

The estate was 12 times as large then as it is now, but its remaining 10 acres remain a showpiece.

This view (above) shows the historic rustic wood fencing and lush foliage at the entrance to the Willowbrook estate of Edward Somerville "E.S." Jaffray ca. 1890. The entrance is framed with stone walls today (photo below from Google Maps Street View) and is now known as Shadowbrook.  (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

Pindar's daughter, Susan Pindar, born at the estate around 1820, was a published poet and novelist, a remarkable achievement for a woman at the time.

Famed author Washington Irving’s nephew Oscar Irving owned the estate in 1832 when Washington Irving visited and fell in love with what would become his own “Sunnyside” estate next door after he bought it in 1835.

One-term New York City mayor (1851-53) Ambrose Cornelius Kingsland, who initiated the legislation that led to the creation of Central Park in Manhattan, also owned the estate and doubled the size of the house built by Thornton before moving on to a new house and estate in what is now Sleepy Hollow.

The estate was finally taken over as a summer country seat by Edward Somerville “E.S.” Jaffray, an English-born New York dry-goods merchant and neighbor and close friend of “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” author Irving.

To be a friend of Irving’s was one that knew few limits. Irving was renowned for eliminating fences and boundaries between his and neighboring estates and joining his garden and Hudson River bank walking paths with those of his neighbors, essentially expanding the reaches of his and all the nearby estates.

This is an undated portrait of Edward Somerville "E.S." Jaffray
 from the collection of his granddaughter, Florence
 Jaffray Harriman. (Florence Jaffray Harriman, 1923, 
From Pinafores to Politics, Henry Holt and Company)

Jaffray, named the richest man in New York City in 1869, was the senior member of the import firm E.S. Jaffray & Co. of New York and held that position for the better part of half a century before his death from influenza at age 76 in 1892. During his proprietorship, the estate was called “Willowbrook.”

Jaffray’s family was entrenched in the Irvington area. E.S. also owned the Quarry Hill estate east across Broadway from Willbrook and his daughter Florence lived there with her husband John Woodriff in the 1890s. His nephew, Howard Jaffray, owned a nearby estate next to Lyndhurst known by several names, but most prominently Veruselle. Another relative owned the estate “The Lindens” which later became Jaffray Park in Irvington. The Jaffrays were also related by marriage to the Barney family whose relatives’ properties eventually became Barney Park, Spiro Park and the lower levels of Memorial Park off Station Road, all in Irvington.

An undocumented story says Washington Irving drank his final glass of wine in Jaffray’s home before heading home on the night in 1859 that Irving died of a heart attack in his Sunnyside bedroom.

Jaffray's granddaughter, Florence Jaffray (Hurst) Harriman recalled in her 1923 memoirs that her grandfather docked a series of steam yachts on the Hudson River at Sunnyside and made his way to his Manhattan office each weekday at 7 a.m. and returned to his country seat at 3:30 p.m. daily during the summer months. She added that the family spent the summer at Willowbrook as well as weekends in the spring and fall and sometimes the winter as well.

The rest of the time, the family lived in a since-demolished mansion at 615 Fifth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets in Manhattan.

After Jaffray’s death, the estate was split into two halves of about 10 acres each. One was Isaac Newton Seligman's “Willowbrook,” a 10-acre estate that ran east from Irving’s Sunnyside to the Old Croton Aqueduct State Park trail and the other the estate of banker Henry Graves Jr. that would become Shadowbrook, running east from the aqueduct to Broadway.

Pictured is an artificial pond with waterfalls above and below on the historic E.S. Jaffray estate Willowbrook ca. 1890 on Sunnyside Brook. (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

Seligman died of a skull fracture after being thrown from his horse on North Broadway near the Irvington Presbyterian Church at about 7:30 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 30, 1917. He was enjoying a Sunday morning ride as was his custom. Widespread published reports indicated he was en route by horse to his Manhattan office 25 miles south, but that story is almost certainly false.

Graves was founder and partner in the banking firm Maxwell & Graves and made millions in banking and railroad ventures. He was also a renowned art and watch collector, vying with renowned automaker James Ward Packard to see who could own the world’s most complicated watch. Packard got there first, in 1927, with a $3,000 watch.

But Graves’ entry was already two years into its eight-year design and manufacture process at Patek Philippe and topped Packard’s when Graves accepted its delivery on July 19, 1933 for $15,000 -- about $300,000 today.

The “Patek Phillippe Henry Graves Supercomplication,” as the watch was named, was one of a kind -- literally. None other was ever built. Among its “complications” were a perpetual calendar with phases and age of the moon, sunrise and sunset and a celestial chart depicting the stars in Manhattan’s nighttime sky.

The watch set a record when it was sold at auction in 2014 for $24 million, the most ever for a watch at auction.

Graves will always be remembered in Irvington for donating a tiny corner of his property -- Irvington property at the southwest corner of West Sunnyside Lane and North Broadway -- that was used to honor Washington Irving.

It’s the site of the Washington Irving Memorial featuring a bust of Irving and sculptures of two of his better-known characters by Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the monumental Abraham Lincoln statue in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Irving monument is set in a small stone plaza designed by Charles A. Platt near Irving’s “Sunnyside” estate.

Surgeon Joseph Augustus Blake Jr. (1864-1937) purchased Shadowbrook in early 1925 from Graves. Blake had just been appointed to run Tarrytown Hospital which opened in 1911. The hospital closed in the 1950s after the construction of Phelps Memorial Hospital.

This is a view of the rear facade of the 19th century Willowbrook mansion of E.S. Jaffray with mansard roof and trellised veranda above a downward sloping lawn just east of Washington Irving's Sunnyside and just north of West Sunnyside lane. The portion of Willowbrook which lay east of the Croton Aqueduct to Broadway eventually was spun off the estate and is known as Shadowbrook today. (Photo courtesy Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

Blake gained international renown for his work in France in World War I. At the 1914 outbreak of war, Blake resigned a pair of prestigious surgical posts at Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons to head volunteer hospitals in Neuilly, Ris-Orangis, and Paris, France. He joined the American military medical corps in August 1917 after the U.S. joined the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia in fighting the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy.

After returning from the war zone, Blake married divorcee Katherine Alexander Duer Mackay.

She was the mother of Ellin Mackay who created a sensation when she married widower Irving Berlin in 1926. The marriage created shock waves because Mackay was an Irish Catholic and Berlin a Jewish Russian immigrant.

Mackay’s wealthy father, Clarence, was the chairman of the Postal Telegraph and Cable Corporation and president of the Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company. He was an anti-Semite who opposed the marriage and became estranged from his daughter after she wed the great songwriter over his objections.

Ellin appealed to her mother at Shadowbrook to support the marriage. Her mother and new stepfather had to be impressed when Berlin presented Ellin with the sheet music, copyright and rights to all future royalties to the song he wrote for her, “Always,” during a visit to Shadowbrook with her in 1926.

It is widely assumed that Berlin played piano in Shadowbrook’s famed music room which had already reportedly hosted a private performance by famed tenor Enrico Caruso during a 1918 visit. It can be guessed that Irving played “Always,” a song which became a hit for four different artists, most recently by the late Patsy Cline in a posthumous 1980 release.

This circular music room at Shadowbrook held a particular allure for Stan and Monica Getz. Among those who likely performed in that room in the first quarter of the 20th century were Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Enrico Caruso. After 1966 the list would include Stan Getz and his extensive list of musician friends and collaborators. (Photo courtesy Monica Getz)

Ellin earned more than $1 million in royalties for the song before her death in 1988, a year before longtime husband Irving Berlin passed on at age 101.

It is also said that the Berlins on at least one occasion traveled to Shadowbrook with friend and composer George Gershwin. “I've been told Gershwin brought his sister Frances here and she sang,” saxophone great Stan Getz and Shadowbrook resident told the New York Times’ Luisa Kreisberg in a Feb. 13, 1977 interview.

Wounded Triple Entente soldiers wish American surgeon Dr. Joseph Augustus Blake “Heureux Noel a J.A.B.” (“Merry Christmas to Joseph A. Blake”) at one of the three volunteer hospitals he oversaw in France during World War I. The photo was taken in December 1916. Blake resigned a pair of prominent Manhattan surgical positions at age 50 in 1914 to donate his skills to treat French and British troops. He joined the U.S. military medical service in 1917 after America entered the war. (Charles Terry Butler papers, New York Academy of Medicine Library)

The Blake family sold the estate in late December 1928 to Charles Todd "C.T." Newberry who moved in in 1929. The estate at that time included the main house, a garage (likely the former carriage house) and a gardener’s cottage. C.T. was one of three brothers behind the J.J. Newberry’s five-and-dime chain that grew nationwide to more than 500 stores before selling to McCrory Stores in 1972.

Newberry died in 1939. His widow, Anna Case Newberry, died in 1966 and the family sold Shadowbrook to the Getzes shortly after.

In Kreisberg’s 1977 story, Stan Getz, then 50, spoke about the neoclassical music room that prompted his and Monica's purchase of the estate. “It's ironic,” he said. “The first record I cut was ‘Always.’ That was in 1946 with Kai Winding. Coincidentally, Winding was the first person to introduce us to Westchester. He lived not far from here, in Dobbs Ferry.”

Among other musicians to have played in Shadowbrook’s music room as guests of the Getzes, according to The Times story and recollected by Monica Getz to this writer, were Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Buddy Rich, Dizzy Gillespie, Jon Hendricks and Erroll Garner.

As of this writing on Memorial Day weekend 2021, Shadowbrook’s 27-room mansion and 10-acre wooded property remained the home of Monica Getz 55 years after purchasing the estate and 30 years after Stan Getz’s death.

This building on the Shadowbrook estate was used by jazz saxophonist Stan Getz as a home recording studio. (Photo courtesy Monica Getz)

Shadowbrook lies on the Tarrytown side of West Sunnyside Lane at Broadway. Its entrance is at the northwest corner of the two roads.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: If you're not familiar with the brilliant musicianship of Stan Getz, the following video is of his final live performance with The Stan Getz Group at the Munich Philharmonic Hall on July 18, 1990. He was already very ill with cancer and would die less than 11 months later, on June 6, 1991 in Malibu, Calif. ...

... If you'd like to read more about the seemingly idyllic life of the Jaffrays at Willowbrook ca. 1880, here's a link to a chapter involving those memories in the memoirs "From Pinafores to Politics" published in 1923 by Florence Jaffray (Hurst) Harriman, a.k.a. Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, granddaughter of E.S. Jaffray. The entire book is online and gives a first-hand glimpse at the town and country lifestyle of the Gilded Age rich. ... For a text-only, easy-read version of the book online via the Library of Congress, click here.