Quarry Hill: Old Jaffray estate became home to Jewish philanthropists, activists, nationalists

This scan of a 1912 postcard shows the Quarry Hill mansion set on its oval drive off East Sunnyside Lane. The mansion was so large that it fooled the seller of the antique postcard who posted it in a recent online auction. The seller believed it to be a hotel and captioned it "Quarry Hill Hotel, Irvington, N.Y."

Owned in the post-Civil War period by Edward Somerville Jaffray, Quarry Hill became the residence of Jaffray’s daughter, Florence Jaffray Woodriff and her husband, John Richmond Piers Woodriff. It was John Woodriff who had the 32-room frame mansion built on the 34-acre estate in 1894.

Edward Somerville Jaffray also owned the large Willowbrook estate to the immediate west of Quarry Hill at South Broadway and East Sunnyside Lane backing up to the border of famed author and Irvington namesake Washington Irving’s “Sunnyside” estate.

Willowbrook was later divided into two estates, one of which survives intact as Shadowbrook, home to Monica Getz, ex-wife of late jazz saxophone icon Stan Getz, at South Broadway and East Sunnyside Lane.

This is a view of the entrance to the Edward Somerville Jaffray estate Willowbrook at the northwest corner of West Sunnyside Lane and South Broadway in southernmost Tarrytown, before 1900. Jaffray was the one-time owner of the Quarry Hill estate across Broadway and just up East Sunnyside Lane that was passed on to his daughter, Florence Jaffray Woodriff and her husband, John R.P. Woodriff, who sold the estate in 1904. Note the rustic wood fencing and foliage at the entrance to Willow Brook, which is now a stone entry to the Shadowbrook estate of Monica Getz and her late ex-husband, jazz great Stan Getz. (Local History Collection, Irvington Public Library)

The Woodriffs sold Quarry Hill to horse breeder and later American Morgan Horse Association co-founder H.R.C. Watson in 1903 for $65,000 ($1.9 million adjusted for inflation). A report at the time indicated the property included a stables, a cottage -- likely for the estate superintendent and/or head gardener -- unnamed other estate buildings and the main house, a stone and shingle mansion of 32 rooms with extensive river and land views, standing on one of the highest points along the lower Hudson River.

Watson barely let the ink dry on the sale papers before selling Quarry Hill on May 18, 1904 to the “Bromo-Seltzer King,” Baltimore druggist Captain Isaac E. Emerson. Emerson invented the iconic headache, upset stomach and hangover remedy, Bromo- Seltzer.

For the record, Emerson’s concoction, while popular, proved potentially deadly. Sodium bromide, the ‘Bromo” of the original formula, is a tranquilizer that was pulled from the U.S. market in 1975 because of its toxicity. Its sedative effect is what made Bromo Seltzer effective against hangovers.

The early formula also included acetanilide as its analgesic ingredient, and that’s now known to be toxic. (Fret not, Bromo-Seltzer is still on the market, with safer replacement ingredients.)

Emerson bought the estate as a gift for his daughter Margaret Mary, 19 at the time, and her first husband, general practitioner Smith Hollis McKim, M.D. The McKims had each grown up in Baltimore but Dr. McKim had opened a private practice in Manhattan after the couple’s marriage in 1903.

The McKims’ marriage didn’t prosper at Quarry Hill. Margaret Emerson McKim became entangled between 1908 and 1910 with the primary heir to the Vanderbilt fortune, recently divorced Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Alfred Vanderbilt, Cornelius’ third-born son was a man known for his wandering eye who was linked in his first divorce to Agnes O'Brien Ruíz, wife of the Cuban attache in Washington, D.C., a woman who would commit suicide in 1909.

Margaret McKim filed for divorce from S.H. McKim in 1910, citing cruelty and “failure to provide” as grounds for the dissolution.

A horse-drawn Bromo-Seltzer wagon is pictured, ca. 1900. Brom-Seltzer, a remedy for hangover and stomach upset, fueled the family fortune of inventor Captain Isaac E. Emerson, a Baltimore pharmacist who bought the 34-acre Quarry Hill estate and 32-room mansion as a gift for his newly married 19-year-old daughter, Margaret Emerson McKim, in 1904. (Wikimedia Commons)

Newspaper reports at the time noted that Smith McKim did not contest the divorce, not showing up for the court hearing or even having a lawyer in the courtroom. It was speculated that McKim’s father-in-law, Captain Emerson, had paid him off to the tune of $200,000 ($5.6 million adjusted for inflation) to a) end a potential alienation of affection lawsuit against Vanderbilt and b) not contest the divorce.

Mrs. McKim went on to marry Vanderbilt in December 1911. Alfred died on May 7, 1915 aboard the luxury ocean liner RMS Lusitania when it was struck and sunk by a torpedo from a German U-boat 11 miles south of Ireland.

Widowed socialite Margaret padded her bank account after Alfred’s death. She inherited a quarter of his estate, approximately $1.2 million ($20.7 million today, adjusted for inflation) in addition to an annual maintenance income of $300,000 ($7.7 million today).

Margaret went on to marry twice, both ending in divorce, the final time in 1934, after which she resumed using her maiden name.

Margaret had sold her Tarrytown estate in 1909 to New York banker Sidney Cecil Borg, son of Simon Borg, a financier who founded banking firm Simon Borg & Co. Sidney Borg’s wife, Madeleine Beer Borg, whom he married in 1898, actually was the better known of the couple, a well-known philanthropist and activist espousing Jewish, children’s, mental health, municipal and prison causes in the first half of the 20th century.

Sidney Borg was familiar with the estate through his business ties with Isaac Newton Seligman, who had already purchased part of Edward S. Jaffray’s Willowbrook estate just down the street.

Madeleine Borg founded the Big Sister movement in America in 1912 and in 1914 helped found the Jewish Big Sister movement. Among other causes that benefited from her executive expertise were the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, the Jewish Board of Guardians of New York, the American Jewish Committee, the National Probation and Parole Association, the Child Welfare League, the Mental Hygiene Committee of the State Charities Aid, the Girls’ Service League of America, the Training School for Jewish Social Workers, the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies of New York, the Montefiore Hospital Ladies’ Auxiliary Society and the Salvation Army.

This 1911 map shows the Quarry Hill estate (upper right) off East Sunnyside Lane (called "Avenue" at the time) in the hands of Sidney Cecil Borg (upper right) above the William R. Harris and Thomas M. King estates that eventually were combined into the Linden Court estate of Mary Duke Biddle that since the 1960s has served as the Tarrytown House Estate. Tarrytown is to the left, north, of Sunnyside Lane and Irvington to the right, south. Helen Miller Gould's property, once part of the vast Lyndhurst estate, lay adjacent to Quarry Hill and the part that is east of the incorporated village of Tarrytown land (horizontal red line) remains undeveloped today as part of the wooded Taxter Ridge Park Preserve. (Map published by George Washington Brumley, 1911. David Rumsey Historic Maps Collection)

In 1929, New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to the New York State Old Age Pensions Committee. She was also named to posts with the New York City Crime Prevention Bureau and the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair.

Madeleine Borg sold the estate in 1947 to developer Clement Merowitz and his Woodland Lake Estates Inc., which sold the mansion and some adjoining property in 1949 to immigrant publisher and Jewish activist Jacob Landau and his wife Ida Bienstock Landau, the legal purchaser.

Jacob Landau, who was born in 1892 in Sadagora, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, emigrated to the U.S. in 1921 shortly after his hometown had been granted to Romania as part of its war reparations following World War I. Sadagora -- today Sadhora -- was absorbed into Ukraine in 1940.

Pictured is an undated scanned version of a postcard depicting the Sadagora synagogue in what is now Sadhora, Ukraine. The synagogue was a Hasidic house of worship. Jacob Landau would almost certainly have attended services at the synagogue as a young man growing up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire outpost, home to some 5,000 jews around World War I. The town was given to Romania as a war reparation after Austria-Hungary's surrender and was absorbed into Soviet Ukraine early in World War II. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Landau founded the first Jewish news agency, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (known as the Jewish Correspondence Bureau until 1919) on Feb. 6, 1917 in The Hague, Netherlands. The JTA collected and disseminated news affecting the international Jewish community, especially on the European war fronts.

At World War I’s end, JTA moved its headquarters to London, then followed Landau to Manhattan, its new headquarters, by 1922.

Landau’s creation was a massive success and played a key role in the eventual establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

By 1925, over 400 newspapers (Jewish and nonsectarian alike) subscribed to the JTA. In 1926, Landau began publishing a newspaper, the Palestine Bulletin, under JTA auspices and spun the Bulletin into the more familiar Palestine Post in 1932. Still in business today, the non-for-profit JTA has correspondents in 33 international cities, including Washington and Jerusalem.

The Landaus were close friends with Albert Einstein and Einstein’s second wife, Elsa. In fact, the Einsteins served as godparents of the Landaus’ son, Albert Einstein Landau, in 1933. The Einsteins attended infant Albert’s Bris Milah that same year.

Albert and Elsa Einstein are pictured aboard the SS Rotterdam arriving in New York on April 2, 1921. The visit was the famed physicist's first to the United States. He would win the Nobel Prize in Physics for his Theory of Relativity later in 1921. Einstein and Elsa were close friends with Jacob and Ida Landau and served as godparents to the Landaus' son, Albert Einstein Landau. (Library of Congress, public domain)

By 1940, the JTA spawned the Overseas News Agency (ONA) of which Landau was managing director. ONA was secretly funded by MI6, the British intelligence service, to provide press credentials to British spies and plant fake news stories in U.S. newspapers to aid the British Empire’s war effort against the anti-Semitic regime of Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany. The United States was officially neutral at the time of ONA’s founding and wouldn’t enter the war until December 1941.

Landau retired in July 1951 and died of a heart attack at age 59 in early 1952.
Jacob’s widow Ida was at home at Quarry Hill with her maid Christina Fernandez in late March 1952, less than two months after Jacob’s death, when fire broke out in the 32-room mansion.

Ida reported the fire at about 6 a.m. but questions about jurisdiction between the Irvington and Tarrytown fire departments and lack of access to fire hydrants by first Tarrytown firefighters and later Irvington firefighters caused delays that left the house in ruins by 10 a.m.

Ida Landau sold what remained of her portion of the one-time Quarry Hill estate in November 1955 to Trout Lake Realty Corp., which transferred the property to Woodland Lake Estates in March of 1956. The entire one-time Quarry Hill property was reunited and redeveloped for single-family homes. It is reached via Whitetail Road off East Sunnyside Lane just east up Sunnyside Lane from the Tarrytown House Estate conference center and hotel.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: Ida Landau's marriage to Jacob in 1921 led to a change in U.S. citizenship laws. Under terms of the Expatriation Act of 1907, the Hartford, Conn.-born alumna of New York University and NYU's Washington Square College of Law  forfeited her U.S. citizenship and right to practice law here because her husband was not a U.S. citizen.

The notoriety of the situation helped prompt passage of the Cable Act of 1922 which allowed American women who married citizens of other countries to keep their U.S. citizenship (the exception being women who married foreign men ineligible for U.S. citizenship -- at that time, Asians). Ida also worked as a journalist and was assistant general manager to Jacob at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Ida co-founded the Delta Phi Epsilon sorority in 1917. ...

... Ida outlived Jacob by 34 years, dying at 86 in Los Angeles on May 4, 1986. ...

... Click here to view film footage from the Fox MovieTone News Collection of Madeleine Beers Borg speaking about aiding the disabled courtesy of the University of South Carolina Libraries Digital Collections. ...

... Once-widowed and thrice-divorced Margaret Mary Emerson was inducted posthumously into the United States Croquet Hall of Fame in 1979. She died at age 74 in 1960 in Manhattan. ...

... Albert Einstein Landau, who went by Al, replaced the iconic Stan Lee as president of Marvel Comics Group in 1973 but his unsuccessful tenure there was terminated in 1975. ... He died at age 60 in 1993. ...