Carrollcliffe: The last of Tarrytown's privately-owned castles is a hotel today

Carrollcliffe, the 45-room castle built by General Howard Carroll and occupied by his family until 1940, is shown in an undated photo. (househistree.com)

Carrollcliffe, one of three castles built in Tarrytown (along with Lyndhurst and since-demolished Ericstan) was constructed by Howard Carroll, a brigadier general in the New York National Guard and in 1898 Inspector General of New York’s fighting forces in the Spanish-American War. 

Carroll (1854-1916) was the son of Irish immigrant and Civil War hero Col. Howard Carroll of the 105th New York Infantry who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862 and died on Sept. 29, 1862. 

General Howard Carroll, 1854-1916, was appointed Chief of Artillery with the rank of brigadier general in the New York National Guard in 1895. He also served as Inspector General in 1898 when he conducted site visits to the camps of all New York State soldiers taking part in the Spanish-American War. (findagrave.com)

The Maryland battle, known in the South as the Battle of Sharpsburg, saw Union Gen. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac thwart Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia’s initial incursion into the North at Antietam Creek near the town of Sharpsburg, Md. 

In his 35 years, the senior Carroll had accomplished a rare feat for the first half of the 19th century, graduating from Dublin University in British-ruled Ireland in about 1848, before emigrating to the United States. 

Axe Castle, previously known as Carrollcliffe, is shown in a postcard ca. 1960. (Westchester County Historical Society)

Carroll was an innovator in the construction of wrought iron railroad bridges before his untimely end. His son Howard was eight at the time of his father's death but went on to become a sort of Renaissance man. 

He worked as a Washington, D.C., correspondent for The New York Times during which time he befriended luminaries such as presidents Ulysses S. Grant and James A. Garfield. The assassinated Garfield’s successor in the White House, Chester A. Arthur, was a friend of the elder Carroll and offered his late friend’s son two posts in his administration, including Ambassador to Belgium and private secretary to the president, but the younger Carroll turned both offers down. 

On the political front, Carroll lost his bid as a Republican for Congress in 1882. In addition to his journalistic efforts, Carroll wrote several plays and authored a pair of books. His most successful play was “The American Countess,” a comedy/drama which ran for 200 nights on Broadway. 

This is a 1977 photo of the original Carrollcliffe/Axe Castle gatehouse. (Westchester County Historical Society)

His books included "A Mississippi Incident” and "Twelve Americans: Their Lives and Times." Carroll married Caroline Starin, daughter of New York businessman and two-term U.S. Rep. John Henry Starin, R-N.Y. He left writing and journalism  to jump into the world of business and finance as president of the Sicilian Asphalt Paving Co. and joined his father-in-law’s very successful Starin City River & Harbor Transportation Co. 

Carroll's father-in-law established America’s first theme park, turning his personal estate across five islands off New Rochelle into Starin’s Glen Island open to day visitors during the summer. The park's design featured five cultures of the world on islands linked by bridges and causeways and included a zoo, a railway, a natural history museum, a “Little Germany” beer garden around a Rhine castle, an aviary, a bathing beach and changing pavilion, a Grand Cafe, bridal paths, greenhouses, a Dutch windmill and a Chinese pagoda. 

He brought tourists -- more than a million per season at one point -- to the park from New York City on a dozen of his company’s ferries. The park preceded Walt Disney’s Disneyland by some seven decades. 

An illustration on a pamphlet from 1891 features Starin's Glen Island in the Long Island Sound off New Rochelle, N.Y. Howard Carroll was an executive with the company of his father-in-law, John Henry Starin, in Glen Island, America's first theme park.

The park’s decline began on June 15, 1904 when one of Starin’s paddlewheel steamboats, the PS General Slocum, burned and sank in the East River killing 1,021 of the 1,342 passengers on board. It was the worst disaster in New York City history until 9/11 and remains the second worst maritime disaster on U.S. waterways. 

The Starin estate sold Starin’s Glen Island after its namesake's death in 1909 at 83. Howard Carroll purchased the park for $100,000 in 1915 and promised to reopen the shuttered getaway, but he died a year later before that could come to pass. 

The park did reopen in 1924 after its purchase by Westchester County, which used landfill to make it one large island and built a causeway to make it accessible by car from New Rochelle. The county built a casino on the location of the old cafe and it eventually became famous as the home of national radio broadcasts of the top Big Band Era performers of the 1930s and 1940s. 

The passenger steamboat PS General Slocum is shown in this illustration after catching fire in the East River on June 15, 1904 while on a charter run of members of a Manhattan Lutheran congregation to a church picnic. Some 1,021 of the 1,342 people on board died. The disaster was New York's worst in lives lost until 9/11. (Illustration by Angelo Agostini in O Malho, 'The Mallet,' magazine, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

It remains a restaurant, catering facility and county park open to Westchester County residents today. Howard and Caroline Carroll began building their 45-room, 28,000-square-foot Carrollcliffe mansion in 1897 on their 68.4-acre estate east of Broadway between Benedict Avenue and White Plains Road (today’s Route 119). The architect was Henry Franklin Kilburn. Some reports say Carrollcliffe stands at the highest point of Westchester County, giving it an expansive view of the Hudson River. 

Howard Carroll served as an official for the Hudson-Fulton Tercentennial Celebration of 1909 commemorating the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River and the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton’s first successful commercial application of the paddle steamer. 

The Axe Castle tower foyer is decorated with a Christmas tree in this 1986 photo. (Westchester County Historical Society)

At Carrollcliffe, the Carrolls hosted the officers of the visiting German fleet stationed in the Hudson River for the Tercentennial. Other invited guests were J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, foreign dignitaries and ambassadors who watched Tercentennial river regattas from the Carrollcliffe terrace. 

The success of those gatherings prompted the Carrolls and Kilburn to design and build a 28,000-square-foot addition that opened in 1910, that included the Great Hall as a new dining room, a pantry, a formal ballroom and additional servants’ quarters, carriage house/garage and stables. The 1910 federal census showed the Carrolls sharing Carrollcliffe with seven female servants -- all post-1890 immigrants to the U.S., six from Ireland, one from France -- and three male employees -- a coachman, a footman and a houseman. 

Howard and Caroline Carroll had three children, daughter Caramai and sons Arthur and Lauren, before Howard’s sudden, unexpected death on Dec. 30, 1916. His wife and children retained ownership of Carrollcliffe and lived on the estate until 1940.

This 1901 map shows General Howard Carroll’s 68.4-acre Carrollcliffe mansion and estate on the southern side of Benedict Avenue, north of White Plains Road (Rt. 119), four years after construction began and nine years before construction was completed. (George Washington Bromley & Co., 1901. David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection)

The estate was sold in 1941 to Emerson Wirt Axe and his wife, the former Ruth E. Houghton, for $45,000. The Axes, economists and investment advisers, converted it into their home and the headquarters of their investment firm E. W. Axe & Co. and renamed Carrollcliffe Axe Castle. 

Axe was a wine connoisseur and kept approximately 5,000 bottles of French wine at a time in the castle's temperature controlled wine cellar.

He was also an expert marksman and chess player and an authority at jiu jitsu and fencing. He interrupted his collegiate studies at the University of Chicago and Harvard to serve with the American Expeditionary Force in France during World War I.

He was a descendant on his mother's side of William Wirt, U.S. Attorney General under President James Monroe.

The Axe Castle small banquet hall is shown in 1981. (Westchester County Historical Society)

Mrs. Axe was one of the first female presidents of a mutual fund and remained a prominent player in the field for decades, managing four Axe-Houghton mutual funds. 

The Axes both died in the 1960s, but their Axe-Houghton Management firm controlled the property until 1992 when the castle and its remaining 11 acres were sold to an investment group led by Tarrytown couple Hanspeter and Steffi Walder, reimagining it as the upscale executive boutique hotel The Castle at Tarrytown.

This is an aerial view to the southwest towards New York City and the Hudson River and its Palisades of the former Carrollcliffe Castle, now the Castle Hotel & Spa in Tarrytown. (castlehotelandspa.com)

It turned out that Hanspeter Walder, a Manhattan banker, had embezzled some $75 million from his UBS clients to pay for the castle and its renovations. He was arrested less than two weeks after 9/11, led out of the castle by FBI agents on Sept. 24, 2001. He pleaded guilty to 16 criminal counts and was sentenced to 7.5 years in federal prison The castle and its accompanying acreage was forfeited to UBS which sold it in 2003 by Elite Hotels, a limited liability company formed by billionaire investor C. Dean Metropoulos, for $10.9 million.

Metropoulos, a Tripoli, Libya-born Greek national, emigrated to the U.S. with his parents at age 10 in 1956. He wound up owning Pabst Brewing Co. and he is the executive chairman and chief executive officer of C. Dean Metropoulos & Co. He was involved in the ownership of major companies including Hostess Brands, Ghirardelli Chocolate, Mumm's/Perrier-Jouet champagnes, Bumble Bee Foods, Chef Boyardee and others. 

The castle is now the upscale Castle Hotel & Spa at 400 Benedict Avenue. 

Other parts of the former 68.4-acre property have been developed as a variety of residential housing complexes including Carrollwood condominiums. 

AUTHOR’S NOTES: Spellings of the name of the estate have varied over the years, depending on the source, and have included Carrollcliff, Carroll-Cliff and Carroll-Cliffe as well as the generally preferred Carrollcliffe. ...

... Dean Metropoulos' son, J. Daren Metropoulos, who dropped out of college as a sophomore to work for his father, made a big splash in 2016 when he purchased Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion West in Holmby Hills, Calif., for a reported $100 million. The deal allowed Hefner to continue living in the 29-room mansion until his death, which came about a year later. ...