Greystone: An original 'Millionaires Row' estate is home still to the mega rich

The original Greystone Castle, later called Hibriten and finally Fortoiseau
as it appeared ca. 1900. The mansion burned on New Year's Eve/Day, 1971-72, at which time the estate was home to Pinsly Day Camp.

Greystone and its original 40 acres -- eventually 172 acres -- east of South Broadway and south of Sheldon Avenue in Tarrytown was established by Captain Josiah W. Macy Jr. around 1860.

Greystone Castle, as it was originally known, was the home of an oil industry pioneer, a two-term Chicago mayor, a Manhattan retailer, a tobacco titan, a dance school and a military-themed boarding school.

Greystone was designed to resemble a stone castle of the type favored by the wealthiest Manhattan titans of finance and industry for their summer residences along the Hudson Valley. It was built of stone quarried on the estate.

The mansion featured 40 rooms and the country gentleman farmer estate included a dairy barn, a poultry house, an ice house, gate lodges at its entrances off South Broadway and Sheldon Avenue, a lake, a massive stone stable and carriage house, a reservoir, greenhouses, a superintendent's cottage, a gardener's cottage and other outbuildings. The estate also included a tennis court and at least one swimming pool.

The 1920 U.S. Census shows nine servants employed in the main house -- a governess and a nursery maid, two chambermaids, a parlormaid, a cook, a kitchen maid, a butler and a houseman.

This hand-drawn 1911 map shows the estate of tobacco executive Robert Byron Dula stretching east from South Broadway, south from Sheldon Avenue and east into unincorporated Town of Greenburgh. The estate, which he named Hibriten after Hibriten Mountain which overlooks his native Lenoir, N.C., included over 170 acres as well as the Greystone Castle built by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil associate Josiah W. Macy Jr. (1837-1872), likely around 1860. The estate bordered (south, towards Irvington, across the bottom of the map east of Broadway) part of the Lyndhurst estate owned by Helen Miller Gould at the time. Helen Gould two years later would remarry and become Helen Gould Shepard. The part of Gould’s estate we now know as Lyndhurst was to the left on this map across Broadway west adjacent to the Hudson River. (George Washington Bromley, 1911. David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection)

Also resident on the estate were a superintendent, a gardener, a poultryman and a chauffeur, all living with their families in estate housing.

Most of the estate staff were foreign-born, their ranks including German, French, Irish and Scottish immigrants.

The mansion burned on New Year's Eve/Day 1971-72.

Captain Josiah W. Macy Jr., ca. 1870. (
Wikimedia Commons)

From pre-Revolutionary War times, the eventual estate was part of the large Requa family farm of close to 300 acres on Philipsburg Manor land. The farm was split into three sections when it was sold in 1849 -- Lyndhurst, Pinkstone and Greystone.

The Requas sold the eventual Greystone property to David Mortimer Stebbins, a New York City merchant, around Oct. 29, 1849, the day the new Hudson River Railroad began service to and from what would become Tarrytown, bringing Hudson Valley estates within daily hailing distance of Manhattan's elite. It is unclear whether Stebbins or Josiah Macy,  who bought the estate around 1860, named it Greystone.

Macy was born into a wealthy family. His father, Josiah Sr., had established a premier shipping and commission firm in New York and become an oil industry pioneer -- opening New York State's first oil refinery in the 1860s. The elder Macy's children made a fortune when the family sold its refinery and oil company to John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Josiah Jr. sat on Standard Oil's board of directors after the sale of the refinery.

Westchester County residents likely are more familiar with Macy's son, Everit -- Valentine Everit Macy -- who inherited $20 million ($300 million today) as a five-year-old on his father's death from typhoid fever at age 38 in 1876.

The original Greystone Castle, later re-named Fortoiseau, is shown ca. 1930, in a picture postcard. Estate owners during that era often commissioned postcards to be made depicting their properties.

The county purchased 172-acre Woodlands Park in Ardsley in 1926 and later renamed it for politician and philanthropist V. Everit Macy.

Walter Smith Gurnee, a former Chicago mayor and businessman with the Midas touch, was married to Mary Isabelle "Belle" Barney of the Barney family whose estate in Irvington is now known as Barney Park. The Gurnees purchased Greystone from the Macys in the mid-1860s. Walter helped establish the initial Hope United Presbyterian Church in Tarrytown (its 500 South Broadway church building is now the First Korean Methodist Church) in 1867 when he allowed Irvington Presbyterian Church to hold its Hope Mission Sunday School classes for children in a building on his estate.

Gurnee, a native of Haverstraw, made his fortune in Chicago in 1843, starting in the leather tanning business as founder and president of the Chicago Hide and Leather Company and later in the firm Gurnee and Matteson and finally president of the Chicago and Milwaukee Railroad. Chicago Hide and Leather Company's works were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire, Oct. 8-10, 1871.

He served two terms as Chicago mayor (1851-1853). A Democrat, he tried to regain the office in 1860, but was defeated by an anti-slavery, pro-Union Republican fellow ex-mayor on the eve of the Civil War and eventually moved back to New York in 1863 where he entered the banking world and served on boards of directors of at least eight businesses.

Gurnee was a prominent member of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Walter Smith Gurnee, two-term mayor of Chicago, ca. 1860. (Wikimedia Commons)

Louis Stern bought the estate from Gurnee in 1899. Stern was co-founder of the Stern Brothers Department Store chain with his brothers, Isaac and Benjamin. Isaac would go on to own Stern Castle on the Cedar Lawn estate in Irvington where Irvington High School stands today.

Stern sold Greystone to Manhattan real estate developer Henry Corn sometime before 1908 and Corn sold it to American Tobacco Company executive Robert Byron Dula in 1909.

National City Bank (today's Citigroup/Citibank) President Frank Arthur Vanderlip Sr., a founder of the Federal Reserve who owned the Beechwood estate in nearby Briarcliff Manor, likely rented the estate briefly in 1917-18 after it was sold to Mrs Joseph Blake, wife of surgeon Joseph Blake, in 1915.

Dula, an American Tobacco Company vice president, renamed the estate Hibriten after Hibriten Mountain which loomed over his North Carolina hometown of Lenoir. Dula was one of several American Tobacco-related GIlded Age estate owners in the area.

A stone patio at Fortoiseau, formerly Greystone Castle and Hibriten, ca. 1930,
from a picture postcard.

Mary Duke Biddle, niece of American Tobacco founder James Buchanan Duke, owned nearby Linden Court on East Sunnyside Lane. American Tobacco executive William R. Harris owned the adjacent Grey Court estate. Those two properties now make up part of the Tarrytown House Estate & Conference Center.  When the U.S. Supreme Court broke up the American Tobacco trust, Harris became president of former American Tobacco subsidiary British American Tobacco, the largest tobacco company in the world today according to sales numbers, most recently in 2019.

American Tobacco president George Washington Hill owned the Richmond Hill estate across South Broadway at Harriman Road from today's Memorial Park in Irvington.

Dula and his older brother George, were sons of Lieutenant S.P. Dula who served during the Civil War in the 26th North Carolina Infantry Regiment attached to the Confederate States Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee. The boys, 13 and 15 at the start of the war, were too young to fight and volunteered for the North Carolina Home Guard in their native Caldwell County.

Surgeon Joseph Augustus Blake, M.D.,is pictured in his World War I uniform, ca. 1915. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Home Guard was sworn to defend against invaders from the North and to round up Confederate draftees and deserters.

Robert was 17 and George 19 when Union forces under Gen. George Stoneman (“Stoneman’s Raiders”) invaded western North Carolina from pro-Union eastern Tennessee on March 23, 1865. Some Union soldiers deserted and formed gangs that terrorized rebel civilians who didn’t have their fighting-age men at home to protect them.

The robbers created an atmosphere of terror by pillaging and burning the homes and crops of the Southern civilians.

One such group of about 30 armed Union men seized a log home owned by the Hamby family to use as a base for its raids. In response, a former Confederate officer who had laid down his arms with Gen. Lee at Appomattox Court House, Va., on April 9, 1865, reached out for help and the Dula brothers were among some 20 volunteers from Lenoir who answered.

The Lenoir 20 surrounded the gang’s compound -- called Fort Hamby -- on May 18, 1865 and forced its defenders to surrender, executing four of them. A witness said in a 1913 interview that the attacks on civilians in the area stopped in the aftermath of the siege.

Today's 612 South Broadway, Tarrytown, entrance to Carriage Trail and Greystone-on-Hudson (formerly Greystone/Hibriten/Fortoiseau). (Google Street View screen capture)

Dula went on to become vice president of the ultimate Big Tobacco giant, James Buchanan Duke’s American Tobacco Company. An antitrust action that started in 1907 broke up Duke’s tobacco monopoly in 1911 and Dula retired but became a director of Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company.

Elizabeth Ann Duncan, elder sister of internationally acclaimed dancer Isidora Duncan, operated a school of dance at Greystone for a brief period from late 1917 until the end of World War I when she relocated the school to Potsdam, Germany, where it had been located before the war. The Tarrytown school was under the patronage of Vanderlip, although it's not clear if Vanderlip purchased or rented Greystone for Duncan's use as a school.

The Blakes, who renamed the estate Fortoiseau, sold the property to real estate investor Willard S. Burrows in 1925, when Blake, a surgeon, was named head of Tarrytown Hospital and the couple bought the Shadowbrook estate at the northwest corner of the intersection of Broadway and Sunnyside Lane. Burrows sold the Fortoiseau estate, approximately 25 acres by then, to E. Drexel Godfrey in late November 1929 for $500,000 ($7.7 million today).

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)

When Godfrey bought the estate, it included the mansion, which was rebuilt by the Blakes after a major 1920 fire and shortly after that remodeled by Burrows, a gatehouse, a gardener's cottage and a stables/garage with living quarters. A large chunk of the northern acreage of the estate had already been sold, along with a couple of barns that had been rebuilt for residential use.

Wealth flowed in Godfrey's veins. His father, Charles Henry Godfrey, was an investment banker and partner in the brokerage firm Drexel, Morgan & Co. -- yes, that Morgan, J, Pierpont Morgan. E. Drexel Godfrey worked at his father's firm and bought Fortoiseau and retired a year after his father's death at Drexel Godfrey's Rumson, N.J., estate.

In retirement, Drexel Godfrey was a noted stamp and book collector.

Physical fitness and healthy living and body building guru Bernarr Macfadden (born Bernard McFadden), founder of the nation's first magazine devoted entirely to sports, Sport (1946-2000), operated his Tarrytown School boarding school for boys at the castle from 1943 to 1954. The boys enrolled at the school wore uniforms and were subject to military-style discipline.

Bernarr Macfadden (right) is pictured with future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (left) at Warm Springs, Georgia in this 1931 photo. FDR would be elected president in 1932 and take office in March 1933. (National Archives
 and Records Administration)

After the demise of the school and Macfadden's death in late 1955, the then-23-acre estate was sold to the then-Yonkers Jewish Community Center which opened it during the summer season as Pinsly Day Camp from 1956 to 1984.

The castle was lost to fire on New Year's Eve/Day 1971-72 and the rest of the buildings were razed in the late 1990s but the estate remained in JCC hands until it was sold in or around 2010 to developers, winding up in 2012 along with some nearby property in the hands of developer Andy Todd of Greystone Mansion Group which is building more than 20 mansions priced between $4 million and $20 million each on the old estate which is now a gated community called Greystone on Hudson.

Pinsly Day Camp campers ca. 1975 enjoy a musical performance including piano, flute, guitar and singers in front of the wooden building (left, rear) that was built to replace the burnt and razed Greystone/Fortoiseau mansion in 1972. (Photo by Andrea Pitluk courtesy Amy (Pitluk) Rosenthal.)

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The video below shows the exact location, views and photos of what was Greystone Castle and the multi-million dollar mega villa built on its footprint . It also tells the story of the unique first century Roman antiquity found during the construction of the new house by the crew employed by developer Andy Todd. ...

... Anyone interested in the Manhattan schist stone quarried at Greystone and other area estates of the Gilded Age in southeastern New York State might want to check out this Columbia University doctoral dissertation from Dec. 1, 1913 by Charles Reinhart Fettke on the subject. ...

... The Yonkers Jewish Community Center is now known as the Harold & Elaine Shames Jewish Community Center on the Hudson and occupies a 75,000-square-foot building on a 6.6-acre campus just northwest of the former Greystone estate. ...

... According to the 1940 U.S. Census, the Godfrey family employed 12 servants, including a butler and a chauffeur, in their immediate household. The census did not identify any other estate employees of which there were surely many. The annual salaries of the 11 household servants who were employed throughout the entire previous year topped out at $1,860 per year ($37,000 today) for the primary cook, 56-year-old Swedish immigrant Ellen Olsen, and bottomed out at $840 per year $1,630 today) for her relief cook, 45-year-old fellow Swede Gunkell Karlson. ... By comparison, 30-year-old butler Bryant Stewart, an English immigrant, was paid only $1,200 per year ($23,300 today). ... The salaries, it should be made clear, were based on a 60-hour work week. ...

... Two Hudson Valley Greystones? Do not confuse this Greystone estate with the Yonkers estate of the same name. Hat manufacturer John Waring built a 99-room mansion on his 33-acre Greystone estate in Yonkers in 1865 and the estate was first rented, then sold to former New York governor and failed Democratic presidential nominee Samuel J. Tilden beginning in 1879. It was sold to New York attorney Samuel Untermyer at auction in 1899. Untermyer established extensive gardens at the estate at 945 North Broadway, Yonkers, that is open to the public daily as the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy in conjunction with the City of Yonkers as a city park. ... Tilden actually won the popular vote against Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the 1876 presidential election to replace Ulysses S. Grant, but was one vote short of the needed 185 needed in the Electoral College for victory. The outcome in three states -- Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina -- were disputed and another dispute hung up one Electoral College vote in Oregon. The race went to a divided Congress in 1877 for resolution and a backroom deal known as the Compromise of 1877, was reached, giving Hayes all the disputed states and the Oregon elector and the White House. In return, Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction in the South and Democrats there instituted racist Jim Crow laws that led to enforced segregation that lasted into the 1960s. .... The video below explores Untermyer Gardens today ...