Maplehurst: Great estate lies buried in the footprint of the Tappan Zee Bridge

This is the Maplehurst mansion of printing press magnate Robert Hoe II, ca. 1890, looking northwest towards the Hudson River. (Westchester County Historical Society)

Maplehurst was the original mansion and 21-acre estate of three premier businessmen: printing press pioneer Robert Hoe II, ladies' hat fashionista George Legg, and paper magnate David Lincoln Luke.

It lay beneath the site of today’s New York State Thruway entrance to Tarrytown's Tappan Zee Bridge -- technically the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge.

David Luke's doomed Hawthorne mansion, shown ca. 1953, stands in stark relief over and next to a graded dirt road that would become the lanes housing toll booths for the Tappan Zee Bridge. Construction of the original bridge ran from 1952 to its opening in 1955. (Westchester County Historical Society)

It was Hoe II who put Maplehurst on the map. He owned the house from at least the time of Tarrytown’s incorporation as a village in 1870 until at least 1893. Photos exist of the estate in 1890 showing a huge greenhouse, landscaping emphasizing the estates breathtaking views looking west over the expansive Hudson River, elegant granite and wrought iron fencing and gates along South Broadway, a reflecting pond, a carriage house/stables and a massive mansion all a block or two south of today’s Roman Catholic Carmelite Church of the Transfiguration.

The estate, which abutted west-east Van Wart Avenue to its south from the river to South Broadway, included another large house for Hoe II’s son Robert III.

Maplehurst featured a large south-facing greenhouse complex (pictured) on an east-west axis. This is an 1890 view of the greenhouses looking west from the Robert Hoe II mansion Maplehurst over the Hudson River at the Tappan Zee. (Westchester County Historical Society)

Robert Hoe II’s father, Robert Hoe, was an English immigrant who founded what became R. Hoe & Company in New York where Robert II was born in 1814. R. Hoe & Co. was the first company in the U.S. to make saws of cast steel and drive the machinery in its factories with steam. The company began making printing presses in 1805 at a time when print was the only widespread form of communication, the high-tech process of its day.

Robert Sr. handed the company to his three sons, including Robert II, in 1841. Robert II’s brother, Richard March Hoe, invented the rotary printing press that revolutionized the newspaper printing process, but Robert II was the company’s business expert. Robert II was also a founder of the National Academy of Design. He died at Maplehurst in 1884.

Granite piers and wrought-iron fencing and gates along South Broadway flank the unpaved 1890 entry to Robert Hoe II’s Maplehurst. (Westchester County Historical Society)

The family later sold Maplehurst to the family of George Legg, a highly successful importer of hats and artificial flowers. Legg, who renamed the property Crestlawn, went on to become a lobbyist battling state and federal efforts to ban the use of feathers as decorations on hats and protect migratory birds being killed for those feathers.

Legg became president in 1899 of the new Millinery Merchants Protective Association. His lobbying efforts failed and Legg’s allies caved, agreeing to a 1904 deal with the government to ban feathers on hats and protect birds.

The extensive landscaping of Robert Hoe II's Maplehurst estate included a reflecting pond, pictured at lower right in this 1890 photo. (Westchester County Historical Society)

The Leggs sold Crestlawn to David Lincoln Luke for $100,000 ($2.6 million today) in 1913. The move eventually united the families as George Legg's granddaughter Cora ended up marrying David Lincoln Luke Jr. in 1930.

Luke Sr. renamed the estate Hawthorne. He was one of four wealthy Luke brothers who owned Hudson Valley estates in Irvington and Tarrytown.

Brother John Guthrie Luke owned a 42-acre estate at 100 North Broadway in Irvington, not far from Sunnyside Lane. In 1924 it became the site of Irvington House for Cardiac Children and since 1963 has been the site of the non-profit Abbott House, a charity that benefits foster children and adults with developmental disabilities.

The carriage house and stables on the former Maplehurst, later Crestlawn and finally Hawthorne estate are shown in about 1950 prior to razing during the construction of the original Tappan Zee Bridge. (Westchester County Historical Society)

Brother Adam Keith Luke purchased the David Dows-owned Charlton Hall estate in Irvington, which he renamed Devon Hall. It stood where Dows Lane Elementary School and the Half Moon Co-op Apartments now stand, and David Luke and his brother Thomas bought Tarrytown estates. Thomas lived at Braemar, a 17.5-acre estate at the northeast intersection of Broadway and White Plains Road in Tarrytown. Thomas' 1905-build Colonial Revival brick mansion is the only one of those owned by the four brothers that remains today, albeit as an office building and only on 4.5 acres of the former estate that lay east of the Old Croton Aqueduct, at 99 White Plains Road, Tarrytown.

The brothers were all pulp and paper manufacturing company executives of the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Co., founded by their father, Scottish immigrant William Luke.

After several mergers and acquisitions, the company is now known as WestRock, a corrugated packaging company. It was formed in July 2015 after merger with MeadWestvaco (the successor company to West Virginia Pulp and Paper) and RockTen. WestRock was then acknowledged as the second largest American packaging company and one of the world's largest paper and packaging companies with $15 billion in annual revenue and 42,000 employees in 30 countries.

David L. Luke's Hawthorne estate is shown in this 1914 hand-drawn map. The main mansion is in the top left surrounded by a circular drive off the South Broadway entrance to the property. An entrance is also shown at top right off Van Wart Avenue. The greenhouse complex is just below the main house on the property line. At bottom right on this map is the outline of the former second house on the estate used by Robert Hoe III when the estate was named Maplehurst. (George W. Bromley, 1914. David Rumsey Historic Maps Collection).

John A. Luke Jr., a Luke family descendant, was chairman and CEO of MeadWestvaco when it merged with RockTen in 2015.

David Luke died of a heart attack at the Savoy Plaza Hotel on April 21, 1934 after attending the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden with his wife, his son David Jr., and his two grandsons. His funeral services were conducted at his Tarrytown estate, Hawthorne.

Luke left an estate worth $891,000 to his wife and children, showed a probate report filed in December 1936 -- a little over two years after his death. That would be $17.2 million today.

The David L. Luke mansion is pictured ca. 1940 while it still bore some hallmarks of a great Hudson Valley manor house. It couldn’t survive the passing of its builder, paper magnate David Lincoln Luke, in 1934, though his widow remained at the estate for a few years after his death. (Westchester County Historical Society)

Tragically, in June 1934 David Luke Jr. committed suicide by jumping out of a private plane.

Hawthorne was sold on Jan. 6, 1942, 30 days after the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, for development as the new prospective home of Tarrytown Hospital which stood a mile north of the estate. At the time of the sale, developers planned to renovate the Luke mansion into a hospital and build other new hospital facilities on the 21-acre property which lay between the Hudson River and South Broadway.

The former Hawthorne mansion of David Luke was to have been rebuilt as a new Tarrytown Hospital, but is shown here ca. 1954 in the process of being demolished as part of the construction of the New York Thruway entry to the original Tappan Zee Bridge. (Westchester County Historical Society)

The proposed hospital never saw the light of day. Instead, the State of New York stepped in and took over the property for use in the construction of the Tappan Zee Bridge which was completed and opened to traffic in late 1955.

The David Lincoln Luke mansion was razed and became the site of a New York State Highway Patrol headquarters off South Broadway next to the entrance of the New York State Thruway onto the old Tappan Zee Bridge until that bridge was torn down in 2015. The site now serves as the gateway to the bicycle and pedestrian path on the northern span of the new $4 billion Tappan Zee Bridge.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Ever wonder why Tarrytown was chosen as the location for the Tappan Zee Bridge? Believe it or not, atomic-age planners around 1950 felt Tarrytown was far enough away from Manhattan to be outside a nuclear blast zone if New York City were targeted by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And add to that the fact that it was located about halfway between the two bridges already spanning the Hudson River -- the George Washington and Bear Mountain bridges are 44 miles apart.