Tiffany Park: Home to village's premier river park, national artistic icon

Charles Louis Tiffany's original Irvington mansion is pictured in this 1893 photo. The mansion was torn down and replaced by owner Ralph Matthiessen in 1925. (The Peterson Magazine, June 1893)

Matthiessen Park -- the estate, not the riverfront park of the same name -- might be considered the jewel of Irvington, New York's Gilded Age estates.

First known as Tiffany Park when international jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany called half of it home, Tiffany's banker in-laws, the Dunhams, lived in the other half, a dual-mansion estate they called Harmony. Both of the yellow stone Harmony mansions remain  today.

Jabez L. Ellis, a business partner and cousin of Tiffany, first purchased the land that would become Tiffany Park from Hudson River Railroad investor Fortune White in 1849. White had purchased the land in 1845 from heirs of 18th century Philipsburg Manor tenant farmer Barent Dutcher.

Charles Lewis Tiffany (in top hat) visits his Tiffany & Co. Manhattan showroom in 1887. Tiffany lived from 1812 to 1902 and his son, the renowned Louis Comfort Tiffany, grew up in Tiffany Park and designed all 185 stained glass windows at the neighboring Irvington Presbyterian Church, of which the Tiffany family were part of the congregation. Louis Comfort Tiffany also designed several windows at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church next door on North Broadway. (Wikimedia Commons)

White was lining up rights-of-way himself and via his Hudson Valley neighbors for the laying of the railroad tracks coming to the eastern shore of the Hudson, getting to what would become Irvington in 1849.

The Tiffanys came into the picture when Tiffany & Co. founder Charles Tiffany and his niece’s husband, banker James L. Dunham, jointly purchased 50 acres from a financially strapped Ellis in 1863. The deal included the old Dutcher farmhouse which eventually became the site of Tiffany’s mansion.

This 1872 map shows the Charles Lewis Tiffany estate Tiffany Park to the immediate north of James L. Dunham's estate Harmony with Harmony's two mansions facing each other across a circular drive. The Dunham house to the right housed Dunham's father Edward, brother Carroll and sister Anne with her famed Hudson River School artist husband Samuel Colman. Tiffany's house is shown at the end of a circular drive off the entry road that still exists abutting the north side of the Irvington Presbyterian Church (Pres. Ch.) property. Property that the related Tiffany and Dunham families shared are marked Tiffany & Dunham or T&D, including the land on the western side of the railroad tracks (lower left) that is today's Village of Irvington riverside Matthiessen Park. Above Tiffany Park is the Long Meadow estate of neighbor Franz Otto Matthiessen, whose nephew would later buy the Tiffany and Dunham combined properties to form a 62-acre Matthiessen Park estate as it was called after 1902. Note that the Tiffany and Dunham estates end at the Old Croton Aqueduct, whle the Matthiessen estate continues to North Broadway, just past the aqueduct -- marked F.O.M. on this map, while access to the Tiffany estate is limited to the single road between the Presbyterian Church and Matthiessen property. (J.B. Beers, 1911. David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

Dunham consigned the portion of his Harmony estate closest to Broadway including the easternmost of the two mansions he would build to his father Edward Wood Dunham Sr., co-founder and first president of the Corn Exchange Bank of New York, with the proviso it would also be available for use by James'  siblings. 

The siblings were his older brother Edward Jr., his younger brother Carroll Dunham, M.D., one of the world's leading homeopathic physicians, and younger sister Anne Lawrence Dunham, whose husband was Samuel Colman, a leading artist of the famed Hudson River School.

The Dunhams built their facing mansions on a circular driveway between and abutting the ends of north Cottenet and Dutcher streets away from Main Street.

Carroll Dunham eschewed living in his father's mansion, instead buying a large lot at the northern ends of North D and North E streets (Dutcher and Eckar streets today). Edward Jr. opted not to live in Irvington, leaving the Dunham mansion in Harmony to his father and the Colmans. It was a fortuitous turn of events as Charles Tiffany's son Louis Comfort Tiffany, would end up studying art under the direction of Samuel Colman leading to an illustrious career in the arts.

The families would sell their easternmost lot for what would become the site of the Irvington Presbyerian Church.

In a coincidence that would have far-reaching effects on the future of the estate, German immigrant sugar refining magnate Franz Otto Matthiessen would buy Tiffany Park's neighboring estate to the north, a 12-acre spread from South Broadway to the Hudson River known as Long Meadow.

But back to Tiffany Park ... The Tiffanys were American entrepreneurial royalty, in acumen if not bloodline.

At age 25 in 1837, Charles Tiffany borrowed $1,000 -- about $23,000 today -- from his father and opened a gift and stationery shop in Manhattan with friend John B. Young. They expanded by selling imported porcelain, silverware, glassware, jewelry and clocks mainly from Europe and Asia in 1839.

The 1866 oil-on-canvas painting Storm King on the Hudson by Samuel Colman is one of the Hudson River School artist's best-known works. Colman instructed teenager Louis Comfort Tiffany as his young neighbor in Tiffany Park learned to paint. (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

Ellis joined the firm around 1841 and Tiffany, Young and Ellis was born. The company continued to grow, began making its own gold jewelry and in the early 1850s was rebranded Tiffany & Co. with international branches in London and Paris.

This is the westernmost of the two facing Dunham mansions built on their Harmony estate in the 1860s. It was built and owned originally by James L. Dunham and after 1922 by Erard A. Matthiessen. The mansion is pictured ca. 1960. (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

Tiffany worked with inventor Thomas Alva Edison on theater lighting and footlights that put the glitter in Broadway in the wake of the installation of electric lighting around 1880 that led to Broadway’s nickname “The Great White Way.”

Tiffany’s reputation as a purveyor of only the finest goods became legendary when the firm bought and then re-sold some of the French crown jewels made available in 1885 by the French government.

Tiffany and his wife, Harriet Olivia Avery Young, sister of early Tiffany business partner John B. Young, had six children, four of whom lived to adulthood. Of these, Louis Comfort Tiffany was the oldest boy. He was born in 1848, a year after brother Charles Jr. had died at age 5.

The iced-over Hudson River is pictured in an undated photo along what is now the public Matthiessen Park west of the Metro North railroad tracks. Pictured at right is the Tiffany dockhouse and from it left into the river the pier at which some of Irvington’s richest and most famous residents docked their yachts in the course of their annual visits to their summer estates. Some used yachts to commute to their Manhattan offices, including Conrad Henry Matthiessen Sr. on his yacht Inga and department store magnate Isaac Stern on his yacht Virginia. (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

Louis Comfort Tiffany was Tiffany & Co.'s first design director and was an artist and designer who worked in a variety of media, most famously stained glass.

He started at least four glassmaking companies of his own, outside the Tiffany & Co. domain, but left those in 1902 to become design director of his father’s company.

Louis Comfort Tiffany spent much of his life on the Tiffany Park estate of his father, attending services at Irvington Presbyterian Church a stone's throw east on South Broadway from his family's house and painting scenes from the Hudson Valley he so loved.

Pictured is the stables/carriage house/garage with attached greenhouse of the Mathiessen estate, ca. 1928. The buildings were later converted to houses for three families. (Dix Duryea Photography, The Architectural Record,  November 1928)

In 1913, he designed and installed 185 blue, green and amber stained-glass windows in the Irvington Presbyterian Church which have recently been restored.

Among other famous works by Louis Comfort Tiffany was his redesign in 1881 and 1882 of several state rooms in the White House in Washington, D.C., under commission of President Chester Arthur, who’d just replaced President James A. Garfield, assassinated in D.C. by Charles Guiteau, nephew of Irvington resident Frederick Guiteau, while awaiting a train that would have taken him to visit Cyrus West Field at Field’s Irvington estate, “Ardsley.”

Louis Comfort Tiffany is believed to be the first professional decorator to work on White House design. It was a task normally assigned to first ladies or female relatives of the president, but Arthur’s wife, Ellen Herndon, only 42 at the time, had died 10 months before his election as vice president. The native New Yorker assumedly picked Tiffany for the task because of his familiarity with him.

This is the wall of stained glass with two doors designed, built and installed by Louis Comfort Tiffany on behalf of his father's Tiffany & Co. in the entry hall of the White House in 1882 at the direction of new President Chester Arthur who has just replaced the assassinated president, James A. Garfield. It was part of an extensive Tiffany & Co. reworking of White House design. (Wikipedia Commons)

Tiffany described wasn't reticent about his 1882 work at the White House: “At that time we decorated the Blue Room, the East Room, the Red Room and the Hall between the Red and East Rooms, together with the glass screen contained therein," Tiffany said. "The Blue Room, or Robin's Egg Room -- as it is sometimes called -- was decorated in robin's egg blue for the main color, with ornaments in a hand-pressed paper, touched out in ivory, gradually deepening as the ceiling was approached.

“In the East Room, we only did the ceiling, which was done in silver, with a design in various tones of ivory.

“In the Red Room, the walls were red with a frieze in which the motif was an interlacing of a design embodying both eagles and flags. The ceiling was in old gold.

“The opalescent glass screen in the hall, which reached from the floor to the ceiling, had also a motif of eagles and flags, interlaced in the Arabian method.”

By way of comparison, this is the redesigned and decorated White House entry hall of the architectural design firm McKim, Mead & White commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 in an effort to shed the Executive Mansion's Victorian trappings and return to its original Federal-style roots. This hand colored photo was taken in 1904. (Library of Congress)

Washington's Evening Star newspaper in its Dec. 19, 1882 edition, described the incoming glass screen in the White House mentioned by Tiffany above.

“What will doubtless be considered the main feature of the interior improvement is the magnificent glass mosaic screen, which is expected to arrive shortly from New York. It will take the place of the present homely, ground glass partition which separates the corridor from the vestibule.

“It will have but two doors, the center of the screen being composed of one large panel. The center of this panel consists of a large oval, having four eagles arranged around a central smaller oval, which is a suggestion of the U.S. shield.

Ralph Matthiessen's 1925 mansion, designed by architect James C. MacKenzie Jr., was built on the site of the forrmer Charles Lewis Tiffany home in what was originally called Tiffany Park, now Matthiessen Park. This is a view of the mansion's front entrance looking northwest over the nearby Hudson River (left rear). (Dix Duryea Photography, The Architectural Record,  November 1928)

“The four rosettes, which are outside the large oval, in the corners of the panel, have the cipher U.S.A. introduced. The whole panel is filled with innumerable pieces of different hued glass and crystal. All around this panel and to both ends of the screen the character will be the same, though not so elaborate as that of the center panel. Tiffany & Co. have never had such an opportunity of showing both sides of the glass mosaic as this will afford, and the effect produced by the lights on both sides . . . will doubtless be magnificent.”

What happened to the Tiffany White House glass? It fell victim to a return to Federal style revival under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 and is believed to have been destroyed.

Louis Comfort Tiffany's work can still be seen at the Tiffany Reading Room at the Irvington Town Hall on Main Street -- formerly the Irvington Public Library -- as well as at Jay Gould's Lyndhurst estate in Tarrytown and the Irvington Presbyterian Church and its North Broadway next-door neighbor, St. Barnabas Episcopal Church.

This is the front of Ralph Matthiessen's 1925 mansion, ca. 1928. (Dix Duryea Photography, The Architectural Record,  November 1928)

Charles Lewis TIffany was 90 when he died on Feb. 18, 1902 -- his son Louis Comfort Tiffany's 54th birthday.

Tiffany's heirs would sell their father's combined Tiffany Park and Harmony estates in 1902 to Conrad Henry Matthiessen Sr., a year after Conrad purchased his late uncle Franz Matthiessen's Long Meadow estate next door from Franz's widow Emma in 1901.

Conrad was a Chicago and Jersey City sugar and corn syrup refiner and the son of Franz Matthiessen's brother Erard Adolph Matthiessen. Conrad's family was all-Matthiessen. His wife Eda Wilhelmine Matthiessen was his first cousin, daughter of Franz's other brother, Frederick William Matthiessen, a wealthy zinc producer in LaSalle, Ill. 

This is the original eastern yellow stone mansion on the Dunhams' Harmony estate as it appeared in a 2019 real estate listing. Edward Wood Dunham Sr. lived in this house originally, along with his daughter and his son-in-law, Hudson River School artist Samuel Colman, who instructed neighbor Louis Comfort Tiffany during Tiffany's latter teen years. 

In I922, Conrad Sr. conveyed the former Tiffany Park property to his son Ralph, the former Dunham property to his son Erard, and the former Long Meadow estate to his son, Conrad Jr., who was known by his middle name, Henry.

In 1925 Ralph razed the former Tiffany mansion and built his own mansion in its place. That mansion still stands today.

In 1927, Henry, who was a World War I pilot for first the British and then the U.S. after America entered the war, decided to leave Irvington for California and sold Long Meadow to his brothers. The sons' mother Eda, who had divorced their father, lived at Long Meadow after the house was almost completely rebuilt beginning in 1929. It was later sold but has remained in private hands ever since.

The Matthiessens had begun leasing the property on the west side of the railroad tracks that would become the public Matthiessen Park in 1917 to the Village of Irvington on an annual basis.

In about 1942, Ralph Matthiessen left Irvington for Hume, Virginia, and in July 1945, Matthiessen announced that he had donated the land that Irvington residents commonly called "The Beach" to the village with the proviso that it only be used as a public park in perpetuity.

The Tiffany Park estate's waterfront acreage, now the Village of Irivington's public riverfront Matthiessen Park, is shown in a hand-colored postcard, ca. 1910. The Tiffany family's boathouse is approached by the main roadway through the property. The boat house led on to a long dock extending into the river at which some of Irvington's Gilded Age tycoons docked their yachts. The right trail branch leads to the one-time sandy "beach" swimming area used by generations of Irvington residents. The swimming area no longer exists. The park itself has been doubled in size by the addition of landfill beginning in the 1960s with stones from area "castles" that burned and were owned by the Stern and Halsey families. Other fill came from "The House that Ruth Built," the original Yankee Staidum in the Bronx, which was torn down in 2009-10, and the 19th century Immaculate Conception Church that burned ca. 1970. (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

The dedication of the new park took place on Sept. 9, 1945, exactly one week after Gen. Douglas MacArthur accepted the surrender of the Empire of Japan aboard the USS Missouri in Toyko Bay, officially ending World War II.

Ralph Matthiessen sold the former TIffany Park estate to an insurance company, Seaboard Surety Co., as a prospective corporate headquarters site at about that same time. Seaboard failed to follow though on the plan and sold the estate to actress Joan Blondell and her new husband, producer Mike Todd, in 1947.

The couple ran into financial trouble -- they had failed to pay property taxes for three years and were in the midst of a divorce -- and the property was put up for auction in 1950. It was subdivided and while the main houses built by Ralph Matthiessen in 1925 and the Dunham family in the early 1860s remain today, other houses were built throughout the estate later.

After Charles Lewis Tiffany's death -- on son Louis Comfort Tiffany's birthday in 1902 -- the Tiffany family sold its Tiffany Park estate in Irvington to the Matthiessen family. Louis Comfort Tiffany would immediately (1902-1905) design and build his new 84-room personal dream mansion, Laurelton Hall, on his new 580-acre estate near Oyster Bay in Nassau County, New York. Laurelton Hall, which featured stables, greenhouses and 60 acres of personally designed gardens, is shown in a 1924 photo. For more photos of Laurelton Hall, click here. (David Aronow, Library of Congress)

AUTHOR'S NOTES: Acreage amounts regarding the properties discussed in this story reflect the best estimates available. Historical estimates vary, with some including acreage covered by the Hudson River. Long Meadow was historically referred to as encompassing 18 or 19 acres, while more recently it has been referred to as encompassing 12 acres The estimates in this story include only actual land, not submerged land involving water rights. ...

... The video below is a 17-minute presentation on the restoration of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Reading Room in Irvington Town Hall in the 21st century. The Tiffany-designed and decorated room served as the Irvington Public Library's reference library from 1902 to 1999 before the library itself moved to the old Lord & Burnham Building at the corner of Main Street and South Astor Street. ...

... The video below examines a famed Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass window from 1905, shortly after Tiffany's family sold Tiffany Park to the Matthiessen family. The window was once featured in Rochroane, otherwise known as Halsey's Castle. The window was saved before Rochroane burned and is now featured in the Corning Museum of Glass. ...

... Here are links to Samuel Colman paintngs from his time living in the Harmony estate next to Tiffany Park in Irvington: Hudson River from Irvington (1867); Autumn on the Hudson River (1867); Irvington-on-Hudson (1866). These paintings might give you a better idea of the agrarian nature of Irvington's countryside in 1866 and 1867. ...

Louis Comfort Tiffany created this undated oil-on-cardboard painting, "At Irvington-on-Hudson," likely between 1865 and 1870 when he was studying under his Tiffany Park neighbor and in-law, Hudson River School painter Samuel Colman, of the Dunham's Harmony estate. The exact location of this scene in the Village of Irvington is unknown. (Nebraska Art Association, Nelle Cochrane Woods Collection)