Tuxedo-moon: Halloween in Sleepy Hollow

Tarrytown, NY, October 31, 2009: We spent the day touring the haunts of Ichabod Crane, Rip van Winkle and Washington Irving along with tours of Kykuit (home to four generations of Standard Oil Rockefellers) and Lyndhurst (the first Romantic mansion in the US and last home of the Jay Goulds).

We started at the Tarrytown farmers' market in Patriot's Park. We soon discovered this was the very spot where British spy John André was captured which unravelled the plot of Benedict Arnold to deliver West Point to the British.

Immediately north of Tarrytown is North Tarrytown, which has rechristened itself as Sleepy Hollow. It is home to the Old Dutch Church where "the headless horseman . . . tethered his horse nightly among the graves in the church-yard." [From the Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.]

Washington Irving is buried in the adjacent Sleepy Hollow Cemetery that overlooks the Old Dutch Church and its burial ground:

Frederick Philipse was a Dutch man who pledged allegiance to the English and received from William and Mary a land grant of 52,000 acres along the east side of the Hudson River. Philipse had one of the largest slave-holdings in the northern colonies and it was he who built the Old Dutch Church. He fled to England during the Revolution and New York State seized his property. This is a view of Philipsburg Manor from across the mill dam; the bridge (center right) at the other end of the mill pond is the approximate site of the one that the Headless Horseman crossed in Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow:

Kykuit, the estate of John D. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Nelson Rockefeller, is atop a hill overlooking Sleepy Hollow:

View from the front door:

Our excellent docent momentarily blanked on the sculptor of Bird in Space (below left); we volunteered Brancusi and the tour moved on; Maillol's Bather Putting Up Her Hair stands in front of the tea house.

Sculpture gardens overlook the Hudson River:

The house seen from the inner garden (righ) and the tea room seen from the riverside porch:

Views of the Hudson River:

View of the Pocantico Hills:

We stopped by the Union Church to see the Chagall stained-glass windows and Matisse rose window, all commissioned by the Rockefellers.

A pumpkin head figure at Sleepy Hollow and a kayak paddling toward Nyack (the kayaker didn't know the lyrics to "Let's Get Away from It All"):

We toured Lyndhurst, the first gothic revival home in America:

For Halloween, Lyndhurst has a scarecrow invasion, an annual art installation with the clothing later donated to homeless shelters:

Our last stop was Sunnyside, the home of Washington Irving and the center of America's 19th century Romantic movement. Irving purchased a two-room Dutch cottage in 1832, enlarged it and romanticized both the house and the landscape.