Hudson Valley, Part II: Clermont, the Vanderbilt Mansion, and Some Convoluted Family Trees

As I mentioned in my last post, grand old estates are plentiful along the Hudson River. One such estate is Clermont, a mansion situated on 500 acres in what is now Germantown, New York.
Clermont was built by and home to the Livingston family, an important clan during the early days of this great nation. The land, originally totaling 13,000 acres, was first owned by Robert Livingston, or Robert of Clermont, the Lord of Livingston Manor. The estate was named for the French words for "clear mountain," as the peaks of the Catskill range are visible across the river. The Lord's only son inherited the land in 1728.

Now here's where things get confusing. While researching Clermont's history for this post I thought for awhile that there were some inconsistent details on the Clermont website's history rundown, but as it turns out the website has it right and it's only confusing because all these Livingstons have the same names and virtually the same jobs. So bear with me: Robert Livingston, Lord of Clermont, passed on his land to his son Robert R. Livingston, a judge on New York's supreme court, whose son, Robert R. Livingston, Jr., is a notable figure because he was one of the Committee of Five who drafted the Declaration of Independence. He did not end up signing the Declaration, though; that distinction went to his cousin Philip Livingston, son of Lord Robert's brother and Judge Robert's uncle, also named Philip Livingston. At this time, apparently, there were four Livingston family members in congress, and Philip Jr. signed on behalf of the whole family (he is depicted doing so along with the other Founding Fathers on the back of the two dollar bill). Robert R. Livingston, Jr. -- again, this is the Lord's grandson, the Judge's son, and two dollar bill guy's first cousin once removed -- was also the first Secretary of State (then called Minister of Foreign Affairs), and he gave the oath of office to President George Washington. Later he was Jefferson's Minister to France and went to Paris to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase. Oh, and just to further complicate things, that R. in Robert R. Livingston? It stands for Robert. Robert Robert Livingston, Jr., son of Robert Robert Livingston. Got it? Good. Me too (here's the family tree -- not that it clarifies anything).

During the Revolution, the original Clermont house was burned to the ground by British troops because of the Livingston family's known support for American independence, and it was rebuilt between 1779 and 1782. When Robert Robert, Jr. died in 1813, he left the house to his daughter Elizabeth. Changes were made to the house throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, most recently in 1920, when Alice Livingston renovated it in the Colonial Revival style, and she willed it to the state of New York upon her death in 1962. Today the house is a National Landmark and part of the Hudson River National Landmark district, twenty miles of land up the Hudson River in Dutchess and Columbia counties dotted with noteworthy historic estates such as this one. The interior has been restored to show what it looked like in the early 1900s. I've never actually gone inside but I did spend a lovely fall afternoon sitting next to the river on the Clermont property, reading. I don't remember what I read; the scenery in those parts can be a bit distracting.

How's this for a segue: Elizabeth Livingston, daughter of Robert Robert, Jr., had a daughter named Robert. Just kidding, her name was Elisabeth, and she was the great-grandmother of Eleanor Roosevelt. Which brings us a few miles down the Hudson to Hyde Park, where both the Roosevelt family home and the Vanderbilt mansion can be found. I'm going to focus on the Vanderbilt for this post, since I haven't actually been to the FDR house yet.

The Hyde Park Vanderbilt mansion is one of several Vanderbilt mansions in the US. This one belonged to Frederick Vanderbilt, one of eight children of William H. Vanderbilt. The other well-known Vanderbilt homes, such as Breakers and Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island, and Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina, belonged to Frederick's brothers. You can see from this picture that the Hyde Park mansion is spectacularly done in a Classical Revival style, the columns and porticos and arcades evoking a very grand Parthenon. The Vanderbilts were prime examples of the "nouveau riche," families who made their millions in the new business frontiers of the 19th and 20th centuries -- the Vanderbilts made their money in the railroad industry -- as opposed to inheriting social stature from aristocratic ancestors. A bit of insecurity about this fact is apparent in the architecture of the mansion: the Vanderbilt mansion website describes the nouveau riche of the late 1800s as beginning to feel that "money was no longer enough." In an effort to conform with the old families who dominated the social scene and were considered higher class than these new millionaires, Frederick Vanderbilt built his family a house reminiscent of "the ancestral home of a noble European line." With fancy new homes that looked old and historic, families like the Vanderbilts could fake an illustrious family history. The picture on the left shows the house under construction in 1895, and in 1898 the family moved in. It was designed by Charles Follen McKim of architectural firm McKim, Mead and White. Despite its classic exterior, the house was state-of-the art for its time. It had central heat, power supplied by a hydroelectric plant built on the property, and was made to be fireproof after a previous house on the estate had burned down. I haven't been inside this house either, but apparently the artificial ancestry theme is carried over into the decorating scheme: the house is filled with European art and artifacts, with a particular emphasis on Renaissance and Rococo styles. Also interesting is that this house was decorated during a significant shift in interior design fashions. In the 1890s, the Victorian style of stuffing rooms full of miscellaneous objects (Olana, described in my post below, is a good example of this), was on its way out, and the notion of having an overarching "design principle" was taking over. As a result the Vanderbilt mansion is an eccentric mixture of the two styles, with various designers from both schools of thought putting their mark on each of the house's fifty rooms.

What's next on Cool Old Buildings? Why, more cool old buildings, of course! Check back soon!

The Hudson Valley: Cool Old Buildings That I Did Not Photograph

Some slight changes are going to be made here at COB. Although the original concept was to take all the pictures for the blog myself, I've found that I just don't have the time to go on photography escapades every single week. So in the interest of keeping COB current and updated I'm going to begin finding some photos on the internet to use. I'll still limit them to pictures of buildings I've actually seen in person.

So with that, here are some cool old buildings from the Hudson River Valley of New York State.
The Hudson Valley is in my humble opinion one of the most beautiful places on Earth. I went to school there, in a little spot called Annandale on Hudson, New York. It's not really a town -- just the Bard College campus and woods -- but it sits right in between Red Hook and Tivoli, two very different but equally quaint little towns. As the name suggests, the Hudson Valley is the lush indentation of land that surrounds the Hudson River on each side. It's one of the oldest parts of the country, not to mention the most literary. This is where the Headless Horseman rode through Sleepy Hollow, where Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years, and where Edith Wharton's doomed heroine Lily Bart did her most ambitious social climbing. Many of the towns have Dutch or German names (such as Saugerties, the town next to Woodstock and the place where the iconic rock concert actually took place, or Rhinebeck, where the uppermost classes of the early 1900's kept their grand country estates), reflective of the area's long history as New Netherland, before the English came to colonize it.

I could probably go on and on about this area -- having lived there for four years I'm very attached to it, and as a writer I found myself continuously inspired by it. The buildings make up no small part of the inspiration factor. If you drive through Tivoli, or down River Road into Rhinecliff and Rhinebeck, or to a greater extent through formerly booming port towns like Kingston and Hudson, you get this sense of decaying elegance, of a once grand area being gently washed away by time and water. This great photograph by Virginia Wilcox below is a nice example of what I mean (see more of her work here). The houses you see are inarguably beautiful, mostly spacious Victorians loaded with wraparound porches and bay windows and other architectural details, or simple upright Colonials, like the one in Kingston with a plaque commemorating the night George Washington spent there. But the damp valley climate is not ideal for preservation, and wood begins to warp, and paint chips, and once spectacular estates, like Edith Wharton's family's, fall into ruins. So everything has an aging, wet, shabby beauty to it. I guess what I like about the Hudson Valley aesthetic is that you can see the history in a building -- you can tell what it looked like when it was new and you can see how that newness has faded. Like I said, I could go on and on.

That said, there are also a number of those elegant riverside mansions that have been beautifully preserved -- in fact, visitors to the Valley can go on a number of historic house tours. The building below is called Olana, and is located right on the river, near the town of Hudson. It was the home of Frederick Church, a famous painter from the Hudson River school. He wanted to build his house on the spot with the most beautiful view of the Hudson, and he did, but today that view is marred somewhat by power cords and the white towers of a factory next to the water. The house was designed by Calvert Vaux after Church, who had originally intended to replace his cottage on the hill with a French-style manor on the hill, went on a tour of the Middle East with his wife and son, and came back so impressed with the Islamic art and architectural styles he had seen on his trip that he decided to reimagine his house on the hill as a Moorish palace. He filled the house with his extraordinary art collection: paintings, sculpture, artifacts and antiques from all over the world. Olana's website calls the house "a Persian fantasy adapted to American tastes and manners." Indeed the collection, not to mention the house itself, is a crazy mixture of periods, styles and cultures: Arabic oil lamps sit on mantles next to busts of French aristocrats, and neoclassical bronze statues stand on Persian carpets. Church's daughter-in-law, who inherited the house along with her husband and lived at Olana until 1964, was adament about keeping the house and collections exactly as Church left them. As a result the Olana you can visit today is virtually unchanged from the Olana that Frederick Church lived in and meticulously, eclectically decorated.

Stay tuned for more Hudson Valley cool old buildings. There are a lot of them.