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Eclectic Dignity

The Riker house in Jackson Heights

Named after one of the members of the Riker family that built it in the mid-1600s, the Lent Homestead in Jackson Heights is the oldest private dwelling in New York City. (Newsday Photo / Bruce Gilbert)

By Denise Flaim | Staff Writer

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Three hundred and fifty years ago, Dutch farmers named the Rikers worked the fertile land beside Old Bowery Bay, never dreaming that the misty island across the way would centuries later make their name synonymous with lock-downs and convicted felons. Probably equally inconceivable to them was the thought that their family's humble little 1654 farmhouse in Jackson Heights would survive to become the oldest private dwelling in New York City.

Retaining most of its Dutch colonial elements -- a barn-like gambrel roof that offered increased attic space, an entrance door divided into upper and lower halves, and eaves so flamboyantly flared that their rear overhang completely shadows a recently added-on mudroom -- the house has immense historical importance.

But the Lent Homestead -- named for the man who built it, Abraham Lent, the grandson of Abraham Riker, one of the founding Dutch settlers -- also has something most other houses in the neighborhood, even the whole Island, don't have: Its own cemetery.

``We have more than one hundred and thirty people back there,'' says Marion Duckworth Smith over tea and croissants in the parlor, which, with the library, was added around 1729. The house's two original rooms - now the dining room and kitchen -- survived a 1950s fire that left vivid scorch marks on the exposed beams and doors, and destroyed the original wide-plank floors.

``Weep not my friends all dear,'' Smith continues, reciting a poem common to several of the Riker and Lent family headstones, which date back to the early 1700s. ``I love that one. I recite it to everyone who comes here.''

When Marion moved in as a bride 14 years ago, the house -so neglected over the years that neighborhood children ran past it, believing it was haunted -- was as valid an excuse as any for a good cry. But the Smiths have restored everything, from the damaged floorboards to the horsehair-plaster walls, and reintroduced attic-stashed relics back into the household: A potbellied stove, found with ashes still in it, sits near the kitchen where it once toiled, and some vintage Morgan club soda bottles, also found in the attic, decorate the dining room's original pine mantle.

Decorated eclectically, the house is countrified enough to show off the couple's collection of French Quimper pottery in the kitchen, but dignified enough to maintain a stylish Victorian profile in the library and parlor. Now, with her last interior project complete -- the mudroom addition, whose faux hewn ceiling beams mimic the original exposed ones -- Marion has turned her energies to the outside. Indulging her taste for the Victorian, she's built a gingerbread cottage near the garage, and added a secret garden along the back of a high brick wall.

On the other side of it, inside heavy, rusted gates, is the place where Michael Smith -- who rented the house before he met Marion -- brought her after their first date, spurring her curiosity with the unforgettable line, ``Would you like to see my cemetery?'' In that sense, the house and its grounds are both a beginning and ending: Earlier this summer, a recent grave was strewn with fresh cut flowers, a clue to the identity of the young man holding a Playbill in an oil portrait in the library, a huge red ribbon pinned, not painted, to his lapel.

``My brother Charles is the last person buried there,'' Marion says softly.

Around the house, stage props purchased at the annual Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS auction -- including Carol Channing's necklace from ``Hello, Dolly'' -- are more than reminders of Marion's sense of theatricality and her regard for her house as, in her words, a ``stage set.'' They are signs of love and affection for someone whose weep-not story is now, too, indelibly linked to this custard-yellow house in Queens.

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