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History vs. the Bulldozer

BY JOHN HABICH | Newsday Staff Writer

October 11, 2006

WYNDCLYFFE

History vs. the bulldozer

On a wooded river bluff in Rhinecliff, N.Y., a Romanesque castle called Wyndclyffe stands boarded up, its roof partly caved in. Surrounded by comparably modest getaways of recent vintage, its once-ample grounds have shrunk to a two-acre lot. This crumbling castle, built in 1853 for an aunt of Gilded Age chronicler Edith Wharton - the spinster Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones - it is said to have been the origin of the expression, "keeping up with the Joneses," because, when it was built, the neighbors rushed to gussy up their own millionaire manors.

Wyndclyffe is among the few dozen imperiled monuments profiled in "Hudson Valley Ruins," by Thomas Rinaldi and Robert J. Yasinsac (University Press of New England, 356 pp., $35).

It takes a middle road between the extravagant picture-book of erstwhile luxury estates and the scholarly architectural catalog, giving overviews of endangered sites by region, and telling in detail the life stories of several properties in each area.

The "ruins" encompass not only empty mansions but also the detritus of commerce: cement mines, gargantuan icehouses, the submerged hulks of steamboats, even an early electric-power station.

These histories are individually riveting and cumulatively alarming. One rushes through these place-portraits to find out whether the architectural protagonist makes it in the end, or dies owing to neglect or ruthlessness.

Some of the ruins, like a stately Greek Revival church in Newburgh (which has twice made the World Monuments Fund's "100 Most Engangered Sites"), are still standing, thanks to the life-support of concerned citizens' groups. Others, such as Briarcliff Lodge in Westchester County, once the nation's premier resort hotel, were decried as eyesores and razed. The inn was sold to developers, then perished in a fantastic fire in 2003, and - typically - despite ballyhooed plans to replace it with something ostensibly better, the site remains vacant.

Sometimes, the threatened landmarks are owned by government agencies that lack the funds to restore them. (One appreciates anew how many estates and museums on Long Island - New York City's other seat of rural splendor for storied tycoons - must be maintained with small government budgets, minimal staffs and volunteers.) Sometimes, preservation priorities collide, as with once-thriving hamlets on land acquired for public parks, allowed to deteriorate or even bulldozed for nature's sake.

In its several nutshells, "Hudson Valley Ruins" reminds us of the callous disregard of the future for today's wealth and power, no matter how grand. One may keep up with the Joneses, perhaps, but not with the onslaught of time.

HUDSON VALLEY RUINS: FORGOTTEN LANDMARKS OF AN AMERICAN LANDSCAPE. By Thomas Rinaldi and Robert J. Yasinsac. University Press of New England, 356 pages. $35.