Billy Joel's Hudson Valley rental house where he finished writing 'New York State of Mind' on market for $2.5 million

The Hudson Valley rental house that inspired Billy Joel’s “Summer, Highland Falls” and where he finished writing “New York State of Mind” is up for sale.

Sotheby's International Realty is asking $2.5 million for the nine-bedroom, seven-bath home at 26 Kings Rd. in Highland Falls, an Orange County village about 53 miles north of New York City. Currently a bed-and-breakfast, it includes a second-floor bedroom dubbed the Billy Joel Room, where the Hicksville-raised Rock & Roll Hall of Famer completed his love song to the Big Apple, “New York State of Mind.” The site also has a pool, a three-bedroom carriage house, a one-bedroom cottage and a vineyard.

Joel, 74, moved to Highland Falls “in I think it was the beginning of the summertime in ’75,” he recalled in a 1981 radio interview. “I had just left Hollywood … and we had done a tour where I crossed over the Newburgh Bridge up on the Hudson River … and I told Elizabeth [Weber, his first wife], I said, ‘Y’know, I really would like to live in that area when we go back to New York,’ and she found a house there” that she rented for them and her son, Sean, then 8 years old. 

While Joel “wrote a lot of the music there” for “Summer, Highland Falls,” he and his family moved to a town house on East 62nd Street in Manhattan at the end of 1975 and “the lyrics came from being in New York City for awhile and thinking back on it.”

“New York State of Mind,” Joel said in a SiriusXM interview in 2016, “I wrote actually while I was on a Greyhound bus on my way back from a gig somewhere.” After three years living in Los Angeles, he had returned East and “in Highland Falls I rented a house. And I was really homesick for New York and the words started coming to me on the bus, and the melody,” he said.

“And I got to the house and my wife at the time … I asked her, 'Where's the piano … I gotta play the piano right now.' She goes, ‘It’s upstairs.’ I went upstairs and started playing the piano. I probably wrote this song in about 20 minutes to a half an hour. The whole thing,” he said, snapping his fingers, “just came out like that. I love when that happens.”

James Peter Donnery and his wife, Roxanne, bought the house in the 1980s for about $100,000, and after becoming empty nesters the following decade turned it into the Overlook on Hudson Bed and Breakfast. The couple died earlier this year, and their children, son Sean and daughters Kim and Emily-Kate, are selling the 2.26-acre estate.

“Summer, Highland Falls” and “New York State of Mind” both appear on Joel’s 1976 album “Turnstiles.”