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 Yonkers, NY - A tour of the proposed Philipse Manor Historic District site in downtown Yonkers will be conducted by the land-marking applicants and their historical consultant on Saturday, March 29 at 1 p.m. starting at the Manor House Square, directly to the east of Philipse Manor Hall.
The Yonkers City Council is invited, as well as the public.
This Philipse Manor Historic District land-marking proposal is the work of a group of concerned Yonkers citizens who fear that, in the present climate of urban redevelopment of the city’s downtown and waterfront, an important parcel of our diminishing stock of the city’s historically important buildings is threatened with destruction. The thirteen buildings within the proposed Philipse Manor Hall Historic District are important for several reasons:
• They represent a variety of significant mid-to-late19th-century architectural styles that were designed by significant Yonkers architects. This is the last intact block of 19th century commercial buildings in the city.
• They form a unit harmonious in scale with their dramatic surroundings of hills, cliffs, and related 19th-century architecture, not to mention a unit that harmonizes with the characteristic Yonkers pattern of intersecting, curving streets and with a public square of moderate width and essentially human scale.
• They represent a period of conspicuous growth of Yonkers’ downtown following the Civil War, when most of the earlier 19th-century buildings, of wood construction and undistinguished in style, were replaced by more distinctive masonry architecture that reflected the commercial, residential and aesthetic desires of a time when Yonkers was increasingly becoming the most important Hudson River town south of Albany. These buildings, and the ones surrounding them, represent Yonkers as a thriving town of America’s “Gilded Age.”
• Most importantly: this block of buildings stands within the closest possible proximity to Philipse Manor Hall, which is probably the most important Colonial house in southern Westchester County, an 18th-century mansion whose own history is intimately bound up with Yonkers. During the last three decades of the 19th century, when the historic buildings that are proposed to be land-marked were erected, Philipse Manor Hall served as both Yonkers Town Hall and Yonkers City Hall.
Six of the thirteen buildings are owned by Greyston Foundation, which has proposed demolishing them in order to build a 16-story residential building across from historic Philipse Manor Hall. Under the guidelines of the Yonkers Landmarks Ordinance, landmarks applications may be made for buildings that are threatened by demolition.
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