It’s one of those bits of trivia an irritating person like me would bring up at a dinner–what is New York City’s largest park?
Central Park is fifth, for what it’s worth, at 843 acres. However, it’s a mere quarter the size of Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, which is by far the biggest. Found at the borough’s northeast corner at the very edge of the city, Pelham Bay Park is made up of marshes, meadows, forests, little coves, golf courses, bike trails, and even a beach.
It’s also host to the Bartow-Pell Mansion, which has one of the best house museum tours I’ve been on in recent memory and one of the more charming gardens in all of New York City.
Getting to it is not the easiest journey. (But what in New York worth having is easy?) You take the 6 all the way to its final stop. From there, a series of buses can then take you to various parts of the park. While I love trains, some part of my brain shuts down trying to figure out bus routes so when I visited last week we took a $10 Uber directly from the station.
After passing the clubhouse for the golf course, you turn into an old stone gate and down a leafy drive before pulling up to an old, austere, gray house. (Sadly, with a parking lot right in front of it.) Before you ring the bell, walk around. In the back is an elegant terraced lawn ringed by fragrant flowers and mature trees. A square-shaped lily pond is the focal point, and a cherub fountain in its center gurgles away. Benches and wrought-iron chairs can be found in romantic little spots.
On a Wednesday afternoon I had the place to myself, the only sign of another human was a little placard encouraging visitors to take a clipping of lavender and other herbs and the only anthropogenic noise being that of an airplane overhead.
The story of this place stretches as far back as you want it to go. There’s a wigwam on the property–it’s a reconstruction used as a teaching tool since the treaty between the indigenous Lenape and Thomas Pell in 1654 that transferred control of what is now the Bronx and parts of Westchester is believed to have taken place here. 1
Fast-forward to 1835 and one of New York’s best-connected families was on the hunt for the perfect country estate. The city was filthy and a large swathe of it had just been destroyed in one of its worst conflagrations. Plus, two of the children in the family had just died one after the other, likely from disease. The father was Robert Bartow, a publisher and paper merchant who was a descendant of Thomas Pell. His wife, though, was Maria Lorillard, an heiress to the Lorillard tobacco fortune. (I’ve always thought it strange that the Astors get trotted out as the original old money tycoons when the Lorillards arguably were first and lasted longer. Just to give readers a sense of their scope, in Newport the family built the original Breakers, Chastellux, Vinland, and Seaview. They also developed Tuxedo Park in New York.)
Her fortune enabled them to buy 233 acres of the former Pell estate and construct a Federal-style country house of gray stone and decorate it to the max in a style becoming all the rage–Greek Revival. The architect remains unknown, although one theory points to Thomas Cole, the titan of the Hudson River School who was married to a Bartow. The house had idyllic views out the back to Long Island Sound and the land surrounding it became a working farm.
The family held onto it for forty years, but by 1888 the large swathes of undeveloped land caught the eye of New York City bigwigs looking to build out the city’s park system. Along with multiple other estate owners, the Bartows sold to the city. The city leased it out, at one point as the Home for Crippled Children.
In 1914 it was rescued by the International Garden Club which needed a headquarters. They hired arguably the chicest firm of the Gilded Age–Delano & Aldrich–to renovate it. The firm added the southern conservatory and the formal garden. When Robert Moses’s grand vision for Pelham Bay Park and Orchard Beach resulted in the razing of a number of nearby historic mansions like Hawskwood and Hunter Island Mansion in the late 1930s, Bartow-Pell survived. It would have been pretty hard, after all, to tear down Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s summer office, which is what the house had become.2
These little morsels of the house’s rich history are all dished out on the tour, of course. It lasts roughly 45 minutes and traverses the public rooms–dining room, double parlors, sitting room, entrance hall–and up the original elliptical staircase to the bedrooms. All the architectural elements, including the moldings, door frames, and medallions, are original and carefully restored. The furnishings are not original nor are they replicas. They are from that era and many pieces have ties to the family.
One of the real joys of touring here is that it gives some love to a period in American design history–post-Colonial but before the Gilded Age–that often gets short-shrift. The pieces here are admired not only for their aesthetics but for their functions. Slipper chairs to, you guessed it, put on your slippers with ease. Girandole mirrors whose convex structure helped increase light. Cellarettes for storing bottles, gout stools, furniture all being on wheels. There are pieces of pure beauty, too, like Charles-Honoré Lannuier’s sumptuous bedstead and a Duncan Phyfe canopy bed. A treasure trove of mirrors. Works by Inness and Cropsey adorn the walls–although the portrait of Bartow’s mother by Asher B. Durand remains missing.
Other items tell a great story–like the desk belonging to Aaron Burr who was married to a Bartow, or the dining room sideboard created by Moses Yale Beach, the newspaper tycoon who founded the AP but started out as a cabinetmaker! There are collectible candle stands with the likeness of Jenny Lind, the 19th century singer whose spurning of Hans Christian Anderson is believed to have inspired The Snow Queen (which inspired Frozen).
Little nuggets are interspersed. Keyhole covers were to prevent servants from peeking or eavesdropping. Tables were set in layers with multiple table cloths. With each subsequent course a cloth was removed, so when you got down to the bare table you knew dinner was ending and it was dessert time.
The best ringing endorsement I can give is that I was with a friend who isn’t particularly obsessed with history, let alone early 19th-century American life, and yet they were engaged and ended up asking more questions than me.
If you do decide to go, make a day of it and bring a blanket, picnic supplies, and a book. The grounds are open every day, but tours of the house are only on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays at 12:15, 1:15, 2:15, and 3:15.
DEPARTMENT OF GRIEVANCES
I have no knock on it as a place to live–in fact, it seemed like a lovely place to live–but Helsinki is one of the most boring cities I’ve ever been to. It should have been a sign that Finns en masse take the fast ferry to Tallinn to go out and that anybody who has a lake house heads there for the weekend. I couldn’t imagine anything short of a conference bringing me back to Finland. That is, until I saw this week that Alvar and Aino Aalto’s 1933 sanatorium there has been restored and is renting out patient rooms to tourists. It’s located just outside of Turku, the historic city in southwestern Finland. The Aaltos were titans of modern architecture and design, and their vision was one that required them to design down to the last detail. Rooms here at the Sanitorium start at around $160 a night.
For years, I thought I had it made with T-Mobile. I was frugal enough that the money I was saving with my phone working automatically while abroad meant I didn’t mind how long it took a browser to load or Google Maps to figure out my directions. The most important things–iMessage, Whatsapp, and Instagram messaging–worked easily. But the news this week that customers of all the major U.S. phone companies were facing outages while traveling abroad because of a third-party vendor reminded me that this perk is not really all that great any more. And the $5 or $10 or whatever it is a day to increase speeds for a small amount of data looks ridiculous when you have e-sim apps like Airalo which gives you dozens of gigabytes of data in foreign countries for the same price.
I always felt a weak area in the travel media world was sports coverage. It’s a blind spot reflecting the type of people employed in the industry, but an egregious one. It’s a huge opening for some outlet to really dedicate coverage to and own. Millions of people travel every year, sometimes great distances, to watch and partake in sports. The airlines know it. They introduce special routes for college football and blast out releases announcing it. That’s why I think it’s brilliant that ESPN is entering the tour business, offering its first sports tour at the end of this summer. Called “Take Me Out to the Ballparks,” it’s a five-day experience involving Green Monster seats at Fenway for a Blue Jays-Red Sox game, a Cardinals-Yankees game from a suite at Yankee Stadium, and a Braves-Phillies game in a suite at Citizens Bank Park. It also has a private tour of the Jackie Robinson Museum and of the ESPN headquarters. ($6,999 per person)
Hyatt just acquired the Me and All Hotels in Germany. Looking at the array of brands under the umbrella of any of the major hotel corporations is a dizzying affair. Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, Intercontinental, Accor, and so on have a ridiculous number of brands that they say is in part to cover gaps in the market. But I don’t know anybody who knows the difference between Canopy, Tempo, and Motto at Hilton versus Courtyard, Springhill, and Four Points at Marriott. I mean, what even is a Renaissance Marriott hotel nowadays? The description on Marriott is: “Renaissance Hotels extends an open invitation to moments of spontaneous discovery, ensuring guests will always leave with a new sense of the destination.” Ooookay? Me and All Hotels is going into Hyatt’s lifestyle portfolio which has Andaz, Alila, Hyatt Centric and Caption by Hyatt. Can anybody without looking it up tell me what Caption by Hyatt is? I know the issue is more complicated and there are legitimate reasons for it but I do hope hotel companies know how ridiculous it all looks.
Virtuoso released its luxury travel trends for summer. The destinations they’re seeing with the biggest jump in summer travel over last year so far are Thailand (+162 percent), Japan (+126 percent), Anguilla (+70 percent), Singapore (+52 percent), Belgium (+50 percent), Bermuda (+50 percent), Iceland (+49 percent), Saint Barthélemy (+49 percent), Sweden (+47 percent), and the Netherlands (+33 percent). A survey of Virtuoso advisors found a majority seeing cruise travel as the strongest part of the industry, with premium ocean experiences as the most in-demand (good news for the Ritz Carlton Yacht!).
TRAVEL INDUSTRY NEWS
Good luck getting tickets but the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Galleria Borghese is now open
Elephant attacks are becoming more common, experts say
Amsterdam is cutting cruise ship stops in half
Everybody is obsessed with this Oslo tourism video
Macron and Hidalgo postponed their swim in the Paris Seine
The Stonewall Visitor Center opened
European airports are a nightmare in the summer
The park is also where the massacre of Anne Hutchinson and her followers is believed to have taken place. Do kids still read Trouble’s Daughter, the book about Hutchinson’s daughter Susanna who was the sole survivor?
La Guardia’s family was spending the summer in Connecticut and all the grand dames of the garden club were at their summer houses, leaving the Bartow-Pell as the perfect office for the mayor to still be in the city but close to his family.