There is a stone castle in a Westchester county park. A real one, with a round tower and battlements, sitting behind a playground on an island off New Rochelle. Most people drive past the entrance on Weyman Avenue their whole lives and never know it is back there.
It is what is left of one of the strangest, most ambitious places this county has ever built.
A Steamboat King and Five Islands
In 1879 a man named John Henry Starin bought Glen Island and four little islands around it. Starin was a former congressman who ran one of the biggest steamboat and tugboat operations in New York Harbor, and he had a very simple idea. He owned the boats. He owned the islands. So he would give New York City somewhere to go on a Sunday and sell them the ride.
The resort opened to the public in 1881. Starin called it Starin's Glen Island and advertised it, with zero modesty, as the most attractive day summer resort in America.
Each Island Got Its Own Country
This is the part that sounds made up. Starin gave each island a theme. There was a German castle with a beer garden around it, modeled on a fortress on the Rhine. There was a Chinese pagoda. There was a Dutch windmill. Footbridges and causeways ran between them, and visitors walked from one country to the next.
There was also a zoo, an aviary, a natural history museum, bathing pavilions and a miniature steam railway. An 1881 promotional card for the place lists two grand concerts every day by Joyce's 71st Regiment Band and puts a round trip excursion ticket at forty cents.
That is a theme park. In 1881. Walt Disney was born in 1901.
Then the Bands Came
The park did not last forever. Starin's steamboat business was badly damaged by the General Slocum disaster in 1904, and the resort closed after that season. Starin died in 1909. Westchester County bought the property in the 1920s and turned it into the public park it still is today.
But the island was not done. The Glen Island Casino went up on the old Grand Cafe foundation, and in the 1930s and 1940s it became one of the most important rooms in American music. Its ballroom was wired for network radio, which meant a band playing there was playing to the entire country at once.
Glenn Miller's orchestra opened at Glen Island Casino on May 17, 1939. The NBC broadcasts out of that room over the following months are what turned him from a working bandleader into a household name. Ozzie Nelson, the Casa Loma Orchestra, Benny Goodman, the Dorsey Brothers, Woody Herman and Gene Krupa all played the island too.
And This Fall It Glows Again
Starting September 11, Glen Island Park fills with hundreds of handcrafted lanterns for the Autumn Glow Festival, running Fridays through Sundays through November 1. Each lantern starts the traditional way, Chinese silk cloth stretched over a steel wire frame, then rigged with modern LEDs instead of an open flame. Some depict old Chinese legends. Others are just flowers, koi, and shapes pulled from nature.
The walk runs 6:30 to 10 p.m., with last entry at 9, and it moves through food trucks and photo stops along the waterfront the whole way. Kids three and under get in free, and so does parking.
A century and a half after Starin lit the place up for day trippers off a steamboat, the island is doing it again. The castle is still standing while it happens.
Follow The 914 Collective on Instagram for more Westchester stories, and read Not Upstate Magazine at thenineonefour.com.
Sources: Westchester County Parks; Starin's Glen Island promotional card, 1881 (Boston Public Library / Digital Commonwealth); William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress; Autumn Glow Festival.
Want more stories like this?
Sign up free for the Not Upstate Digital Magazine — a new issue every two weeks on the people, places, and culture of Westchester and the Hudson Valley.