There is a walled garden on North Broadway with two stone sphinxes sitting on Ionic columns above a lily pond. Most people who drive past it every day have never walked in. It is free.
A Lawyer Buys Greystone
In 1899 a New York lawyer named Samuel Untermyer bought the Greystone estate at auction, out of the estate of Samuel J. Tilden. The house was already grand. John Waring had put up a 99 room mansion there in 1865. Tilden, a former governor, was the first owner to take the grounds seriously, and he built thirteen greenhouses for ornamental plants, fruit and vegetables.
Untermyer wanted more than that. He knew plants. He once said that given the choice again he would have been Parks Commissioner in New York City instead of a lawyer. His ambition for the property was simple and enormous. The finest garden in America.
The Architect
In 1916 he hired William Welles Bosworth, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, and told him to go build it.
Bosworth drew on Indo-Persian paradise gardens. He laid the walled garden out in quadrants split by waterways. He added crenellated walls and octagonal towers. There is an amphitheater with a mosaic stage, and a gate modeled on the Lion Gate of Mycenae. The Temple of the Sky, a roofless ring of Corinthian columns, still stands.
Sixty And Sixty
The estate grew to sixty greenhouses. It also grew to sixty gardeners.
The horticulture got famous well beyond Yonkers, and serious gardeners came here to train. Untermyer opened the grounds to the public and the crowds turned out. On one day in 1939 the gardens drew 30,000 visitors. The New York Times wrote it up that October.
Untermyer died in 1940. Six years later his family handed sixteen acres to the City of Yonkers as a public park.
The Comeback
Then the money ran out.
The gardens went quiet for a long stretch. Mayor Angelo Martinelli pushed a restoration in the 1970s. In the mid 1990s community leaders worked with the Open Space Institute and the City to pull more land back together, which is how the park reached the roughly 43 acres it covers today.
The real turn came in 2011. A small board of Yonkers residents formed the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy and hired Timothy Tilghman as head gardener. Writing about the Conservancy's first ten years, president Stephen F. Byrns says the City of Yonkers embraced the effort from the start, no one more than Mayor Mike Spano. Fifteen years ago you might pass a dozen people there on a perfect spring Saturday. Now it is a crowd.
Go See It
Untermyer Gardens is at 945 North Broadway. There is a lower entrance at 917 Warburton. Admission is free, paid for by donors so anybody can walk in.
Bring somebody who has never been.
Photo credits: Beyond My Ken, Lionel Martinez and Magpieturtle via Wikimedia Commons. Historic photographs from the McGuirk Collection, courtesy of the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy.
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