Lost In Yonkers

A CENTURY AFTER A NEW YORK LAWYER SET OUT TO CREATE A GARDEN TO RIVAL ROCKEFELLER’S, THE ONCE DERELICT UNTERMYER GARDENS IS BEING RESTORED TO ITS FORMER GLORY.

- Margaret Roach

A CENTURY HAS PASSED SINCE Samuel Untermyer set the audacious tone for a prize property in Yonkers, New York, with its monumental Hudson River views. “Make me the finest garden in the world,” he reportedly instructed landscape architect William Welles Bosworth—with the not-so-veiled subtext meaning “outdo John D. Rockefeller’s,” since Bosworth had created that acclaimed Gilded Age showplace just upriver. Untermyer wanted better and, in fact, best.

East met West as a diverse sampler of classical history was erected: two-thousand-year-old Roman marble columns were imported. A two-and-a-half-acre walled Persian garden was built with formal canals, intricate mosaics, and a Temple of the Sky, all watched over by Artemis and a pair of sphinxes. Across the property, a Temple of Love perched above a precipitous, man-made waterfall. Grand.