Schermerhorn Family Home NY

Some of the old residences, frame structures that were erected seventy or eighty years ago, still stand, though their surroundings are all changed, and. it seems a pity that they have survived the destruction of the green fields and graceful bits of forest that surrounded them. Ancient Ash Brook-as the old Lawrence mansion at the foot of East Twenty-fifth Street used to be called-the home in my boyhood of John Lawrence, merchant and man of affairs, continues to defy Time's ravages, and is yet embowered in a lovely garden that occupies nearly a city block, shut in by a high brick wall. The pretty little stream long known as Ash Brook has been stamped out by pavements,' but there are some oaks still standing there that can recall the music of its ripples. At Eighty-second Street and Avenue B is the country residence of Joshua Jones, a long wooden structure of olden fashion, with a gallery on the roof, and the usual broad verandas in front and rear. Two blocks above, the homestead of the Schermerhorn family, a more ambitious structure of two stories and a half, surmounted by a cupola, still looks out towards Hell Gate and the islands. The family owned at one time considerable real estate in this section, and several houses were built by and for the younger members. Their neighbors were the Jones families, the Winthrops, Duns-combs, Kings, John Wilkes, a lawyer, whose city house was in Wall Street, and who was a relative of the famous and eccentric English Member of Parliament of that name ; Josiah Ogden Hoffman, Charles King, and John N. Grenzebach, whose father's grocery store on Park Row had been an ancient city landmark. The latter's estate was at Third Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street, and the house was an ambitious frame structure of three stories, which for nearly half a century attracted notice as a relic of a luxurious period in the past.