Friday, July 15, 2011

'Hedgewood'

'Hedgewood', the Marshall Clifford Lefferts estate designed by Lord & Hewitt c. 1905 in Cedarhurst. Lefferts was for many years involved in the Celluloid Company, serving first as secretary and treasurer and later as president and chairman of the board. He was a well known collector of such things as Japanese armor and early works of Shakespeare. Lefferts was born on East 4th Street in NYC, a descendant of Jacobus Lefferts, one of the earliest Dutch settlers to the area. The house was demolished c. 1940. Photo from American Architect & Architecture, 1905.

5 comments:

Doug Floor Plan said...

I looked around the Tanglewood Crossing area of Lawrence, NY on Bing & could not find anything that looked like 'Hedgewood' to me. From what the photo shows it looks like a nice, stately, country house. I like the foliage planted between the porch at the end of the house & the driveway, giving one some privacy from whomever approaches.

HalfPuddingHalfSauce said...

Demolsihed in the 1940's.

http://books.google.com/books?id=jIXc9ES8qcAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=Lord%20and%20Hewlett&f=false


It would have stood here. Curved silver-roofed structure.

http://www.historicaerials.com/aerials.php?scale=4E-06&lat=40.60687900738&lon=-73.720617033094&year=1966


http://cgi.ebay.com/1919-Letterhead-The-Celluloid-Company-New-York-NY-/370496862536

Doug Floor Plan said...

Thanks again HPHS.
• I like the house even more after seeing the close up of the front door area in the book; sad this house lasted less than 40 years.
• I remember LGB likes the house that’s there now, the modern one with the arched roof. Personally, I’d take ‘Hedgewood.’
• In the 1966 historic aerial view there is still a small structure up by the road on the then-empty lot; I wonder what it was? It’s not there now in any Bing view.
• I like the link to the 1919 letter on The Celluloid Company letterhead that’s for sale on eBay (starting bid only $10). Just imagine: some secretary in a dress, stockings, & heels rolled that paper into a manual typewriter along with another sheet of paper & of carbon for every copy that needed to be made (& that was all the copies you had); if there was a typo she had to erase it on every sheet before typing it correctly; no automatic word wrap; no spell check; no undo (one of the best inventions of all time … I wish I had that in every aspect of my life); no edit function. How did they get so much done?

I like old houses … I love modern technology

The Ancient said...

DFP --

Some of us had secretaries who did just that -- for a very, very long time. I myself typed my senior thesis on a 1922 Underwood. (Granted, I should have got something more recent, but it was still a plausible device in an age when erasures were not permitted in academic submissions.)

HPHS --

Great links. (I seem to remember there was a hacker expression back in the Nineties: "You are so elite.")

HalfPuddingHalfSauce said...

DFP - My thinking on the structure from 1966 - perhaps a walled garden? Heading towards the shore - you can make out a perfect circle cut out in the woods - then a rectangle opening, probably where the house stood.

The Ancient - I'm not a mouthbreather{snort, snort}.