Monday, January 7, 2013

The Henry F. Atherton Estate

 The Henry Francis Atherton estate designed by James O'Connor c. 1919 in Upper Brookville.  Atherton was chairman of the board of Allied Chemical and Dye and secretary of the National Aniline and Chemical Company.  In 1937 Atherton's 21 year old son was found shot in the head in his bedroom the day before he was to return to Harvard for his final year of school in an apparent suicide.  Click HERE to see the Atherton estate on google earth and HERE on bing.


Photos from Architectural Review, 1920.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any chance the property to the west is the stables/farm group from the estate?

chipon1 said...

Re 9:24 i would lean in that direction,

Zach L. said...

I would concur.

The Ancient said...

And those seven carbuncles on Bel Air Ct -- are they occupying the former front acreage?

(It would be fun to be able to superimpose pre-War road maps on the current satellite pictures from Google and Bing...)

Anonymous said...

Ancient -
What do you make of the fact that Carbuncle # 2 seems to have an older roofline and is set in a more densely treed lot?

HalfPuddingHalfSauce said...

The area in question was a open field in 1966 -
http://www.historicaerials.com/aerials.php?scale=1.6E-05&lat=40.8398879540821&lon=-73.5643230000002&year=1966

The house buried in the trees was built in 1994.

Anonymous said...

Anon --

I'm not sure. I couldn't tell whether it was older or just small. But it looks as if it's been modernized -- at least -- within the not too distant past, don't you think?

Anyone familiar with the neighborhood?

A

The Down East Dilettante said...

Actually, the owners of the house in the woods seem to have some taste. I didn't even notice the other Carbuncles (oh, Ancient, how do I love thee? Let me count the carbuncles...) because I was so startled by the ugliness of the one with the orange tile roof.

Are there no landscape architects practicing on Long Island who know how to do anything but those damned forecourt driveways?

Ada Louise Huxtable has died. She's have known what to say about such things.

The Ancient said...

HPHS once again makes the decisive post.

HPHS -- Since you seem to have magical powers with maps that I don't begin to understand, please consider my suggestion about the imposition of old maps with original roads.

The Ancient said...

Zach (and everyone else) --

By way of Obit...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/arts/design/ada-louise-huxtable-architecture-critic-dies-at-91.html?hp&_r=0

Anonymous said...

Anon
Bel Air Ct & Fairway Ct were subdivided simultaneously with preserved acreage deeded to the village. Not disagreeable at all considering what's typically done.

Anonymous said...

NSP
Anyone know the fate of the Alida Livingston house further East on Remsens, near Donna drive? Wonderful, manageable, octagon Delahanty that was for sale with no protection?

The Ancient said...

Since no one's said it outright --

I think this is a lovely house. Very Long Island, and representative of much of what was built elsewhere over the next forty or fifty years. Who knows what's become of the interiors, but a succession of owners have kept something of the grounds intact, and the exterior seems fairly pristine.

Nowadays, it would be unfair to ask anything more.

James said...

Re: Alida Livingston's octagon house.
2 adjacent lots totaling 11acres on the market for $3m, unsure of existence of the house, but the listing makes no mention of it.

James said...

Sorry, that's 21 acres