Vera Neumann — Legendary Designer

Do you know who Vera Neumann was? Perhaps your mother or grandmother owned a Vera scarf? Or maybe you bought some Vera dish towels from Crate & Barrel or a Vera scarf from Target not too long ago? She’s an absolute legend in the world of textile design and her Printex printing plant was located right here in Ossining, at 34 State Street.

So settle in, tie a brightly hued scarf around your neck, and read on . . .

Born in 1907 in Stamford, CT, Vera was creative from the time she could hold a pencil. The story goes that her father nurtured her talent by taking her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art every Sunday as well as hiring a sign painter to give her drawing lessons. Vera went on to study at the Cooper Union and started out as a fashion illustrator and freelance painter of murals for children’s rooms. (Wouldn’t THAT have been a thing to grow up with on your wall!)

She married her husband George Neumann in the 1940s and they became the power couple of textile design. With her limitless imagination and his business acumen, they built a wildly successful and long-lived company. Their first commission was placements for the B. Altman department store, with Vera screen printing the entire run on her dining room table. After that, it was a race to keep up with demand.

The post-WWII world complicated matters, and it became difficult to source fabrics. An oft-repeated story is that Vera came across a stash of silk parachutes in an army surplus store and began screen printing her whimsical, colorful, ever-changing designs on silk and so created her iconic line of scarves.

Outgrowing one studio after another, Vera and George settled in Ossining, buying the former Smith-Robinson House at 34 State Street and fitting it out for their Printex plant. (An 1810 Georgian mansion, it’s still standing today, barely, and is one of the few remaining buildings in Ossining built with prisoner-quarried Sing Sing marble.)

34 State Street, Smith-Robinson House/Printex
Courtesy of the Westchester County Historical Society

With their living space and office right next to the plant, Vera’s reputation and creativity thrived.

Vera and George Neumann in the design studio of Printex. Photo by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. (1951), from the Library of Congress

The Living Room
Photo by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. (1951), from the Library of Congress

Look at that shiny wood floor! And that fireplace!

The printing plant
Photo by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. (1951), from the Library of Congress

The office suite of Printex
Photo by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. (1951), from the Library of Congress

How fabulous was this? River views and no commute? Wood floors and fireplaces? And just look at the Georgian decoration around those doorways! I wonder if any of it survives today?

The Printex company employed many Ossiningtonians. Dr. George Hill, their neighbor at 30 State Street, provided medical services to Printex employees. He also helped connect young people with jobs there. Local artist Donna Chambers was one of them, and the training and inspiration she received no doubt helped inspire her to become a professional artist who creates remarkable quilts and jewelry today.

And here’s just a tiny selection of Vera designs, from a 2015 exhibit at the Alexander Gray Gallery in New York:

If we were going to play six degrees of Vera Neumann, we can connect to President Harry S Truman and First Lady Bess Truman, who chose Vera’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit design (below) for the upholstery in the White House solarium.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit design – note, the shadows are part of the design. It is one of Vera’s most popular, in active use from 1952 to the mid-1980s – a remarkable run!

We can also connect to Marilyn Monroe. who famously wore nothing but a Vera in her last photo shoot (with photographer Bert Stern.) I’d love to post a Marilyn photo here, but I can’t afford the rights, so here’s a link to a photo instead.

But one of the most admirable things, I think, about Vera Neumann is that she kept her price point low enough so anyone could own a Vera. While other designers charged upwards of $25 a scarf, Vera’s averaged from $2 – 10. (Remember inflation! $25 in the 1960s is about $250 today.) “I don’t believe only the wealthy deserve good design,” she said and meant it. And her inexhaustible creativity meant that the market was never saturated with the same thing, so even these “cheaper” scarves were unique and special.

In the 1950s, as their family grew, George and Vera decided to build their dream house, reaching out to the leading architect of the day, Marcel Breuer. On their plot of land at the top of Finney Farm Road in Croton, with magnificent views of the Hudson and beyond, Breuer’s modernist design is a triumph. Still standing, and recently restored, it was on the market in 2020 for $4.2 million. Take a look here and here.

Vera and George travelled widely and collected art – Alexander Calder (who briefly lived in Croton as a child) was a close friend, and the Neumann lawn was decorated with a large Calder sculpture, a gift from the artist.

In the 1960s, the company branched out into clothing and home textiles, and sales skyrocketed. Here are a few outfits I plucked off Ebay/Pinterest:

And here are some home goods items:

Ooh, I’ll take one of each please!

Sadly George died in 1960 and Vera sold Printex in 1967, though she remained active as a designer and board member for decades.

Vera Neumann in her Ossining studio, c. 1974

She lived in her beautiful home with her dachsunds and cats, swimming daily in her indoor pool until 1981, when she moved in with her daughter in Ossining.

Vera Neumann died in 1993, designing to the end. An artist, a trendsetter, a savvy businesswoman, hers was certainly a life well-lived who brought joy to everyone who saw her designs. Check out more of her work here.

Teatown Lake Reservation — From 2022 to Two Million Years Ago

I can’t quite believe it’s taken me this long to write about Teatown Lake Reservation.

Talk about ignoring things in your own backyard! It’s not only a wonderful organization that has provided exemplary stewardship of the land, but it’s also a goldmine of history.

If you know where to look, of course.

Now, I have of late become a little more interested in pre-history – I mean geologic history, the kind that involves rocks and . . . well, rocks. It is truly the history before humans. See here for more.

(Also, see the first chapter of my new book Croton Point Park: Westchester’s Jewel on the Hudson)

But I’m not going to go back to the Precambrian epoch. I mean, I could tell of gneiss and schist and Ossining marble, of ancient continental plates, ever shifting and buckling up mountain ranges. Of Pangaea and volcanoes and ice sheets . . . but already, I feel my attention begin to wane.

No, I have to admit that my interests lie in people – how they lived, what they ate, what they wore, what they did. How different yet similar we are. And, of course, how we got to where we are today.

Teatown has all of this – characters and stories, and a long, long history that can indeed be traced back to rocks and magma.

So let’s start from today, and go backwards, investigating the world of Teatown from 2022 all the way back to – well, I guess the history of the rocks and ice I disparaged above. Or at least until I get bored.

First, no discussion of Teatown would be complete without calling attention to Lincoln Diamant’s excellent book, Images of America: Teatown Lake Reservation.

You can find it in our local libraries, pick it up at the Teatown gift shop, at any number of our local bookshops or, if you must, buy it online.

(Full disclosure, I have plucked much of my research for this post out of Diamant’s book.)

So, what is Teatown? (And how did it get its name?)

Today, 2022, Teatown Lake Reservation is a non-profit nature preserve with miles of trails, native plant exhibits, and a small wildlife refuge. Much of the land that constitute today’s Teatown was owned by Gerard Swope, Sr. and his wife Mary and inherited by their five children. They created Teatown Lake Reservation in 1963 to honor their parents and it has been thriving and growing ever since.

Gerard Swope was president of General Electric from 1922 – 1945 and was a well-respected businessman and labor reformer. He also worked in the Roosevelt administration during the Depression to aid with the economic recovery.

In 1922, Swope purchased the main house, the outbuildings and various parcels of land from the estate of Dan Hanna. In 1924, the Swopes created Teatown Lake, by building the small dam still found at the far side of lake.

I must note that from October – December 2022, Teatown had to do some extensive rebuilding of the dam and in the process, drained the entire lake. Here are some photos and look – you can see the remains of 18^th/19^th century stone walls still stuck in the mud.

And here are some pictures of the diggers and backhoes at work rebuilding the dam and installing a new pump.

But back to the exciting title search — in 1919, Dan Hanna purchased the land. He was the owner and publisher of the Cleveland News, as well as being a coal industrialist from the Ohio region. If you’re a serious political history buff, you might find it interesting to learn that he was the nephew of Ohio Senator Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove (or Kellyanne Conway) to our 25^th President, William McKinley.

Dan Hanna was referred to as a “Cleveland Millionaire,” in a 1916 New York Times squib about his third divorce. (Is that a sniffy New York Times way of saying he wasn’t up to New York social standards?) He then swiftly remarried Molly Covington Hanna in the same year. There are other newspaper clippings I’ve seen that were positively salivating over his marital career (“Dan Hanna is some Marry-er” winked the Lexington Herald-Leader in December of 1916).

At his death in 1922, according to the New York Times, his estate was valued at $10,000,000. He was also noted as having four infant sons. Considering that he married Molly in 1916 and she was 47 at the time, that is either surprising or simply incorrect. Yet this curious 1923 article describes a chaotic life after she was widowed, despite the 978 acre estate on Makeenac Lake in the Berkshires that she received as a wedding gift from Hanna.

Continuing on back in time, the previous owner, Arthur Vernay, purchased the parcel in 1915 from the Hershfeld estate. Vernay was one of those wealthy men with a fascinating variety of interests and hobbies – apparently he was a very successful antiques dealer in Manhattan who was also an enthusiastic big-game hunter in the style of Teddy Roosevelt (and who also donated many carcasses to the Museum of Natural History. Apparently you can still find his name on a plaque in the Roosevelt wing there today.)

Vernay was responsible for building many of the Tudor-style structures that still stand today. Those office buildings by the parking lot? These were the old stables and outbuildings of the Croft, Vernay’s matching Tudor-style mansion that stood across the street until it was demolished in 2019. The Croft supposedly contained imported genuine antique English interiors (a fireplace in there was said to be from the 1300s!) I mean, considering that Vernay dealt in antiques, that seems possible.

Now, here’s where it gets complicated. Before 1915, Teatown was part of a series of parcels that had at one time all been owned and farmed by the Palmer family. The Palmer connection goes back to 1780, when William Palmer purchased a fairly large tract of land from Pierre Van Cortlandt. Palmer lived at 400 Blinn Road (so named in the 20^th century by actor Holbrook Blinn) and seems to have run a successful dairy farm. (Lincoln Diamant says that #400 was a converted dairy barn. But Diamant also says that #400 was a house built by the Van Cortlandt’s in 1740. I’d be interested to know which is the truth.)

In 1826, William Palmer gives several plots of land to his son Robert, who would build himself a farmhouse nearby at 340 Blinn Road.

A few years later, William Palmer would give another plot to his son John, who apparently lived in a farmhouse on or near today’s Teatown administration building. His barn is said to have been on the site of the maple sugaring shed. And the lake? That wasn’t there at all – it was in fact a Big Meadow (so noted on maps of that era.)

At some point, son (or grandson?) Richard Palmer also received a plot of land – this one all the way over by Teatown Road. In fact, if you walk along the Lakeside Trail, crossing the two Eagle Scout-built bridges built by Troop 18 scouts Michael Pavelchek and William Curvan . . .

. . . you’ll eventually come upon some crumbing stone foundations which are all that’s left of Richard Palmer’s farmstead. The buildings were supposedly standing until 1915, and I have even heard that daylilies are still seen to bloom at the site on occasion (though I’ve never managed to see any.)

Other plots of land were sold to non-Palmers, one of which still whispers to us when the leaves are down. As you’re walking on the Lakeside Trail, right next to Spring Valley Road, you might notice a pile of stones. These are the foundation of Kahr’s farmhouse, located at 1685 Spring Valley Road.

And if you walk a little farther and look carefully, you can even see what I believe is the original well for this farmhouse:

Are your eyes glazed over yet? Stay with me a bit longer and I’ll tell you how it got its name AND make the connection all the back to the first people – I’ll be quick, I promise!

How did Teatown get its name?

The story goes (and it comes from the aforementioned Mr. Diamant) that during the American Revolution a grocer named John Arthur moved up from British-controlled Manhattan to the Neutral Zone of northern Westchester. Gossip ensued, and it was bandied about among the local women that Mr. Arthur had several chests of tea in his possession. Now tea was as precious as gold then (remember the Boston Tea Party??) and Arthur was a prudent businessman who hoped to sell his tea for whatever the market would bear. Well, this market of tea-deprived farmwomen was no match for him – they ransacked his farmhouse and found the tea. He finally agreed to sell it to them for a reasonable price and so Teatown was born.

(I will not waste words poking holes into this story as I do not have a better one to offer in its place.)

Moving still further backwards . . .

In 1697 Stephanus Van Cortlandt is awarded a royal patent from King William III for 86,000 acres that ran from today’s Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton all the way up to Anthony’s Nose and inland almost to Connecticut. Stephanus died in 1700 and it was up to his widow Gertrude and about 100 tenant families to farm and maintain the land. (Well, I’m pretty sure Gertrude wasn’t doing any hoeing. . .)

Now, before 1609, when Henry Hudson sailed his Half Moon up the river, the area was home to Algonquin-speaking indigenous people related to the Mohicans, Munsees, Wappingers and Delawares. The Sint Sincks and the Kitchawan were two tribes that likely used the Teatown area as their hunting grounds.

Going back even farther, say about 10,000 – 15,000 years ago, people were following the retreating glaciers and first coming into the area from the south and the west.

Think about that — our area has only been habitable fairly recently. Consider that the most recent ice age, of the Quaternary Period, began over 2 million years ago and it wasn’t until about 25,000 years ago that humans and animals could even have survived. It is, as Town of Ossining historian Scott Craven likes to say, just a geological snap of the fingers!

So there you have it – a thumbnail history of Teatown from November 2022 to 2 million years ago. While this is by no means in-depth reporting, I hope it will inspire you to dig deeper.

A Shameless Plug . . .

I know I haven’t posted much here lately and that’s because I was putting the finishing touches on my new book!

Co-authored with Town of Ossining Historian Scott Craven, it’s called “Croton Point Park: Westchester’s Jewel on the Hudson.” Here’s the cover for your enjoyment:

It’s a fairly comprehensive history of (duh!) Croton Point Park, starting about 25,000 years ago when the ice sheets began their final retreat north. We’ve been getting great feedback on it from people who’ve read it and/or seen one of our presentations.

So check it out! You can buy it at any bookstore in the immediate area, as well as from the usual online bookselling sites. (You can even purchase a Kindle version!)

And please, visit our website: HudsonValleyChronicles.com — you can find other links through which you can purchase the book and read our new Hudson River blog over there.

Thanks for your support!

The Croton Aqueduct, Part I

The Croton Aqueduct is a favorite for local runners. It’s actually a 41-mile long narrow, ribbon of a park that stretches from the Croton Dam to mid-Manhattan. Unpaved, flat, protected, and with a gradual downhill incline, it used to bring water from the Croton Reservoir all the way into Manhattan.

It’s really one of the great engineering feats of the 19^th century, so I can’t let this opportunity pass without giving you a thumbnail sketch of this marvel.

Now, technically it is known as the “Old Croton Aqueduct,” hence the “OCA” signposts you’ll see periodically along the way. It was built between 1837 and 1842 and was in use until about 1890 when the New Croton Dam and Aqueduct were built.

Finding enough fresh water was a huge problem for 19^th century Manhattan, as its population exploded after the Revolutionary War. Also, despite the fact that the Romans had managed to invent and build sewers in their cities centuries earlier, this vital piece of technological evolution hadn’t made it to the New World and so their sanitation was not really up to snuff in those days. Yup, early New Yorkers just emptied their chamber pots onto the streets, relieved themselves in cesspools, and had horses fouling the roads, all of which (and more) trickled into the wells, cisterns and underground springs that provided drinking water. Not surprisingly, people were getting sick and dying from all sorts of loathsome diseases that come from imbibing a side of e coli with breakfast – epidemics like yellow fever and cholera were rampant.

So, in 1833, the city engaged Major David Bates Douglas, formerly an engineering professor at West Point, to survey a route and oversee the massive project. Imagine the bushwhacking his team had to do back then, coming all the way down from Croton on horseback, choosing a route, going through peoples’ farms and estates, making exact measurements, setting spikes. That certainly is a story in itself . . .

Anyway, for reasons I haven’t discovered in my sitting-on-the-couch-and-looking-through-the-Internet research, Douglas was fired in 1837 (and went off to become President of Kenyon College as one does), and an Engineer named John B. Jervis took over. He saw this project through to the end (and got his name on the plaques), building a dam (the Old Croton Dam), digging tunnels, laying pipe, creating reservoirs, building bridges – when you stop to think about, this was a Herculean effort! And just think — it was all likely done entirely by hand – they might have had some sort of steam shovels/excavators back then, but probably not. Hey, the Irish were much cheaper.

The plan was that the water would come down to the city via the aqueduct and pause in the Receiving Reservoir. That still exists, and you’ve probably seen it if you’ve ever visited Central Park — it’s the body of water in the middle of the park, now called the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. No longer used as part of the water system, it’s just a cool, 1.8 mile jogging track around a manmade lake in the upper middle of Manhattan.

The water then traveled downtown to the Distributing Reservoir located on what is now the site of the New York Public Library — 42^nd Street and 5^th Avenue. This was a massive structure, Egyptian in both size and design. Check out this drawing:

Depósito_Croton

And this photograph (not precisely sure what year this would have been, but likely circa 1895 – 1901):

Screen Shot 2018-02-12 at 9.47.59 AM

Fun fact: you can even see remnants of these reservoir walls embedded in the Library building today! Lookie here:

Vestiges_of_Croton_Distributing_Reservoir_embedded_in_the_foundation_of_the_New_York_Public_Library

The Aqueduct began carrying water to the city in June of 1842, and officially opened on October 14, 1842 to great hoopla.

Lydia Maria Child, an author of some renown, wrote about this day: “Oh, who that has not been shut up in the great prison-cell of a city, and made to drink of its brackish springs, can estimate the blessings of the Croton Aqueduct? Clean, sweet, abundant, water!”

(It seems so quaint, her excitement at fresh water, but I bet the citizens of Cape Town, South Africa would echo these emotions today. As of this writing, they’re about a month away from running out of water.)

Here’s a ribbon that was printed for the “Introduction of the Croton Water” to Manhattan:

Silk Ribbon from Croton Aqueduct Celebration

from the New York Historical Society website — Gift of the Virginia Historical Society

Okay, so this has become less of a thumbnail and more of a straight out history lesson, sorry about that. But can you tell I find the Croton Aqueduct fascinating? (Here’s an excellent blog post about all of the above, with much more detail and lots of pictures. Enjoy!)

Tune in next time to read more about the Aqueduct and the running project I’ve been pursuing (on and off) for the past year — to run the length of the Aqueduct.

Here’s the link to part II.

Lorraine Hansberry Lived in Croton!

Do you know who she is? Lorraine Hansberry? She was an African-American playwright whose most famous play, “A Raisin in the Sun” opened on Broadway in 1959.

Copy of Playbill from the original Broadway production on display at the the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

If you weren’t forced to read the play in high school or college, you’ve probably run across it somehow — the play was revived in 2014 with Denzel Washington.

Copy of Playbill from the 2014 revival on display at the the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

There’s also a movie of it out there, starring Sidney Poitier. It was pretty groundbreaking for its time.

Here’s the cover of the play, with a photo of Lorraine Hansberry taken in Croton-on-Hudson:

Anyway, today I had one of those moments where the universe creates perfect synchronicity, and it all had to do with Lorraine and Croton and running.

At the first waterstop this morning (the Taconic Road Runners thoughtfully put out water and Gatorade every Saturday morning for the group run ), I asked my friend Fran if she would be up for changing up our route a little to run past what I thought was Lorraine Hansberry’s house. “It’s on Bridge Road,” I said, “Just down the hill from the Danish Home.”

“Bridge Lane,” corrected another woman at the waterstop. “It’s Bridge Lane — I know, because I live there!”

“Oh wow, what a coincidence!” I said, while guzzling icy-cold orange Gatorade. “Do you happen to know where Lorraine Hansberry’s house is, then? I think I’ve found the address but I’m not sure.”

“Well, funny you should ask – I live in her house.”

I was floored. What? WHAT? No way! I’ve never seen this runner lady before and yet there she was, overhearing my conversation with Fran and living in Lorraine Hansberry’s house!

We chatted for a bit, and then ran off in opposite directions, but we had her blessing to go and take a gander at her house. (To be honest, I’d done a drive by on Friday and snapped this picture with my phone.)

Now, according to a recent PBS American Masters documentary titled “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,” Hansberry supposedly called her home in Croton “Chitterling Heights.” All sorts of literati came up from New York City to visit. (Croton has long been a haven for artists and activists – Lillian Nordica, Isadora Duncan, Gloria Swanson, John Reed, Max Eastman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Lorraine Hansberry are just a few who settled here. Don’t worry, I’ll be running by their houses and blogging about them too!)

Hansberry and her husband Robert Nemiroff moved to Croton in about 1961. Not only were they both artists (he wrote “Cindy, oh Cindy,” a Top 40 song, among other things. Here’s his obituary for more), but both were activists, especially dedicated to causes that promoted racial and sexual equality. Fun fact – in 1964, Hansberry was integral in organizing and participating in one of the first fundraisers in the New York City area for the civil rights movement, held at Croton’s Temple Israel. (The 1963 Birmingham church bombings catalyzed many on the East Coast.) She was the MC of the event, and brought in other like-minded celebrities, including Ossie Davis, James Baldwin, and Judy Collins. They raised over $11,000 for organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality – Freedom Summer voter registration project (CORE), the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the NAACP.

Some of the money raised went towards the purchase of a Ford station wagon for the Freedom Riders Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, men who were subsequently murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. (More info here and here.)

If you’re so inclined, here’s a link to the PBS documentary. Fast forward to about 1:19 in if you want to learn more about Hansberry’s Croton years and the fate of that Ford station wagon . . .)

Tragically, Hansberry died in 1965 at the age of 34 from pancreatic cancer. She is buried in Croton-on-Hudson in the Bethel Cemetery.

Ossining History on the Run

Local History Seen from a Runner's Perspective

Category: Croton-on-Hudson, NY