Category Archives: Jean Zimmerman

Before we left for Italy we swung through Manhattan to see something surprising: a flock of sheep grazing within a fence in Bryant Park, on Avenue of the Americas behind the New York Public Library. It was an art installation of sorts, sponsored by British royalty, which also included a wool-wrapped marble fountain and tea-cozyish squares enveloping the back of the rickety park chairs. New Yorkers, not dumbstruck by any phenomenon, shook their heads and went back to their bag lunches. I was happy to see sheep in midtown, leaning against each other and walking aimlessly around, as they would have 300 or so years ago.

It also reminded me of the time I was researching the colonial at the Historic Hudson Valley library in Sleepy Hollow, New York, which happened to abut the restored Philipse house/farm complex. Emerging from the dusty archives on an early spring day I would look out the kitchen window and see the new lambs kicking up their heels, bleating, their still-long tails dangling. It was another conjoining of books and sheep (like the sheep out back of the NYPL) – perhaps a pairing preordained somehow by nature?

The question naturally arises of how the flock got to midtown. Were they English sheep? Had they crossed the Atlantic? Or had they made their way in to Manhattan by way of the Midtown Tunnel like the circus animals traditionally do on their way to Madison Square Garden?

The question we had looking at the scene in Bryant Park was, who were the real sheep on the scene?

Philipse Manor Hall still sits on its bluff in the city of Yonkers, where it was constructed in 1682 by Margaret Hardenbroeck and her husband Frederick Philipse, at the junction of the Hudson River and a rushing stream local Indians called the Nepperhan. The couple was already extraordinarily wealthy from trading furs, and would eventually own 57,000 acres of land stretching from Spuyten Duyvil up to the Croton River. Successive generations of Philipses lived in the house, enlarged it, decorated it, planted rose gardens outside its front door and tended a deer park out back. When the American Revolution concluded, the family’s members, staunch Loyalists all, were “attaindered for treason,” booted out of the new country in 1783 with little more than the clothes on their backs. Most fled to England, leaving Philipse Manor Hall to the state of New York, which cleaved the huge property into 287 parcels and sold them to the tenant farmers who had always worked the land.

The Manor Hall and its environs looked almost paradisiacal then, with the Nepperhan River rushing down to the Hudson.

Philipse Manor Hall, 1784

Flash forward one hundred years. The handsome house still stands, but Yonkers has been bit by the bug of industry, in a big way. Everything from pencils to hats to elevators are making residents rich, with factories that employ the Nepperhan’s surging water power. The river grows polluted by factory waste. People who live and work on its banks get sick. The city fathers won’t have it. By 1868, Philipse Manor Hall has been transferred from private hands and is now Village Hall. What shall we do about the river?

The Nepperhan, 1920s

Bury it. That solves two problems at once, giving us an hygienic environment and more parking.

Yonkers Downtown Parking with Hudson View

From the 1920s until today, the Nepperhan ran under the city of Yonkers in its flume, secret and silent, largely forgotten.

But something remarkable happened. People decided they wanted the river back. The Nepperhan has been “daylighted,” the term that means opening up the long-disappeared river to run aboveground once more, a feat of mental magic and engineering acumen.

Philipse Manor Hall, 2012

Many people made it happen, including Groundwork Hudson Valley. The plants along the river’s banks are still immature. And this new incarnation lacks the strenuous rapids and waterfalls of the old river. But the Nepperhan has reclaimed its place in front of Philipse Manor Hall, a reunion to warm the hearts of anyone who has a sense of historical justice.

And something to warm my heart in particular: an explanatory sign that cites Margaret Hardenbroeck as a she-merchant. I like to think that I had some small hand in bringing Hardenbroeck out of obscurity with my book The Women of the House.