Bartow-Pell Mansion: The Manor on the Edge of New York City

Hidden inside Pelham Bay Park, the Bronx's sprawling wilderness preserve, stands a Greek Revival mansion that is one of the most improbable survivals in New York City. The Bartow-Pell Mansion, built between eighteen thirty-six and eighteen forty-two, is the last standing manor house in the entire Pelham Bay area, a remnant of a world of great estates that once occupied what is now New York City's largest park.

The story begins in sixteen fifty-four, when Thomas Pell, an English physician from Connecticut, purchased nearly fifty thousand acres of land from the Siwanoy people and received a royal patent establishing Pelham Manor. The Pell family held the land for generations. In eighteen thirty-six, a Pell descendant named Robert Bartow and his wife Maria Lorillard, of the prominent tobacco family, purchased a portion of the original manor and built this mansion in the then-fashionable Greek Revival style.

The house is extraordinary inside. A freestanding spiral staircase rises through the entrance hall in hand-carved mahogany, connecting the elegant parlors below to the bedrooms above. The double-height windows, the intricate iron latticework, and the restrained Federal interiors speak to the craftsmanship of the eighteen thirties, when New York's merchant class was flush with the profits of trade and wanted their country houses to look like temples.

The Bartow family lived here for fifty years. When the last of the children sold the estate to New York City in eighteen eighty-eight, it became part of the new Pelham Bay Park. The mansion sat largely unused until the International Garden Club undertook a restoration in the nineteen twenties, and it officially opened as a museum in nineteen forty-six.

Today it operates as the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, a small but beautifully preserved window into the antebellum aristocracy that once claimed the northern Bronx as its countryside.