2. Edith Wharton spent her summers at the Wyndcliffe Mansion
Edith Wharton, American novelist and author of books such as The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth was Jones’ niece. Although she often feared returning to the mansion each summer, it later inspired some of her novels. Calling the mansion Rhinecliff in her recollections, Wharton observed in her autobiography, A Backward Glance “I was obscurely conscious of a queer resemblance between the granite exterior of Aunt Elizabeth and her grimly comfortable home.”
She later describes the mansion as something that evoked terror. With a note of disgust, she wrote “My visual sensibility must always have been too keen for middling pleasure; my photographic memory of rooms and houses – even those seen but briefly, or at long intervals – was from my earliest years a source of inarticulate misery, for I was always vaguely frightened by ugliness. I can still remember hating everything at Rhinecliff, which, as I saw, on rediscovering it some years later, was an expensive but dour specimen of Hudson River Gothic.”
Although her review of the mansion leaves much to be desired, abandoned building enthusiasts still flock to the “dour specimen of Hudson River Gothic” each year. For those who want to see where Edith Wharton spent the rest of her time, they can visit her birthplace at 14 W. 23rd street.
