Sunnyside (Tarrytown, New York)

Sunnyside is the former estate of the American writer Washington Irving (1783-1859) in the town of Tarrytown, New York. Since 1962, it is registered as a monument of national importance ( National Historic Landmark ), 1966, entry on the National Register of Historic Places.

Sunnyside goes back to the Dutch colonial New York; in 1680 (after Washington Irving's information already in 1656 ) the settlers Wolfert Acker is said to have built his house and have named it after his maxim of life like in Rust ( "Joy in the rest " ) " Wolfert Rust ". Irving adorned the development of the property in his story Woolfert 's Roost with further details of whose factuality but can be doubted. After Ackers death, the house passed into the possession of the Van Tassel family. In the American War of Independence, it was burned down and a new stone house built in its place with two rooms.

This home, which Irving saw for the first time as a fifteen- year-old in 1798 during a visit to Tarrytown was. Between 1820 and 1832 he lived in Europe; with his 1819-20 published " sketchbook" ( The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon ), he became internationally famous in this time as a writer. Several " sketches " from this band, including short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The legend of Sleepy Canyon are located in the vicinity of Tarrytown, the valley of the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains and still led in the 1820s to a glorification of the area as a romantic longing. After his triumphant return to America, Irving was first settled in New York City. In 1835 he acquired then the Van Tassel estate, close to the scene of his best-known stories, and left it under the guidance of the young Boston architect George Harvey to significantly expand. The new two-storey building was provided with stepped gables in Dutch style and a wide Gothicising wooden porch. Above the entrance portal, he had a plaque with an inscription install. Over the years, followed by other outbuildings, in 1847, the striking three-storey corner tower with its distinctive pagoda roof; the four -acre site was redesigned carefully to a romantic landscape garden. 1859, the year of Irving's death, remarked Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., that Sunnyside had become at this time to Mount Vernon for the " most famous and beloved dwelling of the nation." After Irving's death, the house remained in the family until it was purchased in 1945 by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who in 1947 made ​​it a museum open to the public.