In search of Washington Irving's Sunnyside

Tarrytown is a prosperous suburb of New York City, only twenty five miles from Times Square though it feels much further.  Here Washington Irving lived out his prosperous later years in a home called Sunnyside that he'd built overlooking the Hudson River as it flows south to the city. 

The Hudson is unusually wide at Tarrytown, up to three miles across, for a ten mile stretch called the Tappan Zee, Tappan being an old Native American word possibly meaning cold water and Zee being the Dutch for sea. Indeed, the explorer Henry Hudson, sailed up the river that was later named after him, hoping that the width of the Tappan Zee promised a sea ahead that would lead to his finding the north west passage. Instead, it ended in a small lake below Mount Marcy, the highest point in New York State.

Irving valued the Dutch settler heritage of the area. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1818), his own invention disguised as local folklore from the area's eighteenth century past, was among the most famous stories in The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, the book that made his name in both Europe and the United States. Far from being immersed in Tarrytown history to write the story, Irving was in fact in Europe and is said to have written it in England's distinctly unmagical Birmingham. 

Today Sleepy Hollow is a small town next to Tarrytown and is no sleepier than anywhere else on the commuter line to Manhattan. I'd come to pay my respects to Irving and hoped to visit Sunnyside. Yesterday my wife and I turned up at its gates, but it was a Tuesday and the house is only open at the weekends. We talked to a man supervising some workers outside the property. He was evidently some kind of manager and let his party in through the gates without inviting us to take a peak, even after hearing our sorry story about coming from London and not being able to stay until the weekend.

That seemed to be that. It turns out that a number of local attractions including Sunnyside are run by Historic Hudson Valley and annoyingly, they all only open at the weekends. 

Not to be defeated, we tried approaching the property from the other side, along a wooded footpath. We asked a woman who was walking along it whether we could get a view of the house from anywhere. She wasn't hopeful, saying that she had once tried to sneak in through the fence when the property was closed but was quickly apprehended and told to leave, having been spotted on security cameras. 

We did our best, and managed to see a car park through the fence, but that was it. Still, we were able to imagine that Irving himself had likely enjoyed walking through the same woods. 

Back at the hotel, Irving's legacy seemed to be represented only by a conference room called Sunnyside. But then, on the way out of the dining-room we spotted a framed photograph on the wall. 

There it was: the house that Irving bought in 1835 and had rebuilt and extended, just as his hero Sir Walter Scott had done, at enormous expense, with Abbotsford, the farm he bought in Scotland. 

The Tripadvisor comments about the tour of Sunnyside aren't all that positive ("a sadly neglected house and yard that disappointed and upset me") so perhaps we didn't miss much. 

Tomorrow we'll look for Irving's grave.