When the 19th Century was just one third gone and our country just 62 years past the Declaration of Independence, a retired Mayor of New York named William Paulding built himself a cottage overlooking the Hudson River and Tappan Zee.  To design it, he engaged a famously fashionable architect of the time to conceive a manse in "the pointed style."  That meant Gothic, of all styles, and that brought on a gibe: Paulding's Folly, they called the place.

But the architect was Alexander Jackson Davis, and he designed the place right down to tables and chairs.  He was the Frank Lloyd Wright of his time, and he knew what he was doing.

This was the period of birth for the Hudson River School in art and architecture.  America was feeling its young strength.  The Erie Canal brought low-cost grain from the West, and the land overlooking the Hudson was now valued less for agriculture and more as a getaway destination for New Yorkers weary of the City's summer heat.

Davis was comfortable designing in a variety of styles, but the choice of Gothic was adventurous for the time – a bold statement that survives to this day after passage through several hands famous in their day for shaping a young American economy.  The owners were the technology wizards of their time, imagining and nurturing the railroads that would ultimately stitch together a web of states across the North American continent.  One of them, a New York merchant and inventor (of a railcar spring) named George Merritt, so admired Davis's work that he gave Davis a second crack at it – doubling its size in a seamless extension of style.

Today, Paulding's Folly is Lyndhurst.  It's one of several architecturally significant estates in the Hudson Valley – a National Trust Historic Site.

In his time, Alexander Jackson Davis also designed a stately hospital for New York City, a symmetrical edifice in the fashion of the time with, as a reception centerpiece, an octagonal tower.  The whole of the design was never completed, leaving symmetry unsatisfied.  This structure, too, passed through various hands, becoming the City's Lunatic Asylum, then Metropolitan Hospital.

What remains of it today, we call "the Octagon."   It is in ruins, the victim of decades of neglect, but still architecturally significant – still a design of the forward-thinking Alexander Jackson Davis.  And today, it's a part of our community.

Related materials The Octagon as History Octagon Apartments Project 1999 Fire January 2001 Town Meeting Barbara Potts letter to Leo Kayser Tennis Group vs Octagon Parking Town Meeting October 2002 Verbal Melee at Octagon Hearing Affordable Units at Octagon RIOC Board to Vote Island Observer:       Mr. Steinbeck & Mr. Dickens Roosevelt Island TimeLine

At Lyndhurst, a visitor can see what a relatively small amount of money can do to preserve America's architectural heritage.

On Roosevelt Island, a visitor can see the product of official imprudence:  Blackwell House is still a recent wreck, promised restoration work unstarted; the Octagon is barely holding together after the Labor Day fire that took its roof and much of its structural integrity.