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Photos by Marisol Díaz
Students follow in Washington’s steps at Van Cortlandt House Museum By Shant Shahrigian
MICHAEL GRILLO, 52, a museum educator, stands between portraits of Eve Van Cortlandt and Augustus Van Cortlandt in the east parlor room at the Van Cortlandt House Museum, top image.
sshah@riverdalepress.com
L
et’s say it is October 1776. You are lucky enough to be part of America’s high society; but unlucky enough, depending on how you see it, that you have to take a stance on whether it’s wise to dissolve the political bands which have connected you with your mother country. Ah, well. At least the carriage ride out of the reeking city, up Albany Post Road and into the wide country is an invigorating one. Your friends the Van Cortlandts always show good hospitality at their plantation mansion. The long road lands you in front of the Van Cortlandts’ Georgian-style mansion after nightfall. A few torches illuminate rows of small Celtic-looking masks on the front of the house as you walk in. Is the lion at the far end of the building encouraging, or mocking you? A Medusa with a snake coming out of one of her eyes is definitely not a friendly sight here beyond the outskirts of urban life. There must be something funny about the Van Cortlandts! After a morose indentured servant relieves you of your travel things, music from a pianoforte summons you to a parlor where you find men and women doing a country dance. Here is what you came for! Happiness, levity, life itself! You toss off your coat and prepare to hop in without even introducing yourself. But then a tall, wig-less man turns and faces you and your smile goes blank as you remember why you came here, having to make a tough decision…. The imagination is wont to run wild during a visit to the Van Cortlandt House, which has hosted visitors not personally acquainted with the Van Cortlandts since the National Society of Colonial Dames in the State of New York gained a license to operate the building as a museum in 1896. The Colonial Dames are a historic preservation, service and educational non-profit group. It is only in about the last 15 years that museum director Laura Carpenter Myers and longtime tour guide Michael Grillo have drawn increasingly large numbers to the commodious three-story house. Ms. Carpenter Myers estimates about 5,000 students came to the house between September and June to learn about the Van Cortlandts and how they and their contemporaries lived. She said by comparison, less than 3,000 students visited two years ago. The more than six large rooms open to the public for tours are filled with 18th-century furniture and curiosities originally owned by the
THE VAN CORTLANDT House Museum, left.
A THIRD-STORY room in the Van Cortlandt mansion recreates the inside of a modest 18th-century house, below. Van Cortlandts, one of the most powerful families in the history of the Bronx and the rest of New York City. Members include the first nativeborn mayor of New York, a congressman and a lieutenant governor, not to mention distant descendant David Crosby of the folk rock group Crosby, Stills and Nash. During an interview in which Ms. Carpenter Myers peppered the conversation with numerous references to the Van Cortlandts, she said she thought long-gone members of the family would have smiled on the idea of turning their home into a museum. “If they walked down to the house today and saw everything, they’d be highly confused,” she said. “But I think if once the general idea of what was going on was explained to them, they would probably be for it, because they were very civicminded.” In the first room on the tour, a first-floor room with original delft tiles on the chimney and period furniture arranged all over, there is currently a large copy of the Declaration of Independence with two proto-U.S. flags crossed on top of it on a table. Mr. Grillo said he periodically changes the set-up to evoke the atmosphere of the house (Continued on page B12)
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