Boston Post Road Historic District

Along the Boston Post Road in Rye, this 300-acre district between the road and Long Island Sound preserves a large stretch of open land in a densely built corridor. It contains three major estate houses, twenty-two other buildings, the Rye City Golf Club, the Jay family cemetery and the Marshlands Conservancy. Two of the mansions, Alansten (1838) and Lounsberry (also 1838, with later additions), are Greek Revival residences with porticos, fine interior detailing and surrounding outbuildings such as carriage houses, cottages, a tennis house and a greenhouse. Whitby, completed in 1854 to designs by Alexander Jackson Davis, is a Gothic Revival stone building with towers and now serves as the golf club clubhouse. The district is valued for showing the nineteenth-century development of lower Westchester County and for retaining much of its original character. Shell middens and artifacts also show that Native peoples used the shoreline for thousands of years.