Cedarmere-Clayton Estates

Two neighboring estates on Hempstead Harbor in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island, make up this district. Cedarmere, on seven acres, was the country retreat of poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant, who bought an older farmstead in 1843 and spent decades enlarging it. Its main house shows a neo-Colonial look with gambrel roofs and a wraparound porch, and its 1850 Gothic Revival mill and pond landscape, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, remain. Across Bryant Avenue lies Clayton, a 165-acre estate where the Bryce family built a brick Georgian Revival mansion designed by Ogden Codman, Jr. After Henry Clay Frick bought the property in 1919, architects Charles Allom, Guy Lowell and Henry Milliken reworked buildings, and Marian Coffin redesigned the gardens. Together the estates contain seven contributing buildings and nine contributing structures. They show how a quiet farming village became a community of wealthy country retreats over ninety years, and they connect to many notable figures in American art and letters.