Washington Spring Road-Woods Road Historic District

Washington Spring Road and its side lanes, Woods Road and Dirt Lane, form the historic riverside core of Palisades, New York. The district runs down a narrow, hilly valley from Route 9W to the Hudson River and includes 42 properties, mostly two-story single-family houses of frame, stone or brick, along with a Presbyterian church. The oldest are Dutch-vernacular dwellings from the 1700s, clustered near the old river landing, where a ferry operated as early as 1689 or 1700. Later houses show Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate and Second Empire styles. Sloop captains, shipwrights and merchants lived here when the landing prospered as a transshipment point. After river traffic declined and the railroad arrived, wealthy New Yorkers built country retreats. In the early twentieth century, landowner Mary Tonetti drew artists and writers, including Bertram Goodhue, Carl Sandburg and John Steinbeck. Craftsman and Medieval Revival houses on Woods Road date from that era. Despite modern development nearby, the district keeps the scale of a rural river settlement.