St. Nicholas Avenue, the park wall, then the climb: a gravel path switchbacking up the hill past the schist outcrop and the thirteen sweetgums to the pale yellow Federal house with its green shutters and wide piazza. Inside, the hall of miniatures and the two octagonal parlors, the piano, the dining table, a hearth lit for the afternoon, the works in gilt on the papered walls.
Alexander Hamilton commissioned architect John McComb Jr. to build the Grange, his Federal style country house in upper Manhattan, in 1802. He lived there only two years before the 1804 duel with Aaron Burr ended his life. As the city grew around it, the house was moved twice, in 1889 and again in 2008, to keep it standing. It now sits in St. Nicholas Park at 414 West 141st Street and reopened to the public in 2011 as a National Park Service memorial.
Source · National Park Service ↗
The 1802 country house moved into St. Nicholas Park in 2008: clapboard painted pale yellow, green shutters, a hipped roof with a balustrade, piazzas on two sides, the twin octagonal rooms with their mirrored doors, the thirteen sweetgum trees, the Manhattan schist outcrop, City College on the ridge behind. Mood: porch light. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.