Gilded Age Mansion and Grounds now a Monastery

John E. Aldred Estate - St. Josephat's Monastery, Lattingtown New York

Date added: August 03, 2024

Do you have an update on the current status of this structure? Please tell us about it in the comments below.

The John Aldred Estate, named Ormston after Aldred's wife's maiden name, is one of the major estates to survive intact from the Gold Coast era. It was designed in 1916 in the popular Tudor revival style of the early twentieth century by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924), the prominent American Gothicist. Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts were the landscape architects. The construction of the estate typifies the development of the Gold Coast in the early decades of the twentieth century, an area which grew from a cluster of seasonal resorts in the late nineteenth century into one of the largest enclaves of millionaires' residences by the Depression. Aldred himself was a pioneer industrialist in the area of hydroelectric power.

The site acquisition and development of Ormston exemplifies the process of estate construction that characterized the Gold Coast. Aldred bought the land near his friends Henry P. Davison, George Pratt, George F. Baker, J.P. Morgan, and W.D. Guthrie, like other Gold Coast millionaires who tended to settle near business associates or social contacts. Aldred and Guthrie together purchased four hundred acres of already developed land in 1910, demolishing sixty houses in the process of setting up their estates. Aldred's explanation has become part of the folklore of the Gold Coast: " … Mr. Guthrie and I destroyed the Village of Lattingtown to get the view we wanted," To protect his beach from trespassers Aldred paid the State of New York $30,000 for property rights to the land under water adjacent to his estate. The seventy-four-room main house of solid masonry with a steel foundation was built over a two-year period at a cost of $3,000,000 while Aldred and his wife lived in one of the gardener's cottages on the property. It is said that Mrs. Aldred was in charge of the formal gardens fronting the mansion which consists of a central garden with a fountain, rose gardens, and a sculpture-dotted Elizabethan garden. Over $200,000 went into the execution of the grounds including the planting of the first Cedars of Lebanon on Long Island.

Ormston's architect, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, began his career in the Boston office of Ralph Adams Cram. During their collaboration. Cram and Goodhue may be said to have revolutionized ecclesiastical architecture, bringing the Gothic Revival into a period of great popularity. At the height of his career in 1914, Mr. Goodhue withdrew from the Cram organization to establish an independent New York office. A few of his many notable designs include: New York's St. Bartholomew's Church, Nebraska's State Capitol, and Washington's National Academy of Sciences. Goodhue is credited with initiating the vogue for the popular Spanish Colonial Revival style in California through his designs for the 1915 San Diego Exhibition. The Aldred estate is one of possibly only two buildings on Long Island designed by Goodhue.

John Aldred's life was typical of the self-made wealthy American industrialists who settled in the Gold Coast. He was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts and worked in the textile mills at age 15. By 1931 he was either the president or a corporate executive of thirty-seven public utility companies, and worth over $80,000,000. A pioneer developer in the area of hydroelectricity, he built a huge power company on the Shawinigan Falls in Canada and led a $50,000,000 syndicate to build utility companies in northern Italy. Aldred generously endowed technical training schools, for he identified with those like himself who began as unskilled workers in small mill towns. He dominated local village politics in much the same way he built his financial empire and was elected Mayor of Lattingtown in 1935. By the 1940's, Aldred's meteoric career had fallen. He lost his investments in Italian hydroelectric plants with the outbreak of World War II. The Federal Power Act of the 1940s, like the anti-trust laws, prohibited monopolistic, interlocking utility directorates, and Aldred thereby lost control of his many American businesses as well. At a two-day auction at Parke-Bernet galleries in 1940, Aldred's $500,000 art collection and the furnishings of Ormston were sold for $60,000. The estate was put up for sale in 1942 and finally sold in 1944 to the Order of St. Basil the Great, a Ukrainian sect, for $525,000. Aldred gave up his New York City office at 40 Wall Street and moved into the Garden City Hotel where he died November 21^st, 1945.

Ormston is one of the most impressive Gold Coast estates to survive intact. Its development was typical of estate construction in the Gold Coast era. Bertram Goodhue's free Tudor design of the house was highly representative of stylistic trends of the time. The layout of the grounds was one of the masterpieces of the Olmsted Brothers firm, Aldred himself was part of the generation of self-made American industrialists who settled on the Gold Coast. The ownership of the estate by the Order of St. Basil the Great has protected the grounds from serious encroachment.

Site Description

St. Josephat's Monastery is the former John E. Aldred estate known as Ormston. It is situated in the village of Lattingtown, a bucolic community on Long Island Sound in Nassau County which still retains much of its early twentieth-century character as a Gold Coast community, The estate's 117-acre, roughly rectangular plot of land faces Long Island Sound on the north and is ringed by three public roads on the west, south, and east: East Beach Drive, Lattingtown Road, and Peacock Lane. A ten-foot-high stone wall encloses the grounds. Access is gained by main driveways originating at the southwest and southeast corners off Lattingtown Road where there are west and east gatehouses. A service road is located on Peacock Lane. The grounds were designed by the Olmsted Brothers and are somewhat overgrown but still reveal the original picturesque landscaping with formal planting near the mansion. Fronting the house and its southern forecourt are a series of formal gardens of seventeenth-century English prototype. These are dominated by a central rectangular garden introduced by a pergola and with a stone, ogee-roofed garden house at one corner. There are also a lilac walk, topiary garden, and rose garden. The Aldred estate contains a large number of outbuildings, most in the Tudor Revival style.

Approached from the east along the main drive, Ormston is imposingly sited on a man-made prominence created by the landscape architects. The Tudor-inspired mansion is a typically early twentieth-century free design employing period ornament and an asymmetrical plan. It is built of random-coursed, quarry-faced limestone and roofed in heavy slate. All openings are sharply outlined with limestone surrounds. Windows are grouped and vary in size, shape, and placement. There are about a dozen chimney stacks, some rectangular and some hexagonal. Viewed from the front or southern side, the rectangular main block is unified by a strong horizontal roofline. The most notable feature on this facade is the ornamented central bay set off in buff limestone from the brown fabric of the house and reminiscent of "frontispiece" design of French Renaissance architecture. On the ground level, this bay is occupied by a service entrance framed in a pointed compound arch. Symmetrical, balustraded, dogleg stairs rise in two flights on either side to the second-story balustraded landing abutting the main block of the house. This landing extends on the left to enclose the circular forecourt. On the main floor, the entrance is recessed into a semi-circular arched doorway enriched with Gothic relief carving. A three-sided oriel window on the second story features cinquefoil headed windows and Mannerist strapwork. Protruding from the main block of the house on the east is a gable-roofed service wing; on the west is an arcaded loggia supported on squat limestone columns. The rear elevation continues the surface texture and window treatment of the front and is dominated by a pilastered arcade ornamented with strapwork, bosses, and gargoyle capitals.

The interior of Ormston combines several periods of English architecture within a twentieth-century plan. The entry hall faces a massive staircase leading to the basement and upper floors and divides the main floor into two principal areas. To the east is the Great Hall occupying one and one half stories and lit by full-length windows. The walls are sheathed in fielded wainscoting with blank masonry above. The room features an elaborate walnut organ screen in the Tudor style and a large Inglenook fireplace with over-mantel of dressed and carved limestone. The Great Hall debouches into a small morning room and then into a formal dining room paneled in fielded walnut and with an arched, plasterwork ceiling pattern in traditional English rose and strapwork motifs. East of this room are the kitchen and service rooms comprising the eastern wing of the house. West of the entry hall, one enters a narrow hallway which terminates in a large library now used as a chapel. There is also a formal drawing room at this end of the house featuring a Palladian overmantel. The upper floors of the house are occupied by bedrooms, studies, and sitting rooms which are used by the novitiate. The ground floor originally housed Aldred's home office, a gun room, washrooms, storage space, and service rooms. A game room is still used with the only original artifact not sold at auction, a massive carved billiard table. Some of the woodwork and other details of this room were altered in 1922 by the architect Henry W. Rowe. No major alterations have been undertaken on the house.

There are two main clusters of estate dependencies: in the northeast corner of the estate and several hundred yards southwest of the main building bordering East Beach Drive. In the northwest corner are six structures of which the superintendent's quarters is the most important. This is a U-shaped, one-and-one-half-story vernacular Tudor design with hip and gable roofs. The roofs form overhanging eaves with a slight sweep to them. Brick chimneys and wooden cupolas pierce the ridges at several points. The central, higher section is dominated by a half-timbered gable end over the two-door garage opening. To the left of this is a one-story clapboarded hen house of three small stepped units, hip-roofed (in asphalt) with central eyebrow dormers. Nearby is the stable, a two-and-one-half-story hip-roofed vernacular Tudor building with large multi-stack chimneys and gable-ended dormers. Two paired central dormers pierce the cornice line at one side. It is linked to a lower structure of the same style. The greenhouse is an L-shaped structure of one and one-half stories. The greenhouse part is of normal conservatory design in glass with metal supports on a concrete foundation while the potting house is one and one-half stories in brick and half timber, gable-roofed with a porch and rear chimney. Three nearby garden structures follow the same style. The largest is a seven-bay, one-story, hip-roofed construction of open timberwork with a raised central gabled bay. The smaller constructions include: the well house; a square, two-bay open timberwork building with hip roof; and a very low stucco and half-timbered shed with a characteristic overhanging roof.

The most important building in the cluster bordering East Beach Drive is the garage, a one-and-one-half-story vernacular Tudor design, hip and gable-roofed, with hip and gabled dormers and several brick chimneys rising through the ridges. It is picturesquely massed and accommodates four cars in identical stalls. A one-story utility shed lies north of this, vertically battened and hip roofed with exposed rafter ends. There is also a low garden shed, one story in height, half-timbered in the gable field with a central doorway and overhanging eaves.

The two gatehouses are both one-and-one-half-story picturesque dwellings of fieldstone and half-timbering with prominent stone chimneys. One gatehouse is located at the corner of Lattingtown Road and Peacock Lane while the second stands at the junction of East Beach Drive and Lattingtown Road. Finally, south of the main house is a circular gazebo with a metal hemispherical dome carried on six Tuscan columns raised on high plinths.