National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Resource History and Description of Existing Conditions
record of the priorities and issues of their times. It would be impossible for any property owner
to do otherwise.
Nevertheless, with reference to landscape integrity, despite the loss or alteration of
numerous individual landscape features, one can imagine that Frederick and Louise would
recognize the grounds of their home if they were to make a miraculous return. Despite the
many alterations, owing to the survival of overall spatial patterns, views, collections of plants
and many historic structures, the property retains a high degree of integrity to the Vanderbilt
period.
Yet instead of trying to assay the purity of Hyde Park as a reflection of the Gilded Age, a
more helpful exercise would be to weigh the remarkable layers of garden history represented at
Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site. Speaking specifically of Hyde Park, garden
historian Ann Leighton has offered, " . . . we can see a strong pattern, a chain of individuals, each
knowing the one just before and the one just after himself, handing on the new concept of
landscape gardening." 1079 This chain begins with Dr. Samuel Bard's early development of his
greensward in accordance with the concepts of Hogarth, through Hosack's fruitful association
with Andre Parmentier, including Walter Langdon's benign neglect, and on to Frederick
Vanderbilt, the last of the "idle rich" to keep himself very busy on the land that lay between the
Hudson and Crum Elbow Creek.
For almost sixty years, the nation's principal conservation agency has held Hyde Park in
public stewardship. The National Park Service has now attended to the property longer than
any of the four previous families. During these sixty years, the property has been marked
indelibly by the personal intervention of President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal
programs. The landscape was transformed and simplified by two decades of neglect that was
turned around during the 1960s when a strong economy and historic preservation legislation
encouraged larger appropriations. More recently, sustained nationwide interest in cultural
landscapes has made possible the scholarship directed at the grounds during the 1980s and
1990s.
ROADS
TRANSPORTATION, POWER, AND MECHANICAL SYSTEMS
The Cultural Landscape Report for Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site (1992)
documents what little is known about the construction of and alterations to the estate's drives
during the early years of Vanderbilt ownership, circa 1895-1905. 1080 Road surfaces on the estate
were of crushed stone, most likely macadamized. Associate Engineer Alfred D. Curradi
reported that Vanderbilt road construction consisted of sixteen-foot-wide roads with an "eight
to twelve inch telford base" covered by approximately two inches of crushed stone and a top
dressing of approximately one-half inch to three-quarter inch stone screenings. 1081 Excavation
in the 1990s to repair a water line to the River Gate House revealed a Telford-type road. The
1079 Leighton, 119.
1080 O'Donnell, et al, 108-114.
1081 Historian's Research Notes File, 74. Source: Alfred D. Curradi, "Report on Existing Utilities on the
Frederick W. Vanderbilt Estate, Hyde Park, N.Y.," April 30, 1940, hereafter cited as Curradi.
192