National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Analysis of Historical Significance and Integrity by Resource Type
The service areas at Hyde Park are significant as a rare surviving example of a complete
range of functional spaces in a gilded-age country house, in particular service areas arranged in
the Beaux-Arts tradition where the symmetry of the floor plan took priority over the functional
arrangement of rooms. The organization of work areas and staff rooms, as evidenced by the
intact floor plan and its functional zones, is a remarkably uncompromised example of its type.
In addition, the type to which Hyde Park belongs represents the pinnacle of domestic
architectural articulation of household service areas during the Gilded Age. Modernization by
private owners, administrative re-use by preservation organizations, and catering functions in
hotels and clubs have destroyed most service areas in the gilded-age estates reviewed for this
report. 1432
The integrity of Hyde Park's service areas is high. The service rooms have escaped heavy
alteration due to the NPS's location of many administrative and maintenance functions in other
buildings on the estate. Minimal impact has been made on the service areas, and current uses of
service rooms for storage, "light-duty" staff offices, and staff lounges have not significantly
undermined the integrity of the floor plan, features, appliances, or finishes. Additionally, many
of the original furnishings for these rooms remain in the building, if not in their original
locations.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
The redesign and reconstruction of Hyde Park's formal gardens between 1903 and 1904
is significant within the context of landscape architecture as the work of a master landscape
architect, James L. Greenleaf. While the Italian Garden at Hyde Park is one of his earlier works,
Greenleaf completed a large body of design work and was later recognized at the national level
for its quality especially for his work on Country Place Era estates, where his use of classical
proportioning systems was tempered with the realities of site conditions. As a discreet element
within a much larger pre-existing landscape, the Italian Garden at Hyde Park serves as one of
the most intact surviving examples of Greenleaf's residential work.
The garden at Hyde Park is atypical of what is known of gardens of the period, and of
Greenleaf's own later work by virtue of its isolation from the residence. For example, in the
contrasting approach, both Charles Platt's work, as well as that of Greenleaf, for various
members of the Pratt family in Glen Cove, Long Island, featured garden terraces and
architectonic garden spaces organized immediately surrounding the residence. Though
stylistically very different, Greenleaf's garden at Hyde Park shares a diagrammatic likeness in its
isolation from the residence with another unusual garden designed by Beatrix Farrand for
Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller in Seal Harbor, Maine. At Seal Harbor, like at Hyde Park, the garden
is set back from the residence and shut off from the view of the water - serving as a spatial entity
unto itself. An important difference between the two is the fact that the isolation of Farrand's
garden was more self-consciously intended, while the isolation of Greenleaf's garden at Hyde
Park came about as a result of this garden's evolution from a formal/production garden of the
earlier period when it was typical to remove such a feature from the vicinity of the dwelling.
1432 See the List of Repositories Consulted & Outcomes for properties visited.
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