Heyhoe Woods Road - by David Wolk
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The first thing asked about Heyhoe Woods Road by postal workers, catalog order takers, and friends on other coasts and continents is, “Ho Ho what? Where did they come up with that name?” Fortunately, Alice Munro Haagensen has preserved detailed information on this point in her book about the history of Palisades and Snedens Landing.

Heyhoe Woods Road is located on the grounds of an old estate called Heyhoe built by Winthrop S. Gilman Sr. around 1871, fronting on what was then called Rockland Road (roughly todayʼs 9W). One of Gilmanʼs daughters chose the name Heyhoe to commemorate an ancestor, Frances Heyhoe, who married into the Gilman family in 1740. Even in 1871, the choice of name was deemed “whimsical.” (This name really exists; I met a woman named Ruth Heyhoe at an educational technology conference in St. John, Labrador, in 1992.)

Gilman was a wealthy banker and a friend of Andrew Carnegie. In his early years, he was a supporter of the cause of abolition. In 1837, he leased a warehouse he owned in Alton, Illinois to the abolitionist newspaper, The Alton Observer, for its presses. The building was soon burned down by an angry pro-slavery mob. Gilman escaped with his life, but was later put on trial for the crime of riot.

The original Heyhoe mansion was huge, housing 13 children, servants and visitors in legendary grandeur. According to Mrs. Haagensen, the doorknobs were said to be of solid silver, and the house had 26 marble fireplaces. An 1874 map of Rockland County shows a road about where Heyhoe Woods Road is now. This road was called Forest Avenue, and had no houses on it. It connected at a right angle to a nowvanished road called Heyhoe Road. This road passed the side of the Gilmanʼs house and connected to Rockland Road.

Sadly, the abandoned mansion burned to the ground in the 1930s shortly after Route 9W was built. The small brick house where Mr. Kennell lived, opposite the former gas station, now stands approximately on the mansionʼs site. Mr. Kennell used to plow up marble fragments and other artifacts while gardening in his orchard.

In 1939, Theodora Abel, a psychologist, and her husband, Theodore Abel, a sociology professor at Columbia University, decided to move out of New York City along with her aged parents, Robert and Elsie Mead. Theodoraʼs mother Elsie was a great friend of Nannie Gilman Hill who lived in Niederhurst, surrounded by her famously magnificent gardens on Ludlow Lane. Elsie and her daughter enjoyed their regular visits to Snedens Landing in the summers to visit the Hills, so they decided to look for a place there. The Hills also built a house with a fine garden in the Hamptons, on Long Island, called Grey Gardens, which has since become famous on stage and screen as the home of the two eccentric Edith Bealses.

Together with Columbia sociologist Professor Robert MacIver, NYU physicist Jean Cooley, and one of Abelʼs former students, George Weiss, the Abels purchased 24 acres on Oak Tree Road, which was subdivided and became Heyhoe Woods Rd. Each party was supposed to own four acres, but the math does not come out right, and it is likely that Weiss, being quite wealthy, owned a larger portion. During World War II, no buyers could be found for the other two lots.

At the beginning, the town tried to insist that the road for the new subdivision be extended to connect with 9W, roughly following the old right-angled pattern shown on the 1874 map. The new owners, however, stopped this plan and went their own way, trading regular civic road services and through traffic for potholes and wildflowers on a privately maintained dirt road. The dirt surface nearly made it to the 21st century, but was finally paved about nine or ten years ago.

The Abels hired an Armenian architect from Switzerland named Hagopian, who was a strict devotee of the ultramodern Bauhaus style. Given the timing of the commission in the late 1930s, it is more than likely that Hagopian had studied at the Bauhaus school in Germany and was in the United States as a refugee from Hitler's Germany. Theodoraʼs mother, Mrs. Mead, was the one who chose him, after considering and rejecting several more traditional designs by American architects. Then the Cooleys and MacIvers hired the same man to do their houses. Hagopian used British Columbian cedar siding instead of stucco to blend the stark rectangular geometry of the houses into the rural setting, and created unique interiors that made use of all the edgiest “glamour” materials of 1939, such as fluorescent lighting, linoleum, plywood and sheetrock.

The Cooleyʼs house, today owned by Michael and Wendy Yamin, reflects a number of subsequent additions and renovations, the most recent having been designed by Rex Lalire. (Not only an architect but also the next door neighbor.)

Both Cooleys were musicians. Together with Theodora Abel, who was a fine violinist, and another cello player from New York City, they played quartets once a week at their house. When the cellist suddenly died, Edith Cooley learned the cello so they could continue as a string trio.

After the war, Jo Chamberlin, another Columbia professor, and his wife, Mary, bought the lot next to the Abels. John Ewing, an oceanographer and the brother of the director of Lamont, built a house at the end of the road.

The Cooley house was later sold to Sandy and Tinka Vanderbilt. He was an editor at The New Yorker and quite a city slicker when he first arrived. One evening he shouted to his wife from the yard that there was a God-Damned Cocker Spaniel up in the tree howling at him. It proved on closer inspection by more sober observers to be an owl.

During the 1940s, all the children on the road attended the Palisades School, which went through the eighth grade. They walked to school on a path that cut directly through the woods. Zita Abel had a dog named Tony with a mysteriously accurate sense of time. Every day at around two oʼclock, he jumped up from the floor, barked, and rushed out the door through the woods to meet her as she walked home from school. The two Chamberlin girls were sometimes invited to tea by Mrs. MacIver. She considered the caffeine in tea to be dangerous to their health and gave the third and fourth graders sherry instead! She also used to write them notes in Latin and leave the notes pinned to a tree.

Zitaʼs sister, Caroline Abel, married a Frenchman, Pierre Lalire. PIerre started work as a window dresser at Lord & Taylor in 1949, and the next year, he interviewed some candidates applying for the same entry-level job. One of them submitted a portfolio of drawings of shoes. Pierre turned him down—he didn't like the pictures. It was Andy Warhol, new in town from Pittsburgh. Pierre went on to become the head of visual merchandising for a series of large department stores including Halley's in Cleveland and Woodward & Lothrop, in Washington, D.C. The Lalires later bought the house on HeyHoe Woods Road from Caroline's parents in the early 1970ʼs. Caroline also had a dog, an elegant Doberman Pinscher named Eric, who used to lie in the sun with his front legs crossed like a fashion model, before leaping up to chase strangers down the driveway at full tilt.

Two evening wedding receptions have been held in the yard of the Abel/Lalire house, thirty years apart. Both were decorated by Pierre Lalire with luminous white Japanese paper lanterns hung in the trees. At the first reception, it rained, and the guests padded through the mud. At the second, a beautiful, riderless white horse appeared at a gallop, weaving through the trees in the twilight. It seemed to have been sent onto the scene by one of Federico Felliniʼs stage directors, although it was later corralled by its frantic owners and returned to its paddock on the other side of Oak Tree Rd.

Since that time, more subdivisions have gradually accumulated on Heyhoe Woods, and some of the houses have changed hands several times. Sadly, Mary Chamberlin and Theodora Abel, the key sources for most of the old stories, have now been dead for many years since the first version of this article was written in the early 1990s.

Among the newer houses, the Fowlers live across from the Seamans, and the Ewings house was torn down to make way for a new house built by Lisette and Paul George. The Wolks are in the MacIversʼ house, the Chamberlinsʼ house is for sale, and Eugene Kohn has bought the house next door to the Yamins. The Kupferschmidts built a new house across from the Wolks. Next to them, the Riccobonos recently moved into Lillian Langsethʼs former house. Rex Lalire, Theodore and Theodora Abelʼs grandson, along with his wife, who is the author of this article, and their two children, Luc and Alexander, still live in the house his grandparents built. Luc and Alexander are the fifth generation of the family to live there.