Irvington

Irvington, New York (Enter Irvington's Hudson River Gallery)

Much of the land that is now the Village of Irvington was farmland throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. By the middle of the 19th century several large estates had been built overlooking the Hudson River, which were owned by many of the most prominent New Yorkers of the day, among them James Hamilton, Cyrus Field and John Jacob Astor III. In 1835, another prominent New Yorker bought property along the river in the village, then known as Dearman. His name was Washington Irving, the writer whose tales about the Hudson Valley everyone was reading. Eventually, the village changed its name to honor its most famous resident.

The Village was incorporated in 1872, but unfortunately it had lost some of its northernmost territory when the Village of Tarrytown incorporated two years earlier. Many Irvington residents believed that Sunnyside, Washington Irving’s home, and Lyndhurst, then the home of George Merritt, had been “kidnapped” because they were now part of Tarrytown.

In 1870 Irvington’s largest industry, Lord and Burnham, which manufactured greenhouses and boilers until it closed in 1988, established itself on both sides of the railroad tracks along the riverfront. Much of the complex was built on landfill, changing the shoreline forever. These buildings, once empty and derelict, have taken on new life in the 21st century as the village library, affordable housing, offices, art galleries and restaurants.