Nut Grove
Encyclopedia
Nut Grove, also known as the William Walsh House, is a historic house located on McCarty Avenue in Albany
, New York, United States. It is a brick building originally designed in the Greek Revival
architectural style
by architect Alexander Jackson Davis
in the mid-19th century. In 1974 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places
.
It is Davis's only house in that style in the Hudson Valley
, and one of the rare Greek Revival houses to use the "Grecian country house" variant of the style. In the early 20th century it was modified for use as a hospital. Today it is part of a drug treatment clinic, known as the Reilly House and used for sober living
. Much of its original ornamentation
is gone, but it retains the basic form and some of the interior decoration.
garden and gazebo
are located to the north, part of a grassy area with some mature trees separating ACCA from the Nutgrove Garden public housing
complex on Nutgrove Lane to the east. Cherry Hill
, another old estate
listed on the Register, is a quarter-mile (500 m) to the east on South Pearl Street (New York State Route 32
) just north of McCarty. Across McCarty are modern single-family homes. To the south is a wooded slope leading down to Interstate 787
.
The building itself is a two-story structure of yellow brick, five bays
wide along its long side. It is topped by a flat roof. A small shed-roofed one story addition is on the west side of the facade
, housing what is now the main entrance at its east end. A wood frame
addition with clapboard
extends one bay from the south, complemented by one extending from the east just above the southeast corner.
Along the east facade
, originally the front, is a full-length verandah
supported by columns. The window lintels have shell or rosette
designs, and the original main entrance has Greek Revival
detailing. On the north side, the current main entrance has a small porch with a flat roof supported by square columns. Both the shed-roofed addition and the main block's roof are topped with a plain wide frieze
and box cornice
. A modern roof with larger box cornice, pierced by a chimney at the south end, forms the uppermost layer.
. William Walsh and his wife were part of the city's wealthy aristocracy. They were related by marriage to Henry James
.
Those connections led them to friends of Davis, who had built many structures in the Hudson Valley, notably the 1839 Oliver Bronson House
in Hudson
, today recognized as a National Historic Landmark
(NHL). Most of his houses were in either the various Gothic Revival styles becoming popular at the time or the new Hudson River Bracketed mode considered to have been developed by the Bronson house. Both styles were seen as gentler and more harmonious with the surrounding countryside in comparison with the Greek Revival style, whose monumentality, especially in its temple variant, was more suited to public buildings and churches, such as Davis's 1835 Dutch Reformed Church
at Newburgh
, also an NHL.
For the Walshes, Davis built a Grecian country house overlooking the Hudson River
. That variant retains the basic form and symmetry of the standard Greek Revival house, but with some slight deviations and extra decoration
to create interest and distinguish it from more standard country houses. Nut Grove was originally topped with a hipped roof
, had two rear wings and featured diamond-paned glass windows. A garage and cottage were also located to the southwest.
Davis designed several similar Grecian country houses after 1835. A simplified version, with some Italianate
features, appears in The Architecture of Country Houses, Andrew Jackson Downing
's influential 1850 pattern book. Nut Grove is the only one known to survive.
The Walshes lived at Nut Grove until William died in 1863. His wife soon remarried to Robert Donaldson, who owned two other Davis houses downriver in Barrytown
, one of which she moved into with him. Her nephew, Dudley Walsh, took over Nut Grove.
In the 1870s, Walsh sold it to Thomas McCarty, an Irish immigrant
who had become a wealthy brickmaker. McCarty had served two terms on Albany's City Council before becoming a state assemblyman
. The city eventually annexed
the area around Nut Grove, and McCarty made two unsuccessful bids for mayor. He built a driveway connecting the property to South Pearl Street, the beginning of today's McCarty Avenue, and began to subdivide the property.
The house was purchased in 1902 by Eleanor Spensley, who had founded the Hospital for Incurables in downtown Albany
20 years earlier. She died two months later. For hospital purposes the roof was raised and dormer windows added.
In that form, the Hospital for Incurables continued operating in the house until 1973. After it was closed the two rear wings were demolished. It remained vacant, owned by the hospital, until sometime after it was listed on the Register in 1974 when the Addictions Care Center of Albany acquired the property. The roof was completely replaced with a flat roof and modern sliding windows were installed. It is now the Reilly House, a sober living environment
that can hold up to 12 men at a time.
Albany, New York
Albany is the capital city of the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Albany County, and the central city of New York's Capital District. Roughly north of New York City, Albany sits on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River...
, New York, United States. It is a brick building originally designed in the Greek Revival
Greek Revival architecture
The Greek Revival was an architectural movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in Northern Europe and the United States. A product of Hellenism, it may be looked upon as the last phase in the development of Neoclassical architecture...
architectural style
Architectural style
Architectural styles classify architecture in terms of the use of form, techniques, materials, time period, region and other stylistic influences. It overlaps with, and emerges from the study of the evolution and history of architecture...
by architect Alexander Jackson Davis
Alexander Jackson Davis
Alexander Jackson Davis, or A. J. Davis , was one of the most successful and influential American architects of his generation, in particular his association with the Gothic Revival style....
in the mid-19th century. In 1974 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...
.
It is Davis's only house in that style in the Hudson Valley
Hudson Valley
The Hudson Valley comprises the valley of the Hudson River and its adjacent communities in New York State, United States, from northern Westchester County northward to the cities of Albany and Troy.-History:...
, and one of the rare Greek Revival houses to use the "Grecian country house" variant of the style. In the early 20th century it was modified for use as a hospital. Today it is part of a drug treatment clinic, known as the Reilly House and used for sober living
Sober living environment
Sober living environments are facilities used by addicts recovering from substance abuse, which serve as an interim environment between rehab and a return to their former lives. SLEs grew out of a need to have safe and supportive place for people to live while they were in recovery...
. Much of its original ornamentation
Ornament (architecture)
In architecture and decorative art, ornament is a decoration used to embellish parts of a building or object. Large figurative elements such as monumental sculpture and their equivalents in decorative art are excluded from the term; most ornament does not include human figures, and if present they...
is gone, but it retains the basic form and some of the interior decoration.
Building
The building as it is today stands at the rear of the Addictions Care Center of Albany's (ACCA) 8 acres (3.2 ha) property on the south side of McCarty just east of Bowne Street, near the southern boundary of the city. To its west and northwest are ACCA's other two, more modern buildings, and a parking lot. A meditationMeditation
Meditation is any form of a family of practices in which practitioners train their minds or self-induce a mode of consciousness to realize some benefit....
garden and gazebo
Gazebo
A gazebo is a pavilion structure, sometimes octagonal, that may be built, in parks, gardens, and spacious public areas. Gazebos are freestanding or attached to a garden wall, roofed, and open on all sides; they provide shade, shelter, ornamental features in a landscape, and a place to rest...
are located to the north, part of a grassy area with some mature trees separating ACCA from the Nutgrove Garden public housing
Public housing
Public housing is a form of housing tenure in which the property is owned by a government authority, which may be central or local. Social housing is an umbrella term referring to rental housing which may be owned and managed by the state, by non-profit organizations, or by a combination of the...
complex on Nutgrove Lane to the east. Cherry Hill
Cherry Hill (Albany, New York)
Cherry Hill, also known as Historic Cherry Hill, is a historic home and museum located at Albany, Albany County, New York. It was built in 1768 and is a -story, rectangular wood-frame dwelling sheathed in clapboard. It features a gambrel roof with dormers and wooden porches with turned...
, another old estate
Estate (house)
An estate comprises the houses and outbuildings and supporting farmland and woods that surround the gardens and grounds of a very large property, such as a country house or mansion. It is the modern term for a manor, but lacks the latter's now abolished jurisdictional authority...
listed on the Register, is a quarter-mile (500 m) to the east on South Pearl Street (New York State Route 32
New York State Route 32
New York State Route 32 is a north–south state highway that extends for through the Hudson Valley and Capital District regions of the U.S. state of New York. It is a two-lane surface road for nearly its entire length, with few divided and no limited-access sections. From Harriman to Albany,...
) just north of McCarty. Across McCarty are modern single-family homes. To the south is a wooded slope leading down to Interstate 787
Interstate 787
Interstate 787 is an auxiliary Interstate Highway in the U.S. state of New York. I-787 is the main highway for those traveling into and out of downtown Albany. The southern terminus is at the Interstate 87/New York State Thruway exit 23 toll plaza southwest of downtown Albany...
.
The building itself is a two-story structure of yellow brick, five bays
Bay (architecture)
A bay is a unit of form in architecture. This unit is defined as the zone between the outer edges of an engaged column, pilaster, or post; or within a window frame, doorframe, or vertical 'bas relief' wall form.-Defining elements:...
wide along its long side. It is topped by a flat roof. A small shed-roofed one story addition is on the west side of the facade
Facade
A facade or façade is generally one exterior side of a building, usually, but not always, the front. The word comes from the French language, literally meaning "frontage" or "face"....
, housing what is now the main entrance at its east end. A wood frame
Timber framing
Timber framing , or half-timbering, also called in North America "post-and-beam" construction, is the method of creating structures using heavy squared off and carefully fitted and joined timbers with joints secured by large wooden pegs . It is commonplace in large barns...
addition with clapboard
Clapboard (architecture)
Clapboard, also known as bevel siding or lap siding or weather-board , is a board used typically for exterior horizontal siding that has one edge thicker than the other and where the board above laps over the one below...
extends one bay from the south, complemented by one extending from the east just above the southeast corner.
Along the east facade
Facade
A facade or façade is generally one exterior side of a building, usually, but not always, the front. The word comes from the French language, literally meaning "frontage" or "face"....
, originally the front, is a full-length verandah
Verandah
A veranda or verandah is a roofed opened gallery or porch. It is also described as an open pillared gallery, generally roofed, built around a central structure...
supported by columns. The window lintels have shell or rosette
Rosette (design)
A rosette is a round, stylized flower design, used extensively in sculptural objects from antiquity. Appearing in Mesopotamia and used to decorate the funeral stele in Ancient Greece...
designs, and the original main entrance has Greek Revival
Greek Revival architecture
The Greek Revival was an architectural movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in Northern Europe and the United States. A product of Hellenism, it may be looked upon as the last phase in the development of Neoclassical architecture...
detailing. On the north side, the current main entrance has a small porch with a flat roof supported by square columns. Both the shed-roofed addition and the main block's roof are topped with a plain wide frieze
Frieze
thumb|267px|Frieze of the [[Tower of the Winds]], AthensIn architecture the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Even when neither columns nor pilasters are expressed, on an astylar wall it lies upon...
and box cornice
Cornice
Cornice molding is generally any horizontal decorative molding that crowns any building or furniture element: the cornice over a door or window, for instance, or the cornice around the edge of a pedestal. A simple cornice may be formed just with a crown molding.The function of the projecting...
. A modern roof with larger box cornice, pierced by a chimney at the south end, forms the uppermost layer.
History
When the house was built, in 1845, it was south of Albany's city limits, in the Town of BethlehemBethlehem, New York
Bethlehem is a town in Albany County, New York, USA. The population was 33,656 at the 2010 census. The town is south of Albany. Bethlehem includes the following hamlets: Delmar, Elsmere, Slingerlands, Glenmont, Selkirk, South and North Bethlehem. U.S. Route 9W passes through the town...
. William Walsh and his wife were part of the city's wealthy aristocracy. They were related by marriage to Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
.
Those connections led them to friends of Davis, who had built many structures in the Hudson Valley, notably the 1839 Oliver Bronson House
Oliver Bronson House
Oliver Bronson House, also known as Dr. Oliver Bronson House and Stables, was originally built and substantially redesigned by architect Alexander Jackson Davis in 1839 and 1849. It was an early example of the Hudson River Bracketed style that he originated...
in Hudson
Hudson, New York
Hudson is a city located along the west border of Columbia County, New York, United States. The city is named after the adjacent Hudson River and ultimately after the explorer Henry Hudson.Hudson is the county seat of Columbia County...
, today recognized as a National Historic Landmark
National Historic Landmark
A National Historic Landmark is a building, site, structure, object, or district, that is officially recognized by the United States government for its historical significance...
(NHL). Most of his houses were in either the various Gothic Revival styles becoming popular at the time or the new Hudson River Bracketed mode considered to have been developed by the Bronson house. Both styles were seen as gentler and more harmonious with the surrounding countryside in comparison with the Greek Revival style, whose monumentality, especially in its temple variant, was more suited to public buildings and churches, such as Davis's 1835 Dutch Reformed Church
Dutch Reformed Church (Newburgh, New York)
The Dutch Reformed Church is one of the most prominent architectural landmarks in Newburgh, New York. It was designed by Alexander Jackson Davis in 1835 in the Greek Revival style common in America in that time period. It is his only surviving church in that style and is considered to be his latest...
at Newburgh
Newburgh (city), New York
Newburgh is a city located in Orange County, New York, United States, north of New York City, and south of Albany, on the Hudson River. Newburgh is a principal city of the Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown metropolitan area, which includes all of Dutchess and Orange counties. The Newburgh area was...
, also an NHL.
For the Walshes, Davis built a Grecian country house overlooking the Hudson River
Hudson River
The Hudson is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. The highest official source is at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains. The river itself officially begins in Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York...
. That variant retains the basic form and symmetry of the standard Greek Revival house, but with some slight deviations and extra decoration
Ornament (architecture)
In architecture and decorative art, ornament is a decoration used to embellish parts of a building or object. Large figurative elements such as monumental sculpture and their equivalents in decorative art are excluded from the term; most ornament does not include human figures, and if present they...
to create interest and distinguish it from more standard country houses. Nut Grove was originally topped with a hipped roof
Hip roof
A hip roof, or hipped roof, is a type of roof where all sides slope downwards to the walls, usually with a fairly gentle slope. Thus it is a house with no gables or other vertical sides to the roof. A square hip roof is shaped like a pyramid. Hip roofs on the houses could have two triangular side...
, had two rear wings and featured diamond-paned glass windows. A garage and cottage were also located to the southwest.
Davis designed several similar Grecian country houses after 1835. A simplified version, with some Italianate
Italianate architecture
The Italianate style of architecture was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. In the Italianate style, the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Italian Renaissance architecture, which had served as inspiration for both Palladianism and...
features, appears in The Architecture of Country Houses, Andrew Jackson Downing
Andrew Jackson Downing
Andrew Jackson Downing was an American landscape designer, horticulturalist, and writer, a prominent advocate of the Gothic Revival style in the United States, and editor of The Horticulturist magazine...
's influential 1850 pattern book. Nut Grove is the only one known to survive.
The Walshes lived at Nut Grove until William died in 1863. His wife soon remarried to Robert Donaldson, who owned two other Davis houses downriver in Barrytown
Barrytown, New York
Barrytown is a hamlet within the town of Red Hook in Dutchess County, New York, United States. It is within the Hudson River Historic District, a National Historic Landmark, and comprises four of the Hudson River Valley estates: Edgewater, Messina, Rokeby, and Sylvania...
, one of which she moved into with him. Her nephew, Dudley Walsh, took over Nut Grove.
In the 1870s, Walsh sold it to Thomas McCarty, an Irish immigrant
Irish American
Irish Americans are citizens of the United States who can trace their ancestry to Ireland. A total of 36,278,332 Americans—estimated at 11.9% of the total population—reported Irish ancestry in the 2008 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau...
who had become a wealthy brickmaker. McCarty had served two terms on Albany's City Council before becoming a state assemblyman
New York State Assembly
The New York State Assembly is the lower house of the New York State Legislature. The Assembly is composed of 150 members representing an equal number of districts, with each district having an average population of 128,652...
. The city eventually annexed
Annexation
Annexation is the de jure incorporation of some territory into another geo-political entity . Usually, it is implied that the territory and population being annexed is the smaller, more peripheral, and weaker of the two merging entities, barring physical size...
the area around Nut Grove, and McCarty made two unsuccessful bids for mayor. He built a driveway connecting the property to South Pearl Street, the beginning of today's McCarty Avenue, and began to subdivide the property.
The house was purchased in 1902 by Eleanor Spensley, who had founded the Hospital for Incurables in downtown Albany
Downtown Albany Historic District
The Downtown Albany Historic District is a 19-block, area of Albany, New York, United States, centered around the junction of State and North and South Pearl streets . It is the oldest settled area of the city, originally planned and settled in the 17th century, and the nucleus of its later...
20 years earlier. She died two months later. For hospital purposes the roof was raised and dormer windows added.
In that form, the Hospital for Incurables continued operating in the house until 1973. After it was closed the two rear wings were demolished. It remained vacant, owned by the hospital, until sometime after it was listed on the Register in 1974 when the Addictions Care Center of Albany acquired the property. The roof was completely replaced with a flat roof and modern sliding windows were installed. It is now the Reilly House, a sober living environment
Sober living environment
Sober living environments are facilities used by addicts recovering from substance abuse, which serve as an interim environment between rehab and a return to their former lives. SLEs grew out of a need to have safe and supportive place for people to live while they were in recovery...
that can hold up to 12 men at a time.