House & Garden 
another’s share of the natural beauties about 
them, and for the benefit of good roads, with 
a few other advantages, but not banded 
together primarily for social intercourse or to 
enforce customs or opinions upon their 
fellow residents. 'This freedom is reflected 
in the fact that the park has existed without 
a central resort or club house of any kind, 
and with not even an official place for the 
annual meeting. In laying out the grounds, 
Haskell and his coadjutors provided only 
one place where a community building might 
stand. That, as the map shows, was in the 
upper end of the Ramble. The same element 
that has proposed to make a separate borough 
of Llewellyn has suggested erectinga club house 
and developing a more centralized club life. 
At the lower intersection of Park Way and 
Oak Bend, were once found the remains of 
the old house of Anthony Oliff, the first 
settler in this region, whose coming, tradition 
says, dated back to 1678. One of the most 
characteristic early houses of the park now 
stands there. It is an English Gothic 
wooden structure, of two stories, with a large 
central and two subordinate gables, and is 
now owned by Mr. William E. Garrison. The 
central gable forms the pointed roof of an 
unexpectedly large room, used by Edward 
W. Nichols, for whom the house was built, 
as a studio for landscape painting. The 
architect was Alexander J. Davis, one of 
whose better known works was the group of 
old college buildings on University Place, 
New York. This house is on comparatively 
level ground, and opposite, in the Ramble, 
an old dam across the stream has been re¬ 
stored by a neighboring resident, for winter 
skating and the added coolness it affords in 
summer. 
Two newer houses have been built in this 
same district, one of which remodeled by 
Percy Griffin from an earlier square structure, 
is shown here as an example of the later de¬ 
velopment of Llewellyn Park architecture. 
This house is particularly lavish in its piazza 
spaces, which face the east and command a 
distant view toward New York. What the 
near view from a lower level of the park em¬ 
braces mav be observed from a lawn of the 
old Auchincloss place, half way between the 
Ramble and Eagle Rock Road, the northern 
boundary of the park. Here is one of the 
few instances of the cutting away of trees in 
order to gain a vista and a prospect. The 
city of Orange, with St. John’s Church the 
prominent feature, is near at hand. 
Fronting on Mountain Avenue, and ex¬ 
tending to the crest of the ridge, is the 
O. D. Munn place, in which is a much too 
rare attempt to use formally a natural feature 
of the park. In the rear of the homely 
dwelling, and reaching nearly to the out¬ 
cropping ledge of rock, is a series of rather 
too narrow terraces, with flower beds and 
summer-houses. From the Munn resi¬ 
dence, looking upward, a curtain of trees and 
underbrush almost shuts out the ridge. 
From the small pavilion, the view is magni¬ 
ficent, the eye sweeping across the distant 
Newark Meadows to New York and Staten 
Island. Here one can best imagine the 
mood that seized upon Llewellyn Haskell, 
when he saw this, fifty years ago ; this alone 
would explain the birth of the project that 
has matured as Llewellyn Park. 
A RESIDENCE AT LLEWELLYN PARK 
335 
