Jones's Wood

Jones's Wood was a block of farmland on the island of Manhattan overlooking the East River that has left some vestigial mark on the present-day Upper East Side of New York City. The farm of 132 acres (53 ha), known by its 19th-century owners as the Louvre Farm, extended from the Old Boston Post Road (approximating the course of Third Avenue) to the river and from present-day 66th Street to 75th Street. It was purchased from the heirs of David Provoost (died 1781) by the successful innkeeper and merchant John Jones, to provide himself a country seat near New York. The Provoost house, which Jones made his seat, stood near the foot of today's 67th Street. After his death the farm was divided into lots among his children. His son James retained the house and its lot. His daughter Sarah, who had married the shipowner and merchant Peter Schermerhorn on April 5, 1804, received Division 1, nearest to the city. On that southeast portion of his father-in-law's property, Peter Schermerhorn, soon after his marriage, had first inhabited the modest villa overlooking the river at the foot of today's 67th Street.

In 1818 Peter Schermerhorn purchased the adjoining property to the south from the heirs of John Hardenbrook's widow Ann, and adding it to his wife's share of the Jones property—from which it was separated by Schermerhorn Lane leading to the Hardenbrook burial vault overlooking the river at 66th Street—named his place Belmont Farm. They at once moved into the handsomer Hardenbrook house looking onto the river at the foot of East 64th Street; there he remained, his wife having died on April 28, 1845. The frame house survived into the age of photography, as late as 1911. It survived an 1894 fire that swept Jones's Wood almost clear and remained while the first building of The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, now Rockefeller University, was erected to its south. The block of riverfront property now occupied by Rockefeller University is the largest remaining piece of Jones's Wood. The house was razed after 1903.

After 1850 Jones's Wood entered the broader history of New York when suggestions for setting aside a large public park, which was eventually to result in the creation of Central Park, lit first on the wooded Jones/Schermerhorn estate on the East River. Intermittent editorials in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune and William Cullen Bryant's Post had offered rosy images of rural Jones's Wood. State senator James Beekman, who had a share in the grand Federal-style Beekman house between today's 63rd and 64th Streets that abutted the modest Hardenbrook-Schermerhorn villa, lobbied the city aldermen in 1850, and a resolution was duly passed in 1851 to acquire the Jones's Wood property, which, the New York Herald said, "would form a kind of Hyde Park for New York".

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