Westchester Real Estate 2012: Ossining Best Place for Architecture Admirers

Architecture aficionados won’t find any place in the county much better for looking and learning than the Village of Ossining, which is home to more than 270 years’ worth of historic sites and structures—and some from as far back as the early 17th-century arrival of the Dutch. You can also count on them being there in the future—large swaths of Ossining have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The village offers something from every era and style. The Downtown Historic District is chock full of Victorian-era commercial buildings. Five historic churches built between 1834 and 1885 are an encyclopedia of Gothic Revival. In the south are the houses of the historic Sparta neighborhood, a trove of intact, Federal-style structures.
Some of the other architectural highlights include Moorehaven, a home built circa 1740 as a rural Dutch farmhouse, later remodeled in the Gothic Revival style in the 1850s, and updated in Shingle style in 1880. Less esoteric, but just as architecturally significant, is a Sears Roebuck kit house constructed around 1929 on Liberty Street, one of several in the village.
Fans of the Italianate style—with its square cupola, low-pitched roof, and decorative window crowns—will enjoy the Crotonville School Building, which dates to around 1860. Hamilton Avenue has some of the best preserved examples of late 19th-century Victorian architecture in the county.

The best example of 1930s art deco in the village is the First National Bank and Trust Company building downtown. Also built in the 20th century is the I.R. Williams House, built in the American Craftsman style in 1914—the architect of which was none other than Gustav Stickley.

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For something modern, check out the Ossining Public Library, which opened its new building in 2007. It’s not only a stunning structure; it uses the earth’s constant temperature below the frost line to heat and cool the airy, 47,000-square-foot building using a unique geothermal system.

Calvary Baptist Church, formerly St. Paul’s Espiscopal Church, the oldest church in Ossining, dating from
the 1830s.

Highland Cottage

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General Edwin McAlpin’s house, called “Hillside”

First Baptist Church of Ossining

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Victorian buildings on Main Street

The 1843 Kane Mansion

 

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