“Cliff Notes” is the visitors’ letter for the Palisades Interstate Park in New Jersey. Published occasionally since 1998, each issue has featured a story about the human or natural history of the Palisades.
Cliff Dale Parts 1 & 2
by Eric Nelsen | November 2007 & January 2008
Part 1
For most hikers familiar with the trails in the park, the signature former Palisades estate would have to be George A. Zabriskie’s “Cliff Dale.” The imposing, two-story gray stone ruins of the manor house foundation — built in 1911, the upper floors torn down by the WPA in 1939 — still loom along the Long Path about half a mile north of Alpine Lookout. (The ruins are hidden from motorists on the Parkway for most of the year, only to emerge like a ghost castle flickering into view for a moment or two as they speed by once the leaves have fallen.) Stone columns are scattered among the trees that are growing from the scalp of the ruins. At the feet of the ruins is a declivity in the cliff top in which hikers can still trace the outlines of a man-made pond, overgrown with brambles and vines.
Yet Zabriskie’s was not the first estate to be built at this site, roughly opposite Hillside Avenue in what would become the town of Alpine by 1911. An earlier incarnation of “Cliff Dale” had its tale related in Walker’s Atlas of Bergen County from 1876. That article is reprinted in its entirety here.
CLIFF DALE
The subject of our artist’s sketch on page 98, and the residence of W. C. Baker, Esq. (appropriately named from the peculiar combination of cliff and dale which makes the grounds so grandly beautiful), is situated on the border of the Palisades, overlooking the Hudson, fifteen miles from the City Hall in New York, directly opposite the city of Yonkers, and a little more than a mile from Cresskill Village, a station on the Northern Railroad. The beauty of the scenery and views from the grounds is simply grand. Plainly visible to the naked eye are Long Island and the Sound, and the different railroads winding between them and the observer. The top of the Palisades at this point is about five hundred feet above tidewater.
Mr. Baker’s first purchase here was made in 1871, since which he has purchased adjoining lands, adding to the beauty and value of his original grounds thereby.
Springs abound on the place, one in particular being strongly tinctured with iron and sulphur. From these springs, by means of steam apparatus, water is forced to all parts of the grounds, supplying houses, barns, and ponds, as well as for irrigation, and providing a sufficient supply for two beautiful fountains, the water from which forms the handsome little lake shown in the picture, and running from thence falls, broken into foam and spray, hundreds of feet to the river below. Mr. Baker also manufactures his own gas, which (with the water facilities and other conveniences) gives him all the advantages in that line to be derived from a residence in the city. Mr. Baker was born in the State of Maine, in the year 1828, and his attention was early called to the subject of heating and ventilating buildings. He has obtained patents on many different inventions of his own, the most important of which is the hot-water heater used in railroad coaches, both in this country and in Europe. He became so eminently successful with his inventions regulating heat that he was led to undertake the artificial hatching of eggs by producing and maintaining a heat corresponding exactly to that produced by the body of the fowls. It required the finest possible regulating medium to keep the heat just right, and Mr. Baker met with many disheartening failures in his experiments, all appliances known to the scientific world for testing temperature failing to be delicate enough for the work. This would have discouraged most men, but Mr. Baker, relying upon his own inventive genius, supplied the want, and now, by the aid of gas to produce the heat, and electricity to test and control it, he has made the “incubator” a perfect success. The present hatching capacity is about 200,000 eggs per year. Every egg is hatched with the precision and regularity of clock-work, and the chickens are removed to the breeding-house, which is also made to answer the purpose of a green-house, and is warmed by means of hot water contained in galvanized iron tanks, connected with which are cylinders of the same material, which run through the coops or pens on either side, and about two inches from the ground. These pipes or cylinders are wrapped in flannel, and the little chicks crawl under them, and evidently find them an admirable substitute for the mother hen
Heat from the pipes also warms the plants arranged on the shelves through the centre of the building, which is thirty by one hundred and fifty feet. Once each day the chickens are given cooked food. When three weeks old they are removed to other coops with cooler temperature. The hennery is a low building eight hundred feet in length, subdivided into numerous coops, each ten by twenty feet, and each provided with nests convenient to the passage-way, along which is laid an iron track with a small car used for carrying food and gathering eggs.
Among the different breeds of fowls [,] White Leghorns are preferred for market, and the Black Spanish for laying. Mr. Baker has demonstrated to the world that notwithstanding the numerous failures in this and other countries, hatching and rearing fowls by artificial heat is both practicable and profitable.
In a future story, we will chronicle the second incarnation of “Cliff Dale.” But we felt it important to set the scene with this account of Mr. Baker — and his “Cliff Dale,” that remarkable place where some 200,000 chickens a year once came home to roost…
Part 2
In the Park Commission’s Annual Report for 1939, two pages are devoted to the accomplishments of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the park that year, ending with, “The razing of the Zabriskie house on the edge of the cliffs in Alpine, one of the properties conveyed to the Commission by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was partly completed. This is one of the buildings visible from the river that has had to be demolished in compliance with the terms of the gift, with a view to the preservation of the skyline of the Palisades.”
Rockefeller had purchased this particular piece of property in 1930. In 1933 he donated it, along with many similar properties he’d acquired around the same time, to the Park Commission, with the request that the Palisades skyline be returned to its natural appearance. This was in response to fears that the construction of the George Washington Bridge, which opened in 1931, would lead to a spate of over-development on the cliff top, marring the Park Commission’s thus-far successful efforts to preserve the Palisades scenery.
And so the mansions fell.
Except, this particular mansion, once the largest on the cliffs, did not fall so easily. A sizable piece of it, seven decades later, is still standing. Built into a hillside, the southern portion is two stories tall; north of that, the WPA crew must have finally decided to use the basement as a containment vessel for the thick-walled upper stories they toppled. Around the west side of the foundations, in numerals formed by stone and mortar, about two feet tall, is a date:
1911
George Albert Zabriskie was forty-two years old in 1911, the scion of a family tree that traced its New World roots back to August 1662, when 24-year-old “Albert Saboriski,” probably of Prussian or Silesian descent and seemingly traveling alone, first stepped off D’Vos (The Fox) at the docks at New Amsterdam. Albert would eventually cross the Hudson into New Jersey. The family he began there would become among the most prominent in Bergen County by the time of the Revolution. Throughout the nineteenth century, the family continued to grow and flourish. George A. Zabriskie was born to a branch of the family that had re-crossed the Hudson to live in New York City. By the time he was supervising the construction of a cliff-top summer estate in Alpine — his year-round residence was on Central Park South — Zabriskie had made a name for himself in the flour business, serving as the New York representative for the Minneapolis-based Pillsbury flour mills.
The fifteen-room manor house that was built for Zabriskie at Alpine in 1911 was constructed of native stone on a 25-acre estate that had once belonged to William C. Baker, an innovator in using steam heat to artificially incubate chicken eggs. (Over 200,000 chickens a year were hatched in buildings on Baker’s estate). In addition to the manor house, Zabriskie had a gate house built on the Boulevard (today’s U.S. Route 9W), where he and an aunt, who lived with him for many years, stayed during the construction of the manor house. In the natural hollow to the south of the manor house was a man-made pond. Terraced gardens adorned the cliff edge to the east. On the other side of the road were cottages, greenhouses, a barn, and other buildings (the Alpine Public School stands on these grounds today). Zabriskie kept the name that Baker had assigned to the estate, “Cliff Dale” (though he usually spelled it as one word, “Cliffdale”).
During World War I, Zabriskie was named sugar and flour administrator of the Food Administration Board under Herbert Hoover and a member of the United States Sugar Equalization Board. As noted in the New York Times, “His wartime and post-war work on behalf of the welfare of America’s allies won him the awards of the Belgian Order of the Crown, the Polish Polonia Restituta Cross, and the Order of Icelandic Falcon.”
But his true passion was for American history and historic preservation. A member of the Sons of the American Revolution, Zabriskie would go on to become a president of the New York Historical Society. From the Times again: “Active in patriotic societies and civic affairs of New York, [Zabriskie] was chairman of the membership committee of the Museum of the City of New York. He often fought to prevent the destruction by city planners of historical landmarks, such as the old Fort Clinton in Brooklyn.”
Zabriskie wrote a number of books, some of them self-published, on topics ranging from polar exploration to early Dutch Christmas traditions to The Bon Vivant’s Companion, a guide to mixing cocktails.
After he sold his Alpine estate to a real estate agent working for Rockefeller, George Zabriskie continued to lead an active life, pursuing his many and eclectic interests. He was eighty-five years old when he died at his winter home at Ormond Beach, Florida, at the start of 1954.
Today, the ruins of his cliff-top estate continue to captivate and intrigue hikers.