westchester remembered
FROM PLOUGHSHARES TO GARDEN SHEARS A FOUNDER’S PROGENY BREAKS GROUND FOR WOMEN IN LANDSCAPE DESIGN by Suzanne Clary
ON DECEMBER 16, 2014, the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation announced a list of 100 built sites or projects spanning the last century considered the most impactful of their kind in the everyday life of New Yorkers. What all the entries shared – by design – was that their primary designers or stewards were women. Prominent undertakings like the Brooklyn Bridge and the restoration of Grand Central Terminal, cultural monuments like the African Burial Ground Interpretative Center, and public outdoor spaces including the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden and Woodlawn Cemetery, were just some of the outstanding enterprises nominated for consideration, born out of women’s leadership in the fields of architecture, landscape, engineering, and construction. The list announced by “Built by Women New York City” (BxW NYC) included Mary Rutherfurd Jay, (1872-1953) one of America’s earliest landscape architects and the subject of an upcoming exhibit at the Jay Estate in Rye. The scion of a venerable New York family, Mary’s father, Peter, died in 1875 of a brain hemorrhage when she was only three. Mary’s mother, then 8 months pregnant with her 4 th child, moved to Rye to live with in-laws. In the chaos that surely followed, Mary would recall growing up surrounded not just by a loving extended family of grandparents, aunts and cousins, but also a 400-acre backyard that included meadows, apple orchards, vine-covered arbors and “a sunken garden which covered an acre and a half, several hundred feet from the house.” No doubt inspired by the solace all this greenery provided, “M.R.,” as she became known, went to Massachusetts to study design and horticulture at MIT and Har- vard’s Bussey Institute in an era when there were exceedingly few men – let alone women – pursuing this emerging career. A small cadre of con- temporaries at the time included Ellen Biddle Shipman, Rose Standish Nichols and Beatrix Farrand. Mary studied classical and scientific theory
MARY RUTHERFURD JAY IN FARMERETTE UNIFORM
BELOW: PLEACHED LINDENS AND
PLAISANCE
BY M.R. JAY
AT I.N. PHELPS STOKE ESTATE IN GREENWICH, CT
and was exposed to ideas on urban renewal as well. Raised in a socially conscious fam- ily, one of Mary’s first papers on “Tenement Gardening,” published in 1905, observed that charities could help improve poor neighborhoods in Boston with the distribu- tion of clematis vines and nasturtium filled flowerboxes to immigrant families. Returning to New York, her first success- ful residential project as a “garden archi- tect” – her own term – was a “ plaisance ” or pleasure-ground with shrubs and trees. This
40 landscape projects from Long Island to Palm Beach for family and friends as no- table as New York housing reformer and architect I.N. Phelps Stokes, author of the monumental “The Iconography of Manhat- tan;” financiers William A. and William G. Rockefeller; Remington Arms President Samuel Pryor; and yachtsmen C. Oliver Is- elin and Henry R. Mallory. Her portfolio included commercial work too – a rarity for women at the time. In 1924 she designed a
roof garden for the New York Times Annex onWest 43 rd Street as part of its expansion in the French Renaissance style. She collaborated on the project with muralist and architect J. Alden Twachtman, son of the great impres- sionist and Cos Cob Colony painter, who customized a pergola for the
she created for her sister Laura at her home “Spring Farm” in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1907. This led to other estate commissions in exclusive Greenwich neighborhoods known today as Khakum Wood, Field Point Park and Circle, and Round Hill. Over the next 21 years, Jay drafted over
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