Hemlock Castle on the market for $9.85M
GREENWICH — Few homes in Greenwich are as rich in history as Hemlock Castle.
It was built in 1913 for a direct descendant of General Israel Putnam, the local hero of the Revolutionary War, who shared the same name. It was later owned by the man who sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. The home was the site of a 1927 birthday party for the scandal-ridden mayor of New York City. One of the wealthiest men in America, a former newsboy from Chicago who rose from poverty to become “a modern Horatio Alger,”
also lived there.
But it’s also about the architecture: The old stone
castle looks like it might have been transported from a Jane Austen novel to the rocky cliffs of Greenwich.
“The architecture is spectacular,” says John McAtee, the co-listing agent for the property. “It’s Tudor, Elizabethan, very English. But very light and approachable on the inside.”
The dimensions are fitting for a castle, with over 4 acres of grounds. The estate boasts 20,000 square feet of space, with a 13,500-squarefoot main residence with eight bedrooms and a 3,400-square-foot carriage house with three to four bedrooms along with garage parking for five cars and a tennis court.
The house, originally called Freestone Castle, was
designed by James C. Green, a prominent architect who worked on large-scale office buildings in New York and Chicago as well as several other “castles” in Greenwich. The home at 17 Hemlock Drive in central Greenwich was part of the Edgewood Park Land Co., a development that aimed to replicate the style of gracious country living of the English tradition in a southern Connecticut setting, complete with its own golf course.
Israel Putnam was the first owner of the castle, which was later acquired by Harry H. Frazee, a theater producer who owned the Boston Red Sox. Frazee, who died in 1929, is reviled to this day in Boston for trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919 for $100,000.
“It might be a great house for a Yankees fan,” McAtee said dryly. Frazee was good friends with the high-living and nattily attired mayor of New York City, Jimmy Walker, and threw him a big birthday bash at the estate.
In 1928, the home passed to Archie Moulton Andrews, who once hawked newspapers in front of the Chicago Herald as a teenager. An enormously successful businessman in real estate and the automobile industry, Andrews later bought the Herald building, according to obituary notices, and he was often described as a true-to-life Horatio Alger figure. Andrews bought the yacht Sialia from Henry Ford, and it was a wellknown sight at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich. It carried a crew of 32 sailors.
The sale price for Hemlock Castle was $300,000, a vast sum in those days, and Andrews lived at the residence with his wife, Eleanor, until his death at the home in 1938.
The home was extensively renovated in the 1990s by Patrick and Sandra Portier. Patrick Portier was the head of a company that imported fine wines and luxury foods. The house was subdivided into four condominiums for a time, and it was later reestablished as a single family home, now owned by the Fong family. The “main residence” boasts 13,500 square feet, and there are two additional residential spaces of 3,500 square feet that once housed servants’ quarters.
At the main residence, there is a wealth of architectural details, both inside and out.
“Beautiful curved limestone friezes in the ceiling,” McAtee said. “And outside, little vignettes everywhere that tell a little story. Every time I’m here I see something new.” The terracotta chimney pots on the roof of the structure are all decorated in a distinctively different style, for instance, and the gabled roof catches the light and creates shadows in interesting ways.
The house is set beside a formal garden and a well-conceived landscape design. “The grounds are extraordinary: a formal garden, walled, mature trees, a reflecting pool, and Chinese maples, very rare, they look like they’ve been here 100 years,” said McAtee. Inside the house, which sits atop a hill, the trees swaying in the breeze convey a sense of being high inside a wooded glade.
“It’s really unique in its scale, and functionality with today’s lifestyle,” said McAtee, calling it an architectural treasure “hidden in plain sight.”
The property is listed for sale through the New England Land Company at $9.85 million.