Fonthill: A Castle In the Bronx

This beautiful castle is in New York City, in the Bronx neighborhood of Kingsbridge. This part of Kingsbridge is now technically in Riverdale. Its modern address is 6301 Riverdale Avenue at West 263rd Street.

Actor Edwin Forrest (1806-1872) purchased farmland overlooking the Hudson, in Kingsbridge, in 1847 and had this castle built for him to live in with his wife Catharine.

Forrest was a well-known Shakespearean actor who was also famous for the messy and sensational divorce case that he became embroiled in.I am going to write about the Forrest case in a future post - it has been in my to-do file for some time, and it was pure serendipity that I decided to write about this building.

Forrest named the property Fonthill, after writer William Beckford's Fonthill Abbey in England. Beckford (1760-1844) is best known for his Gothic novel Vathek (1786). The original Fonthill was nicknamed Beckford's Folly. Beckford lived there alone in one of the 12 bedrooms. The doors were 35' tall and it took 500 workers several years to build. Twice the 300' tower on the abbey collapsed and had to be rebuilt.

Forrest sold his Bronx Fonthill to the Sisters of Charity and the College of Mt. St. Vincent, in 1856. This was doubtless part of the fall-out of his divorce in 1850. In 1849, Edwin and Catherine separated and Forrest had moved back to his native Philadelphia.

Fonthill has been a beautiful part of the Mt. St. Vincent campus ever since 1856. In 1912 Stephen Jenkins wrote that it was being used as a combination chaplain's residence, library and museum.

The stereoscopic picture of Edwin Forrest's Fonthill is from NYPL Digital Gallery and dates from the 1860-1915 period. The Mathew Brady photograph of Edwin Forrest is from Wikipedia, as is the picture of Beckford's Fonthill.

Hermalyn, Gary and Robert Kornfeld. Landmarks of the Bronx (1989), p. 27.
Jenkins, Stephen. The Story of the Bronx (1912, 2007 ed.) p. 325.