Afternoon Tea at the Claremont Inn

This beautiful inn is long gone, but in the 1930s the Claremont still stood at Riverside Drive and 125th Street, just opposite Grant's Tomb. According to Helen Worden in This Is New York (1939), you could have lunch or afternoon tea on the terrace overlooking the Hudson River, and it was a lovely place "although it lost much if its charm when the interior was altered" (p. 167).

The house was built in 1797 by the Post family.Worden writes that the Claremont stood on the site of the Battle of Harlem Heights, fought in September 1776 during the Revolution. And it was here that people gathered to watch Robert Fulton's famous steamboat make its maiden voyage down the Hudson. Worden also notes that Joseph Bonaparte, "the mournful exiled heir to the French throne," spent the final years of his life here, too.

Lossing says that among the residents of the house was Viscount Courtenay, later Earl of Devon, in the early 19th century. Worden writes that the nearby "Grave of an Amiable Child" was the grave of Courtenay's illegitimate child. However, it is the grave of St. Claire Pollock, who fell to his death off the cliffs into the Hudson in July 1797. Roadside America notes that it is one of only three private gravesites in Manhattan (the other two are Grant's Tomb and the grave of William J. Worth at Broadway and 25th Street).

The Claremont had become an inn by the early 1860s. There were lovely formal gardens with arbors and pavilions, according to Benson Lossing's The Hudson (1866), quoted in Arthur G. Adams' The Hudson (1981): "...Jones' Claremont Hotel [is] a fashionable place of resort for the pleasure-seekers who frequent the Bloomingdale and Kingsbridge roads on pleasant afternoons. At such times it is often thronged with visitors, and presents a lovely appearance."

James Rian wrote about the pleasures of dining here in 1930's Dining In New York. Although Rian writes that it was by then "the lonesomest place in New York," it was one of New York's finest French restaurants. One could have "perfect planked steak" and "the most marvelous Turtle Soup L'Anglaise" and "a special Claremont Inn interpretation of Salmon Steak en Gelee that would inspire awe in a robot." Or one could simply have profiteroles and lemonade. One dined out on the "broad ample veranda" facing the river and "watch[ed] snooty little tugs puff up and down the river, dodging in an out among a perfect maze of ferries, battleships and square-riggers in the coastal lumber service."

According to Nathan Silver in Lost New York (2000) the inn was "burned and demolished" (p. 59) by the City in 1951; Silver doesn't say why, but I suspect that there was no very good reason for the destruction of this beautiful building. They did, however, put up a commemorative tablet at Claremont Playground the following year. It hardly seems like a fair trade, though.

Photograph of the Claremont is from the NYPL Digital Gallery. Also see here at Morningside Heights.net.

Adams, Arthur G. The Hudson: A Guide to the River (New York: SUNY Press, 1981)  [he quotes the Lossing book on p. 374]
Rian, James. Dining in New York (orig. pub.1930, 2007 Rian Press reprint) p. 136.
Silver, Nathan. Lost New York (Mariner Books, 2000).
Worden, Helen. This Is New York (Doubleday and Doran, 1939).