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Pre-Revolutionary House In Dire Disrepair Adds To List Of Houses Town Aims To Preserve: Future Use Remains Unknown
By Tina Traster
If you’ve driven by the corner of Storms Road and Kings Highway in Valley Cottage lately, you’ve noticed the pre-Revolutionary house known as “Storms Tavern” has been deteriorating for some time. The house, where George Washington has been said to visit, was sold to Tilcon Minerals Inc. two decades ago and used as a rental house.
Now, the mining company is donating the house at 407 Storms Road, which sits on 1.6 acres of land, to the Town of Clarkstown. On Tuesday, the town board will accept the donation through a formal resolution. The resolution says that “no change of use or activity is currently planned for this parcel.”
“I’m delighted that Tilcon is donating this historic house,” said Town Supervisor George Hoehmann. “Structurally, it is in good shape and we are going to protect and preserve it.” As for future use, the Supervisor said the town is exploring possibilities. “The roof is ten years old and the furnace is only four years old. The house mostly needs cosmetic work.”
The world of historic preservation is filled with good intentions – but breathing life into historic buildings, especially those with pedigree, requires a well-founded mission, funding, volunteers, and an ongoing vision.
The acquisition of the 1765 house adds to the town’s portfolio of historic properties. Also on Tuesday, the town approved authorization to bond $1,168,920 to finance the purchase of an historic parcel and farmhouse at 101 Old Route 304 in New City, known as the Peter Depew House. The total purchase of $2.9 million for the 1700s house situated on 32 acres is a joint purchase with the county through the Open Space Acquisition Program to ensure that this heritage-rich property continues to serve as a symbol of Rockland’s history and a resource for community engagement, according to a statement by Howard Hanna Rand Realty and Rand Commercial, which brokered the sale. The town and county plan to allow the Rockland Farm Alliance to use the property for farming.
Over the past three decades, Clarkstown has attempted to preserve historic properties, including the Cropsey Barn in New City, the Congers Train Station and the Traphagen and Budke House in West Nyack. In 2019, the town and county completed a $1.5 million renovation of the dilapidated 1796 New World Dutch barn on Little Tor Road, which is owned jointly by the county (61 percent) and the town (39 percent).
Historians agree it’s imperative to have a strong vision when towns acquire historic properties.
“Clarkstown has done a magnificent job of acquiring and maintaining properties,” said Rockland County historian Marianne Leese. “If Clarkstown can acquire Storms Tavern, that’s wonderful. The question is, what will they do with it?”
In 2021, in an update to Clarkstown’s Comprehensive Plan, it notes the “recent losses of some very important historic properties, and the near-loss of the Storms Tavern in Valley Cottage.”
The Traphagen and Budke houses in Clarkstown are used for seasonal festivals and other robust programming. “There are monthly activities in these houses,” said Hoehmann.
However, the Poor House, located in Clarkstown but owned by the Town of Ramapo, is a deteriorated relic that’s been sitting idle for years. Also, in 1990, Clarkstown acquired the Paul Farmhouse, which was restored in 1996. The Dutch farmhouse, circa 1881, mostly sits shuttered on Gilchrest Road.
Built by John Storms, the Storms Tavern was sold to Tilcon in 2005 for $492,500 and used as a rental property for its mining employees. The seller was Alison De Lima Greene, whose family owned the house for three generations. Today, Zillow estimates that the 1,872 square-foot house would sell for around $729,000.
The 407 Storms Road property has been paying $5,500 in property taxes to the town and county, and $8,100 to the Nyack School District.
Legend has it that the Continental Army forces once quartered here, backed their horses down Casper Hill to confuse the oncoming British and the make their own escape. Half a century later the house had became a way station on the Underground Railroad by which runaway slaves escaped to the north, according to New York Heritage.
Not much is known about the first century and a half about Storms Tavern except that is allegedly hosted George Washington and served as a store and tavern.
What we do know is that the house was purchased in and around the 1930s by a family of storied artists and writers that lived there for three generations.
Agnes de Lima was born in Hollywood, New Jersey, in 1887, and she grew up in Larchmont, New York, and New York City. Her family had emigrated from Curaçao and had become successful in banking. In 1904, de Lima went to Vassar College, where she participated in the Progressive Era by campaigning to raise the wages of maids and drifted away from her family’s conservative beliefs. She became active in reform movements and feminism. De Lima went on to write on education for The New Republic and Nation journal and received a master’s degree in 1912 from the New York School of Social Work (now part of Columbia University).
Her only daughter Sigrid de Lima and her husband Stephen Greene, an abstract painter, moved into the house in the late 1950s. She died in 1974. The notable artists, who hosted a list of Who’s Who in the art world, called the Storms Tavern the “Wisteria Cottage.”
When the Greenes moved into the Valley Cottage house, they found many kindred spirits among the loosely knit community of artists and writers who had also made their homes in Rockland County, including Jasper Johns and “Irascible” Richard Pousette-Dart. The writer Harvey Swados and his wife Bette, an editor, were immediate neighbors and close friends through much of the 1960s. Other close friends of the Greenes included artist Eugene Powell and his wife Neva (an educator), printmaker Sylvia Roth, MoMA curator Mildred Constantine, and mystery writer Dorothy Davis and her husband, actor Harry Davis.
Sometimes the guests were Stephen’s students, sometimes close family friends, including art world friends like Dore Ashton, Barbara Rose, Martica Sawin and John Yau. The painter Anne Poor (step-daughter of Reality editor Henry Varnum Poor) was a life-long friend and often shared the Greenes’ Thanksgiving dinner. Other times, they entertained more notable, or soon to be notable, personages, including Andy Warhol, who was not yet famous.
Sigrid de Lima earned an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University in 1944. After graduating, she worked for the United Press, and as a freelance journalist until she began writing fiction full-time in 1948. She wrote five novels, but stopped writing in the late 1960s after her last work received a mediocre review.
Stephen Greene, born in New York City, attended the National Academy School of Art and then the Art Students League, and earned a BFA and a MA at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He studied with Philip Guston, and they remained friends until Guston’s death in 1980.
Greene taught at Princeton University for many years where he was teacher to many well-known figures in the art world including Frank Stella and art critic and historian Michael Fried. After the mid-1950s and until his death Greene’s mature work was related to abstract expressionism, color field painting and surrealism. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Tate Gallery in London. He died aged 82 in November 1999 at his home in Valley Cottage, the Storms Tavern. Sigrid de Lima has died two months earlier.
Their daughter, Alison de Lima Greene, is a curator at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and has published a number of works on modern art. Her departure from the Storms Tavern ended a legacy.
Now it is up to Clarkstown to create a new chapter for the house.
