Jones's Wood

Today, the site of Jones's Wood is part of Lenox Hill, in the present-day Upper East Side of New York City.

On that southeast portion of his father-in-law's property, Peter Schermerhorn, soon after his marriage, had first inhabited the modest villa overlooking the river at the foot of today's 67th Street.

They at once moved into the handsomer Hardenbrook house looking onto the river at the foot of East 64th Street;[7] there he remained, his wife having died on April 28, 1845.

[9] Intermittent editorials in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune and William Cullen Bryant's Post had offered rosy images of rural Jones's Wood.

[11] When the Joneses and Schermerhorns proved reluctant to part with the property, Beekman introduced a bill into the state Senate to authorize the city to appropriate the land by eminent domain.

[15]: 452–453 [16] In any case, the Jones and Schemerhorn heirs subsequently brought a lawsuit and successfully obtained an injunction to block the acquisition, and the bill was later invalidated as unconstitutional.

[22] The dispute peaked in mid-1853 when Beekman and Morgan presented competing bills that respectively advocated for Jones's Wood and Central Park.

Unlike the 1851 act, Beekman's amended bill would not take property assessments into consideration, which was seen as a move to retain support from neighboring landowners.

Jones's Wood became the resort of working-class New Yorkers in the 1860s and 70s, who disembarked from excursion steamers and arrived by the horsecars and then by the Second Avenue Railroad, to enjoy beer, athletics, patriotic orations and rowdy entertainments that were banned by the prim regulations of the city's new Central Park.

[28] Valentine Mager, the proprietor, pointedly advertised in The New York Times on April 25, 1858, that his grounds (enlarged by additional leases from Joneses and Schermerhorns) were "on the whole, the only place on the Island where a person can enjoy or make himself comfortable.

Thomas Francis Meagher's address to the "Monster Irish Festival" at Jones's Wood on August 29, 1861, was memorable enough for excerpts to be printed among inspiring exemplars of oratory in Beadle's Dime Patriotic Speaker (1863, p. 55).

The northern section of the Louvre Farm, as the families still termed it, from 69th to 75th Streets,[30] was divided into lots in 1855, advertised to the public as part of the "beautiful property so well known as Jones's Wood" and sold for residential development.

[32] Several proprietors succeeded to the leases of the amusement park, and John F. Schultheis, who had purchased some Schermerhorn lots outright, erected his "Colisseum" about 1874.

[35] "Jones's Wood, the general and inclusive term for the neighborhood, was razed by fire in 1894", Hopper Striker Mott recorded in 1917.