William Van Duzer Lawrence
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Van Duzer Lawrence (1842-1927) was a millionaire real-estate and pharmaceutical mogul who is best known for having founded Sarah Lawrence College in 1926. He was instrumental in the development of Bronxville, New York[1], a wealthy suburb fifteen miles north of New York City, where he established the coveted Lawrence Park neighborhood in addition to Bronxville's Lawrence Hospital. He is buried at the Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
Contents |
[edit] Activities in Bronxville
[edit] Early Construction and Development
The construction of the Harlem Line, a light rail network running northward from Manhattan's Grand Central Station to Dutchess County, opened up Westchester County, just north of New York City, to the possibility of living outside of New York while still being able to make a daily commute for work. Lawrence took advantage of what he saw as the likelihood of an expolsion of growth in Westchester County and, in 1890, purchased a large track of land in and around Bronxville that formerly served as a farm belonging to early Bronxville settler James Prescott. Lawrence divided the land into dramatically situated, rocky parcels that were connected by carefully designed, winding roads that were meant to render impossible any noisy truck traffic. The area grew quickly, and a number of Italianate, Tudor style, and Romanesque Revival estates were seen as early as the late 1890s.
[edit] Lawrence Hospital
Just after the turn of the century, William Lawrence's son, Dudley, nearly died of pneumonia while en route to a hospital in New York City. William Lawrence realized that Westchester County needed a hospital of its own, and in 1909 he founded Lawrence Hospital in downtown Bronxville. Now a 280-bed acute care facility, it is one of the oldest still-operating hospitals in the region.
[edit] Sarah Lawrence College
Originally intended to serve as a women's college where the children of New York's aristocracy could learn to take their place in polite society, Sarah Lawrence has changed enormously since its founding in 1926. Named for Lawrence's wife, Sarah Bates Lawrence, the College was situated on Lawrence's former estate, known as Westlands. William Lawrence's son, Dudley, supervised the construction of a number of purpose-built cfacilities for the College, which was to be situated around the former Lawrence family manor, a breathtaking and enormous building constructed in the Tudor style in 1917. Now widely regarded as one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the nation, Sarah Lawrence has expanded its campus to occupy 41 acres in Bronxville, Yonkers, and Lawrence Park, and it is currently the home of over 1,300 graduate and undergraduate students.
[edit] References
- Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993 (2nd edition).
- Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: the Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985
