Riverdale Music School

Riverdale Music SchoolLocation: 5260 Fieldston Road (West 253 Street At Post Road). Block: 5836, Lot:3127.

Status: Heard on 02/09/1982; 04/13/1982 and  on 1/5/1993  as Joseph Bicknell Residence (now part of the Riverdale Country School), LP-1281.  It was decalendared via a no action motion.

Description from the Bronx Survey

The Riverdale Music School at Post Road and West 255rd Street is hou:.ed in the Gothic Revival homestead of the Joseph I, Bicknell family. Bicknell, a Manhattan printer, moved to Riverdale in 1872. Although an 1872 map shows the two and one-half story building standing on Bicknell ‘s estate, the house may in fact predate the Civil War. In 1910 the Bicknell estate was rented by the Riverdale Country Day School; the residence served as the main school building until 1917.

The house was moved in 1924 and placed on a new stone foundation. By 192S an area of the hillside was leveled to form a football field and track behind a tall stone retaining wall along the Post Road. The basement of the school served as a locker room until 1960 when a new gymnasium was constructed.

The upper stories have housed at various times the grade school, administrative offices, laboratories and the Music School. The Music School, a quasi-independent unit of the Riverdale Country Day School , currently occupies most of the building . The Riverdale Music School is a two and one-half story frame Gothic Revival house with a peaked roof that is pierced by the steeply pitched gable of a projecting oriel over the central entrance. Overhanging eaves are supported by jigsawn brackets and are ornamented with baseboards.

A tall, one-story porch with brackets and posts. that form Tudor arches under the entablature extends across the full width of the building. A low spindle railing surrounds the porch. Windows have heavy central muntins. The door enframement is particularly fine with a Tudor arch and twin transom lights over a double, two-panelled door. Although the Music School building has been re–sided and extensions have been built over the years, it retains both the character and details of a Gothic Revival country house.

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