Historic Home Lost to Urban Renewal: "Cedar Lawn"

The first major undertaking in Beacon's Urban Renewal program was the Forrestal Heights Housing Project. In 1966, between South Avenue and Dinan Street, a handful of handsome old homes on Wolcott Avenue were seized and razed, among them a dilapidated, bulging, made-over apartment house once known as "Cedar Lawn."

Cedar Lawn had belonged to one of New York's most famous physicians of the nineteenth century . He was Dr. Egbert Guernsey: journalist, philanthropist, founder of two hospitals, and New York's most noted doctor of homeopathy. Dr. Guernsey (1823-1903) would escape his busy Fifth Avenue practice to come to his Georgian mansion summer home with its accompanying 12 acres in Fishkill Landing (now Beacon) for more than fifty years. The doctor's hefty presence (he weighed over 400 pounds!) often was seen riding in his carriage about the streets of Fishkill Landing, off to assist those in need regardless of their station in life.

This quality of mercy shown by Dr. Guernsey was not lost on one his literary friends, the writer Bret Harte who is best known for his fictional stories of California's Gold Rush miners. But in his short story, "The Man Whose Yoke Was Not Easy," Harte based the main character on Guernsey, describing his fictional doctor (that is, Guernsey) as a "man who, through his long contact with suffering, had acquired universal tenderness and breadth of kindly philosophy; a man who devoted the greater part of his life to the alleviation of sorrow and suffering, whose face was as kindly, whose touch was as gentle in the wards of great hospitals as it was beside the laced curtains of the dying Narcissa."

Cedar Lawn was located about where the Forrestal Heights  highrise is today. By about the 1950s and 1960s, the house was no longer a private residence, the landlord having chopped the mansion into apartments, a shell of its former grandeur.