Rich People, Part 2

The Twerys

Former Rockefeller Mansion, Tarrytown, NY  

An essay by Dr. Lloyd Sederer

You could ride a bicycle around the giant kitchen table. Not one from La Tour de France, I grant you, but a bike with two wheels (and white sidewall tires).  I swear it because I remember getting yelled at for doing just that.

The table’s massive bulk surely must have weighed a ton because three 9-year-old boys straining enough to risk a hernia could not budge it. It sat impassively at the center of the kitchen, with shiny copper pots and pans hanging above the wood monstrosity, ready as clubs (I imagined) to pound onto the skull of any fool of an intruder to the Twery mansion in Tarrytown, New York.

The Twery Estate was right next to where the Rockefellers had their mansion and estate. The Rockefellers! American nobility!

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The estate’s massive grounds displayed tiers of lawns, sloping down to the swimming pool and further to the clay tennis court, both fenced in but with easy access to boys who knew where the keys were stowed. For a few summers, my cousin Steve and I were occasionally brought there by our mothers, Muriel and Harriet (respectively), closely knit sisters, who were first cousins and friends since childhood with Ethel, the Twery heir, who often stayed at the estate – no need to go on vacation, I suppose. There were a lot of bedrooms, I don’t recall counting. Ethel had a husband, but I don’t think I ever saw him; he would have reason to secrete himself from boys who did not read the WSJ. The three mothers liked each other a lot, I could tell by how much they laughed. Perfect for boys who wanted their mothers occupied with anything but them.

One of the 3 cousins (not me or Steve) had a single seat motorized car, a scaled down version of a racing car, like those in The Indy 500. He would drive it about the estate’s long, serpentine, paved paths which served no purpose except for a boy who would not let his cousins drive the car, no less sit in it. 

The tennis court was off-limits to we boys. We never figured out why (or abided by the prohibition) since we didn’t know how to play, and if we scuffed the clay with our sneakers, it would be promptly broomed by an out of sight but nearby man every time we exited the gate. The pool had a high metal fence, which was unnecessary since we were Jewish boys not known for aquatics.

At the periphery of the open land - before the woods took over – was a jungle of plantings, including more purple rhododendrons than I had ever seen, even in the Bronx (my borough) Botanical Gardens. Backing up the rhodos was an army of Arbor Vitae, rising so high that, when near, my 9-year-old neck could not sufficiently extend to see their pinnacle.

Beyond the Rockefeller and Twery Estates was Sleepy Hollow, NY, where a headless horseman, in need of a head, would have yours if you wandered off the Twery Estate without your mother or other protective adult.

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The home, aka the mansion, towered from the high point of the property; it must have invited 1-word pronouncements like “ostentatious” and “pretentious”, or “magnificent” and “spectacular”, depending on the viewer. The mansion and its vast, obsessively designed and tended property surely served the purpose of displaying wealth, not only to a child.

The 19^th C. mansion itself was a massive stone fortress; formidable, fit to repel barbarians. Its dark grey slate roof sat atop two high ceiled stories, and the attic. The kitchen, pantry, laundry room, mud room, and servants’ quarters were on the ground floor, below the entrance.

Inside the mansion, we boys were first drawn to the attic, though, at first too scared to ascend to its dangers.  When we finally determined to advance up the stairs, each steeled himself, not wanting the others to know his fear. Only to be disappointed at the end of our climb. There were glass casement windows that opened on their sides that allowed ample daylight to reveal heaps of antediluvian furniture too broken and peeling, to which Good Will would kindly say, no thanks; and piles and piles of collapsing cardboard boxes so dusty we could write our initials on them with our young fingers.

We mansion detectives concluded that the cachectic bodies of the mansion’s living dead, intent on subjecting children to unspeakable acts, must be in the basement, surely a perfect set for a Stephen King film.

But the tale of the perilous investigation of the basement by nine-year-old adventurers, equipped with weapons (not unlike what would be carried by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars), awaits another story, as I will soon exceed my word limit for this essay.*

*When I was, for seven years, the mental health editor of The HuffPost (when it began), as a rule, we would only review (with exceptions!) submissions of ‘about’ 800 words or fewer. This word limit was told to me early on, by a not reliable source, “based on the time it took a NY subway train to reach 2 stops in Manhattan”. Turned out to be about a good number, however, which newspapers like the NYT employed for op-Eds.

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As improbable as it was, Abe and Eva Twery had owned and lived on that estate - at least when I was a boy. Tante Eva was my grandma Rose’s older sister, Abe her husband. Uncle Abe and Tante Eva were immigrants from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20^th Century, as were my mother’s parents.

Abe Twery owned a very large (huge), two level, dingy and ungapatchka’d antique store on The Bowery, then called Skid Row, in lower Manhattan. The Bowery was east of Soho and north of Chinatown and was then ridden with “flophouses” renting cheap beds and rooms for the night to unsheltered alcoholic men, many who by day were visible lying destitute on the street and in doorways.

Twery’s store was not meant to be much of a showroom; it was an overloaded warehouse of precious 19^th C. European art. A perfect source, it seems, for high end interior designers to find and purchase antique art, lighting, and furnishings for their prosperous clients, or to specify antiquities for him to find on his next trip.

Abe frequently went to England and Eastern Europe, each time acquiring a full shipping container or more (I was told) of paintings, lamps and chandeliers, furniture, and chatzkes. His container had to have been piled high entering the port of NYC, among innumerable other shipping containers looking like huge lego blocks on the immense cargo ships that docked in NYC.

The Twerys must have gotten great bargains and sold high, because they were rich. Like they had so much money they bought an estate mansion in Tarrytown, next to you know who.

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When I moved back to New York City in 2002 to live and work, having left after college, I drove to Tarrytown. It was hard to find where the Twerys had lived. So I approximated their mansion’s location by finding the old Rockefeller estate.

As I drove around the stately vicinity still etched from childhood into my mind, I realized that the Twery property had been subdivided, many a time. There were large lots with big “McMansion” homes, but no mansion. It must have been torn down.

Part 1 of Rich People was published on my website, wwwaskdrlloyd.com, on August 10, 2026

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Dr. Lloyd Sederer is a psychiatrist, public health doctor, and non-fiction writer.

More of his writings and media is on his website, www.askdrlloyd.com – without any “firewall”.