Why this Upper Manhattan home perched on a cliff is called the “Pumpkin House”
There’s a lot to say about this gravity-defying dwelling in Hudson Heights: it’s a three-story residence perched atop a steel and concrete foundation 265 feet above the Henry Hudson Parkway.
Built in 1925 by an engineer named Cleveland Walcott on land purchased from New York Herald publisher James Bennett Jr., the cantilevered house on 186th Street and Chittenden Avenue affords a spectacular panorama of the Palisades across the Hudson.
It also offers a stunning view of the George Washington Bridge, which the house predates by six years.
Why would anyone commission a rectangular-shaped house that looks like it could slide off its foundation? A widower with four sons, Walcott was described as eccentric and ”really sort of a dreamer” by one of his sons, per a 1999 New York Times FYI column by Christopher Gray.
His eccentricity might explain his idea for the house, which showed “a peculiar arrangement of rooms,” wrote Gray: “The second floor had six bedrooms, of which the largest was 11 feet, 6 inches by 10 feet, 10 inches; the others were about 8 by 10 feet. Plans show that four of these smaller bedrooms had no doors, and that the two bathrooms on that floor had showers only, no tubs.”
When Walcott was building his single-family house, Upper Manhattan remained a sparsely populated and undeveloped part of the city. Thanks to the opening of the George Washington Bridge, Inwood, Hudson Heights, and Washington Heights transitioned from neighborhoods of farms and summer estates to middle-class slices of Gotham.
Apartment buildings soon surrounded Walcott’s residence, which was no longer his, having lost it due to foreclosure in 1927 (below in the 1930s).
Over the next century, the house had only a handful of owners. It most recently traded hands in 2019. (Sotheby’s has some incredible photos of the boxy yet lovely interior rooms.)
What else makes this residence so unusual? Like many mysterious buildings, it’s known by a nickname: the Pumpkin House. Why pumpkin? The answer lies in the house’s appearance from below.
“The light of the setting sun combined with the glow from the windows makes it look like a jack-o’-lantern from passing tour boats or people strolling by on a path by the river,” wrote Josh Barbanel in The Wall Street Journal in 2010 (above, 1930s).
When it earned its nickname isn’t clear. But catch a glimpse of the house from the Henry Hudson Parkway one evening and see the formation of the windows: “two on top, a center pane and a wide window on the bottom,” states Steven Kurutz in a 2008 New York Times piece.
Even without the right light (above in 2014), it really does resemble the spooky face of a jack-o’-lantern.
[Top photo: copyright/photographer unknown; fourth photo: New York Public Library Digital Collections; fifth photo: New York Public Library Digital Collections; sixth photo: Wikipedia]
