The house of Astor is gone now, but within the limits of this park still stands the home of Gracie, the merchant, where Irving was a constant visitor, and where, in the rooms given over to stranger hands, still linger memories of Paulding and Halleck, Bancroft and Drake, and a host of others.
It was while working on Astoria that Irving began the building of Wolfert's Roost, the Van Tassel house of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, on that delightful spot on the Hudson which in the first days of Irving's residence there was called Dearman. In after time the name was changed to Irvington, in his honor, and Wolfert's Roost, in honor of the glorious country, became Sunnyside. It is Sunnyside to this day, altered by additions made in the intervening years, but still the house of Irving; and the ivy clinging to its walls has sprung from a root taken from the ruins of Scott's "fair Melrose" and planted where it now grows by the friendly hand of Jane Renwick.
On the corner of Seventeenth Street and Irving Place (a thoroughfare to which his memory gave a name), late in life, Irving lived betimes. Here was once the home of John T. Irving, a nephew of the author. It is a sturdy house still, and looks as youthful as its neighbors that were built many a day after it. Then it stood quite alone in a stretch of country. From the windows of the large room on the ground floor, Irving could see the waters of the East River. In this room he wrote portions of Oliver Goldsmith, parts, too, of the Life of Mahomet, and arranged the notes of what was to be his last book—the Life of Washington.
But his real home was Sunnyside, and there, in the year 1859, when he was seventy-six years old, he died.