While new construction is all the rage, Riverdale has long been known for its grand, classic houses.
In particular, it’s the landmarked Fieldston area and the estate part of Central Riverdale that are filled with lovely housing stock, including Tudor, Georgian, Dutch Colonial and Arts and Craft styles. Over the years, these areas, filled with multimillion-dollar homes, have attracted the rich and privileged, including Lou Gehrig, Ella Fitzgerald and Sugar Ray Robinson. John F. Kennedy spent his youth in an enormous white mansion on Independence Avenue. And the luv gov, Eliot Spitzer, grew up in a similarly lavish palace on Livingston Avenue.
“It’s a really nice blending of traditional styles and a few modern ones,” says Brad Trebach of Trebach Realty about the estate area and Fieldston.
But Riverdale isn’t all mansions.
Spuyten Duyvil, for instance, (the southernmost part of Riverdale and the proud beneficiary of a Metro-North stop, which gets you to Midtown in 22 minutes) has a great number of detached single-family houses. These are generally in the $1 million to $1.5 million range. There are also a large number of co-ops and rental buildings.
North Riverdale has only one big co-op complex (Skyview) and mostly two- and three-family houses, which range from $675,000 up to $1 million (and even though they’re multi-family homes, they’re generally smaller than houses in the tonier parts of Riverdale).
Central and South Riverdale have the main concentration of co-ops. Three-bedroom co-ops in a non-doorman building “start at around $520,000,” says Trebach. “They go up in a luxury building to $1.2 million – if it’s a luxury building with river views.”
These two areas also have a nice collection of houses.
“Houses in the non-estate area go from $800,000 to $1.4 million,” says Trebach. “They’re mostly detached, fairly close together, with their own driveways and small- to medium-sized yards.”