Estherwood (Dobbs Ferry, New York) and Willie Sutton

The interior features lavish decoration and detail, with generous use of marble and gold leaf. As the only significant châteauesque building in Westchester County, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) in 1979 as Estherwood and Carriage House.

Contents 1 Buildings 1.1 Mansion exterior 1.2 Mansion interior 1.3 Carriage house 2 History 3 Aesthetics 4 See also 5 References

Buildings

The Estherwood NRHP listing recognizes both the mansion and its carriage house as contributing resources. Both are located on a 10-acre (4 ha) parcel just east of the main Masters buildings. Mansion exterior

The house is three and a half stories high, with a varying number of bays on each of its sides. It is faced in white pressed brick with granite trim and terra-cotta detailing. Its roof is black and red ceramic tile, with copper cresting and stone filials, from which four red brick chimneys rise. A copper-clad cupola caps the east facade's tower. The porte-cochère on the west facade, the house's main entrance, is supported by granite piers and Doric order columns. It has a Guastavino tile ceiling to match the one on the veranda that encircles the rest of the house. The irregular fenestration includes fifteen dormer windows and a second-story oriel window. Mansion interior

From the entrance, there is a vestibule with mosaic flooring, marble baseboards, classical molding and bronze light fixtures. It leads to 65-foot-long (20 m) Great Hall that rises two stories to a coffered ceiling and skylights. A divided staircase of pink marble rises to a gallery that overlooks the hall. The balcony is supported by Ionic columns on high plinths. The hall also features a green marble fireplace with limestone trim. The oak parquet floor has a carved Greek key-patterned border repeated on the underside of the gallery.

Six rooms are located off the Great Hall, also with lavish decoration. The dining room has dark oak walls with carved Northern European motifs such as boars' and rams' heads, broken by copper and bronze medieval sconces. Built-in service units are supported by caryatids. The north wall is broken by the fireplace, with a mosaic wall and surround. The adjacent plaster wall is painted Pompeii red. The shallow vaulted ceiling is, like that of the Great Hall, coffered.

The Music Room – known as the "Red Room" – features an alcove flanked by red marble columns and pilasters, both with capitals highlighted in gold leaf. Adamesque swags and garlands, also highlighted in gold, are carved into the wall and ceiling along with musical motifs such as lyres, horns and Pan flutes. These motifs recur in the stained glass window transoms. The south wall is of mahogany with brass trim; it features the Music Room's fireplace, flanked by carved Corinthian pilasters.

The Reception Room features intricately patterned plaster walls and ceilings. Two of its windows have gold-stained panels, and an original crystal chandelier still hangs. The drawing room at the house's northwest corner features scrolled brackets and marble Composite columns on high plinths. Its marble fireplace has wood surrounds.

The large octagonal library has a central octagonal stained-glass skylight. Stained glass, with a rich floral motif, is also found in the transoms of the two large windows in the north wall. Other ornament includes the plaster molding with gold leaf. The shelving is made of dark Honduran mahogany. Of the six major rooms on the main floor, the Billiards Room is the least decorated, with oak wainscoting and eared windows and doors. The plaster ceiling likewise has a simple molding and a central medallion.

Upstairs, the house has been remodeled somewhat by the school, but the bird's-eye maple and golden oak woodwork have been retained, as well as the frosted glass closet-door panels and sliding doors off the gallery. The attic also features its original arched doorways, water tanks, and unusual floor-to-ceiling diagonal braces in the center.

This fine mansion is currently being used as teacher housing for The Masters School. Because of this some of the rooms have been connected and furnished so that it can accommodate their needs.

Estherwood houses a Steinway and Sons piano that is often used for student recitals and performances. Carriage house

The carriage house is located to the east of the main house, downhill from it. It was built to take advantage of the slope, in a massed Queen Anne style with Stick-style porte-cochére. Its interior features wrought-iron columnar supports and sliding doors between every space. History

Ohio native James Jenning McComb's wealth came from his invention of the ties that secured cotton as it emerged from balers. In the 1860s he came to Dobbs Ferry, where he sent his three daughters to the Misses' Masters School, named for its founding sisters in 1877. He bought the current property and eventually moved his family to the small Park Cottage (still standing) near the school's Clinton Avenue location to shorten his daughters' walk to school.

The octagonal library was first built as an addition to Park Cottage, to complement an octagonal library desk McComb had bought in Europe. He was soon dissatisfied with how poorly the new room integrated with the rest of the house, and hired the New York firm of Buchman & Deisler to design a new house connected to the library that would better match it.

McComb and his family lived in Estherwood from its completion in 1895 to his death in 1901. He had continued to acquire nearby property and rent it to the school, and in 1910 the school bought it all, including Estherwood and the carriage house, from his heirs. It has made few changes to the building, primarily adding an elevator in 1949. Estherwood was used as a dormitory for many years; today its upper floors serve as faculty apartments and the main floor is used for special events and school functions. Aesthetics

Estherwood is a rare residential commission for Albert Buchman, better known for commercial and institutional structures such as the New York World Tower and the Student Building at Barnard College. He brought to the commission a breadth of architectural knowledge and an awareness of the ostentatious tastes of the new rich of the Gilded Age. In its lavish use of materials and elements that would be characterized as conspicuous consumption, Estherwood has been compared to Richard Morris Hunt's The Breakers – the Vanderbilt family summer home in Newport, Rhode Island – that had been completed only three years before, attracting much notice as the most expensive house ever built at that time. See also National Register of Historic Places listings in southern Westchester County, New York

Willie Sutton and Estherwood (Dobbs Ferry, New York)

William Francis "Willie" Sutton, Jr. (June 30, 1901 – November 2, 1980) was a prolific American bank robber. During his forty-year criminal career he stole an estimated $2 million, and eventually spent more than half of his adult life in prison and escaped three times. For his talent at executing robberies in disguises, he gained two nicknames, "Willie the Actor" and "Slick Willie." Sutton is known, albeit apocryphally, for the urban legend that he said that he robbed banks "because that's where the money is."

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career in crime 3 Personal life and death 4 Urban legend 5 In popular culture 6 References 7 External links

Early life

Sutton was born into an Irish-American family in an Irish neighborhood in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He was the fourth of five children, and did not go beyond the 8th grade of school. Career in crime

He turned to crime at an early age, though throughout his professional criminal career, he did not kill anyone. Described by Mafioso Donald Frankos as "a little bright-eyed guy, just 5'7" and always talking, chain-smoking ... cigarettes with Bull Durham tobacco." Frankos stated also that Sutton "dispensed mounds of legal advice" to any convict willing to listen. Inmates considered Sutton a "wise old head" in the prison population. When incarcerated at "The Tombs" (Manhattan House of Detention) he did not have to worry about assault because Mafia friends looked after him. In conversation with Donald Frankos he would sadly reminisce about the violent and turbulent days in the 1920s and 1930s while he was most active in robbing banks and would always tell fellow convicts that in his opinion, during the days of Al Capone and Charles Lucania, better known as Lucky Luciano, the criminal underworld was the bloodiest. Gangsters from the time period, and many incarcerated organized crime mafia family leaders and made Mafiosi loved having Sutton around for companionship. He was always a gentleman, witty and non-violent. Frankos declared that Sutton made legendary bank thieves Jesse James and John Dillinger look like amateurs.

Sutton was an accomplished bank robber. He usually carried a pistol or a Thompson submachine gun. "You can't rob a bank on charm and personality," he once observed. In an interview in the Reader's Digest published shortly before his death, Sutton was asked if the guns that he used in robberies were loaded. He responded that he never carried a loaded gun because somebody might get hurt. He stole from the rich and kept it, though public opinion later turned him into a perverse type of Robin Hood figure. He allegedly never robbed a bank when a woman screamed or a baby cried.

Sutton was captured and recommitted in June 1931, charged with assault and robbery. He did not complete his 30-year sentence, escaping on December 11, 1932, using a smuggled gun and holding a prison guard hostage. With the guard as leverage, Sutton acquired a 13.5-meter (45 ft) ladder to scale the 9-meter (30 ft) wall of the prison grounds.

On February 15, 1933, Sutton attempted to rob the Corn Exchange Bank and Trust Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He came in disguised as a postman, but an alert passerby foiled the crime. Sutton escaped. On January 15, 1934, he and two companions broke into the same bank through a skylight.

The FBI record observes: Sutton also conducted a Broadway jewelry store robbery in broad daylight, impersonating a postal telegraph messenger. Sutton's other disguises included a police officer, messenger and maintenance man. He usually arrived at banks or stores shortly before they opened for business.

Sutton was apprehended on February 5, 1934, and was sentenced to serve 25 to 50 years in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the machine gun robbery of the Corn Exchange Bank. On April 3, 1945, Sutton was one of 12 convicts who escaped the institution through a tunnel. Sutton was recaptured the same day by Philadelphia police officer Mark Kehoe.

Sentenced to life imprisonment as a fourth time offender, Sutton was transferred to the Philadelphia County Prison, Holmesburg section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On February 10, 1947, Sutton and other prisoners dressed up as prison guards. The men carried two ladders across the prison yard to the wall after dark. When the prison's searchlights hit him, Sutton yelled, "It's okay!" No one stopped him.

On March 20, 1950, Sutton was the eleventh listed on the FBI's brand new FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, created only a week earlier, on March 14.

In February 1952, Sutton was captured by police after having been recognized on a subway and followed by Arnold Schuster, a 24-year-old Brooklyn clothing salesman and amateur detective. Schuster later appeared on television and described how he had assisted in Sutton's apprehension. Albert Anastasia, Mafia boss of the Gambino crime family, took a dislike to Schuster because he was a "squealer." According to Mafia turncoat and government informant, Joe Valachi, Anastasia ordered the murder of Schuster, who was then shot dead outside his home on March 9, 1952.

Judge Peter T. Farrell presided over a 1952 trial in which Sutton had been charged with the 1950 heist of $63,942 (equal to $626,773 today) from a branch of the Manufacturers Trust Company in Sunnyside, Queens, part of more than $2 million he was estimated to have stolen from various banks over the course of his career in crime. Sutton was found guilty and given a sentence of 30 to 120 years in Attica State Prison.

Farrell suspended Sutton's sentence in December 1969, ruling that Sutton's good behavior in prison and his deteriorating health due to emphysema justified the suspension of the sentence. After the ruling was delivered, Sutton said "Thank you, your Honor. God bless you" and started crying as he was led out of the court building. Sutton still had to receive a suspension of a separate 30-year-to-life sentence he had received in Brooklyn in 1952 and then could be released on parole from a 1930 conviction.

Willie Sutton stole an estimated $2 million in his career, and spent more than half his adult life in prison.

Once a free man, he spoke about prison reform and consulted with banks on anti-robbery techniques. In an ironic display, he made a television commercial for New Britain Bank and Trust Company in Connecticut for their credit card with picture ID on it. His lines were, "They call it the 'face card.' Now when I say I'm Willie Sutton, people believe me." Sutton disliked Jimmy Carter and when Carter ran for President in 1976, Sutton told an interviewer "I've never seen a bigger confidence man in my life and I've been around some of the best in the business". Personal life and death

Sutton married Louise Leudemann in 1929. She divorced him while he was in jail. Their daughter Jeanie was born the following year. His second wife was Olga Kowalska, whom he married in 1933. His longest period of (legal) employment lasted for 18 months.

A series of decisions by the United States Supreme Court in the 1960s led to his release on Christmas Eve, 1969, from Attica State Prison. He was in ill health at the time, suffering from emphysema and in need of an operation on the arteries of his legs.

Sutton died in 1980 at the age of 79; before this he had spent his last years with his sister in Spring Hill, Florida. He frequented the Spring Hill Restaurant where he kept to himself. After Sutton's death, his family arranged a quiet burial in Brooklyn in the family plot. According to findagrave.com his plot is under the family name of Bowles at Holy Cross Cemetery. Urban legend

Sutton is famously — but apocryphally — supposed to have answered reporter Mitch Ohnstad, who asked why he robbed banks, by saying, "because that's where the money is." The supposed quote formed the basis of Sutton's law, often taught to medical students.

In his partly ghostwritten autobiography, Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber (Viking Press, New York, 1976), Sutton dismissed this story, saying:

The irony of using a bank robber's maxim as an instrument for teaching medicine is compounded, I will now confess, by the fact that I never said it. The credit belongs to some enterprising reporter who apparently felt a need to fill out his copy...

If anybody had asked me, I'd have probably said it. That's what almost anybody would say...it couldn't be more obvious.

Or could it?

Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I'd be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that's all.

Go where the money is...and go there often.

Nevertheless, the legend has resulted in the "Willie Sutton rule," used in activity-based costing (ABC) of management accounting. The law stipulates that ABC should be applied "where the money is," meaning where the highest costs are incurred, and thus the highest potential of over-all cost reduction is. In popular culture

Actor Jay Novello portrayed Willie Sutton in "The Case of Willie Sutton", a 1952 episode of the TV series Gang Busters.

Sutton's life is the subject of a 2011 documentary film In the Footsteps of Willie Sutton.

The life of Willie Sutton is portrayed in the 2012 novel Sutton by J.R. Moehringer.
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