Untermyer Gardens (Walled Persian Garden & Vista)

The story

In the early 20th century, high-profile lawyer and industrialist Samuel Untermyer set out to build an extravagant, highly specific obsession on a 43-acre bluff overlooking the Hudson. At its core sits a high-walled Indo-Persian charbagh—a classical quadrilateral paradise garden divided by intersecting water channels, flanked by octagonal towers, sphinx statues, and colonnades. Widely cited as the finest Persian garden design in the Western Hemisphere, it was constructed not in Isfahan, but along North Broadway in Yonkers.

When Untermyer died in 1940, the grand estate was gifted to the city, but decades of decay turned the grounds into a surreal, crumbling ruin. By the 1970s, the unlit, overgrown walled gardens and stone grottoes became a legendary midnight haunt for local teenagers, urban explorers, and occult rumors—eventually becoming tangled up in tabloid lore and Satanic Panic press coverage during the Son of Sam era.

Thanks to ongoing restoration by the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy, the formal beauty is fully back, but the site's peculiar tension remains intact. You step through a stone gateway into immaculate Persian symmetry, then walk out toward the Vista staircase—a massive stone descent modeled after the Renaissance gardens of Villa d'Este—before coming across a dramatic Temple of Love perched on a rock outcrop over a ravine.