Van Vorst House (531 Palisade Avenue): Van Vorst House (Palisade Ave.)

Van Vorst House
531 Palisade Avenue
Between Bowers and South Street
Jersey City Heights

A small house sits serenely along the well-trafficked Palisade Avenue in the eastern part of Jersey City Heights. Shaded by large trees and covered in ivy, the home's style is plain and unremarkable except for its stone construction. The simplicity of the home's design belies the fact that it is one of Jersey City's architectural treasures - one of a handful of colonial-era structures that have survived into the present day.

The Van Vorst family, descendants of Cornelius Van Vorst (d. 1638), who settled in Pavonia as the superintendent for the Dutch proprietor Michael Pauw, flourished in the Township of Bergen. They established several small farms and homesteads on the west bank of the Hudson River. At one time, Jersey City could boast of several different "Van Vorst" homes that once belonged to members of this prosperous farming family. Over the years, these buildings disappeared, leaving only a few archival images as evidence of their former existence.

The Van Vorst farmhouse is only several hundred feet west of the Palisade cliffs. Early residents must have once enjoyed panoramic views of Upper New York Bay, Manhattan Island, the Hudson River, and the small farms scattered among the tidal marshlands below. Mid-nineteenth-century maps identify the nearby areas as Washington Village and Van Vorst Heights, sections of the larger and formerly independent municipality of Hudson City. The nearest main thoroughfare was the appropriately named winding route known as the Bergen Woods Road (now parts of Summit Avenue, Sanford Place, and Kennedy Boulevard), as that area remained largely forested into the early 19th century.

The building reportedly dates back to 1740-42 or “about the middle of the eighteenth century,” according to the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). The Library of Congress includes the Survey on its website that features photographs of the Van Vorst house by R. Merritt Lacy (1933) and architectural renderings.

The HABS images show the two-story bluestone house as it appeared in the late 1930s, with a wood-shingled pitched roof and inside stone chimneys with exterior brick tops. The first level façade features two windows with shutters and a front door to the right. A glass-overhead transom and a stone lintel and sill frame the doorway. The house portico may not be original to the house. Three smaller windows appear on the second floor. The wood trim around the windows and doors is painted white.

On the first floor is a living room with a fireplace (the mantel is not original), a kitchen and side hallway, and a staircase, leading to three bedrooms on the second floor. Below the first floor is a cellar, and at the rear of the house is a single-story brick extension of a later date.

There are no records of the earliest residents of the house. The house was one of several properties once owned by prominent local landholder Cornelius “Faddy” Van Vorst (1728-1818), who operated the profitable Paulus Hook ferry. After Cornelius died in 1818, the title to the property passed to his son John Van Vorst (1761-1832). It is held that in 1842, following the subdivision of his father's estate, the house and farm were bequeathed to his only son, also named John Van Vorst (1823-1895), an alderman of Jersey City and a member of the NJ General Assembly (1851-1852, 1864-65, and 1868).

The HABS reports that Augusta Waugh purchased the house from John Van Vorst in 1859 and was later owned by the Tuttle family, ca. 1866. This account is in keeping with a study completed by Alice Larkins in the 1970s for the Jersey City Historic Districts Commission (see Anthony Olszewski).

In 1901, the Tuttles sold the house to Emil and Elizabeth Stahl.  An investor, who took out patents for beverage-related products, such as a counter carbonator (1919) and a beer cooler (1898), Stahl also took an interest in the colonial history of his home. Eventually, Elizabeth Stahl sold the house to Captain John A. Byrne and his wife Lovina in 1935/1936. The Pflaster family members were the new owners in 1965, followed by Ian Anderson, who bought the house in 1980.

The Van Vorst House remains in private ownership today as it has for more than 270 years.

Mc Lean, Alexander. History of Jersey City, NJ. Jersey City, NJ: Jersey City Printing Company, 1895.
Olszewski, Anthony (2002). "From Before the Revolutionary War! Jersey City's Oldest House." http://www.cityofjerseycity.org/vanvorstfarmhouse.shtml Retrieved 2 June 2014.
“Van Voorst—Van Vorst,” in Charles H. Winfield, History of the County of Hudson, New Jersey. New York: Kennard & Hay Printing Company, 1874: 425-439. 
Williams, Seymour. “Van Vorst House, NJ-501R.” Historic American Buildings Survey. Library of Congress, 1938. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/nj0537/ Retrieved 2 June 2014.