Springside

Springside was the estate of Matthew Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. It is located on Academy Street just off US 9. Detailed plans for a landscape, villa, and complex of farm buildings were drawn up by the influential Andrew Jackson Downing with assistance of Calvert Vaux prior to the former's death. The landscaping was completed and remains Downing's most intact surviving landscape, but only a few of the buildings he planned were ever built; most have since been lost to fire and structural failure. A cottage where Vassar resided was dismantled and removed in the mid-1970s. Its facade is on display in the New York State Museum. Downing's landscape, in the English landscape gardening tradition, has survived several serious efforts to redevelop the property in the last half-century due to opposition from local preservationists. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Matthew Vassar Estate, and further it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1969, but the estate was not permanently protected for almost two decades, when a lawsuit was settled with the transfer of the land to its current owners, Springside Landscape Restoration.