If you come across this French Renaissance mini mansion perched on a hilltop corner in the Tremont section of the Bronx, you might start hearing the Addams Family theme song in your head.

The rusted iron front gates, the loosely attached candlesnuffer turrets, the wraparound porch supported by paint-stripped corinthian columns, the deadpan sculpted figures flanking the entrance—these and other eerie features make the house one of the spookiest in the city.

But once you get past that haunted house first impression, this holdout from an era when the Bronx transitioned from a rural retreat to an urbanized borough starts to tell its origin story.

It was built in 1896 by Edwin Shuttleworth. Born in Lancashire, England, Shuttleworth immigrated to New York City in 1882 and made his fortune as a stone dealer.

At his stone yard between East 104th and 105th Streets and the East River, he received shipments of granite, limestone, and other building material popular in the Gilded Age. With so much construction happening in Gotham in the late 19th century, Shuttleworth’s business brought him prominence and prosperity.

In 1896, Shuttleworth and his American-born wife, Elizabeth, were living in a tenement on East 94th Street and Madison Avenue, states the 1986 Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC) report about the house.

Desiring a distinguished home of his own, he looked not to Fifth Avenue or the fashionable West End but to the “north side,” another name for the Bronx.

Shuttleworth purchased a plot of land on Anthony (formerly Prospect) Avenue and Mount Hope Place in the thriving Tremont area. Much of the Bronx was still rural, and magnificent estate houses built by wealthy Manhattan families dotted the countryside.

But Tremont was more like a suburb, with elevated train service and churches, schools, shopping, and Claremont and Crotona Parks, states the LPC report. It would be a prime place for a businessman with a growing family to build a home.

The land Shuttleworth purchased had been part of a farm owned by the colonial-era [Buckhout family](http://It would be a prime place for a businessman with a growing family.). It looked over Mount Hope—really just a hill—and a close neighbor at the time might have been a nearby asylum for people with tuberculosis.

Shuttleworth hired an architectural team and supervised the house’s construction, according to a writeup in Bronx Architecture by David Bady. The architects, Neville and Bagge, had designed many new townhouses on the West Side of Manhattan. But what they and Shuttleworth created in Tremont was no cookie-cutter row house.

“The house, as projected by the architects, was a rather straightforward example of the French Renaissance ‘chateauesque’ style, first introduced to this country some two decades earlier by the prominent architect Richard Morris Hunt,” states the LPC report.

“Stairs from the street reach a raised veranda and the central doorway, where stone caryatids, representing classical deities, support a florid carved entablature with dolphin-shaped consoles and a Pan-faced keystone,” wrote Bady.

The choice of rough stone for the walls was likely made by Shuttleworth. Perhaps he really loved stone, or it was simply an ode to the building material that paid for the house.

He probably had a hand in the detailing, which the LPC report described as “distinctly idiosyncratic….It seems likely that Shuttleworth himself commissioned a master stone craftsman and allowed him free reign.”

Inside spoke to the wealth and position of the family, soon to include three children. “Across from the front parlor was the smoking room; there were servants’ quarters reached by back stairs; a domed skylight lit the main stair hall, parquet floors ranged from white mahogany to quartered hazel,” per the LPC report.

“On the other hand, there was a single bathroom upstairs, and the servants’ lavatory was in the basement next to the wine cellar,” adds the LPC.

You would expect such a monumental house to serve as the family home for at least a few decades. Yet census records show that by 1910, the Shuttleworths were living on West 85th Street. By 1920, the census lists the family address as Hollywood Avenue in Douglaston, Queens.

Why did Shuttleworth leave the stunning home (above, in 1940) he helped design? It might have had something to do with the changing face of Tremont, which was rapidly urbanizing and becoming more of a middle- and working-class enclave for apartment dwellers.

“The North Side became part of the Borough of the Bronx of Greater New York in 1898,” states the LPC report. “From 1890 to 1900 the population of the Bronx more than doubled to some 200,000 people. But even more dramatic change was on the horizon, and it is a measure of this change that by 1914 Tremont alone claimed this same number of people.”

“The advent of the automobile, the further extension of the elevated railway, and the completion of the Grand Concourse in 1909 attracted building speculators in abundance,” continues the LPC report. “The heyday of the Bronx had arrived, and the large houses of the 1890s soon gave way to streets lined by apartment buildings.”

Somehow, the Shuttleworth house evaded not just the wrecking ball but decades of renovation that would have remade this Gilded Age remnant. Its story in recent decades isn’t clear, but it still stands, a reminder of a very different Bronx dwarfed by apartment buildings and out of place in a struggling neighborhood.

One mystery still remains: whose heads are carved in stone (sixth photo, above) on the turret? The LPC report and David Bady state that one is Shakespeare, but the other, a female face, isn’t known. A safe bet is that she is English, and both heads serve to honor Shuttleworth’s birthplace.

• Hat tip: The Bronx and Beyond: Architectural History FB page*

[Fourth image: The Great North Side or Borough of the Bronx; seventh image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

Tags: 1857 Anthony Avenue Bronx, Edwin Shuttleworth House Bronx, Gilded Age Bronx Mansions, Gilded Age Holdout Mansions NYC, Gilded Age Mansion Shuttleworth, Shuttleworth House Tremont Bronx, Stone Mansion Tremont Bronx, Tremont Bronx Mansions

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