This Little-Known Bronx Enclave Is Becoming One of NYC’s Priciest
Fieldston, in the Riverdale area, is the first Bronx neighborhood to appear on a list of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods
IN A WOODSY enclave along the Hudson River, residents hike, golf and ride horses. Mature trees drape over multimillion-dollar mansions, and boats hum along the river.
No, this isn’t the Hudson Valley or upstate New York.
It’s the Bronx, New York City’s northernmost borough.
Roughly 30 minutes from Midtown Manhattan by train, the Riverdale area of the Bronx is under the radar compared with many New York City neighborhoods. But the section, which includes sought-after Fieldston, has long at-tracted well-to-do citydwell --ers looking for more space, greenery and top schools such as Horace Mann School, Riverdale Country School and Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy. Riverdale Park, which runs along the Hudson River, has hiking trails, while nearby Van Cortlandt park has a golf course and horse stables.
Last year, Fieldston became the first Bronx neighborhood to appear on PropertyShark’s list of New York City’s 50 most expensive neighborhoods by median sale price. In the second quarter of this year, it happened again: Fieldston claimed the ranking’s 46th spot, thanks to a surge of seven single-family home sales in the neighborhood.
As of October, the median sale price of a singlefamily home in the Riverdale area— which also includes Central Riverdale, North Riverdale, and Spuyten Duyvil—for 2024 was $1.275 million, up around 16% from $1.096 million in 2020, according to PropertyShark, a nationwide real-estate data pro-
MILLION
2024 median sale price of a singlefamily Fieldston home as of Oct.
vider, which included the adjacent neighborhoods of Kingsbridge and Marble Hill in its analysis.
Earlier this year, a Georgian- style residence in a section of Central Riverdale known as the estate area traded hands for $7 million, setting a record for the section, according to real-estate agent and attorney Brad Trebach of Trebach Realty. Later this year, he is bringing a roughly 14,000square-foot home in a nearby subdivision called Villanova Heights to market for $7.25 million.
The Riverdale section has a mix of detached single- family homes, co-ops, condos and rental buildings. Single-family home prices have been gradually increasing for years, Trebach said, driven by limited space for new construction and a growing demand for larger living spaces, a national trend that was accelerated by the pandemic. Fieldston in particular is desirable for its proximity to some of the area’s private schools and for its landscape, which features rock outcroppings and leafy streets.
“ ‘How did I not know this place existed?’ ” is a question Evan Geoffroy, 46, often hears from friends when they visit his home in the estate area. Earlier this year, Geoffroy and his partner, Kemba Buchanan, paid $1.99 million for a Federal--style, five-bedroom home, moving from a rental in Harlem. They have four young children, and when they started looking for a larger home with a yard, they immediately thought of Riverdale.
Geoffroy, who commutes to Manhattan twice a week for his job in the wholesale business, grew up in Connecticut and often drove through Riverdale on trips to Manhattan. “It always had this sort of magic aura to me,” he said. “As we got into the city, the buildings would start to get bigger, it would start to get denser, and then, all of a sudden, there was this beautiful, picturesque residential neighborhood.”
Geoffroy and Buchanan started looking for homes near the Riverdale Metro-North station in January. Their circa-1940s home had been on and off the market since 2022, with listing prices ranging from $2.249 million to $2.65 million. It last sold in 1997 for $750,000, according to property records.
The pair made an offer on the house less than 24 hours after touring it. They moved in a few weeks later, after refinishing the floors and repainting.
Some of the oldest homes in the Riverdale area are located in the estate area, which dates back over
100 years ago and was used as a suburban getaway for wealthy city families, according to Trebach. The estate area was home to a young John F. Kennedy, who lived in a stucco-clad mansion there from 1927 to 1929, according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The home is adjacent to the Wave Hill public garden and cultural center, originally an estate occupied over the years by the likes of Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt.
The boundaries of some Riverdale neighborhoods are a matter of debate. Fieldston’s original map, which PropertyShark uses for its rankings, includes a variety of home types and had a median sale price of $900,000 in the second quarter. But some consider the true boundary of the
is made up of around 260 single-family homes. The median sale price of a single- family home in Fieldston for 2024 was $1.8 million as of October, according to PropertyShark.
In 2006, the FPOA and several adjacent homes were designated a historic district.
There are typically one to three single-family home sales in Fieldston each quarter, according to local real-estate agent Julie Gaynor of Brown Harris Stevens. The sales surge during the second quarter was likely due in part to families with children in the local prep schools buying homes before the start of the school year. In the third quarter, Fieldston had only two single-family sales and didn’t make the top 50 in PropertyShark’s most recent ranking.
Home values in the area have increased significantly since Marcia and Meyer Uranovsky bought a fixer upper just outside the FPOA in 1997 for around $300,000. Ready to downsize, they put the Tudorstyle house on the market for $1.8 million in September. In early October, it went into contract, and is slated to close later this year.
Gaynor, their real-estate agent, declined to comment on the expected sale price but said it is in the ballpark of the listing price.
Artists who immigrated from South Africa in 1996, the Uranovskys were attracted to the roughly 3,600-square-foot house largely because they could afford to buy it. No one else wanted it because it was in such poor shape, according to Meyer, 85, a contemporary painter.
There isn’t a corner of the home the Uranovskys didn’t touch, doing most of the work by hand, said Marcia, 77, a former designer and fabricator for Martha Stewart. In the kitchen, Meyer made cabinetry out of old French wine boxes they collected. He sculpted original stucco walls in the foyer to look like stone and transformed the basement into an art studio.
The pair are unsure where they will move next and plan to stay with their daughter in nearby Westchester County while they figure it out. Leaving Riverdale is bittersweet, but they are happy their home will be loved by someone else. “It’s become a part of us,” Marcia said.
The Riverdale area continues to be under the radar, said local agent Chris Casey of Compass. Dr. Zak Hillel, an anesthesiologist, learned about it in the 1980s while living in Manhattan. “I had a girlfriend at the time and I told her ‘I want somewhere quiet,’ ” he said, so she took him to Riverdale.
Shortly after, Hillel moved into the Villa Charlotte Brontë co-op in Spuyten Duyvil. Its circa-1920s buildings, wrapped in vines and overlooking the Hudson River and the Palisades, are well known in the area, said Casey.
In the early 2000s, Hillel said, he sold the co-op for about $600,000 and bought a roughly 0.7-acre lot in the estate area, just a few doors from where Kennedy lived. On it, he and his then wife, Anna, built a 5,500square-foot, five-bedroom home. Their daughter attended Horace Mann and rode horses at the Riverdale Stables.
Today, Hillel shares the home with his current wife, Patricia Hillel, their young son and a property caretaker.
“I wanted to escape from the world here,” he said.
