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.
Surviving gateposts at cottage entrance, 2007
Downing's original site plan.
The gardener's cottage, since dismantled and removed.
Facade at New York State Museum
Andrew Jackson Downing was an American landscape designer, horticulturist, writer, prominent advocate of the Gothic Revival in the United States, and editor of The Horticulturist magazine (1846–1852). Downing is considered to be a founder of American landscape architecture.
Design II, English or Rural Gothic style, Cottage Residences, 1842
Design VI, Italian style, Cottage Residences, 1842
Looking east from the top of the Washington Monument towards the National Mall and the United States Capitol in the summer of 1901. The Mall exhibited the landscape of winding paths and seemingly random plantings that Downing had designed in the early 1850s.