Hopper House Art Center

The Hopper House had been built in 1858 by the boy's maternal grandfather. Edward's father, Garrett Hopper, moved into the house after marrying the owner's daughter Elizabeth in 1878. Both Edward and his sister Marion were born in the house --- she in 1880 and he in 1882. Marion lived in the house, unmarried, until her death in 1965. Although Edward left Nyack in 1910 to live in Manhattan, he held title to the house until he died in 1967. No other family has owned it.

The Hopper family was solidly American middle class. Garrett Hopper owned a dry goods store, where women bought material for making clothes before the days of ready-to-wear. The Hoppers were prosperous enough for Edward to make three trips to Paris in the decade after his graduation from Nyack High School (then on Liberty Street).

Although he grew up to be a cultivated, well-read man, Edward Hopper always reflected his upbringing as the son of a small businessman upstate. Although something like half the business blocks we see were built in the first decade of Hopper's life and well over a hundred houses now here were already standing, the town had a far different character when Edward Hopper was going to school.

From the time of the Civil War until 1893, Nyack was a fast-growing center of transportation and manufacturing. Population had nearly doubled to 4,500 from 1860 to 1880 and climbed by another

40 percent from 1880 to 1890. Nyack was both a rail terminal, with 30 passenger trains a day in the late 1880s, and a port for steamboats and a cross-Hudson ferry.

The town boasted three shipyards, six shoe factories, four cigar factories, a church organ factory, and on the block across Broadway from the Hopper family house there was a piano factory three stories high! After the financial panic of 1893 and a brief but harsh depression with no "safety nets" for those who lost their jobs or their bank deposits, growth came to a halt and many factories closed for good.

Nyack survived as a picturesque river town where not much happened. One local industry that continued well into the 20th century was boat-building, which had a strong appeal for young Hopper. After school, he spent many hours around the docks at the foot of Main Street and at a boatyard where Gedney Street joins Ackerman Place (a few blocks north of Hopper House). The boy built his own boat to prove he could do it and thought seriously of becoming a marine architect. Some of his earliest drawings were of boating on the Hudson, and a love of boats and the water was reflected in paintings and watercolors through much of his career.

As soon as he graduated from Nyack High School in 1899, Edward Hopper started commuting to art classes in New York City. He also gave art classes of his own at the house in Nyack on Saturdays. After three trips to Paris from 1906 to 1910, he moved to Manhattan and did not live in Nyack again.

Living first in a room on East 59th Street, he moved in 1913 to a 74-step walkup apartment and studio at No. 3 Washington Square North, where he lived for the rest of his life until his death in 1967. With him for the last 42 years was his wife Jo, who was an artist in her own right. The former Josephine Nivison committed her life to Hopper's career and served as the model in many of his paintings. They had no children.

In the summers, Edward and JO Hopper sometimes drove across the country but usually visited New England. From 1930 to 1966, they stayed in a house and studio that they had built in South Truro on Cape Cod. On the way to the Cape, they would stop in Nyack to visit Marion and pick up their car. Marion, Edward and JO Hopper all died within a few years of each other, and all are buried in a family plot in Nyack's Oak Hill Cemetery, across from Nyack Hospital on Route 9W. The graves are high on a hill overlooking the Hudson.

Today the house looks almost exactly as it did in 1912. The house would have been torn down were it not for the efforts of neighbors determined to save it. In 1970, five years after Marion's death and three years after Edward's, it was dilapidated and boarded up, with an overgrown wisteria that hid the front porch and reached along an overhead wire to the opposite side of Broadway.

With the support of many people in Nyack, a committee was formed and was incorporated in 1971 as the Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation, a not-for-profit organization, dedicated to the preservation and restoration of Hopper's birthplace and boyhood home. Trustees and members contributed their time and expertise to the painstaking and exhausting task of restoring the aging house. An exhibit and an auction were held to stimulate interest and to raise funds. Local businesses contributed goods and services. A bank assisted with financing. The Nyack Rotary Club helped to transform the backyard into an attractive garden, and the Village of Nyack provided a platform for outdoor concerts.

As you enter the house today, the rooms on the left are in the original part of the house, built in 1858 in the Federal style. The room to the right of the front door is in the part of the house added in 1882. The interior and exterior of this part of the house are in the style loosely called "Queen Anne," with a ceiling of polished wood and a tiled fireplace.

The room to the right at the back of the house, once used as a kitchen, has been designated the Edward Hopper Room and is devoted to exhibits about the artist's life and career. Posters, books, postcards and other Hopper materials are available for purchase in this room.

Today, Hopper House is a community cultural center and exhibit space, providing an attractive, well-lighted ground floor gallery.