Robert De Niro's House

Robert De Niro won Academy Awards for The Godfather Part II and Raging Bull, then spent the 1990s in Goodfellas, Cape Fear, and Casino. He co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002.

The house at the end of the road went up in 1811, built by Philip Hasbrouck, a farmer and distiller, in the year he married Esther Bevier. He died in 1841 and she stayed until 1871.

That road was not always a dead end: before the 1950s a bridge carried it over the Wallkill River toward what is now Gibbons Lane. Hasbrouck’s surviving ledgers now sit in the Historic Huguenot Street archive.

Title sits with the Riverside Trust, which Ulster County parcel rolls show holding 9 Gardiner parcels under 7 deeds, about 241 acres in all. Only the 78 acres with the house carry the county’s estate class.

De Niro acquired the place in 1997 and rebuilt it around the old farm’s bones. One barn became a recreation building with a gym, a boxing ring, a basketball court, and a small film studio.

In 2010 the trust sued Gardiner to cut its $6M assessment to $4M. A judge sided with the town in 2014, and De Niro’s side then covered its legal costs with a check for $129,000.

The bill on that assessment ran about $170,000 a year, and roughly $124,000 of it belonged to the New Paltz school district, not to Gardiner. A win for the trust would have cut $57,000 a year.

Down the same dead-end road, the Phillies Bridge Farm Project grows food on 65 acres that Mary and Jim Ottaway donated in 2002. Its CSA collapsed in 2013 and came back the next spring.