Back in April I posted on the sale of 161 Pecksland Road and mentioned the Beagle Club, speakeasies, and Babe Ruth. Now a reader has supplied some interesting, corrective information, and because comments are attached to the original post they’re related to, this one would be buried, so I’m reprinting it here.
Barbara25 minutes ago
As an old Glenville history buff who came across your delightful site, I wanted to clarify the location of the speakeasy, which was across the road at Pecksland and Riversville closer to the river (some give the address 100 Riversville, though that was the site of the club / restaurant building, not the speakeasy). The $8m+ Pecksland McMansion was neither on the site of the former Byram River Beagle Club nor the speakeasy. The Beagle Club began at the bridge across the street, spanning both sides of the Byram River in the direction of Glenville Rd, bordered by the current Bailiwick development on the other side of the river.
The site holds an incredible amount of history. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz famously eloped at the Byram River Beagle Club in November 1940, and later had an episode about the club on their show. Babe Ruth frequently dined there with Yankees teammates when Riversville Road was still dirt and gravel, and old bottles from the speakeasy were uncovered in the area.
The land across Riversville road bordering Pecksland, close to the home you reference here, was also historic as it was actually part of the last large Rockefeller family holding in Greenwich. It was sold in 2023 to Greenwich Academy, which thankfully seems on board to preserve the virgin forest to prevent further sprawling development in that immediate area (though nobody is complaining about the new DeCicco's down the road).
After the Beagle Club closed, the parcel was purchased and a home was built right above the river's banks in the late 1940s, changing the property's address to 56 Riversville. The Hollywood actress Margaret Sullavan later bought it, designed and added an acting studio, and lived there until she died in 1960, hosting many celebrity friends like the Fondas and Jimmy Stewart. Her daughter, actress and Andy Warhol muse Brooke Hayward, referenced the home and its brick patio overhanging the Byram River in her bestselling 1977 memoir, Haywire, which she wrote after divorcing Dennis Hopper.
An opera singer and her banker husband bought and later subdivided the Beagle Club property. She kept the original 1940s home, River Song, along with a stretch of land across the river to preserve her view, and lived there until right before her death in 2012. But before the newer developments across the river bordering Bailiwick were approved, archaeological surveys were conducted. These documented the ruins of the Beagle Club and uncovered artifacts from the site's time as a farm, a speakeasy, and before that, a Native American encampment (the Siwanoy tribe lived along the same banks, with some Greenwich Siwanoy artifacts dating back to 4,000BC). The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and local historical experts including the Greenwich Historical Society have also done surveys, and an earlier one was completed of a Siwanoy camp on the river in the 1920s. There's a lot of history online about this fascinating spot's history, but the Historical Society has the most complete survey of its history and prehistory in their archives. Greenwich has little nooks like this that are saturated with history, and brings me great joy to imagine.
