The Nikko Tea House

The Nikko Tea House (later called the Nikko Inn) was the most exotic establishment in early-20th-century Croton-on-Hudson — a Japanese-themed roadhouse perched on the bank of the Croton River, surrounded by “a dense grove of pines and cedars, in which are many picturesque summer houses,” as the New York Times described it. Built around 1907 by real estate developer Clifford B. Harmon, it was designed to lend an air of cosmopolitan glamour to his new suburban subdivision — “HARMON, the New City on the Hudson.”

The verse on this page was hand-lettered (by an artist with the initials “W.K.”) onto the back of a promotional postcard. The card was distributed to potential buyers visiting Harmon-on-Hudson by motor car or train. Though the message was printed identically on every copy, it was designed to look handwritten, as if a friend had personally invited you to come.

The author signed himself C.K. Nazu — identified as the manager of the Nikko Tea House. Whether “Nazu” was a real Japanese surname or an Americanized affectation is unclear; the early Nikko employed a number of Japanese waiters and entertainers (Oscar Levant later recalled, in his 1965 memoir, sharing “cellar quarters with twenty or thirty Japanese waiters” while playing the piano there at age sixteen).

From Tea House to Speakeasy

The Nikko Tea House had a long second life. As the country’s appetite for Japanese exotica gave way to the Jazz Age, the building’s use shifted with the times.

Why It Belongs in the Croton Archive

This is the only one of our six Croton poems written in the twentieth century, and the only one written as commercial copy. While Morris in 1842 was commissioned by the City of New York and Phillips in 1842 wrote a temperance anthem, Nazu in 1907 was selling a meal and a country drive. The shift in purpose — from civic celebration to suburban marketing — tracks the larger arc of how the Croton River’s meaning changed across two generations.

By 1907 the river was no longer a wonder of engineering or a mythic source of urban salvation. It was scenery. It was amenity: “the situation picturesque; the food is fine we think.” The same waters that Morris’s nymphs had blessed and Child’s ragged children had washed in were now a backdrop for excursions in horseless carriages, advertised on postcards distributed to prospective buyers of suburban lots.

And like the Croton itself, the Nikko Tea House proved adaptable. It survived as a Prohibition-era speakeasy with a Japanese host, then as a fragment of memory in the autobiographies of jazz musicians who passed through it. The poem on this page is a fragment from its first innocent year, when it was still trying to be exactly what its name promised: a place to drink tea on the brink of a wooded river.

Source

Hand-lettered verse on a promotional postcard issued by the Nikko Tea House, Harmon-on-Hudson, NY, c. 1907. Author signed “C.K. Nazu, Manager.” Hand-lettering by artist with initials “W.K.” Postcard documented at crotonhistory.org — “A Delightful Place to Dine”. Historical timeline assembled from the Croton Historical Archive blog and contemporary newspaper accounts.