In The Bronx, a white house for sale delivers some strong ties to a man who later made his way to the White House.
This property, located at 5040 Independence Ave. in Riverdale, has listed for $6 million and spans more than 17,000 square feet on a lush 1.2-acre parcel overlooking the Hudson River, The Post has learned.
Moreover, it’s the site where President John F. Kennedy resided during his middle school years in the 1920s while attending the prestigious Riverdale Country School, and where his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy famously returned for a visit during his Senate campaign in 1964.
But its stately proportions are only part of the story.
The home JFK once knew is long gone — demolished decades ago — but something new now stands on the land, and it’s looking for a new owner.
“There’s been a few families and a few iterations of houses before this one,” said Dustin Crouse, who is co-listing the property with Erin Boisson Aries of Douglas Elliman. “The current family has owned it since 1991 and developed it over two generations. It’s been a labor of vision — and of time.”
The original home that once stood here — a three-story stucco residence built in 1907 — was purchased by the Kennedy family when Joseph P. Kennedy moved the clan from Massachusetts in pursuit of business and political influence.
JFK lived at the Riverdale address from the fifth through seventh grades.
Though that home is no longer standing, some fragments of its presence remain.
“There are structural elements in the basement — sort of a stone room — that date back to earlier versions of the property,” Crouse said.
The new mansion, completed but not fully customized, offers approximately 17,620 interior square feet and 4,500 square feet of terraces.
A dramatic triple-height atrium, inspired by the Guggenheim Museum, forms the architectural heart of the home. Its rotunda-style curves and skylit openness speak to a modern vision — one far removed from the homey bones of JFK’s era.
There are nine bedrooms, seven bathrooms and two powder rooms.
The main residence is complemented by a 2,000-square-foot guest cottage with three additional bedrooms and its own two-car garage.
A 10-car garage sits below the main house, which also includes a sprawling sunken living room, a formal dining room, a media room, a library and a large eat-in kitchen with an adjacent morning terrace.
“There’s an additional 7,500 square feet in the basement that could be further developed that they haven’t touched — it’s raw space right now,” Crouse said.
Rather than completing the interiors to their own tastes, the sellers opted to leave key design decisions up to the next owner. The property is being delivered with a temporary certificate of occupancy and will require finishing touches such as flooring, railings and tiles.
“You don’t need to rip anything out or do a teardown,” Crouse said. “It’s purely a design project. It’s customizable for a new purchaser to come in to create extraordinary generational living.”
The reason for the sale is simple: the family is downsizing.
“Their lifestyle has changed. They no longer need something this large,” Crouse added.
The residence sits adjacent to Wave Hill Gardens, a historic public garden and cultural center that has hosted everyone from Mark Twain to Theodore Roosevelt.
Nearby are the Riverdale Yacht Club, and Van Cortlandt Park’s golf course, stables and hiking trails — amenities that speak to a long-standing ideal of Riverdale as New York’s closest approximation of country life.
“The beauty of this place is that you can live like you’re in the countryside but still be 30 minutes from Midtown,” Crouse said.
Riverdale was once among the most fashionable retreats for wealthy New Yorkers.
“At the turn of the last century, this was a very popular destination for families,” Crouse said. “That’s coming back.”
And Riverdale isn’t the only location where traces of JFK’s childhood have been paved over by modern luxury.
The Kennedy family’s 6-acre Bronxville estate — where JFK lived from 1929 to 1941 — was demolished in the 1950s. It was later subdivided into three homes, including a colonial-style house at 4 Crown Circle that sold in 2024 for $4.7 million.
Still, for Kennedy history buffs, 5040 Independence holds a unique distinction: it’s where the young Jack Kennedy likely threw balls in the backyard, made his way to school and began to emerge as the boy who would one day become the 35th president of the United States.
In 1964, Robert F. Kennedy returned to the property on the campaign trail for his New York Senate bid.
He remembered the nearby school but confessed he didn’t remember much of the house, the New York Times reported at the time. Still, the visit became a symbolic retort to accusations that RFK was a political outsider — a “carpetbagger” — in New York.
Kennedy told students at Mount St. Vincent College after visiting the home that New York had shaped who he was having lived there for the first 20 years of his life.
A brass plaque later installed by the New York Community Trust marks the site’s presidential significance.
Crouse sees strong potential for renewed interest in Riverdale’s estate market.
“What I’ve noticed, especially in the last couple of years since the pandemic is that I’ve just seen a return of a lot of people that have lived in Manhattan and Connecticut or other places sort of nearby, like Westchester, that are returning to Riverdale and returning to the larger, larger homes that have been available,” Crouse said.
Recent sales seem to bear that out.
“Last year, a $7 million sale closed for a 1.5-acre property nearby,” Crouse said. “That’s a big number for Riverdale.”
What sets this home apart, he added, is the sheer scale of the offering — inside and out.
“There’s just nothing else like it,” Crouse said.