Untermyer Gardens Cancelled Its One Ticketed Night. The Rest of the Year Runs Without It

"The continuing turmoil in Iran." That's the reason the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy gave this week when it called off Mehregan, the Persian harvest gala that was supposed to fill the Walled Garden tonight, September 27. The nonprofit's cancellation notice points to the unrest inside Iran and the strain it's placing on the Persian community here and abroad, and says planning a formal dinner months in advance had become impossible to ask of anyone with a firm commitment.

For a garden that runs almost entirely free and unscheduled the rest of the year, this is the one night that required a ticket, a reservation, and in some years a shuttle from the Greystone train station. Its disappearance is real news. It's also a decent test of what this park actually is to the people who live near it, as opposed to the people who buy a seat once a year.

What Mehregan Actually Was

Mehregan is an old secular harvest festival, and Untermyer has staged it as a benefit gala in the Walled Garden since at least 2016, with editions on record through 2020, 2024, and 2025. The format has stayed consistent: cocktails, a Persian dinner served under a tent with the Hudson River behind it, and live music, all inside what the Conservancy calls the finest Indo-Persian garden in the Western Hemisphere. Guests without cars have been able to note it on their ticket order so the Conservancy's shuttle can meet them at Greystone station. In past years, proceeds went toward restoring the garden's ziggurat-shaped Persian Pool.

None of that describes how most people who live a few miles from North Broadway actually spend time here. Mehregan was the one evening a year that asked for an RSVP and a credit card. Everything else the garden does asks for neither.

The Entrance Most Visitors Never Find

South of the main gate, along the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail, a pair of stone gateposts carries carved figures of a lion and a unicorn. That's the garden's back entrance, and it opens onto a mile-long carriage path that climbs north through the old estate grounds to the gardens above. The Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct run a guided walk that starts a mile south at the Lenoir Nature Preserve on Dudley Street, follows the aqueduct trail through the woods, and ends at the same gateposts before touring the restored gardens. Go the other direction and the path drops downhill to the Greystone Metro-North station, which sits directly below Untermyer's grounds.

Either way, nobody buys a ticket. The Old Croton Aqueduct State Historic Park is open year round from sunrise to sunset with no admission charge, and the back gate into Untermyer is simply where that public trail happens to intersect a public garden. For a lot of neighbors, this is the whole relationship: not a destination reached by car and gate fee, but the far end of a walk that starts somewhere else entirely.

What's Actually Left on the 2026 Calendar

The concert series that closed the summer season is worth a second look for what it says about pricing. Its sixth annual run ended on September 12 with Lori Belilove and The Isadora Duncan Dance Company, after earlier evenings from the Victor LaGamma Ensemble and the early-music group Sonnambula. A grant from the Asbjorn Lunde Foundation covered attendance for Yonkers youth ages 7 to 18. Tickets for adults ran $25 to $35, a fraction of what a seat at a benefit dinner costs, and by the time Mehregan was due to happen this month, that season had already been over for two weeks.

The October workshops are smaller and stranger in a good way. The phone-photography session is taught by John Jacono, the staff photographer who shoots the garden's own Instagram and newsletter photos and who came to horticulture after spending fifteen years printing exhibition prints for fashion photographers. It's a two-and-a-half-hour class capped at a handful of people, priced under the cost of most dinners out, and it exists specifically because the Conservancy needs the fee income to keep restoring the grounds.

The Free Night the Whole City Shows Up For

If Mehregan was the garden's one paid, RSVP-only evening, the Grand Holiday Illumination is its opposite in every respect. Inaugurated in 2015, it started with the Walled Garden lit by more than 100,000 lights, according to the Conservancy's own account. By last winter's run, the count had grown past 150,000, and the Conservancy's own announcement called it the only major light show in Westchester County that's free to attend. Opening night runs a formal lighting ceremony from 5:30 to 8 p.m.; every night after that, the gates are open 4:30 to 8 p.m., no tickets, no reservations, through January 4.

It also runs on volunteers rather than paid staff. Each night needs several people to count visitors and pour hot cocoa, in two-hour shifts, and the Conservancy's own sign-up describes the usual mix as families, community groups, and religious groups from around the city, alongside anyone else who wants a shift. That's the part worth sitting with. The event that disappeared this year needed a caterer, a tent rental, and guests willing to commit to a date months out during a period of real global uncertainty. The event that's about to become the neighborhood's actual December ritual needs whoever signs up to serve cocoa on a given Tuesday.

For Cedar Knolls and Lawrence Park West, the two Yonkers enclaves that carry a Bronxville mailing address and sit inside the same city that owns and runs this park, that difference matters more than the cancellation itself. Mehregan was never the reason people walked the aqueduct trail to Untermyer on an ordinary Saturday. It was the one weekend a year the garden asked something of you in advance. The rest of the calendar, the free trail gate marked by a lion and a unicorn, the light display that's run every winter since 2015 regardless of what else got cancelled that fall, never asked for a reservation to begin with.

Sheila Stoltz tracks Untermyer's calendar the way she tracks everything else worth knowing in this part of Yonkers. Sheila Stoltz