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If you wanted to pick the single worst year for Gilded Age architecture, you could make a strong case for 1927. In the space of about twelve months, the wrecking crews took down three of the most extraordinary private houses in America, all within a short walk of one another on Fifth Avenue. It was the year Millionaire's Row truly began to die.
The first to go was the W. K. Vanderbilt 'Petit Chateau' at 660 Fifth Avenue. This was the house that had started it all, the French chateau Alva Vanderbilt used to force her family into society, the setting of the legendary 1883 costume ball that broke Mrs. Astor's social monopoly. Sold to a developer in 1926, it was demolished in 1927 and replaced by a commercial building. The trendsetter of Millionaire's Row was among the first of the great chateaux to fall.
The second was the William A. Clark mansion at 962 Fifth Avenue, the notorious 'Clark's Folly,' with its 121 rooms, 31 bathrooms, four art galleries, and private coal railway. Senator Clark had died in 1925, and within two years his enormous palace was sold for a fraction of its cost and torn down, barely sixteen years after it was finished. An apartment building took its place.
The third was the grandest social loss of all: the Astor double mansion at 840 and 841 Fifth Avenue, the home of 'the Mrs. Astor' and the famous Four Hundred. Demolished in 1927, it made way for Temple Emanu-El, the monumental synagogue that opened two years later. The most exclusive private address in America was gone, replaced by one of the largest houses of worship in the world.
Taken together, these three demolitions in a single year amount to one of the most concentrated losses of great architecture in American history. And they did not happen in isolation. The Cornelius Vanderbilt II House, the largest private residence ever built in the city, had fallen just months earlier, in 1926. In the span of about two years, the heart of Millionaire's Row was gutted.
Why did they all come down at once? The forces had been building for years, and by the mid-1920s they reached a tipping point. Fifth Avenue land values had soared as commerce pushed northward, making the lots far more valuable than the mansions. The original owners were dying off, and their heirs faced crushing maintenance costs and new income and estate taxes. The French chateau style had fallen out of fashion. And the booming Jazz Age economy made redevelopment irresistibly profitable.
So the wreckers moved from one palace to the next, and a streetscape that had taken decades to assemble was dismantled in a few short years. The city that replaced it, all towers and hotels and department stores, was busier and richer than ever, but the canyon of private chateaux was gone for good.
There is a particular poignancy in the clustering of these losses. It was not a slow attrition spread over a century but a sudden, brutal clearing, as if New York had collectively decided in the 1920s that the age of private palaces was over and there was no time to waste in erasing it. Within a few years, a visitor to Fifth Avenue would have struggled to believe the mansions had ever existed.
For anyone who loves these houses, 1927 is a year to mourn. The Petit Chateau, Clark's Folly, the Astor mansion, three completely different palaces, three completely different stories, all reduced to rubble within a single trip around the sun. Each had been, in its day, among the most remarkable private homes in the country.
The lesson of 1927 is how fast it can all disappear. A great house can stand at the center of a city's life for a generation, and then, in the space of a year, be gone, its site handed over to whatever the next era happens to want. Millionaire's Row did not fade away. It was demolished, deliberately and quickly, in a handful of devastating years, and 1927 was the worst of them.
