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Everyone remembers Fifth Avenue's Millionaire's Row. But the single most extravagant private mansion in the whole city may have stood on the other side of Central Park, on Riverside Drive, and the reason it is so often forgotten is exactly the reason it was doomed: its address.
When the steel titan Charles M. Schwab chose Riverside Drive for his palace in 1902, fashionable New York was baffled. The Upper East Side, near Central Park's eastern edge, was where society lived. The Upper West Side was considered the wrong side of the park, respectable but unfashionable, the kind of place a striver might build but a true aristocrat would not. The financier Jacob Schiff had owned the very parcel Schwab chose, but his wife had refused to move to the wrong side of the park, and he gave it up.
Schwab built anyway, and on a colossal scale. His mansion, Riverside, took up an entire city block between 73rd and 74th Streets. It enclosed seventy-five rooms and fifty thousand square feet, combined elements of three French chateaux, and contained a bowling alley, a pool, and three elevators. It was grander than almost anything on Fifth Avenue, grand enough to make Andrew Carnegie remark that it made his own mansion look like a shack.
And yet it never worked the way Schwab must have hoped. The whole point of a great Gilded Age mansion was to serve as a stage for society, but society did not come to Riverside Drive. The address that Schwab had chosen, or been able to afford, kept his palace at the margins of the social world it was built to dominate. It became the textbook example of a white elephant: a possession so large and costly that it is almost impossible to use or sell.
The term white elephant fits Riverside perfectly. It was magnificent and almost useless, an enormous drain on Schwab's fortune with little of the social return that justified such houses. As long as Schwab was fabulously rich, the cost did not matter. But when his fortune collapsed in the 1929 crash, the white elephant became an unbearable burden, a mansion he could neither afford to keep nor manage to sell.
His struggles to get rid of it became almost legendary. He offered Riverside to the city as a mayoral residence in 1935, and Mayor La Guardia turned it down flat. No private buyer would take on such a vast, unfashionable house in the middle of the Depression. The grandest private mansion in New York had become an albatross, too expensive for its owner and unwanted by everyone else.
Schwab died in 1939 with his fortune gone, having moved out of the great empty house into a hotel. Riverside passed to the city, sat unwanted through the war, and was finally demolished in 1948. A red-brick apartment complex took its place, and the most extravagant private mansion the city ever built faded almost completely from public memory, precisely because it had never been part of the fashionable world that wrote the histories.
The lesson of Riverside is a strangely modern one, familiar to anyone who has ever thought about real estate. Location is destiny. The most magnificent house in the world is only as valuable as its address, and an address that society has decided is wrong can doom even a palace that outshines Carnegie's mansion. Schwab learned that lesson the hard way, and his white elephant paid the price.
It is worth remembering Riverside, though, precisely because it breaks the Fifth Avenue pattern. The lost mansions were not confined to one fashionable strip. The grandest of them all stood off to the side, on the wrong side of the park, built by a self-made man who wanted to outshine everyone and succeeded, only to watch his triumph become a burden and then a memory.
So when you think of the lost palaces of Gilded Age New York, do not stop at Fifth Avenue. Cross the park in your imagination, walk up Riverside Drive, and picture the white elephant that once stood there, a French chateau grander than Carnegie's, undone not by bad taste or neglect but by the simplest fact in real estate: it was in the wrong place.
