Fifth Avenue at Grand Army Plaza, c. 1908, with the Cornelius Vanderbilt II House dominating the block. — Image source: Wikimedia Commons If you stand today at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 58th Street, looking across at the limestone facade of Bergdorf Goodman, you are standing on the grave of the largest private home […]
A surviving photograph of the neighboring W. K. Vanderbilt 'Petit Chateau' at 660 Fifth Avenue, one of the family's lost Fifth Avenue mansions. — Image source: Wikimedia Commons In 1882, the richest man in the world finished building a house so large it swallowed an entire block of Fifth Avenue. His name was William Henry […]
Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, 'the Mrs. Astor,' painted by Carolus-Duran in 1890. — Image source: Wikimedia Commons For roughly a generation, one woman decided who counted in New York society and who did not, and the instrument of her power was a ballroom. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, known simply as 'the Mrs. Astor,' presided over the Gilded […]
Senator William A. Clark's Fifth Avenue mansion, nicknamed 'Clark's Folly,' photographed around 1910. — Image source: Wikimedia Commons Some Gilded Age mansions are remembered for their beauty. The William A. Clark House is remembered, when it is remembered at all, for its sheer, staggering excess: a 121-room French chateau on Fifth Avenue that took fourteen […]
The William K. Vanderbilt House, the 'Petit Chateau,' at 660 Fifth Avenue. — Image source: Wikimedia Commons When the William K. Vanderbilt House rose at 660 Fifth Avenue between 1878 and 1882, New York had never seen anything quite like it. Nicknamed the 'Petit Chateau,' it was one of the earliest true French chateau-style mansions […]
Senator William A. Clark's Fifth Avenue mansion, completed in 1911 and demolished only sixteen years later. — Image source: Wikimedia Commons Here is the pattern that makes Gilded Age New York so heartbreaking to study: the grandest houses often had the shortest lives. These were not ancient piles worn down over centuries. They were brand-new, […]
Fifth Avenue and Grand Army Plaza around 1908; the Cornelius Vanderbilt II House occupied the block where Bergdorf Goodman now stands. — Image source: Wikimedia Commons Walk into Bergdorf Goodman at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 58th Street, ride the escalators up through the floors of designer clothing, and you are moving through the […]
The William A. Clark House, 'Clark's Folly,' whose 121 rooms drew mockery from the city's architecture critics. — Image source: Wikimedia Commons Some houses are remembered for their beauty. The William A. Clark mansion is remembered for its numbers, and what numbers they were. One hundred and twenty-one rooms. Thirty-one bathrooms. Four separate art galleries. […]
Fifth Avenue at Grand Army Plaza, c. 1908, when the avenue was lined with private mansions. — Image source: Wikimedia Commons For about fifty years, upper Fifth Avenue was not a street of stores and offices. It was a near-unbroken wall of private chateaux, known to all of New York as 'Millionaire's Row,' where the […]
The William K. Vanderbilt 'Petit Chateau' at 660 Fifth Avenue, the house Alva Vanderbilt used to break into society. — Image source: Wikimedia Commons When the Vanderbilts made their colossal fortune in railroads, the old guard of New York society refused to acknowledge them. Money earned from trains was considered vulgar by families who had […]
