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Charles M. Schwab began his career driving stakes for a dollar a day and rose to become president of U.S. Steel and the founder of Bethlehem Steel. When a man makes that journey, he tends to want the world to know it, and Schwab announced his arrival with one of the most extravagant private houses New York has ever seen, a French chateau so grand that even Andrew Carnegie was taken aback.
Between 1902 and 1906, on a full city block of Riverside Drive between 73rd and 74th Streets, Schwab built 'Riverside,' a seventy-five-room, fifty-thousand-square-foot palace of pink granite. Designed by the architect Maurice Hebert, it fused details from three real French chateaux: Chenonceau, the exterior staircase of Blois, and Azay-le-Rideau. It cost about six million dollars and included a bowling alley, a pool, and three elevators.
When Schwab's old mentor Andrew Carnegie, himself the owner of a grand Fifth Avenue mansion that is now a museum, came to see Riverside, he reportedly said: 'Have you seen that place of Charlie's? It makes mine look like a shack.' Coming from one of the richest men in the world, it was as close to a benediction as Gilded Age architecture could receive.
But Riverside carried a fatal flaw from the start: its address. Schwab had built on the 'wrong' side of Central Park. Fashionable society lived on the Upper East Side, and the Upper West Side was considered unfashionable, even a little eccentric. The financier Jacob Schiff had owned the same parcel and abandoned it because his wife refused to live there. Schwab built anyway, and his mansion became the textbook example of a white elephant, magnificent and almost impossible to use.
For a while, none of that mattered. Schwab was fabulously rich and threw himself into the role of steel titan and bon vivant. But he was also a relentless gambler, in business and at the casino tables, and the Wall Street crash of 1929 devastated his fortune. The man who had built a chateau grander than Carnegie's found himself, in his final years, unable to afford it.
His attempts to unload Riverside became almost comic. In 1935 he offered the mansion to the city as an official residence for the mayor. Fiorello La Guardia took one look at the enormous, gloomy pile and reportedly said, 'What, me in that?' No buyer materialized. The house that had once made Carnegie's mansion look like a shack had become a burden no one wanted.
Schwab's wife died in early 1939, and he moved out of the great house and into a hotel, bequeathing Riverside to the city. He died six months later, his fortune all but gone, a poignant end for a man who had once embodied American industrial swagger. The mansion sat empty, its landscaped grounds turned over during the war to a victory garden.
In 1948, Riverside was demolished. In its place rose a large red-brick apartment complex that, with no small irony, still bears the name Schwab House. Where a seventy-five-room chateau once commanded an entire block of Riverside Drive, there is now an ordinary mid-century apartment building, its residents largely unaware of the palace that preceded them.
Riverside is a uniquely modern kind of cautionary tale. It was not destroyed by war or neglect or even, primarily, by changing taste. It was undone by real estate and by reversal of fortune, by an address that society had decided was wrong and a crash that emptied its owner's pockets. Even the most magnificent house in the world, it turns out, is only as valuable as its location and its owner's bank balance.
So while the lost palaces of Fifth Avenue tend to get all the attention, the grandest private house of all may have stood across the park, on Riverside Drive, in glorious isolation. It dazzled Andrew Carnegie himself, and within forty years it was gone, replaced by apartments and remembered by almost no one.
There is a final irony worth holding onto. Schwab helped build Bethlehem Steel into a colossus that supplied the girders and the guns of modern America, and that industrial legacy still shapes the country. Yet the most visible monument he raised to himself, his Riverside chateau, was gone within a decade of his death. The steel endured; the palace did not. It is a fitting epitaph for an age that built its grandest houses to look eternal and then watched them prove to be the most temporary architecture it produced.
