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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 inherited their wealth, and the reigning queen of society, Mrs. Astor, would not so much as call on the Vanderbilt women. So Alva Vanderbilt did what any determined social climber with unlimited money would do. She built her way in.
Her weapon was the Petit Chateau, the French chateau she commissioned at 660 Fifth Avenue from the architect Richard Morris Hunt and completed in 1882. It was one of the first true chateau-style mansions in the city, a pale, intricately carved confection of Indiana limestone that looked as though it had floated over from the Loire Valley. But its beauty was only half the point. The house was a stage, and Alva intended to use it.
The masterstroke was the housewarming. In March 1883, Alva announced a costume ball so lavish that all of fashionable New York was desperate to attend. Young society women rehearsed elaborate dances for weeks. And then, according to the famous legend, Alva let it be known that Mrs. Astor's own daughter could not be invited, because Mrs. Astor had never formally called on the Vanderbilts.
For the most powerful woman in New York, this was an impossible situation. Her daughter was distraught at the prospect of missing the party of the year. And so Mrs. Astor did the unthinkable: she paid a formal call on Alva Vanderbilt, thereby acknowledging the family as social equals. The Vanderbilts were in. The closed door of old New York had been forced open, and the instrument that pried it loose was a brand-new mansion and a single, devastatingly well-timed party.
The ball itself was the social event of the age, attended by some twelve hundred guests in extravagant costume. It announced, definitively, that a new kind of wealth had arrived and would no longer be kept on the margins. From that night forward, the Vanderbilts were not climbers but pillars of society, and the rigid order that Mrs. Astor had policed for so long began to loosen.
There is a deep irony in what happened next. The house that won this famous war did not long outlive its own triumph. The Petit Chateau set off a building frenzy as other families raced to construct their own chateaux up and down Fifth Avenue, and within a few decades the entire avenue had been transformed, first into a canyon of palaces and then, as commerce arrived, into a corridor of shops and offices.
By the 1920s, the Petit Chateau was an antique stranded in a changing city. The land beneath it had become far too valuable for a private house. In 1926 it was sold to a developer, and in 1927 it was demolished, replaced by the commercial building that still stands at 660 Fifth Avenue. The mansion that had rewritten the rules of New York society lasted just forty-five years.
Perhaps the most telling detail is Alva's own reaction. By the time her great house came down, she had divorced William, remarried, and reinvented herself as a campaigner for women's suffrage. In a draft of her memoirs, she noted the demolition of the Petit Chateau only in passing, a single line for the building that had launched her into history.
It is a remarkable thing to consider. A house can change the social order of an entire city, can break a monopoly that seemed unbreakable, can host the party that everyone remembers for generations, and still be torn down within the lifetime of the woman who built it. The Petit Chateau did all of that, and then it disappeared.
What it left behind was not a building but a turning point. After the Petit Chateau, New York society was never quite as closed, the Vanderbilts were never again outsiders, and Fifth Avenue would never be the same. The mansion is gone, but the war it won reshaped the city that demolished it.
