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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 in America, and it set a template that ambitious millionaires would copy up and down the avenue for the next forty years. It was also, by the reckoning of many who saw it, simply one of the most beautiful private houses ever built in the city.
The architect was Richard Morris Hunt, the most fashionable designer of the age, working closely with the mansion's real driving force: Alva Vanderbilt, William's wife, who was determined to use architecture to force her family into a society that had snubbed them. Hunt blended late French Gothic with Beaux-Arts refinement, and the result was a three-and-a-half-story chateau of pale, intricately carved stone that looked as though it had been lifted from the Loire Valley and set down in Midtown Manhattan.
The craftsmanship was extraordinary. The facade was faced in gray Indiana limestone, and the masonry firm of Ellin and Kitson reportedly put more than forty carvers to work on its exterior and interior stonework. Visitors entered into a grand hall sixty feet long, faced in pale Caen stone, off which a carved stone staircase rose toward an enormous fireplace.
Beyond the hall lay a sequence of rooms each more lavish than the last. The library was paneled in sixteenth-century French woodwork. The salon, in the Louis XV style, was designed and built in Paris by the firm of Jules Allard and shipped across the Atlantic; its ceiling was painted by Paul Baudry, fresh from his celebrated work for the Paris Opera. The single most important object in the room was an ebony secretary desk built for Marie Antoinette herself, a piece that survives today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At the western end of the grand hall was the banquet hall, the largest room in the house at fifty by thirty-five feet and two stories high. It was Gothic in style, with seven-foot wainscoting topped by Caen stone, a massive double fireplace with marble caryatids and an oak overmantel by the sculptor Karl Bitter, a musicians' gallery, and a great stained-glass window. It was less a dining room than a baronial hall.
All of this beauty served a sharp social purpose. In March 1883, Alva threw a costume ball in the new house that the entire city was desperate to attend, a party so dazzling that it effectively forced the reigning queen of society, Mrs. Astor, to formally acknowledge the Vanderbilts at last. The Petit Chateau did not just look like a palace. It worked like a battering ram against the closed doors of old New York.
And yet, for all its beauty and all its triumph, the Petit Chateau survived only forty-five years. As Fifth Avenue turned commercial and the land beneath it soared in value, even a masterpiece became expendable. In 1926 the house was sold to a developer, and in 1927 it was demolished, replaced by the office building that still stands at 660 Fifth Avenue.
The most poignant detail is how little its loss seemed to register, even with the woman who had built it. By then remarried and known as Mrs. Belmont, Alva mentioned the destruction of her great house only in passing in a draft of her memoirs. The mansion that had rewritten the rules of New York society was gone, and its own creator could spare it barely a sentence.
It is a sobering thought. We imagine that beauty protects a building, that a house this lovely, this carefully made, would surely be cherished and preserved. But the Petit Chateau proves otherwise. In Gilded Age Manhattan, no amount of carved limestone or imported French paneling could outweigh the value of the dirt underneath.
What remains is a scattering of photographs, a few salvaged objects in museums, and the memory of a chateau that stood for less than half a century before the city that had marveled at it decided it would rather have an office building. The Petit Chateau was one of the most beautiful houses New York ever built, and that, it turned out, was not nearly enough to save it.
