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After a long series of demolished Fifth Avenue palaces, it is a relief to end with a then-and-now that has a happy ending. On the cliffs of Newport, Rhode Island, The Breakers still stands, almost exactly as it did when Cornelius Vanderbilt II completed it in the mid-1890s as his family's summer cottage, a seventy-room cottage with the Atlantic crashing below the back lawn.
The 'then' is a brand-new Italian Renaissance-style palazzo, the grandest summer house of the Gilded Age. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the same architect responsible for so many of the lost New York mansions, and decorated by the firm of Jules Allard and Sons along with Ogden Codman Jr., it was built between 1893 and 1895 for the same Cornelius Vanderbilt II whose New York palace would later be demolished. Overlooking the sea along what is now the Cliff Walk, it was the ultimate statement of Vanderbilt wealth at the height of the family's power.
The 'now' is, remarkably, the very same building, preserved, restored, and open to the public as a museum. The Breakers is owned and operated by the Preservation Society of Newport County, which maintains it as one of the most visited historic houses in America. The same facade, the same cliff, the same ocean view that the Vanderbilts knew can be experienced today by anyone who buys a ticket.
This is what makes The Breakers such a satisfying counterpoint to the lost mansions of Manhattan. Where the Cornelius Vanderbilt II House in New York was demolished after just forty-three years, his Newport summer house survives, more than a century and a quarter later, essentially intact. Two houses, the same owner, the same architect, and two completely different fates.
Why did one survive while the other fell? The answer comes back, as always, to land and use. The Fifth Avenue mansion sat on commercial real estate that became worth more than the house itself, and it had no obvious second life. The Breakers, by contrast, stood on the Newport cliffs, where the pressure of commercial redevelopment was far weaker, and it eventually found a future as a museum, a purpose that justified its preservation.
The then-and-now of The Breakers is therefore an unusual one, because the two images are almost identical. Set a photograph of the mansion from around 1900 beside one taken today, and the building looks essentially the same: the great Italian Renaissance facade, the terraces, the cliff, the sea beyond. What has changed is not the house but its role, from private summer retreat to public museum.
There is a quiet lesson in that continuity. The Breakers proves that these houses could survive, that demolition was not inevitable, that with the right circumstances and the right stewardship a Gilded Age palace could be carried intact into the present. It is the exception that shows what might have been possible for the lost mansions of New York, if only the economics had been different.
Walking through The Breakers today, you are walking through a world that, in New York, exists only in photographs. The scale, the craftsmanship, the imported marble and gilt, the sheer ambition of Gilded Age domestic architecture, all of it is here, real and present, not reconstructed but preserved. It is the closest most of us will ever come to stepping inside the vanished palaces of the era.
So this then-and-now ends not with rubble but with survival. The same Newport cliff, more than a century apart, still holds the same magnificent house, cared for and open to all. After so many stories that end with the wrecking ball, The Breakers offers the rarest thing in the history of the Gilded Age mansions: a happy ending.
If you want to understand what New York lost when it demolished the Cornelius Vanderbilt II House and its neighbors, go to Newport and walk through The Breakers. It is the surviving twin of the lost palaces, standing on its cliff above the Atlantic, proof that at least one of these extraordinary houses was saved.
