On an October afternoon in 1886, the greatest crowd New York had ever seen gathered at the southern tip of Manhattan, watching a colossal figure wrapped in French tricolors rise from the waters of the harbor. The Statue of Liberty was about to be unveiled, and the whole nation had its eyes on the ceremony. The man chosen to deliver the principal address, standing before the assembled dignitaries and the immense sea of onlookers, was not a president or a general. He was a railroad lawyer named Chauncey Depew, a man whose name most Americans already knew from the countless witty speeches he had given at a thousand dinner tables.
When the moment came, he stepped forward and spoke, his words broadcast not by radio or telegraph but by the sheer force of his reputation as the most sought-after orator in the land. It was a long road from that podium to the Hudson River village where he had been born. In 1834, Chauncey Depew came into the world in Peekskill, New York, a small, bustling community on the eastern bank of the Hudson. The Depew family was rooted in that soil as deeply as a family could be, farming land they had owned since 1684.
Young Chauncey left the farm for Yale, graduating in 1856, then returned home to study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1858 and opened his own practice in Peekskill. Politics called early, and he served a short stint in the state legislature and then as New York’s Secretary of State, a respectable start for a young man from the country. Then came the crossroads of his life.
In 1865, Depew was appointed and confirmed as United States Minister to Japan, a prestigious diplomatic post he had never even asked for. At almost the same moment, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the steamship king who had just begun buying up railroads, sent for him and offered him a job as attorney for the New York and Harlem Railroad, at a salary far below the diplomatic one. When Depew pointed this out, the Commodore gave him a piece of advice that would reshape his future. “The railroads are the career for a young man,” Vanderbilt said.
“There is nothing in politics. ” Depew took the words to heart. He turned down Japan, and in 1866 he went to work for the Vanderbilt family. He would later call it the best career advice he ever received.
From that small line, Depew rose steadily. By 1876 he was general counsel and director of the entire Vanderbilt railroad system. In 1885, he was named president of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. In 1898 he stepped down from the presidency and moved up to chairman of the board, a title he held for the rest of his life, serving three generations of Vanderbilts.
But the railroads explained only half of his fortune. Depew had become the most in-demand after-dinner speaker in America, the man every banquet committee wanted, someone who could rise from the head table with a story, a joke, or a kind word for every person in the room. His speeches were recorded and sold to the public on phonograph cylinders. A little book of his after-dinner verse even appeared, titled simply “Chauncey.
” Cartoonists adored him. He seemed to be everywhere at once, always cheerful, always ready with a speech, forever loyal to the Vanderbilt family, and the humor magazines never ran out of ways to poke fun at the three of them together. After the Statue of Liberty came ever larger platforms. He became the voice of great national occasions, from the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration in 1889 to the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892.
By 1888, a man of his standing needed a home worthy of a railroad president, and he found one on the north side of West 54th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. This was the height of Manhattan elegance. A few blocks away, the Vanderbilts had lined Fifth Avenue with a series of mansions, which meant Depew lived within walking distance of the family he served. The house itself had been completed in 1873 for Dr.
William A. Hammond, the former Surgeon General of the United States Army, designed by the architects D. and J. Jardine.
At thirty-seven feet wide, a generous width for a Manhattan home, it was built of Philadelphia brick in the French Second Empire style so popular in that era. Its most distinctive and dramatic feature was a corner bay window that rose two stories before giving way to a mansard roof of slate, crowned by an ornamental iron crest. Depew paid $125,000 for the house in 1888, and in 1901 he hired the architects Ludlow and Valentine to modernize it inside and out. Crossing the front door, a visitor entered a reception room filled with paintings, antiques, and souvenirs Depew had collected on his travels abroad.
In 1897, at a reception for his nieces, one of the most attended parties of the season, a wing of five rooms was opened and a Hungarian band played music for the guests. The house also had a narrow music room with an upright piano, a private space meant for the family’s comfort rather than entertaining guests. In the library, the drama of the Gilded Age was on full display, with an Egyptian frieze running below the ceiling. Its shelves held Depew’s collection of rare books alongside bound volumes of his own speeches.
Those shelves were so admired that decades later, when the house was divided into apartments, they were deliberately left in place. It was, fittingly, a room built around words. The dining room was the showpiece, with deep Turkish red wallpaper, leather-covered chairs, and an elaborate bronze chandelier that, like every fixture in the house, glowed with electric light. Just below the ceiling ran a row of mottoes in several languages, most of them about dinner, not unlike the word art seen in homes today.
Upstairs, one bedroom combined Aesthetic Movement furniture with an Empire-style chandelier, a fitting final touch for a house that contained thirty-two rooms in all. His first wife died in 1893, and Depew was deeply shaken by the loss. In 1899, he went to Washington as a United States Senator from New York, serving two terms until 1911. In 1901, he married Mary Palmer in Nice, France.
When they returned to the capital, the Depews lived in one of the most celebrated houses in the city, the Corcoran House, at Lafayette Square on the corner of H Street and Connecticut Avenue, across the park from the White House. The house began its life in 1828 as a Federal-style home. Daniel Webster had lived there before the banker William Wilson Corcoran bought it. Corcoran hired the architect James Renwick Jr.
, the designer of the Smithsonian Castle, to transform it into an Italianate mansion, one of the first examples of that style in Washington, with wings extending half a city block along H Street, bay windows, stone balconies, and a rooftop terrace behind a classical balustrade. Guests’ carriages entered through a large arched gateway into a walled garden with fruit trees and a fountain. After Corcoran’s death, his grandson rented the house to a succession of prominent senators and officials, and the Depews were among the tenants. A portrait of “May” was painted there in 1902 and hung in the house’s music room.
Sadly, the Corcoran House was demolished in 1922, and today the American Chamber of Commerce building, designed by Cass Gilbert, stands on its site. Depew’s reputation suffered after 1905, when a government investigation into the life insurance industry criticized his conduct as a director of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. In early 1928, while returning by train from a winter stay in St. Petersburg, Florida, he caught a cold that turned into pneumonia.
He died just a few weeks before his ninety-fourth birthday. As for the mansion, Chauncey Jr. lived at 27 West 54th Street until his death in 1931, after which his father’s library, paintings, and art objects were sold at public auction. The house sat empty for two years.
In 1933, it was converted into a rooming house, its rooms divided into small apartments. In 1939, the old mansion and its neighboring buildings on both sides were demolished to make way for an apartment building called the Regent House, which still stands on the site today. Chauncey Depew lived through nearly a century of American life, moving from a village on the Hudson to the very shadow of the Statue of Liberty, while his elegant home, where he had hosted the most distinguished figures of New York, disappeared long ago. But back in Peekskill, his childhood home, known as the Chauncey M.
Depew House, still stands to this day.
