Somebody walked into Caroline Astor’s house on Fifth Avenue with a tape measure and wrote down the length of her staircase railing. Twenty-eight and a half inches high, forty-five feet along the south side of the stairs, forty-eight feet along the north. Those measurements were printed in the spring of 1926 in a sale catalog under a lot number, lot 160, and the description covered the entire decorative iron work of the house: every stair balustrade with its leaf scrolling, the molded brass rail on top, everything except the balcony in the picture gallery. You could bid on the staircase, not the house.
The staircase. Someone had had to do that job. A man had walked up and down those stairs counting feet so that a stranger could buy them by the yard. And this was not a scandal.
The papers of that April carried no outraged editorial about it, though I went looking for one. It was a Tuesday and a Wednesday in April, at eleven in the morning, then at a quarter past two the next day. An unrestricted public sale, held on the premises under the management of the American Art Association. The two men running the room were Otto Bernet and Hiram Park.
In 1926 they were still employees, selling a dead woman’s woodwork off the walls she had chosen it for. My reaction to these catalogs changed as I read further into them. The first one made me angry. By the fifth, I felt something closer to vertigo, because by then I had understood that the format was ordinary.
There is a page at the front of that catalog describing the house it is dismembering. It admires the proportion of the facade and the quality of the gates. In its own words, “The house is known as one of the most notable residences of New York. ” Then it starts numbering the rooms.
Twenty-two lots before the staircase, on the same floor, the same document offers the music room. Not the furniture in it. The room. Carved and lacquered paneling, three door frames with wreathed oak leaves above them, glazed cabinets with musical trophies carved into the lunettes.
One lot. The wreckers came for the shell later the same year. The man who sold that house had barely known the woman who built it. Caroline Astor died in the autumn of 1908.
Her son, John Jacob Astor IV, went down with the Titanic four years after her. By the spring of the sale, the owner was his son, Vincent, and the catalog’s own foreword is precise about it. “By reason of the disposal of the Vincent Astor residence at 65th Street and Fifth Avenue,” it begins, “the contents of the house have been consigned by Mr. Astor to the American Art Association for unrestricted sale.
” Consigned: the word you would use for a shipment. The building had been two houses. Richard Morris Hunt put it up in the middle of the 1890s in the manner of a French chateau. Caroline had one half and her son had the other.
Now, the story everybody knows about that house. You have heard that four hundred was the number who counted in New York and that the figure came from the capacity of the ballroom. The number is real and the source is known. Ward McAllister gave it to the New York Tribune in 1888.
What he actually talked about was who is at ease in a ballroom and who is not. The arithmetic about the room was not his; that came from the reporter who noticed the coincidence and put it in the same article. Jerry Patterson and William Grimes both went looking for the origin, and both say plainly that it is unknown. Delmonico’s had a four hundred person limit as well, and so did the Cotillion dances.
The ballroom story is the one thing most people know about that house. It is a reporter’s aside from over a century ago, and it has outlived the ballroom by a hundred years. Take the catalog in order and you can walk the building. The third floor comes first.
Lot 101 is the fireplace out of bedroom number one: white lacquer, gilded finials, fluted columns. Five lots later comes the maid’s sewing room, which turns out to have had a carved fireplace of its own in rosewood and tulip wood. The maids had a carved fireplace. I have not worked out what to make of that myself.
Then the oak library sold whole: wall panels, a wainscot, a cupboard, an overmantel panel with a mirror, and thirteen compartments of shelving and pigeonholes. Somebody’s working library, taken back to the studs and offered as furniture. Down on the second floor go the music room, the iron work, and then the southeast salon, which tells you what kind of document this is. The paneling is sold on all four sides of the room.
Two pairs of double doors and three single doors are included. The description is careful to note that the sliding doors through to the next salon are excluded. A person had to sit down and decide where one lot stopped and the next began. A person drew that line down the middle of a doorway.
The ceiling of the same room went separately. It was an allegory painted on the inside of a dome: Socrates, Nero with a lyre, a man at work on a crucifixion. Whoever bought it had to get it down off the ceiling first. The inner bronze gates were sold, too.
That is the one I find hardest to picture. Not the doors. The gates. More than a hundred pictures came down off the walls of a gallery that faced you as you came through the front door.
The family had bought them over decades. And there is one line in that foreword that I had to read twice. The objects, it says, will be exhibited practically in the same manner as throughout the occupancy of their owners. They did not clear the house and lay the contents out on tables.
They left everything where the Astors had kept it, opened the front door, and let the buyers walk around a family’s rooms with a numbered list in their hands. Benjamin Winter took the ground. As for Bernet and Park, they went on. Eleven years after this sale they broke away and founded a firm carrying both their names and handled what was left of the great houses.
Then the wreckers came for them. Their sale rooms on 57th Street were scheduled for demolition, and in the summer of 1949 they closed the doors and moved uptown. The firm that had sold Fifth Avenue by the room was turned out of its own address by the same trade twenty-three years after it took this house. Forty-eight hours was all the city asked for.
That figure is not an estimate; it is in the building code of the city of New York as amended to 1922, in section three, under the heading “Notice to Demolish. ” The wording runs like this. Before any existing building is demolished, a statement in writing on the appropriate blanks shall be submitted to the superintendent of buildings. It must give the full name and residence of each owner.
It must give the name and business address of the person who is to do the work. Then the last line: such notice shall be submitted not less than forty-eight hours before the work of demolition is commenced. A form with two names on it, filed two days early. Compare that with what the same code required to put a building up: a detailed statement of specifications in triplicate, plans, structural detail drawings, and a further statement in writing sworn before a notary public or a commissioner of deeds.
Sworn under oath to build. To destroy, you filled in a blank with your name and your wrecker’s name, and you waited two days. There was no hearing, no review. The Bureau of Buildings had no power to refuse, because the law gave it no ground on which to refuse, and the form asks for nothing about the building itself: not its age, not its architect, not what you intend to put on the site instead.
A shed behind a grocery and a chateau by Richard Morris Hunt went through the identical two-day process on the identical blank sheet. The asymmetry is the whole mechanism. Hunt spent about two years designing and building the Astor house. The city wanted two days of warning before it came apart.
Then there is what happened to the paperwork afterwards. The Department of Buildings kept docket books, and from 1916 onward those ledgers recorded demolition permits alongside everything else. The later series runs to 151 volumes and it survives in the city’s own archive. What does not survive is the file behind the line.
The department’s practice until the middle of the 1960s was to dispose of the files of buildings that had been demolished, not lost, not damaged in a flood, thrown out as routine, because a building that no longer existed did not need a folder. So the archive holds complete papers for the structures that lasted into the 1970s. For the ones that came down, it holds a line in a ledger. Which brings me to a number you may have run into: seventy mansions demolished on Fifth Avenue.
I have gone looking for the source of that figure, and I cannot find one. The popular accounts say “most” or “many” or “countless. ” The scholarly ones give you names and dates and refuse to produce a total. That refusal is not laziness; it is the honest position, because the records that would settle it were thrown away.
None of this was sinister. There was no meeting in an office about erasing the memory of an avenue. A clerk was told to make room. A dead building’s folder is the obvious thing to throw out, and every year another few hundred went.
One institution has come closest to fixing it. The Office for Metropolitan History was founded in 1975 by Christopher Gray, who wrote the Streetscapes column in the New York Times for nearly thirty years. It has digitized the abstracts of every new building application filed in Manhattan from 1900 to 1986. You can search by address, by year, by architect.
Demolition permits are not in it. The database covers what went up, so you can find out what went on to a Fifth Avenue lot down to the year and the name of the man who drew it. What came off the lot you have to reconstruct from newspapers, from sale catalogs, and from photographs that happen to have been taken. That is the source problem underneath this whole subject, and it is the reason nobody can tell you how much was lost.
The story everybody tells is that taxes killed these houses. Income tax arrived. Estate tax arrived. The great fortunes could not carry the upkeep, and the palaces came down.
I believed a version of that myself until I looked at the rates. The rates say close to the opposite. The heaviest years of demolition on Fifth Avenue run from about 1925 to 1928: that is when the Vanderbilt houses go, and the Astor house, and the Clark house, and the Huntington house. In 1926 the federal estate tax exemption was doubled and the top rate was cut in half.
Through those same four years, the top rate on income stood at twenty-five cents on the dollar, the lowest since before the First World War. The punishing rates come later. By 1932 the top rate on income was sixty-three cents on the dollar; estates were taxed at seventy by the middle of that decade and seventy-seven by the time of Pearl Harbor. So the wrecking crews were busiest in the cheapest tax years of the century.
The years when a rich family really was being squeezed came afterwards, when most of the great houses had already gone. The Landmarks Preservation Commission has written designation reports on this part of Manhattan, and they explain the loss of the private houses without using the word “tax” once. “Rising land costs,” they say, “and other economic factors. ” The documents from the sales themselves are blunter.
In August of 1925, Archer Huntington went to court for permission to sell his stepmother’s house at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. His argument, as the Times reported it, was that the building now standing on the premises is unsuitable to any commercial or business uses. Read that again. Not too expensive, not too old, not too big: unsuitable to business.
The block had stopped being a place where anybody lived, and a house makes a poor store. He had an offer of $3,800,000. The building came down the following June. Then nothing was built there for fourteen years.
A cleared corner at Fifth and 57th, ground about as valuable as any in America, stood empty through the whole Depression. Tiffany finally opened a store on it in October of 1940. In that same August, a few hundred feet away, Alice Vanderbilt asked the state supreme court in New York for leave to sell. Her house at 1 West 57th Street was the largest private building in the city.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle printed her asking price: $7,100,000 cash. She got $7 million from a company called Brased Realty. The accounts of that sale are unusually frank about what the buyer thought he was paying for: he bought the land, and not the house that stood on it. Then, a week before the wreckers came, in January of 1927, she did something I did not see coming.
She opened the house to the public and charged fifty cents at the door. Anybody with the coin could walk through it: the picture gallery, the bedrooms, the staircase her husband had commissioned in the 1880s. She gave the takings to charity, and then handed the keys to the men with the crowbars. I have turned that over a good deal.
I cannot decide whether it was generosity, or a last look, or a woman making her city pay a small toll to see what it was about to knock down. There is one number that makes the upkeep argument concrete. Her husband’s will had left her an income of $250,000 a year out of a trust of $7 million. That sounds enormous, and it was.
It was also, by the accounts of the estate, just about enough to run this house and the summer place at Newport, and nothing beyond them. She was employing thirty-seven servants in one building. Long afterwards, the Times summed the whole business up in one sentence: the upkeep of the place was a burden on the estate, and its neighborhood, encroached upon by business, was no longer considered suitable for residential purposes. Not a word about tax.
The men who bought these houses would not have got past the servants’ entrance of any of them. Benjamin Winter came off a ship from Lodz in 1891, twenty years old, with nothing. He painted tenements for twelve years and saved. In 1912 he bought his first tenements, and the year after that he put up his first apartment house in Washington Heights.
Anthony Campana, who took the avenue north of the park entrance, was born in Italy. That is not a detail on the side. The families selling were liquidating a way of life. The men buying were doing what the sellers’ grandfathers had done, only faster, and in a form the sellers found vulgar.
Winter is the one to follow, because his best trade tells you how this avenue really worked. In January of 1926 he bought the old Temple Emanu-El at Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street. The price was $6,500,000. He sold it eleven months later to Joseph Durst for $7 million: half a million dollars for holding a building under a year and doing nothing to it at all.
Now look at what he had bought the year before: the Astor house at 65th Street. And look at who bought that site from him: the congregation of Temple Emanu-El, moving uptown to 65th Street, having just sold him the building they were leaving. He sold that congregation their new address and bought their old one inside twelve months, and took a profit on both ends. Fifteen years earlier he had been painting other people’s hallways.
Now he stood in the middle of the largest religious property deal in the city, collecting from both sides of it. He bought William Kissam Vanderbilt’s chateau at 52nd Street as well. And in that same January, Emily Vanderbilt Sloane sold him the northern half of the Vanderbilt Triple Palace for a reported $3. 5 million.
By the following year he had formed his own company and listed preferred shares on the stock exchange. Inside twenty years his firm turned over more than $500 million of property. He and a competitor named Frederick Brown were given the credit in the trade press for turning Fifth Avenue into a shopping street. What that meant in practice was that the two of them between them bought the corners.
A corner with a mansion on it produced no rent. A corner with eight floors of shops and offices on it produced rent forever. And the difference was large enough to pay for the demolition several times over. Brased Realty was Brown.
He bought Alice Vanderbilt’s house for $7 million and put Bergdorf Goodman on the site; the store opened in the first days of March 1928. Campana, meanwhile, took down the Clark house and the Hagan house and three more besides, and put up apartment buildings on the sites. Several of those were designed by Rosario Candela, and they are now among the most expensive addresses in America. It would be easy to make these men the villains.
I do not think it survives contact with the record. They bought from willing sellers at high prices. Nobody forced Alice Vanderbilt into court. Every one of these houses was offered by a family that wanted the money more than the building.
Had Winter not bought them, the next man in line would have. What happened to him afterwards is worth knowing anyway. He went bankrupt in 1937. The headline in the Times that November reported that the immigrant house painter who had built a $40 million fortune now said he had no assets at all.
There is a symmetry in it I would not have dared invent. The man who took down the Vanderbilt houses and the Astor house stood in a courtroom twelve years later and explained that he owned nothing. For five years there was a famous chateau on the corner of 52nd Street with nothing inside it. No paneling in the ballroom.
Bare plaster where the great staircase window had been. Shutters closed on the finest private house in New York and the traffic going past it on Fifth Avenue. William Kissam Vanderbilt had died in Paris in July of 1920. His house was empty by the autumn.
It was the one they called the Petite Chateau. In 1885 a professional journal polled the country’s leading architects on the best buildings in the United States; this house came third, behind only the Capitol in Washington and Trinity Church. Alva Vanderbilt gave her costume ball there in March of 1883, and that ball is why most people have heard of the place. Two things about it want correcting.
The cost is always given as $250,000, with $65,000 of it on champagne. That number came out of the newspapers of the day; it did not come out of a bill or a ledger. The Museum of the City of New York, which knows this material as well as anyone, calls it an estimate rather than a confirmed figure. No account book has ever surfaced.
The guest count is softer still. The New York Tribune reporting the next morning said there were between six hundred and eight hundred people present. Modern accounts routinely say twelve hundred. The lowest number is the one printed the next morning, which is usually a bad sign for the higher ones.
And the famous story in which Alva refuses to invite Caroline Astor’s daughter until Caroline herself comes and leaves a calling card is called apocryphal by that same museum. It may have happened. Nobody has shown that it did. What is beyond argument is what came out of that house in October of 1921.
Three afternoons, the 17th, 18th, and 19th, at the American Art Galleries on Madison Square, Thomas Kirby took the rostrum with Bernet and Park assisting him. Between them they emptied the Petite Chateau without once naming the family who had lived in it. The catalog is titled “The Costly Antique and Modern Furnishings, Interior Decorations, and Embellishments of a New York City Palatial Mansion. ” That is all.
No address, no owner. It does say, at some length, that the house was designed and furnished under the direct supervision of the distinguished American architect, the late Richard Morris Hunt. They would not print the name Vanderbilt. They would print the name Hunt.
Discretion for the family, advertising for the building. You can identify the house anyway from the lots themselves, which is an odd way for a document to give itself away. Lot 235 is a stained glass window by John La Farge. It shows the Field of the Cloth of Gold: Francis I and Henry VIII meeting on horseback with Anne Boleyn in attendance, ten hinged casements in wrought-iron frames.
That was the great window over the staircase. Lot 241 is a pair of circular windows. One is inscribed in the glass itself: “Richard Hunt, Architect. ” The other reads “La Farge, 1882.
” So the architect’s signature, fired into the glass of the house he built, went under the hammer with a number attached to it. The ballroom was lot 231: gilded ivory paneling, fourteen feet high, thirty-eight by thirty-three feet. There was a Jacobean oak room as well, with lion heads on the chimney piece. And then, having emptied it, everybody left it alone.
Winter did not acquire the property until 1925. The wreckers came the year after that. Between the sale and the demolition sits half a decade in which the building simply stood there. No photograph of the inside of it in those years has ever surfaced.
There was a key somewhere, and a man who went in now and then to look at the roof. Whoever he was, he is the last person who saw those rooms. There was no wrecking ball. That machine takes over in the 1950s, and by then this avenue was finished.
Demolition in New York in the ’20s was handwork, and it was a salvage business before it was a destruction business. The money was not in knocking a building down. The money was in what you could carry away and sell afterwards. Bricks came off whole and were cleaned by hand with a hammer; a fast man could do five thousand in a day.
Floorboards and studs were prized up, the nails knocked out one by one, and the timber tied into bundles for resale. Fixtures, radiators, mantels, doors: all of it had a price on it. The trade even had a slogan. A national salvage firm in Chicago sold reclaimed material by mail order, and their line was five words: “Wrecking to save, not to destroy.
” That is either honest or shameless, and I go back and forth on which. The man at the top of the business in New York was Jacob Volk. His method, in his own reported words, was the reverse of everybody else’s. “Some men start at the bottom and work up,” he said.
“I start at the top and work down. ” In 1910 he took the contract for the Gillender Building at Nassau and Wall Streets. It was thirteen years old. It was also the tallest thing anybody had yet pulled down, and he took it and its neighbor down in forty-five days.
Then he complained about it, and the complaint is the most revealing thing he ever said. “If we had been allowed ten days’ time to clean the buildings, we could have made $7,000 by the sale of the fittings. But as it was such a rush, everything had to go by the run and be consigned to the dump heap. ” He was not mourning the building.
He was mourning the fittings. A skyscraper in the financial district was to Volk an inventory problem, and the tragedy of it was that the schedule had cost him $7,000 in resale value. James Thurber profiled him for the New Yorker. The man in that profile had pulled down the best places in the city, was proud of it, and could not pass a tall building without sizing it up.
One writer on the trade records that Volk kept a blackjack and a bottle of whiskey on his desk. He also held a grudge against the great architects of the previous generation. Hunt and Stanford White had built things meant to last. From where Volk sat, that was somebody making his job harder on purpose.
There is a dispute about how many he took: the Times obituary is cited for a figure above 2,500 buildings; Thurber wrote 250 big structures. Volk also claimed to have invented the wrecking ball. That claim is disputed. And in any case, the ball did not displace the sledgehammer and the pneumatic gun until long after these houses were gone.
Every firm in that trade kept books, contracts, schedules, salvage inventories. The one records archive I could find survived by accident. The records of the Albert Volk Company are cataloged, conserved, and available to anybody who asks. They sit in the construction files of the Frick Collection.
Henry Clay Frick built his house on 70th Street on the site of the old Lenox Library, which was razed across the summer and autumn of 1912. The wrecker’s paperwork went into the folder for the new building. The new building became a museum, and museums do not throw folders away. So the trade that emptied Fifth Avenue is documented in one place, and it is documented there because of the one job that ended with a house still standing.
The wreckers were a service, and what they were serving was an argument about height. An architect sued the city of New York for the right to build higher on Fifth Avenue, and he won. That lawsuit is why the avenue above the park entrance looks the way it does. In January of 1922 the city had imposed a height limit there of seventy-five feet, seven stories, more or less.
The intention was plain enough: keep the avenue low and keep it looking like a street of private houses. It lasted roughly a year. The man who broke it was the architect J. E.
R. Carpenter, who brought the test case and won it in 1923. His argument was that the avenue would be greatly improved in appearance when deluxe apartments replace the old-style mansions. That account of the case comes from Christopher Gray, who wrote about Carpenter in the Times.
The effect is not in doubt. After the ruling, the apartment builders went up the avenue almost house by house. A decade before the lawsuit, McKim, Mead and White had built 998 Fifth Avenue at 81st Street, facing the Metropolitan Museum. That building had already shown that people at the very top of the market would take an apartment on Fifth Avenue itself.
The builders were inventive about the rules. One developer filed his tower at 64th Street as an apartment hotel rather than an apartment house, which let him go to twenty-three stories instead of fifteen. Then in April of 1929 the Multiple Dwelling Law replaced the old tenement rules. On a large enough plot, you could now put a tower on top of a base and reach something like three hundred feet.
The plot size requirement is where it turns. Thirty thousand square feet was the threshold. No single Fifth Avenue house sat on anything close to that. Two or three of them in a row did.
So the profitable move stopped being the purchase of a mansion and became the assembly of a block front. And here is the part that surprised me. The people being cleared off those lots very often moved back onto them. Margaret Hagan is the clearest case.
Her house stood at 1 East 64th Street, on the Fifth Avenue corner. Campana bought it and pulled it down in the spring of 1930. Rosario Candela designed what went up in its place, and the new building opened in October of the following year. She is said to have written a clause into the sale contract guaranteeing herself an apartment in whatever rose on her own lot.
She was among the first residents. That one rests on a single account, and I would hold it loosely. The pattern behind it is documented over and over. At 740 Park Avenue, finished in 1930, three houses were cleared to make room, and the Brewers and the Lees, whose houses those had been, moved into the new building.
A newspaper of the day described the place as twelve mansions built one on top of another. That is not a joke at anybody’s expense; it is an accurate description of what these buildings were for: fourteen rooms, eight servants’ rooms, a private elevator landing, so that you never met a neighbor on your own floor. The people who bought them were not coming down in the world. They had done the arithmetic and decided that thirteen floors up with an elevator beat four floors of stairs and a staff of thirty.
Alice Vanderbilt would not do it. She left a house of well over a hundred rooms and moved into another private house further up the avenue, and died in it. New York was calling it Clark’s Folly while the man was still alive and still living in it. William Andrews Clark was a copper senator from Montana, one of the richest men in America and, by common agreement, one of the least liked.
He commissioned a house at Fifth Avenue and 77th Street in 1897. It was finished in 1911. Fourteen years to build. The first plans came in at about $415,000.
The revised plans of 1901 came to $2. 5 million. The finished house cost around six million, though other good sources say seven, and nobody has an audited total. Whichever figure you take, the final bill was something like fifteen times the first estimate.
It was designed in Paris and built in New York, and the sources cannot agree how the credit divides. The newspapers counted 121 rooms and 31 bathrooms, four art galleries, a swimming pool, a Turkish bath, a garage hidden inside the building. He bought a granite quarry in New Hampshire for $50,000 and built a railway to move the stone. He ran a bronze foundry with two hundred men in it.
He put in a private underground rail line to bring the coal in, seven tons of it a day. He bought Gobelin hangings from Prince Murat for $200,000, and more from the Earl of Coventry for $350,000. The chamber organ was said to be the largest in the country. Critics of the period were merciless; they said the place would suit the showman Barnum.
He died in March of 1925, aged eighty-six. The house sold in February two years later for under $3 million, less than half what it had cost. And the wreckers had it that same month. Sixteen years.
He spent fourteen years building it, and it stood for sixteen. His widow Anna and his daughter Huguette did not build again. They took a floor in an apartment house a few blocks south, at a rent reported at something like $30,000 a year, within walking distance of the hole in the ground where the 121 rooms had been. The collection is where this stops being a spectacle.
Clark’s pictures and furniture were valued at close to $3 million. He left them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on one condition: they were to be kept together in a gallery of their own. The Metropolitan said no. That refusal was not only snobbery about Clark, though there was some of that.
A museum that accepts a condition like that gives up control of its own walls forever, and the Metropolitan had already learned to say no to such gifts. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington said yes. More than eight hundred objects went south in 1926, and the Corcoran built a whole wing to hold them, finished two years later. Inside that wing they installed the Salon Doré, the gilded room.
It was made in Paris around 1770, in the Hôtel de Clermont in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was a drawing room for a young countess, finished in time for her marriage that December. Clark bought it around 1904 and had it fitted into the house on Fifth Avenue. It is still standing, and not in New York.
When the Corcoran was dissolved in 2014, the paintings went to the National Gallery of Art. The building and the art school went to George Washington University, and the agreement names the gilded room specifically among the things the university received. It has since been restored, and students use it. This gets reported wrongly almost everywhere, including by museums that ought to know.
The canvases went to the National Gallery. The room did not go anywhere. A French salon of 1770 crossed the Atlantic, spent sixteen years inside a Fifth Avenue house, and has now stood in Washington for a hundred years. In January of 1930, when everybody with a Fifth Avenue mansion was trying to sell one, a man bought one.
His name was Augustus Van Horne Stuyvesant Jr. He was the last direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor who had run the town when it was called New Amsterdam. He and his sister Anne paid $450,000 for the house at 2 East 79th Street: a chateau of 1899, built by Charles Gilbert for Isaac Fletcher, most recently owned by the oil man Harry Sinclair. His sister died a few years later.
After that, he lived there alone with his servants for the rest of his life. The Times, writing after his death, said he had spent thirty years or more in seclusion, with no family life and no social life of any kind. His only regular recreation was an hour’s walk each day through the streets near the house. Once or twice a month he was driven in a Rolls-Royce to St.
Mark’s Church in the Bowery; there he would read the family tombstones and sit in the family pew. That is a whole life in three sentences, and I have not been able to put it down. He died in August of 1953, aged eighty-three, overcome by heat while he was out walking. Three days later there were eight people at the funeral: his butler, six elderly house servants, and one relation.
The butler sat by himself in black, crying into a handkerchief. He is the last of the holdouts, and the holdouts turn out to be more interesting than the sellers. They are also almost without exception women. The men died first, and the widows stayed on in houses built for entertaining that nobody was entertaining in anymore.
Ella Wendel stayed on at Fifth Avenue and 39th Street until March of 1931. Hers was the last private house on that stretch of the street; it had no electricity in it and no telephone. Carrie Astor Wilson, Caroline’s daughter, was at 64th Street until 1948, and the government of India bought her house that December. And there is Grace Vanderbilt, about whom you will read something untrue.
The story is that she stayed on in the last Vanderbilt house on the avenue until she died in 1953. She did not. The house was sold in 1940, with an arrangement letting the family stay for a period afterwards. She bought a different house at 86th Street in October of 1944.
She moved out of the old one the year after that. She is said to have called her new place “the gardener’s cottage. ” It has twenty-seven rooms, and it is now the Neue Galerie, and I would like to know whether she said it with a smile. Florence Twombly outlasted all of them.
Born a Vanderbilt, she kept a house of seventy rooms at 71st Street, and she died in it in 1952. That building came down five years afterwards. By 1960 the Times could count what was left on the avenue: five single-family mansions on the whole of what people had once called Millionaires’ Row. Five on a street that had held them shoulder to shoulder for two miles.
And that count was taken before the worst decade for demolition in the city’s history had properly begun. One more thing about these households, which the photographs never show you. Andrew Carnegie’s will, published in 1919, pensioned his servants at half their wages and left them legacies according to how long they had stayed: $600 if you had been there four years, $2,000 if you had been there fifteen. That is the only such provision I could find for any of these houses.
What became of the staff of the ones that simply closed, thirty and forty people at a time, is not recorded anywhere I can reach. Nobody wrote it down, because nobody was writing about them at all. $3,500 bought a Vanderbilt ballroom in November of 1945. The buyer was Paramount Pictures.
The Times printed the figures: $3,500 for the carved panels, mirrors, and other fixtures of the ballroom; $975 for the dining room; $1,250 for the study. A film studio bought three rooms out of the greatest private house of the 1880s, and bought them for set dressing. The house was the Triple Palace: three residences behind one front, running the block between 51st and 52nd on the west side of the avenue. It was built for William Henry Vanderbilt from about 1879 and finished inside by 1883.
The whole thing cost around $2 million, and roughly two-thirds of that went on his own half: six hundred workmen, something like sixty sculptors and craftsmen brought over from Europe; brownstone rather than the white marble originally planned, partly because Vanderbilt happened to own a brownstone quarry. The entrance hall was thirty-six feet square, lined in marble mosaic with a stained glass skylight in bronze frames. The first thing you met coming through the door was a malachite vase nine feet high, out of the Demidov collection in Russia. John La Farge made nine stained glass windows for the staircase landings.
Where those windows are now, nobody I have consulted can say. There is a credit dispute buried in this house. The plans were filed by John Butler Snook, so Snook is the architect of record. The design was actually by Charles Atwood and by Christian Herter of the Herter brothers.
In 1886 the Herters complained about it in print and said the architecture had been theirs. The northern half went to Benjamin Winter and came down in 1927. The southern half went on. Henry Clay Frick rented it from 1905 at $100,000 a year; he lived there with his pictures for a decade before building his own house on 70th Street.
Cornelius Vanderbilt III and his wife Grace took the place after him. He died early in 1942, and a newspaper wrote afterwards that its days of magnificence were ended. Three weeks before the wreckers, the house was opened for public sale of its rooms and fittings. People walked in and carried out mirrors, paneled walls, chandeliers, inlaid floors, and mantelpieces.
Set the ballroom price against the building cost. William Henry Vanderbilt’s own half of that house cost something over a million dollars in the money of the 1880s. His ballroom went sixty years later for $3,500. That same year Grace sold the picture collection.
It had opened in the 1880s with 207 oils and watercolors in a room lit by 169 gas jets; it was the most publicized private gallery in the country, and Vanderbilt had a book published about it. It brought $323,000. Demolition of the southern section began in September of 1947. The site was clear by March of 1949, when they laid the cornerstone of the replacement.
You will read that the house came down in 1945. That is the auction, not the wrecking. It stood empty and stripped for two more years, and the reason is dull: the buyer had planned an office building for a magazine publisher, the war stopped construction, and the scheme had to be restarted afterwards. One last piece of that house went somewhere nobody would guess.
There was a gilded console in the drawing room, made by the Herter brothers, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and Egyptian alabaster. It left the family and turned up in a private collection in Southern California. From there it went into Liberace’s house in Palm Springs. It was sold at auction in Los Angeles three separate times, then passed through a New York dealer.
It was given to the Metropolitan Museum, where it stands today, with every step of that written into its catalog entry. Not all of them went, and none of the survivors were saved by anybody deciding to protect them. There was no binding protection for any building in New York City until the spring of 1965. The city had an advisory commission from 1962, and it could not stop a single wrecker.
It could only object. So look at how each survivor actually got out. Henry Clay Frick wrote his house into his will in 1915 as a public museum with an endowment of $15 million attached. His widow had a life tenancy, and she died in the autumn of 1931.
John Russell Pope began converting the building two years after that; it opened to the public in December of 1935. Frick did not save his house by loving it. He saved it by giving it a job, and paying for the job in advance. Otto Kahn died at his desk in March of 1934.
His house on 91st Street was sold to the Convent of the Sacred Heart that May for $900,000. Two months. It became a school, and it is a school still. Felix Warburg died in 1937.
By 1941 the papers were reporting that his house would be demolished for an eighteen-story apartment building. His widow Frieda handed it to the Jewish Theological Seminary instead, and the Jewish Museum opened in it after the war. That house was about three years from the wreckers. What saved it was a deed of gift.
The pattern repeats down the avenue: a foundation, a university, a foreign government. Carnegie’s house reached the Smithsonian in the end for a dollar a year. Every one of them stopped being a private house between 1919 and 1958. Not one waited for the law, because the law came too late to have saved any of them.
The strangest case is George Blumenthal, who was president of the Metropolitan Museum. Inside his house on 70th Street he had installed the entire marble courtyard of a Spanish castle. It was built in the first decade of the 1500s; it had been ripped out of Almería and sold to a Paris dealer at the turn of the twentieth century. His will instructed the museum to take the house apart and keep the valuable structural elements.
Demolition began in August of 1945. The courtyard went into crates and sat in storage for about eighteen years. A curator named Olga Raggio researched it and rebuilt it, quietly removing the arches Blumenthal had added, and it opened again in the 1960s. A man arranged the destruction of his own house in order to preserve the room inside it.
And then there is the pair on Fifth Avenue that I keep coming back to. In 1902 the firm of Hunt and Hunt built two marble houses side by side for George Washington Vanderbilt’s daughters. Same architects, same year, same commission. They were called the Marble Twins, and you could not tell them apart from the street.
One of them was sold in 1944 and demolished, and a department store went up on the ground. The other is still there. Art dealers took it in 1917. Airline offices had it by the ’70s, and it became a New York City landmark in 1977.
It has spent the last thirty years as a very expensive store. Its twin was pulled down for a store. It survived by becoming one. That is the fourth way out, and it is the one nobody expects.
The Morton Plant house at 52nd Street is standing today because Cartier wanted the address. The commerce that ate the private houses of lower Fifth Avenue preserved the two that happened to be the right size to sell things out of. What lived and what died came down to who was holding the deed in the wrong year, and whether that person wanted a monument or wanted the money. The law came in 1965, and it came because of a house on Fifth Avenue rather than a railway station.
You will read, including on the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s own website, that New York got its preservation law in response to the loss of Pennsylvania Station. That is the story everybody tells, and it is not quite right. Penn Station started coming down in October of 1963. The bill was still sitting unsigned fifteen months later.
The destruction of a great terminal produced pickets and photographs and a famous line in the Times about a city getting what it deserves. It did not produce legislation. What finished the argument was the Brokaw mansion at 79th Street. It was not the finest house in the city, and nobody pretended it was.
It was a French chateau of the late 1880s on the corner of 79th Street, built for a clothing manufacturer. By the ’60s an engineering institute had its offices in it. Its demolition was announced in September of 1964. There was a rally outside it that month, about 125 people, and among the speakers was Ed Koch, twelve years away from being mayor.
The commission that existed then said it would protest, and admitted it had no power to stop anything. Scaffolding went up on the 5th of February. The wreckers started the next morning, which was a Saturday. The preservationists of the day were certain the timing was deliberate: getting an emergency application in front of a judge on a Saturday morning is a great deal harder than doing it on a Tuesday, and by Monday there would be nothing left to save.
Ada Louise Huxtable wrote about it in the Times two days later and described the work as done “in weekend stealth. ”
Mayor Wagner signed the landmarks law that April, two months and thirteen days after the Brokaw came down. Nathan Silver, who was in the middle of the fight, said flatly that the outcry over that house was what got the mayor to sign, which was decades too late for the avenue this has all been about. The catalog survived.
The Frick Art Reference Library holds more than 98,000 sale catalogs. The Metropolitan’s own library has digitized enough of them that you can read the Astor sale tonight, for nothing, from anywhere in the world. The demolition files did not survive. The city threw them out one folder at a time, as routine, for fifty years.
So the best surviving record of these houses is the paperwork that took them apart. We know the length of Caroline Astor’s stair rail to the half inch. And we know it because someone was selling it. If you want to know what one of these interiors looked like, you do not go to a photograph.
There usually is not one. You go to the list of what came out of the building. Those lists were written to help a stranger bid. They are the closest thing we have to a survey.
The gate from Alice Vanderbilt’s house stands at the entrance to the Conservatory Garden up at 105th Street. Most people who walk through it have no idea they are passing through a front door. Her marble mantelpiece is in the Metropolitan. Look at the credit line under it: it is dated 1925.
She gave the fireplace away the year before she sold the building. She knew exactly what was coming, and she got out what she could carry.
