A History Lover's Guide to New York City

The second half of the nineteenth century in the United States was a time when a very few made enormous fortunes. There was no personal income tax, and business activities were unregulated. In 1900, 1 percent of the American population enjoyed over 50 percent of the country’s wealth. “Robber baron” was a term applied to Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Carnegie, Frick and others who built their millions and their corporations through cutthroat competition.

American novelist and humorist Mark Twain called this era “the Gilded Age” in his 1873 novel of the same name, co-written with Charles Dudley Warner. The novel satirized greed and excess in vivid imagery that made a lasting impression on the public. Indeed, the extravagance of the rich during the Gilded Age was legendary. A popular way to demonstrate wealth was to build elaborate mansions. Fabulous, incredible and magnificent were fitting adjectives for the huge and grandiose Italianate villas, Neoclassical French chateaus and massive English manors that became home to New York’s wealthiest residents. Fifth Avenue from 50^th to 95^th Streets was nicknamed “Millionaires’ Row.”

One family in particular, the Vanderbilts, sought to make 5^th Avenue their neighborhood. Cornelius Vanderbilt was a local boy who had made good. Cornelius started out with a $100 investment in a ferry between Staten Island and Manhattan. He went on to build an empire in Hudson River shipping and railroads. Forever known as the “Commodore,” Cornelius was the richest man in America when he died in 1877. His estate was worth more than $100 million. Most of this went to his eldest son, William Henry Vanderbilt, who had doubled the fortune to $200 million by the time of his own death in 1885.

The Vanderbilts used their money to crash all social barriers. They were not the first in New York nor the last to do this, but they were certainly among the most ostentatious. It was the home of Cornelius’s grandson William Kissam Vanderbilt and his wife, Alva, that set the standard by which all others would be judged. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt and completed in 1883 at a cost of $3 million, the splendid French chateau stood at 660 5^th Avenue and 52^nd Street.

This Vanderbilt challenge to social order offended Mrs. William Backhouse Astor Jr., who preferred to be called “the Mrs. Astor.” The Mrs. Astor felt it was her obligation to maintain the distinction between the old moneyed New York set and the newly rich. She created the first American social register. This listed New Yorkers who could trace their families back three generations in the city—no mean feat for the nineteenth century. The Astor money had begun with John Jacob Astor. After arriving from Germany nearly penniless in 1784, he started in the fur business and branched into real estate. Astor bought up considerable early New York property, making him the richest man in America by 1830. Astor Place in Lower Manhattan, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and the Astor Court at the St. Regis Hotel, with its portrait of John Jacob Astor, are reminders of the prominence of the Astor family in New York.

In a very expensive tit for tat, in 1893, the Mrs. Astor had constructed an enormous double chateau at 840 5^th Avenue at 65^th Street. As with the William Kissam Vanderbilt home, the architect was Richard Morris Hunt. The new Astor mansion was meant to surpass all others. It featured separate residences for mother and son, John Jacob Astor IV, with shared first-floor entertaining areas, including a very large ballroom.

The Vanderbilt and Astor homes no longer stand as magnificent testimony to their petty competition. Each home was demolished in the twentieth century. A high-rise replaced the Vanderbilt home. Temple Emanu-El, home to a reform Jewish congregation founded in 1845, has stood on the site of the Astor mansion since 1929.

Another equally impressive competition in New York City home building occurred a few years later between two other great rivals: Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. In this case, however, and to our benefit, the homes survived. Today, they are exceptional museums.

Andrew Carnegie, born in Scotland in 1835, came to the United States with his family when he was thirteen. In Alleghany, Pennsylvania, Andrew found work as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, earning $1.20 a week. Energetic and enterprising, Andrew believed it possible in the United States for a poor boy like himself to get ahead. He found better and better jobs until, as a telegraph operator with the Pennsylvania Railroad, he met people who would offer him his first investment opportunity. Andrew Carnegie, in the 1870s, was one of the first in the United States to recognize the emerging importance of steel. By the end of the nineteenth century, the output of Carnegie Steel had exceeded the output of all of the steel factories in Great Britain. When Carnegie decided to retire, J.P. Morgan bought him out to form the United States Steel Corporation, the nation’s first billion-dollar corporation. This made Andrew Carnegie the richest man in America.

Carnegie’s tastes were not quite as extravagant as the Vanderbilts’. The Carnegie home exterior was brick, not marble, giving it a less ostentatious appearance than many other mansions. Still, it is hardly possible to call his sixty-four-room, English-style manor home on 5^th Avenue at 91^st Street modest. The great hall, with its Scottish oak paneling, and the garden vestibule, with its Tiffany windows, speak of great expense. Carnegie wanted all the latest technology in his house. He had electricity, central heating and air conditioning installed. This was the first private home in New York City to have an elevator.

Carnegie created not only an imposing home for himself but also an entire neighborhood of luxurious mansions. He bought much of the land surrounding his new home, reselling the lots to wealthy friends who would agree to build their own residential palaces in the vicinity. George Baker, Collis Huntington, William Sloane and others were only too happy to accommodate him and themselves. The Carnegie Hill Historic District is the beneficiary of this legacy of wealth and extravagance.

In retirement, Carnegie devoted his energy to giving away the money he had earned. He believed that “the man who dies rich, dies disgraced.” Before his death, Carnegie gave away 90 percent of his fortune to thousands of recipients. He did keep $22 million, so he was by no means impoverished. He founded the Carnegie Technical School, later Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He built Carnegie Hall in New York City, as well as libraries in New York and across the country. He also established the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.

Carnegie’s partner in the steel industry was Henry Clay Frick. Frick had brought to the business his holdings in coke, the fuel needed to run the furnaces to make Carnegie’s steel. Like Carnegie, Frick was a self-made man. Carnegie appreciated Frick’s ruthlessness and made him president of Carnegie Steel. In 1899, however, Carnegie forced Frick out of the steel company, blaming him for many labor problems, including the violent Homestead Mill Strike of 1892. The two men became bitter enemies.

Frick, therefore, enjoyed “besting” Carnegie. He built a larger office building in Pittsburgh than Carnegie. When Frick left Pittsburgh to come to New York, he wanted a New York City home grander than Carnegie’s. Frick succeeded when he commissioned a marble palace in 1914 by architect Thomas Hastings. Frick conceived of his home as a future art museum that would hold his very important paintings and artifacts. The Frick Collection is the realization of his dreams.

Although many of New York City’s most imposing private homes have fallen to the wrecking ball, a surprising number have survived. Today, their original elegance is put to new use in museums, schools, commercial establishments, diplomatic missions, nonprofit institutions, apartments and, in some cases, individual homes once again. Take a walk up Millionaires’ Row. Make a detour onto the blocks of streets off 5^th Avenue on the Upper East Side. Enjoy those homes that are open to the public. Those not open to visitors still present beautiful façades to the passerby, enhancing New York’s glamour.

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Images

Alwyn Court. Courtesy of James Maher.

Each year on a weekend in October, this nonprofit organization organizes special tours of New York City sites, many of which are not normally open to the public. While some visits are free, others require advance registration and involve a fee. The mission of Open House New York is to educate the public on the architecture of the city. On occasion, one of the Gilded Age mansions not ordinarily open to the public will be part of the Open House New York tours.

Proceeding north along 5^th Avenue are many mansions that you may visit or at least enjoy their exteriors.

Designed by Hunt and Hunt, this 1905 home was built for William K. Vanderbilt, who was a younger son of the “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt. A short list of wealthy New Yorkers lived at number 647, the only remaining Vanderbilt home on 5^th Avenue where once many Vanderbilt mansions stood. Today, it is the New York flagship store of the Italian fashion house Versace. It is possible to conjure up the glory of the home from its structure and overall presentation.

One of the Vanderbilt neighbors on 5^th Avenue was Morton F. Plant, a successful banker who commissioned Robert Gibson and Cass Gilbert to build for him a beautiful Italian Renaissance–style marble and granite palazzo. Soon after his home’s completion in 1904, Plant became disenchanted with the neighborhood, as it was becoming increasingly commercial. He moved his residence farther up 5^th Avenue to 86^th Street. Plant sold the home at 651 5^th Avenue to the French jeweler Cartier, who converted it to a store. It remains Cartier’s today. There is one account of the transaction that alleges that Cartier obtained the home for a string of pearls that Morton Plant wanted for his wife.

Henry J. Hardenbergh designed this magnificent nineteen-story French Renaissance–style masterpiece. The hotel, which faces the Grand Army Plaza, opened for business in 1907. It is a National Historic Landmark.

On the south side of the Grand Army Plaza once stood the 1883 home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, the eldest grandson of the “Commodore,” Cornelius Vanderbilt. Designed by George B. Post and Richard Morris Hunt, this was the largest private home ever built in New York City. This house was demolished to make way for the elegant ladies’ fashion store Bergdorf Goodman’s, which has occupied this site since 1928.

In front of the Plaza Hotel there is a 1916 memorial to Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the New York newspaper the World. It was built with funds that Pulitzer provided himself. Carrere & Hastings designed the Pulitzer Memorial. The sculpture by Karl Bitter is a series of basins topped by the bronze figure of a young woman. The memorial has the extremely apt title for an area of so much wealth: The Fountain of Abundance. A 1903 statue of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman by Augustus Saint-Gaudens is also in the Grand Army Plaza. The Grand Army Plaza was named in honor of the Grand Army, the formal name for the Union army during the Civil War.

Near the Plaza Hotel on the park side of Central Park South are horse-drawn carriages for hire for rides through the park. These carriages offer a nineteenth-century experience in present-day New York.

1 East 70^th Street at 5^th Avenue • Manhattan/Upper East Side
212-288-0700 • www.frick.org • Admission Fee

The beautiful Louis XIV–style home sits back from 70^th Street while its gardens border 5^th Avenue. When Frick had the home built, he envisioned that it would open one day as a museum to display his important art collection, which includes paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velazquez, Degas, Turner and many others. The home, furnished as it was when Henry Clay Frick lived here, has sixteen galleries of important furniture and decorative arts. Thomas Hastings of Carrere & Hastings designed the residence, completed in 1914. Architect John Russell Pope made additions to the original building to enhance its suitability as a museum. It is a National Historic Landmark.

1 East 75^th Street at 5^th Avenue • Manhattan/Upper East Side
Exterior Only

This Italian Renaissance–style palace, built in 1896, is the former home of Edward Harkness, the son of a founder of Standard Oil. James Gamble Rogers was the architect. The home is surrounded by a beautiful wrought-iron fence with a fleur-de-lis motif. The home is now the headquarters of the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit organization founded by Edward Harkness and his mother, Ann, that promotes public health policy. In the early twentieth century, Edward Harkness was listed as the sixth richest person in the United States, after John D. Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, George F. Baker and William Rockefeller. A philanthropist, Harkness gave generously to the New York Public Library and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Much of the Egyptian collection at the Met, including the Tomb of Perneb, was the result of contributions by Harkness. The close collaboration of Harkness and architect James Gamble Rogers continued when Rogers built the impressive mausoleum for Harkness at Woodlawn Cemetery in 1925. It awaited Harkness until his death in 1940.

Since 1958, the NYU Institute of Fine Arts has occupied the former home of James Duke, a self-made man. Duke, for whom Duke University is named, was the founder of the American Tobacco Company in North Carolina. Until James Duke and the second half of the nineteenth century, tobacco users in this country smoked cigars or pinched snuff. Duke popularized the cigarette. He had a flair for marketing—he had celebrities endorse his cigarettes and put their photos on the back of cigarette packages, making them collectibles. Duke also profited from the 1884 invention of the cigarette-rolling machine by James Bonsack. The machine brought cigarette prices down dramatically. Ever cheaper, cigarettes became increasingly popular. Duke’s fortune paid for this lovely 1912 French Neoclassical chateau in white. Architect Horace Trumbauer patterned the mansion after the eighteenth-century Labottiere home in Bordeaux, France.

972 5^th Avenue at 79^th Street • Manhattan/Upper East Side
www.frenchculture.org • Free/Fee

The Embassy of France in the United States has a very active branch for cultural services in New York City. Art, musical performances, films and lectures fill the annual calendar. The mission is to inform Americans of French culture with the goal of good Franco-American relations. The French Cultural Services are housed in a beautiful 1904 Italian Renaissance mansion. Famed architect Stanford White designed the house for Payne and Helen Hay Whitney.

2 East 79^th Street at 5^th Avenue • Manhattan/Upper East Side
212-888-8660 • www.ukrainianinstitute.org • Free

This is the former home of industrialist Isaac D. Fletcher, designed by Cass Gilbert and completed in 1899. A later occupant of this home was Harry F. Sinclair, founder of the Sinclair Oil Company. The Ukrainian Institute of America has owned this French Renaissance–style mansion since 1955. The institute exhibits the works of Ukrainian artists and hosts a classical music concert series. This site is also visited in Chapter 8. It is a National Historic Landmark.

1048 5^th Avenue at East 86^th Street • Manhattan/Upper East Side
212-628-6200 • www.neuegalerie.org • Admission Fee

This is one of New York’s more recent art museums, dating to 2001. Philanthropist Ron Lauder and the estate of Serge Sabarsky established the museum. Its setting is the beautiful 1914 Carrere & Hastings–designed Louis XIII–style town house, once home to William Starr Miller. The museum contains Austrian and German art of the 1890 to 1940 period and includes works by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Ernst Kirchner and Emil Nolde. The famous 1907 Gustav Klimt painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer—the “woman in gold”—is here. In addition to the art, there are concerts, lectures and films presented at the Neue Galerie.

1083 5^th Avenue between 89^th and 90^th Streets • Manhattan/Upper East Side
212-369-4880 • www.nationalacademy.org • Admission Fee

This Beaux-Arts mansion, enlarged in 1914 by architect Ogden Codman Jr., was the home of Archer Huntington and his wife, sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. Archer Huntington was heir to the fortune of his railroad magnate father, Collis Huntington. Archer and Anna Huntington left the house to the National Academy of Design in 1939. Rembrandt Peale, Samuel F.B. Morse and other artists founded the National Academy in 1825 to educate Americans regarding the importance of art. Today, the National Academy of Design has a large collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art with rotating exhibits.

2 East 91^st Street at 5^th Avenue • Manhattan/Upper East Side
212-849-8400 • www.cooperhewitt.org • Admission Fee

The home of Andrew Carnegie is today the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. This Smithsonian Museum is dedicated to the study and display of historic and contemporary design. The museum has a varied collection of applied arts, industrial design, drawings and textiles on display with rotating exhibits. Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, the granddaughters of Peter Cooper, the iron works magnate and inventor of the steam locomotive in this country, began the collection in 1897. These two sisters sought the same recognition for the interior design of a house that architects such as Stanford White and Cass Gilbert achieved for the exterior. Originally, Cooper Union housed the collection.

The Cooper-Hewitt has occupied the Carnegie Mansion since 1976. The Carnegie Mansion is one of the few remaining New York mansions with a lawn and a garden to give visitors a true appreciation for what New York was like for the wealthy at home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the house is not furnished today, there is an interactive display on the second floor that shows photographs of the mansion as it would have looked when Andrew Carnegie and his wife lived here. Visitors can experience the original house by taking the central stairway with its sumptuous oak paneling to the second floor. The first-floor library retains on its walls stencils of Carnegie’s favorite homilies that inspired and motivated him. Try to imagine the large pipe organ that once stood in the main hallway to play music each morning to awaken the Carnegies. Andrew Carnegie loved music. He was a member of the New York Oratorio Society and contributed the funds to build Carnegie Hall in New York City. The 1901 Georgian-style brick home, designed by architects Babb, Cook & Willard, had all the latest technology, including central heat, air conditioning, electricity and telephones. The house is a National Historic Landmark.

1109 5^th Avenue at 92^nd Street • Manhattan/Upper East Side
212-423-3200 • www.thejewishmuseum.org • Admission Fee

Cass Gilbert designed this exceptional French chateau, completed in 1908, for financier Felix M. Warburg and his family. Frieda Schiff Warburg donated the family home for use as the Jewish Museum in 1944. Renovations and additions have since expanded the museum’s gallery space. The museum’s permanent collection and rotating exhibits provide insights into Jewish culture and art.

67 and 69 East 93^rd Street • Manhattan/Upper East Side
212-369-4460 • www.classicalamericanhomes.org • Not Routinely Open to the Public

The home at 67 East 93^rd Street is the private residence of Richard Jenrette, who founded the Classical American Homes Preservation Trust. Jenrette opens his house to the public for prearranged group tours. The beautifully appointed home, built in the 1920s for the George F. Baker family and designed by Delano & Aldrich, includes paintings of early New York scenes and public figures such as Governor DeWitt Clinton. More information is on the website. The tour fee is a contribution to the Classical American Homes Preservation Trust. The building at 69 East 93^rd Street is the former carriage house for the complex. Today, it serves as home to the administrative offices of the Classical American Homes Preservation Trust. It is not open to the public.

Delano & Aldrich, sought-after residential New York architects in the early twentieth century, designed a complex of Neo Federal– and Classical-style homes in the 1920s for George F. Baker and his son George F. Baker Jr. The home at 75 East 93^rd Street now houses the offices of the Russian Orthodox Synod in the United States. The senior Baker was chairman of the First National Bank of New York—a forerunner of Citibank—and a close friend of J.P. Morgan. As an indicator of their wealth, not only were the homes spectacular, but the Bakers also had railway tracks constructed in the basement for their private rail car to join the main tracks running under Park Avenue.

The Williard Straight House is red brick with white marble trim in the Federal style. Designed by Delano & Aldrich, it dates to 1915. Williard Straight was a diplomat, financier and founder of the New Republic. Sadly, Williard Straight died only three years after the home’s completion while serving in the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I. The house has since had a number of occupants, including the Audubon Society and the International Center of Photography. It is now again a private residence.

The New York Palace Hotel restored six town houses originally built in 1884 for Henry Villard, founder of the Northern Pacific Railroad and publisher of the New York Evening Post. Mrs. Henry Villard was the daughter of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Enter the hotel that incorporates the Villard town houses on Madison Avenue to appreciate the exterior courtyard and the massive foyer with its double staircase, enormous chandelier and rose marble fireplace. Villard had intended to live in one of the six houses designed to resemble a single Italian palazzo but never did because of financial problems. Happily, the McKim, Mead & White–designed homes survived Villard’s problems.

The flagship store of Ralph Lauren, with the interiors restored to give the impression of an elegant home, is in the house built for Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo. Waldo never took up residence in this 1898 home, possibly because she ran out of money before its completion. This extraordinary French Renaissance–style house, designed by architect Francis H. Kimball, has an elaborate scheme of windows, chimneys and medieval statuary.

West 54^th Street between 5^th and 6^th Avenues • Manhattan/Midtown
Exterior Only

If 5^th Avenue were once a Vanderbilt neighborhood, the Rockefeller neighborhood was West 54^th Street between 5^th and 6^th Avenues. John D. Rockefeller Sr. had a home at 4 West 54^th Street. The elegant Moorish Room from this now demolished home is in the Brooklyn Museum. Architect Henry Hardenbergh designed the elegant homes still standing at numbers 13 to 15 West 54^th Street from 1896 to 1897 for members of the Rockefeller family. Nelson Rockefeller, vice president of the United States during the tenure of President Gerald Ford, died at 13 West 54^th Street on January 26, 1979. These homes were close to Rockefeller Center and even closer to the Museum of Modern Art, which was founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and mother of Nelson Rockefeller.

The architectural firm of Harde & Short designed this twelve-story apartment building, completed in 1909. Built in the style of the French Renaissance and with detailed exterior terra-cotta ornamentation, it is one of the most beautiful apartment buildings in New York City. It remains an apartment building today, with a first-floor restaurant open to the public. Although multi-family dwellings and apartment buildings had long existed in the city, they had been for the poor, not the rich. But at the end of the nineteenth century, the rich also became interested in apartment living. Particularly after 1916, with the institution of the income tax, as well as rising New York City land values, few could afford individual homes here. Luxury apartment buildings accommodated the increased demand. This building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

1 West 72^nd Street at Central Park West • Manhattan/Upper West Side
Exterior Only

One of the earliest and most famous of New York’s elegant apartment buildings was the Dakota—so named because its location at West 72^nd Street and Central Park West in 1884 seemed as far from central New York City as the Dakota Territory. Henry Hardenbergh was the architect. The Dakota has been home over the years to many famous people, especially those in show business. John Lennon was living in the Dakota when he was shot and killed on its doorstep in 1980. It is a National Historic Landmark.

Images

The New York Public library. Courtesy of James Maher.