At the end of the 19th century, when the first trumpet jazz It had not yet been heard in Manhattan, there were a few years in which New York became a city of palaces and nightclubs similar to Tolstoy’s Saint Petersburg. It was as if they had planted an old European kingdom with magic beans. In the course of a single generation, surnames like Vanderbilt or Rockefeller that had brought humble European immigrants to the United States went on to name dynasties as powerful as those of royal families, and in the same way the mansions that these princes of railroads, oil or steel were built on Fifth Avenue were as splendid as the palaces of the Renaissance and Baroque without the city having first gone through the Middle Ages. “At that time it was often said that these houses were as magnificent as the palace of Versailles, and in the case of some the comparison was not entirely exaggerated. I relate them to the pyramids of Egypt: they were built as a demonstration of power and wealth,” he explains in a conversation by e-mail the American architect Gary Lawrence, author of a book (Houses of the Hamptons 1880-1930) and a popular Instagram account (Mansions of the Gilded Age) about the topic.
It refers, for example, to the residence that Cornelius Vanderbilt II, grandson of the railroad pioneer and founder of this powerful family, built in 1883 on 57th Street in New York, considered with its 130 rooms the largest single-family home in how many there have been in the city. “The usual thing in this type of mansion is that a third of the space would be dedicated to services such as the kitchen or pantry and areas for the living of domestic employees,” says Lawrence. “Another third of the house was occupied by the bedrooms of the family and their guests. The rest was for living rooms, libraries, and for the impressive rooms on the ground floor, where social life took place.”
It was not with these mansions but with the skyscrapers that New York ended up dazzling the world, but lately that lost city of coffered ceilings, gigantic stone chimneys and walls decorated with grotesque It has aroused people’s interest. This is demonstrated, in addition to the 110 thousand users who follow Lawrence’s publications on Instagram, the success of The Gilded Agethe new series from Julian Fellowes, creator of Downtown Abbey, which HBO premiered last year and has just picked up for a second season. Set in the eighties of the 19th century, the series reflects quite well how in the middle of the second industrial revolution, architecture and art regained the function of investing the power of the new fortunes with greatness, as well as marking the rank among those aristocrats lacking king and titles of nobility that were the American magnates of those years.
The first chapter raises it from the beginning. The Gilded Age It begins with the move of George Russell, a railroad magnate, and his wife, Bertha Russell, to the splendid and gigantic mansion they have just built in New York. “This looks like Tsarskoye Selo,” says one of the characters when admiring the house, referring to the palace complex of the former imperial family of Russia. However, the Russell home does not please everyone. Across the street, an old lady (played by Christine Baranski) suspiciously contemplates the arrival of the couple from the window of a more modest-looking house than his own. Unlike his new neighbors, this character is part of the “old money” rich (old money) of New York, an elite dominated those years (both in the series and in real life) by Lady Astor and her list of the 400, an index of those millionaires of all time, of which in the HBO series Mrs. Russell, representative Unlike the “new money” rich, he longs to be part of it. The character of Bertha Russell is fictional but is inspired by someone real, Alva Vanderbilt, and although on the outside her house in the series is more reminiscent of the mansion that another member of the Vanderbilt family built, William Henry Vanderbilt’s Triple Palace, The story of his move is taken from his biography. In 1878, after marrying one of the grandsons of the founder of this dynasty a few years earlier, Alva Vanderbilt thought that the best way to present herself to New York high society would be to have the most wonderful mansion in the city built and have a ball there. To do this, he conceived, together with the architect Richard Morris Hunt (one of the main people responsible for the brilliance of the Golden Age), the Petit Château, designed with the castles of the French Renaissance as a reference and furnished with treasures such as an old desk that Marie Antoinette had in Versailles. .
It was a great coup. With its pointed turrets and Indiana limestone façade, the house stood out like a Gothic cathedral among the flat houses and “the most hideous chocolate-colored stone ever quarried” that, as novelist and interior designer Edith Wharton described, dominated at the time. the “small and low” city of New York, and soon other millionaires wanted to live in a similar house. In 1893, Lady Astor herself had a mansion built in the same style when her nephew, Waldorf Astor, built the Waldorf Hotel next to her old brownstone to annoy it, dwarfing it with her building. Another château-style mansion was the one that the mining magnate JR De Lamar had built next to that of a rival, the banker JP Morgan. “There are a few cases of millionaires who had worked for others and, when they were outweighed by their wealth, they built mansions next to their former bosses to cast a shadow over them,” explains Gary Lawrence. “In general they liked the press to say that their houses were the most magnificent in the city. And on Sundays, those who lived in poverty in the slums of New York walked down Fifth Avenue and dreamed that one day they too would build a house like that of the Astors, who in Germany had been butchers, or that of the Vanderbilts, who had started out as farmers.”
Although the American dream continued, that kind of New York court of the Medici soon succumbed. As Gary Lawrence explains, “on the island of Manhattan there came a point where the city could only grow upwards,” and so, for example, the land of Ava Vanderbilt’s Petit Château is now occupied by the 660 Fifth Avenue skyscraper. The same fate befell the house of her cousin Cornelius II, replaced less than 50 years after being built by the warehouses. Bergdorf Goodmanalthough some remnants of it remain in Manhattan: the entrance doors are now in Central Park, and the large chimney can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As for the pleasure mansions that millionaires had built for themselves in other places like Newport, they fell into decay as the gulf that separated them from ordinary people diminished. “They were very expensive houses to maintain, and although until the beginning of the 20th century the rich barely paid taxes, their privileged situation soon changed,” notes Gary Lawrence. “In addition, servants stopped wanting to live isolated in lonely country houses and began to look for better-paying jobs in the numerous shops and offices of the cities.”
In New York, only a few of the Gilded Age mansions still stand today. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt in neoclassical style, the former residence of Henry Clay Frick has housed a magnificent museum of his art collection since the 1930s, and although it is now overshadowed by other taller buildings, the JR De Lamar’s Chateau (bought by Poland for its consulate) continues to stand proudly in front of JP Morgan’s house, home of the library and museum founded by this magnate.
“In a way, the city of grand mansions and the city of skyscrapers created each other, because apart from a mansion that reflected their new status, the industrialists of the Gilded Age also wanted skyscrapers that bore their name or that of theirs. their companies, and they often hired the same architects who had built their houses to do them,” says Gary Lawrence. “In addition, although they seemed old, the mansions of those years were made with steel structures like skyscrapers and had the latest advances in electricity, fire safety and sanitary systems. The surprising thing is that, while the old buildings they had taken as a model have been standing for centuries, much more technologically advanced buildings such as the mansions of the Gilded Age were demolished in less than fifty years.
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