INTRODUCTION
A L E X A N D E R T. S T E WA RT H O U S E , F I F T H A V E N U E
American millionaires acquired the best in European and Asian art. From Henry Clay Frick’s Fragonard panels commissioned by Madame du Barry, to Thomas Fortune Ryan’s ducal collection of old masters, to Otto Kahn’s 18th-century salon from the Hôtel d’Humières in Paris, the Great Houses were given distinction through remarkable private art collections. • • •
Mr. and Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt officially opened their new house at 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue in the winter of 1882 with a costume ball for 1,200 people. The lavishness of this event, said to have cost a quarter of a million dollars, was on a scale never before attempted in a private house on this side of the Atlantic. The success of the party was directly related to the interest created by the house itself, as it was radically different from any other
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3 4 T H S T R E E T . (Author’s Collection)
residence in the city. Designed to re-create the luxurious lifestyle of the great European town house, this Loire-inspired limestone chateau designed by Richard Morris Hunt affected the way wealthy New Yorkers lived for the next 50 years. The Vanderbilt house was a dramatic departure from the interminable blocks of Italianate brownstones then lining the better residential sections of Manhattan. With its French Renaissance–inspired tourelle and steeply pitched roof with ornate copper cresting, the building relieved the monotonous boxlike appearance of the typical New York town house. The white of the tooled limestone must have created a startling contrast to the unrelenting sea of chocolate brown. Before the Vanderbilt house, there had been attempts to replicate European residential standards, the earliest being the Leonard Jerome house, completed on Madison Square in 1859. Jerome, a Wall
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