This page, clockwise from above left: The James A. Burden house; Oliver Jennings’ mansion (7 East 72nd Street), Henry Sloane’s mansion (9 East 72nd Street), and Benjamin Guggenheim’s mansion (15 East 72nd Street); 18 and 20 East 72nd Street belonged to Felix and Frieda Warburg and mayor Hugh T. Grant, repectively. Opposite page: The mansion of Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo (at 867 Madison Avenue) is now home to Ralph Lauren’s men’s store (above); Ralph Lauren’s women’s store was once the site of Alva Vanderbilt’s home (below).
brothers: real estate investors and developers Henry and Alexander Hirsch. In 1894, Henry T. Sloane (the furniture and carpet retailer) purchased a large lot which was mid-block, between Fifth and Madison avenues and two doors west of the Tiffany mansion. He hired the architect Carrere & Hastings to build a French-style mansion. Before construction was finished, however, it emerged that Sloane’s wife, Jessie, was having a torrid affair with Perry Belmont (son of August Belmont, who was the Rothschilds’ business agent in New York). The couple separated before it became time to occupy the house. In January 1897, Jessie hosted a “housewarming” reception for 200 guests, inviting many prominent New Yorkers including: Ava and Jack Astor (parents of Vincent Astor); the Stanford Whites; Mamie and Stuyvesant Fish (whose new house was close to completion on East 78th Street and Madison Avenue); Mr. and Mrs. Ogden Mills; and William K. Vanderbilt (who was now divorced from Alva, who had married Belmont’s brother, Oliver). Sloane was absent. The Sloanes’ divorce was a huge scandal of the day, made more colorful by the fact that Jessie had been a girl from Brooklyn, starstruck by New York society. Five hours after the divorce was granted in 1899, Jessie became Mrs. Perry Belmont. At her new husband’s insistence, she returned the deed to the mansion to Sloane. He rented the house to Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, and his family as well as his 17 servants. In 1901, Pulitzer vacated and the house was sold to James Stillman, one of the founders of National City Bank (now CitiBank), a widower who lived there until his death at 67 in 1918. The house was then sold to John Sanford, a businessman and horse breeder, and heir to a carpet fortune. 138 QUEST
Sanford’s son, Stephen “Laddie” Sanford, was a famous Palm Beach–based polo player as well as director of the family carpet business. The essence of East 72nd Street that gives it the architectural and social finesse that it retains today is a result of the construction in the mid-1890s. In 1894, across the street from the Tiffany mansion, another McKim, Mead, & White design was purchased by the then newly divorced Alva Vanderbilt who had abandoned her famous château on Fifth Avenue to her ex-husband William K. Vanderbilt. It was in this new house that her daughter Consuelo, forced by her willful mother, dressed and prepared for her wedding to Lord John Churchill, the 9th Duke of Marlborough. Alva, it was said, had originally wished to marry her daughter into royalty. Everything came with a price, and the Vanderbilts could provide that. She couldn’t find a suitable king or prince and so she settled on Churchill, who lived in the largest private ducal palace in England: Blenheim. For Churchill, it was the answer to the expensive upkeep of such an establishment. It was, perhaps, the most famous marriage of an American at the end of the 19th century, a financial transaction that embellished Alva’s strong sense of breeding. Also in 1895, diagonally across from the Tiffany house on the northeast corner of East 72nd Street and Madison Avenue, a real estate heiress by the name of Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo began a’building. Waldo’s architect, Alexander Mackintosh from Kimball & Thompson, created a mansion modeled after a château in Loire. The house was completed in 1898 but Waldo, who was then a widow in her forties, never moved in. Instead, she lived most her life in a smaller house adjoining it. Its first occupants were antique dealers and interior decorators and, in the 1980s, Ralph Lauren leased it for