Monday, June 5, 2017

"Manhattan's Last Gilded Age Mansion Is for Sale"

From Town & Country, April 27:

The Fifth Avenue residence built in 1905 and previously owned by a Vanderbilt is on the market for $50 million.

 
The last of Manhattan's Gilded Age mansions could be yours—for $50 million.
As the New York Post first reported, the six-story Beaux Arts limestone townhouse once owned by the granddaughter of railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt is on the market for the first time in years. 
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The 20,000-square-foot mansion at 854 Fifth Avenue was built in 1905 for R. Livingston Beeckman, a stockbroker and future governor of Rhode Island, and was designed by Warren & Wetmore, the firm that worked on Grand Central Terminal. A working stove from 1905 is still in place, and the interior is essentially unchanged from the way it looked during the era when Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined the term Gilded Age.
The house cost $60,000 to build and was sold in 1912 for $725,000, setting a Manhattan real estate record for the time. It next traded hands in 1925, when Emily Thorn Vanderbilt Sloane White and her husband, Henry White, paid $450,000 for it. The granddaughter of "Commodore" Vanderbilt added ceiling frescoes and gilded touches, including the gold leaf-coated cherubs that adorn the ceiling moldings of the second-floor dining room....MORE
The listing is still live at Elliman.