At noon on March 31, 1948, a crowd gathered on Riverside Drive in Manhattan to watch a house come down. A crane swung a two-ton steel ball into the northwest tower of the structure. The stone held through the first impact, but by the fifth blow, the crown of the tower gave way, and five tons of masonry dropped into the street inside a cloud of white dust. What came down that afternoon had covered an entire Manhattan city block.
The mansion had 75 rooms, 50,000 square feet of floor space, and lawns and terrace gardens on all four sides. Inside stood a chapel with a pipe organ built into it, and in the cellar sat a private power plant that fed 6,000 light bulbs. By the time the wrecking ball arrived, the building had been standing empty for nine years. Before he died, the man who built it had tried to give it away.
He offered the entire property to the city of New York as an official residence for the mayor, and the mayor turned him down. The man who built it was Charles Schwab. He started work at 17, carrying survey stakes around a steel mill for a dollar a day. At the end of his life, he owed more than he owned.
The mayor who refused the gift was Fiorello LaGuardia. He had grown up on an army post in Arizona and began his working life as an interpreter on Ellis Island. As mayor, he rode out with fire companies, and when newspaper deliverers went on strike, he read the comics aloud on the radio so the city’s children would not miss them. The refusal was not simply a matter of temperament.
A building of that size is expensive merely to keep standing. By the mid-1930s, property taxes alone reportedly ran above $60,000 a year, close to $1. 5 million in today’s money. On top of that came coal for the private power plant and wages for the staff required to keep the place from rotting.
New York had no official mayoral residence at the time. Mayors lived wherever they had lived before taking office, and the arrangement had never caused much difficulty. Schwab was not solving a problem for anyone. He was handing over a liability and hoping it would be received as a gift.
This was not his first attempt to be rid of the place. As early as 1930, a New York paper reported that the block had been sold and an apartment building would go up. Nothing came of it. What New York chose instead years later tells you what the city considered reasonable.
Gracie Mansion, a wooden country house built by a merchant in the late 1700s and standing in a public park, became the mayor’s official home in 1942. LaGuardia moved in and stayed. When Schwab died in 1939, his will left the property to the city government. The bequest was declined.
No official was willing to explain to taxpayers why the municipality should take on the largest private house on the west side. Title passed to Chase National Bank, which held the property as custodian and set about finding an occupant. In the last year of the war, a wire report noted the bank offered the house for rent at $75,000 a year, well over a million in today’s money. It found no tenant.
Nine years is a long stretch for a building of that size to sit unoccupied on a public street. During the war, parts of the building found a use no one had imagined. Sections were partitioned into apartments. On the terrace lawns where gardeners had once kept formal beds, someone planted a victory garden and grew vegetables.
In 1947, the Prudential Insurance Company bought the block. Reported figures for the sale vary, sitting somewhere above a million dollars. The price mattered less than the intention. Prudential wanted the ground.
The company said from the outset that the mansion would come down and apartments would go up in its place. The doors were opened first so buyers could come in and strip out anything worth carrying away. A house of 75 rooms had stood available for most of a decade. The city would not take it as a gift.
No tenant would take it at any rent. In the end, the only serious offer came from a buyer who wanted the dirt underneath. Charles Schwab had paid $865,000 in 1901 for that piece of ground on the west side of Manhattan, roughly $36 million in today’s money. Newspapers reported it at the time as the largest sum ever paid for a building lot in New York.
The land had once belonged to orphans. The Orphan Asylum Society had moved there in 1839, when the district was called Bloomingdale and lay roughly five miles north of the city proper. What the society wanted was distance from the crowding and fevers downtown. The society’s annual report from the 1870s shows 188 boys and girls living there that year on a budget of about $37,000.
After 60 years, the city caught up and surrounded the place. The society moved on to Westchester, and the land went on the market. It did not all go to Schwab. On the Broadway frontage, another buyer put up the Ansonia, an enormous apartment hotel still standing today.
One half of one orphanage became a building full of apartments. The other became a house for two people. The first man to buy Schwab’s half was Jacob Schiff, a banker rich enough to build whatever he liked. He bought the ground, then did not build on it.
According to the account that has come down, his wife refused to make the move. If she went to live out on the drive, she said she would never see her friends again. Schiff sold the land on, and the buyer was Charles Schwab. Then that conversation happened a second time in a different household.
Rana Schwab did not want to go either, and her reasoning ran along identical lines. Her friends were on the east side of the park. She believed crossing it would cost her every one of them. Her husband signed for it anyway.
Central Park functioned as a wall. Society had settled along its eastern edge and had no particular reason to cross. Move a mile west, and you were out of the system. The west side carried its own difficulties.
An elevated railway ran up Ninth Avenue, and below Riverside Park on the Hudson shore, the New York Central ran freight at ground level. The view Schwab paid a record price for came with a working railway at the bottom of it. Developers had an answer ready. Riverside Drive was going to be the next avenue of the rich.
The Hudson was wider and finer than anything the far side of the park could offer, and the ground was cheap enough to build properly on. Schwab believed it harder than any of them and paid accordingly. The migration never came. Fifth Avenue stayed Fifth Avenue.
The mansion had two sets of bronze doors, one on the Riverside Drive side facing the Hudson, another opening onto 74th Street. Each leaf weighed between a ton and a ton and a half. When the New York Times described them before the work was finished, the paper reached for a comparison and settled on the bronze doors of the Capitol in Washington. Nobody actually knows how many rooms were behind those doors.
Newspapers of the day, architectural histories, and sale notices give figures anywhere from 40 to 86. The number that appears most often is 75, and that figure may well be wrong. What is not in dispute: four stories and a footprint running the full width of the property. At the heart of the plan stood a chapel, two stories high and large enough to seat a full orchestra.
A pipe organ had been made for that space and fitted into the fabric of it. Schwab had the instrument enlarged in 1904 at a cost of $21,500. Seven years later, he had it enlarged a second time for $23,457. 50.
Each enlargement would run close to $800,000 in today’s money. A second organ was installed at the main staircase so that music met you on the way up. Underneath all of this was an indoor swimming pool, 20 feet by 30, lined in glazed brick and roofed in glass. On the same level lay a gymnasium 50 feet long and a bowling alley.
Electricity came from the property itself. A generating plant in the cellar carried the entire load, including the lamps, the three elevators, and a system for cooling the air in summer. Air conditioning in a private residence in 1906. Three decades later, Schwab was still bringing it up in conversation.
Deliveries never crossed the lawn. A service tunnel ran beneath the garden so coal and groceries could reach the house unseen. The garage held four motorcars at a moment when most of New York still moved by horse. The rooms were done as a kind of museum of dead European monarchy, a different reign in each.
Dinner was eaten under Louis XIV. Henry took the library, which reproduced the one at Fontainebleau. Francis I was given the main hall. The parlor was worked up from the Petit Trianon at Versailles, the private retreat Marie Antoinette used to escape her own court.
Pillars of carved marble, paneling in South American mahogany, and a picture gallery holding art worth something in the region of $55 million in today’s money. Upstairs, the room the owner actually slept in measured 20 feet on a side with a shower stall five feet square. Of every measurement in the inventory, it is the only one that sounds as though it belongs to a person rather than an institution. When the Times passed judgment on the finished work, the word it landed on was pretentious.
The paper did not intend an insult. The point was that this structure made a claim, and the claim was the biggest anybody in the city had yet attempted. The chapel organ was not furniture. It had been built into the structure of that room, cut to fit it and nothing else.
Forty-two years later, that was going to become somebody’s problem. On the evening of December 12, 1900, some 80 men sat down to dinner at the University Club in New York. Chauncey Depew and Edward Harriman were there for the railroads, along with the bankers James Stillman and August Belmont and Henry Rogers of Standard Oil. Their guest of honor was 38 years old and ran Carnegie Steel.
Seated on Schwab’s right was J. Pierpont Morgan. At 63, Morgan was at the height of everything he could do. He disliked competition the way some men dislike noise.
He had spent years buying companies for the specific purpose of stopping them fighting each other. Then Schwab stood up and spoke without notes. His subject was the future of steel, and his argument was consolidation. A single company holding the best mills in America could run each one for what it was actually good at.
Waste would go, price wars would end. What was left would be large enough to take on Europe and win. Accounts of how long he talked run from half an hour to an hour and a half. Every version agrees on one thing: Morgan, who had a cigar in his hand throughout, never lit it.
Through January, the two of them worked on it, mostly at Morgan’s house on Madison Avenue. None of this had been mentioned to his employer. Here was the president of Carnegie Steel negotiating in private with the one man capable of buying Carnegie Steel, and Andrew Carnegie had not been informed. When Schwab finally did raise it, he raised it on a golf course.
Carnegie kept a cottage by the links at St. Andrews in Westchester. Schwab went up and played a round with him, then asked what figure would move him. The older man wrote a number on a sheet of paper.
Morgan looked at the sheet and accepted without haggling. The number on that paper was around $492 million, more than $20 billion in today’s money, handed to one man and his partners for one business. United States Steel was incorporated in February 1901, assembled out of 10 separate companies with an authorized capitalization of $1. 4 billion.
It was the first billion-dollar corporation in the history of the world. In the same year, the entire federal government of the United States spent $517 million. The new steel company was capitalized at nearly three times the annual cost of running the country. Charles Schwab was made its first president at 38.
The job was smaller than it appeared. Elbert Gary held the chairmanship, and the board held the power. Schwab ran the mills. The decisions that mattered were taken somewhere he was not sitting.
In January 1902, a short item ran in the New York Sun. Charles Schwab, president of the United States Steel Corporation, had been playing roulette very high for several days at Monte Carlo. That afternoon he broke the bank. The number was 26, backed in the maximums and in various combinations, and it produced 50,000 francs.
For a very large number of Americans, gambling was not a vice or a weakness. Gambling was a sin. United States Steel had just been floated, and ordinary Americans had bought shares in it. Would you leave your savings with a corporation whose president spent his evenings at a roulette table in a foreign casino?
The man who took it hardest was Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie had come out of a strict Presbyterian household with no patience for waste of any kind and none whatever for gambling. The cable he sent Schwab was short and brutal. Public sentiment was shocked, the papers were demanding a denial, and there would probably have to be a resignation.
To Morgan, Carnegie wrote separately. A son had disgraced the family was how he framed it. Nothing had wounded him so deeply in a long while. Whatever the younger man’s talents, he was not fit to head the corporation.
Schwab’s account of the trip was a different story altogether. By his telling, there had been a motoring tour through the south of France with a party of friends. He had gone into the casino because he liked the orchestra. The sensational reports were false, and on no occasion had he won more than $36.
The arithmetic troubles me. Fifty thousand francs came to somewhere near $10,000 in the money of the day. Thirty-six dollars is not a modest version of that. Those two accounts are not describing the same evening.
Morgan said nothing in public. His private position was that what a man did with his own evenings was his own affair. Schwab stayed in post for the time being. What that could not do was recover the loss, because Carnegie never came back.
A friendship that had carried a grocery clerk to the head of American industry did not resume for years. Schwab also talked too much in public. Audiences were told that a college education was not necessary for success in business. Trade unions, he said, held back economic growth.
More seriously, he had used his own money to buy a small steel company in Pennsylvania, then folded it into a shipbuilding venture that ran into trouble. His health broke, and a long rest abroad followed. In August 1903, the presidency was handed back. The top job at the first billion-dollar company on Earth had lasted him about two and a half years.
Four miles north of Wall Street, on the block he had bought with the proceeds, the foundations of the house were already in the ground. Charles Schwab was born in February 1862 in Williamsburg, Pennsylvania. The family moved to Loretto after his father bought the town’s livery stable. High school was finished there, and that was the end of his formal education.
Seventy miles west lay Braddock and Andrew Carnegie’s Edgar Thomson works on the Monongahela. The boy went and took a job clerking in a store for $10 a month, with 12-hour days and the bookkeeping on top. One of the regular customers came in for cigars. Captain Bill Jones ran the Edgar Thomson works.
Both men cared about music. Jones began using his new hire as a messenger to Carnegie. One afternoon, left waiting in the house, the boy sat down at the parlor piano and started to play. Carnegie came in and told him to carry on.
The Scot loved Scottish tunes above all others. He asked whether the young man could play his favorites at a party in three days’ time. Schwab did not know a single one of them. He said yes, then learned the music inside three days and played it.
Well enough to be remembered. At 23, a bridge over the railroad tracks was handed to him to design and build. The work came in under schedule and under budget. When a customer complained about the quality of Carnegie rails, the young superintendent set up a chemistry laboratory in his own kitchen and taught himself the metallurgy almost nobody in the industry understood yet.
In 1887, a British steelmaker offered $50,000 a year to come and run works in Birmingham. He turned it down because the offer did not extend to the men working under him. Two years later, the captain was killed in an accident at the furnaces, and Schwab took over the mill. Three years after that came Homestead.
The lockout at the Homestead works in 1892 turned violent, and it ended with the union broken and men dead on both sides. Carnegie sent Schwab in afterwards to run what was left. Schwab moved into the plant and stayed there, walking every part of it at all hours. His method was not complicated: talk to people, pay a bonus for quality rather than volume.
By 1900, Homestead was the largest steel plant on Earth. The presidency of Carnegie Steel came at 35. In 1883, Schwab married Emma Eurana Dinkey, whose family kept the boarding house where he had been lodging. Everybody called her Rana.
Their first house together stood on Jones Avenue in Braddock, and it is still there today. The place looks like exactly what it was: a decent house belonging to a young man doing well in a milltown. Nothing about it predicts what came next. Consider what the other steel money did.
Andrew Carnegie put his house up on Fifth Avenue and used an established New York firm. Henry Clay Frick built at 70th Street and hired Carrère and Hastings, the practice that had just produced the New York Public Library. Schwab hired Maurice Hébert, a French architect almost entirely unknown outside a small professional circle. My own guess is that Schwab did not want an architect with opinions.
He already knew what he wanted in detail, down to which specific buildings in France he wanted quoted. What he needed was somebody who would execute the thing rather than argue about it. The front of the house came from Chenonceau. The exterior staircase was lifted from Blois.
Azay-le-Rideau supplied further elements. Those are three real châteaux standing today in the Loire Valley, put up in the 1500s for kings and for the people who served them. Before a single stone was cut, the entire design was modeled in wax. The model cost $20,000, roughly $750,000 in today’s money.
Somebody built a wax house so that a man could walk around it and decide whether he liked the real one. A quarry was opened at Peekskill up the Hudson to supply this one building and nothing else. More than 100 artists, modelers, and engineers were engaged on the project. Hébert went in person to supervise the weaving of reproduction tapestries.
Several of those tapestries were considered good enough to hang at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 before they were installed in the house. The Times reported the governing rule of the job: no stock material anywhere in the building. Made to order, all of it, and made once.
Work started in the spring of 1902. The original plan had the family moving in by Christmas of 1904 at a projected cost of $2. 5 million. The building was finished two years late, and the final figure has never been pinned down closer than somewhere between 6 and 10 million.
The presidency of United States Steel had been handed back the previous summer. The job that paid for all of this was three years gone before anybody moved in. The shape of the house was a capital letter H. Turn it on its side, and you have the cross-section of a steel beam.
That object is the most consequential thing in this entire story, and it is not the house. Bethlehem Steel made that beam in America. It was the small Pennsylvania firm Schwab had bought with his own money, the private purchase that had helped cost him the presidency. Freed of that job, he turned his full attention to the mills he actually owned.
Within a few years, the company was the largest supplier of structural steel to the American construction industry and the second largest steel producer in the country. For the next quarter of a century, when a tall building went up in New York, the bones of it were very often his. Late in 1914, the British Admiralty needed submarines quickly, 20 of them. British yards had quoted 15 months.
Schwab offered nine and put his own money behind it by accepting a financial penalty if he missed the date. American neutrality law made the delivery illegal. His answer was to build the components in the United States and assemble them at a British-owned yard in Montreal. In April 1918, President Wilson put him in charge of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, which meant authority over every shipyard in the United States.
He tore up the cost-plus contracts the industry had been living on and replaced them with fixed prices. Afterwards, the accusation came that Bethlehem and its chairman were profiteers who had grown fat on a war. The charges went to the courts, and the courts rejected them. A beam that lets you build 15 stories does not only change what a building looks like.
It changes what the ground underneath is worth. Fit 600 apartments onto the same ground, and the value is set by hundreds of rents collected every month. The consequences arrived on Fifth Avenue first. Cornelius Vanderbilt II had built the largest private residence New York has ever seen.
In 1926, it was pulled down, and a department store took the site. The rest of the avenue followed through that decade and the next. On Riverside Drive, two dozen apartment blocks stood along the drive by 1910. The causation deserves care: income tax arrived in 1913, domestic servants became difficult to find, and the Depression finished off what was left.
But the beam is the part he made himself. His works were rolling the steel that made his own house impossible. For a while in the early 1930s, on Wednesday evenings, you could hear that chapel on the radio. The National Broadcasting Company carried a series of organ recitals played live from inside the house.
The man at the console was S. Archer Gibson. Schwab kept a private organist on a salary of $10,000 a year, well over $300,000 in today’s money. Gibson was one of a household staff of about 20.
A census taker came round in 1930 and wrote down the servants living in the building. Most had been born in England, the arrangement wealthy Americans of that period considered correct. Among them was the butler, George Stone, who had been there for years and would stay. Twenty people to keep one building running for a family of two.
Rooms opened and aired and closed again, most of them for nobody. In 1916, the couple sent out a Christmas card, and the picture they chose to put on it was their own staircase. Rana Schwab lost that argument about moving. What she did afterwards is the genuinely surprising part.
She took the interiors over, working room by room, overseeing the design of a house she had said she did not want. She did it thoroughly enough that contemporaries credited the choices to her rather than to her husband. Almost everything we know about her comes from other people’s descriptions. She left very little in her own voice.
What survives is a set of observations by visitors, journalists, and the people who worked for her. Over the years, this much is clear. She went out less and less. Her health declined.
Invitations kept arriving, and she stopped accepting them, including invitations from the White House. Friends from across the park did come over to see her, but the traffic ran one way. She received, and increasingly she did not go. Her husband’s life ran in the opposite direction entirely.
Charles Schwab was the most sociable man in American heavy industry. His weeks ran through dinners, plants, and meetings, through hotels in London, Paris, and Pittsburgh. The house filled up when he was in it and went quiet when he was not. There is one striking exception to the inwardness of that place.
In 1917, with American troops going to France, Rana Schwab gave over two rooms on the ground floor to Red Cross volunteers. Women came in and worked in them, knitting socks and rolling bandages. The couple had no children. He was still being paid a quarter of a million dollars a year at the point when he could not pay his taxes.
His salary as chairman arrived every year, straight through the worst of it. In 1918, when Forbes published the first list of the richest men in America, Charles Schwab came in 13th with an estimated fortune of $70 million, something over a billion in today’s terms. On the same rung sat Guggenheim and the son of J. P.
Morgan. His fortune was not sitting in a vault. It was in Bethlehem stock, in other people’s ventures, and in property. When the market went in October 1929, the paper value went with it.
Several of the investments turned out to have been poor ones, including money placed in Death Valley Mining. What did not move at all was the outgoing side of the ledger. Bethlehem sold structural steel, and in a depression nobody builds. Consider what he was carrying: the house on the drive, a second estate out at Loretto with its own golf course, staff in both places, a private railway car, and the giving, which was constant and largely unrecorded.
By 1933, the taxes on the Riverside property were going unpaid. Bethlehem Steel held its annual meeting in 1935, and a small stockholder named Mary Gallagher rose to speak. Her point was straightforward. The old man was no longer of use to the company and ought to retire.
He was 73 years old and sitting right there in the room. This was the man who had built the firm out of almost nothing and put the beams into half the skyline of New York. Two years later, at another annual meeting, a different shareholder went further and proposed that the salary be cut or stopped altogether. By the accounts that survive, the executives present were shaken by it.
Around this same period, the house went on the market at $4 million, about $95 million now, a fraction of what had gone into building the thing. Nobody came forward, not at 4 million, not at anything. Rana Schwab died in January 1939. She was 79, and she had lived in that house for 33 years, most of them without going out of it much.
Her husband left within weeks and never went back. Rooms were taken in an apartment hotel at 290 Park Avenue. After a lifetime of bronze doors, a rented flat in Midtown. For years, money had gone out from him to old friends, to relatives, to men he had worked alongside decades earlier in Pennsylvania.
Those payments now had to be reduced. People who knew him at the end said this was the part he took hardest. He died on September 18, 1939, of heart disease, eight months after his wife. The address was a rented apartment less than two miles from a house he still owned.
An old automobile went for $20 at an administrator’s sale. A set of carpenter’s tools went for four. Those lines belong to the Pennsylvania half of the estate. A preliminary accounting of the New York estate listed debts of just over $24 million, owed chiefly to banks.
Against that stood assets of $353,000. The Pennsylvania filing showed $300,000 in debts against $51,000 in assets. He had been borrowing against what he owned in order to keep going, which is what people do when they are confident the situation is temporary. The man who had put United States Steel together died owing more than he could cover.
There were two executors. One of them was his younger brother. They had a decision to make about the Bethlehem stock, which was the largest thing left. One of the two wanted it sold at once before the price could slide further.
His co-executor, the brother, argued against. Caution won, and the shares went. Inside three years, the mills and the yards were taking orders as fast as anyone could write them, because the country was at war again, and Bethlehem built ships. The price climbed.
Had those two executors sat still and done absolutely nothing, the estate would have come out solvent. Out at Loretto, the second house went the same way. Immigrant had 44 rooms and a golf course of its own on land that had once run to a thousand acres. It was auctioned in 1942.
One bidder appeared. The building and 240 acres changed hands for $32,500, call it $650,000 today. It became a Franciscan friary, and it is still standing, part of a college campus up in the hills where he was raised. In the cemetery there stands a private mausoleum.
He and Rana are both inside it. Of everything he built or bought or was handed in 77 years, that is the only piece still doing the job he intended for it. In 1947, Prudential had thrown the doors open so buyers could come through and carry off anything worth having: bronze fittings, stained glass, paneling, marble, carved doors. Around a hundred people walked those rooms that day.
S. Archer Gibson was among them. He had not come to buy a thing. He went through to the chapel, where the instrument he had played for years still stood in the space it had been built to fit.
Then he put his hand on the cabinet. The organ could not be got out. It had been cut to fit that chapel and nothing else. The wrecking company announced that it would come down with the walls.
Then at close to the last possible hour, a man named Eric Stoddard drove down from New Canaan in Connecticut and bought it. He had it taken apart piece by piece and carried out of the chapel. Part of that organ went into a house in Camden, Maine, where it went on being played. A few other things survived.
The mahogany doors and some of the carved marble went across the river to Our Lady of Lebanon Cathedral in Brooklyn. They are still there. You can walk in and put your hand on them. Everything else came down through the spring of 1948.
By 1950, there was a new building on that block: 19 stories of red brick and 636 apartments. Families moved in. Some of their grandchildren live there now. Three great steel fortunes built houses in Manhattan.
Andrew Carnegie’s place on Fifth Avenue is the Cooper Hewitt Museum, and anybody can walk through it. Henry Clay Frick’s is the Frick Collection, and people queue to get into it. Both of those buildings are still doing something. Schwab’s became apartments.
For my money, the reason is the one difference between the three men that nobody thinks to mention. Carnegie handed his house over. Frick planned from the beginning that his would end up a museum with his pictures in it. Schwab wanted a home.
He said so repeatedly, and he meant it. The intention was to stay until he died. He is the only one of the three who got precisely what he asked for.
It stayed a home right up until it was nothing at all.