A man once walked through Caroline Astor’s mansion on Fifth Avenue with a tape measure and recorded the exact length of her staircase railing. In the spring of 1926, those measurements were printed in an auction catalog under lot 160, offering the entire decorative ironwork of the house for sale to the highest bidder. Bidders could purchase the staircase without purchasing the house. The sale was entirely legal and generated no scandal.
It was part of an unrestricted public auction managed by the American Art Association, which dismantled the Astor residence room by room. The catalog carefully itemized everything from carved paneling and fireplaces to the music room itself, sold as a single lot complete with its doors and glazed cabinets. The house had been built in the 1890s by Richard Morris Hunt for Caroline Astor and her son. By the time of the sale, her grandson Vincent Astor owned the property.
The catalog’s forward stated that the contents had been “consigned” by Mr. Astor for sale. The building was demolished later that same year. The fate of the Astor mansion was not unusual.
Between roughly 1925 and 1928, the heaviest years of demolition on Fifth Avenue, some of the most famous private homes in America were stripped and torn down. The timeline runs against a common assumption that crushing taxes drove the mansions down. The federal estate tax exemption was doubled and the top rate cut in half in 1926, while the top income tax rate stood at its lowest level since before World War I. The punishing rates arrived later, after most of the great houses were already gone.
Land values and commercial opportunity drove the destruction instead. When Archer Huntington went to court in 1925 for permission to sell his stepmother’s house, his argument was that the building was unsuitable to commercial use. A house made a poor store, and the block had stopped being residential. Property was sold for the ground beneath the buildings, not the structures themselves.
Developers like Benjamin Winter made fortunes on this logic. Winter arrived from Lodz in 1901 with nothing, painted tenements for twelve years, and eventually built a real estate empire. In 1926, he bought the Astor house. He also bought the old Temple Emanu-El, sold it eleven months later at a profit, and then sold the congregation the Astor site for their new synagogue.
He bought William Kissam Vanderbilt’s chateau and other landmarks, and his firm turned over more than $500 million in property within twenty years. By 1937, he was bankrupt, telling a courtroom he had no assets. William Kissam Vanderbilt’s Petite Chateau at 52nd Street was emptied in three afternoons in October 1921. The auction catalog refused to name the Vanderbilt family, but the lots themselves gave the building away, including stained glass windows inscribed with the architect’s name and date.
The house sat empty and stripped for five years before Winter bought it and the wreckers came. Demolition at the time was a salvage business. Bricks were cleaned by hand, timber was pulled up and resold, and fixtures carried away. Jacob Volk, the leading wrecker in the city, profiled by James Thurber in the New Yorker, was proud of his work and held a grudge against architects who built things meant to last.
He once complained not about losing a building but about losing $7,000 in resalable fittings because of a rushed schedule. A lawsuit in 1923 changed the avenue’s fate. Architect E. C.
Carpenter sued the city for the right to build higher on Fifth Avenue and won. After that ruling, apartment builders went up the avenue almost house by house. In 1929, new housing laws allowed towers on large plots, and builders began assembling three or four mansion lots at a time. The people being cleared off those lots often moved back onto them, taking apartments in the new buildings that replaced their own homes.
Alice Vanderbilt refused that path. She left her house of more than a hundred rooms for another private house further up the avenue and died there. William Andrews Clark’s mansion at 77th Street took fourteen years to build and cost roughly fifteen times its original estimate. It stood for sixteen years.
After his death in 1925, the house sold for less than half what it cost and was demolished in 1927. His widow and daughter moved into an apartment a few blocks south. Clark left his art collection to the Metropolitan Museum on the condition it be kept together in its own gallery. The museum refused.
The Corcoran Gallery in Washington accepted instead, and the collection, including a French gilded room from 1770, went south. That room still stands in Washington today. A few owners refused to sell. Augustus Van Horne Stuyvesant Jr.
, the last direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, bought a Fifth Avenue house in January 1930, at the height of the selling panic. He lived there alone with his servants for the rest of his life, walking the streets daily and occasionally visiting the family pew at St. Mark’s Church. When he died in 1953, only eight people attended his funeral.
The holdouts were mostly widows. Ella Wendell stayed in her house without electricity or a telephone until 1931. Florence Twombly kept a house of seventy rooms and died in it in 1952. By 1960, only five single-family mansions remained on the entire avenue.
The last Vanderbilt palace, the Triple Palace built for William Henry Vanderbilt, was sold room by room at public auction in 1945. Paramount Pictures bought the ballroom for $3,500 to use as set dressing. The house stood empty for two more years before demolition finally began. A gilded console from its drawing room eventually passed through Liberace’s house in Palm Springs and was later given to the Metropolitan Museum.
The few surviving mansions were not saved by preservation law, which did not exist with any real power until 1965. They survived because their owners converted them. Henry Clay Frick turned his house into a public museum with an endowment. The Warburg house became the Jewish Museum.
The Morton Plant house survived because Cartier wanted the address and converted it into a store. Its twin, built by the same architects in the same year, was demolished for a department store. The destruction of Pennsylvania Station is often credited with producing New York’s landmarks law, but the legislation did not pass until after the Brokaw mansion at 79th Street was torn down in February 1965, reportedly on a weekend to prevent a court challenge. Mayor Wagner signed the law two months later.
The buildings themselves are gone, but the auction catalogs survive. The Frick Art Reference Library holds more than 98,000 of them, and the Metropolitan Museum’s library has digitized enough that the Astor sale can be read online. The demolition files did not survive. The city routinely threw them out for fifty years.
So the best surviving record of these lost houses is the paperwork that took them apart. Caroline Astor’s stair railing is known to the half inch because someone was selling it.