As his mother, brothers, and sisters toured the 250 rooms of the château during their Christmas visit, as they were driven over the two hundred miles of roads he had laid out, as they were shown around Biltmore Village, the town George had built on his estate for the eighty house servants and over three hundred outdoor workers that it took to run his barony—a village with a school, shops, a railroad station, sawmills, a hospital, a post office, and All Souls Church—the family realized that there was no question but that younger brother George was pure Vanderbilt. He had outdone them all, as well as every other millionaire of the Gilded Age.
It had taken one thousand laborers, each earning ninety cents a day (seventy-five cents a day more if they brought a mule with them), six years to build Biltmore, lay out the park around it, and landscape an outer area of eleven thousand acres. The work had been completed just in time, for shortly after the family Christmas reunion, George’s mother, seventy-five-year-old Mrs. William H. Vanderbilt, passed away. George closed up the mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue and moved down to Biltmore.
Vanderbilt’s goal at Biltmore was to promote scientific forestry and farming and to run his duchy as a self-sustaining estate. A director of forestry oversaw the improvement of timber in the acres of forest. A director of agriculture was in charge of breeding dairy cattle and European hogs. The director of landscaping, Chauncey Beadle, who came to the estate in 1890 when it was being built, stayed for the next sixty years, supervising the care of the 11 million specimens in the arboretum.
Two million young trees were sold each year from the Biltmore nurseries, which covered one hundred acres. Trees from thousands of acres of forests were selectively cut, hauled to the estate’s large steam sawmill and then to the planing mill, and sold for commercial lumber. Three thousand cords of firewood were sold annually, along with fifteen hundred cords of bark from chestnut oak for the manufacture of tannic acid, fifteen hundred cords for the making of chestnut extract, tons of fresh produce from the truck farms and fruit from the greenhouses, milk and ice cream from the dairies, and pedigreed livestock from the barns. The annual income Vanderbilt received from his forest industry was great enough to offset the expense of supporting the large army of mountain men he needed to care for his domain and run it as a center of scientific forestry work. “He employs more men than I have in my charge,” commented the U.S. secretary of agriculture. “He is also spending more money than Congress appropriates for this Department”28
At Biltmore, George led the life of a gentleman farmer, in his spare time studying the plants, birds, and animals of his principality, learning various dialects of American Indian tribes, and, for some obscure reason, translating contemporary literature into ancient Greek.
Biltmore was a monument to a young man’s fantasy. When Henry James came to visit, he found it “utterly unaddressed to any possible arrangement of life, or state of society.” All it was, he concluded, was “a phenomenon of brute achievement.” The room to which he had been assigned, he complained, was located about half a mile from the “mile-long library….We measure by leagues and we sit in Cathedrals.”29
It could get lonely living in a 250-room house set in the midst of so vast and remote an estate, with only servants and an occasional guest. On June 2, 1898, at the age of thirty-six, George Vanderbilt married Miss Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. With their only child, Cornelia, born in 1900, they journeyed from Biltmore to their mansion in Washington, D.C., then to their summer cottage in Bar Harbor, stopping in every now and then at 640 Fifth Avenue, which George had inherited after his mother’s death.
Was there no end to what Vanderbilt money could buy? Indeed there was, and for George Vanderbilt, the glimpses of the end were closer than the misty blue-gray mountain peaks he could see from his bedroom window.
Five years after the opening of Biltmore, George Washington Vanderbilt was running out of money. Suddenly, work stopped. Some of the rooms of the château were never completed or decorated, closed off forever with bare brick walls. The poultry farms, which were losing money, were abolished. Olmsted had dreamed of a road circling the entire estate with plantings on each side, a great arboretum of specimen trees and shrubs. He laid out his plans for this Arboretum Road, as he called it, and enthusiastically showed them to Vanderbilt. For the first time, his patron did not give the nod of approval. Annual expenditures for improvements and maintenance of the barony were slashed from $250,000 to $70,000. Vanderbilt’s financial adviser, his brother-in-law Hamilton McKown Twombly, criticized Olmsted’s son, who had continued his father’s work. ‘The trouble with you landscape architects is that you don’t protect your clients from their own ignorant impulsiveness about matters in which they rely on your experienced judgment.”
“If we had known earlier,” the younger Olmsted later responded, “that George Vanderbilt was spending more than his income on the Biltmore Estate and eating seriously into his capital, we could, and would, have urged methods of economizing—to any desirable degree—much more satisfactory in the net results, and less wasteful, than [what] inevitably happened when the annual expenditure was suddenly and arbitrarily cut to about a quarter of what it had been running.”30
Not even Vanderbilt wealth could fund dreams too grand. George tried to sell 120,000 acres of forest to the United States Forest Preservation Commission at a low price, but his offer was not accepted.
When George Vanderbilt died of a heart attack on March 6, 1914, at the age of fifty-two, and his debts were paid and his estate settled, the full effect of his Ludwig-like building spree was obvious: His net estate was less than a million dollars, $929,740.98, including only $11,125 of railroad stocks and bonds. His fourteen-year-old daughter, Cornelia, received the $5 million trust fund he had inherited from his father, and his wife was left the homes at Bar Harbor, Washington, and Biltmore, with no money to run them. Within three months of her husband’s death, Edith Vanderbilt had sold 86,700 acres of the Biltmore barony to the National Forest Preservation Commission for $433,500, at $5 an acre, $200,000 less than her asking price; she would sell off additional acreage as she needed money until only a core estate of 12,500 acres remained. The executors of George Vanderbilt’s estate were compelled to reduce the individual bequests made in his will because there simply were not the assets to fulfill them. “Which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?” Luke 14:28.
3.
Like the grand finale of a Fourth of July fireworks display, George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore was the biggest and most startling of the Vanderbilt mansions. It was overwhelming. And it was the end. One by one, the mansions now would begin to fall.
“William K. Vanderbilt is in charge of everything,” Chauncey Depew had told reporters that day in September 1899 when Willie’s older brother, Cornelius Vanderbilt, passed away. “He is the head of the family.”31
For a while, Willie managed the affairs of the railroad empire with a vigor that had not been seen in the family since the days of the Commodore.32 He acquired selected railroad properties to complement the Vanderbilt railroad system, which now traversed twenty thousand miles and included seventy thousand freight and passenger cars, and concentrated on reducing the cost of haul and doubling the haul carried by each freight car by improving the track system and eliminating grades and curves. His work polished the bottom line, increasing the profits of the railroads and adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the value of New York Central stock and to the family fortune. “While many individual Americans are wealthier than any of the Vanderbilts,” the New York Times reported, “the combined fortune of the descendants of the Commodore who inherited large fortunes and usually married into other wealthy and prominent families, is commonly rated greater than that of any single family group in the United States, and among the greatest in the world. The combined fortunes of the descendants of Commodore Vanderbilt probably reach a total today which runs into the billion
s.”33 It was predicted that under Willie’s directorship, the Vanderbilt lines would soon extend across the continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the family fortune would continue to swell.
But with more money than one person could ever spend, no matter how hard he tried, and try he certainly did, Willie soon tired of merely making more money and devoted himself to a life of leisure. Before he was fifty, he had all but retired from the irksome task of running the railroads, handing the management over to the Morgan interests, while he explored the world on extended cruises aboard the Valiant, sailing from Oyster Bay to Newport, to the races at Cowes off the English coast and at Kiel in the Baltic Sea, on to Monte Carlo and Venice, and then to the Caribbean. He defended the America’s Cup with the Defender, and established a racing stable in France that was a phenomenal success, with his horses winning the Grand Prix and almost every important prize.
Willie indeed had it all: good health, good looks, good friends, and good fun, and an ever-growing fortune that enabled him to do anything anyone could do. He also had the intelligence to perceive that perhaps having everything left a lot to be desired. On one of his trips back to the United States from his French stables, he talked with reporters in extraordinarily candid terms about what it meant to be rich. “My life was never destined to be quite happy,” he told them. “It was laid out along lines which I could not foresee, almost from earliest childhood. It has left me with nothing to hope for, with nothing definite to seek or strive for. Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”
He continued lecturing the astonished reporters: “If a man makes money, no matter how much, he finds a certain happiness in its possession, for in the desire to increase his business, he has a constant use for it. But the man who inherits it has none of this. The first satisfaction, and the greatest, that of building the foundation of a fortune, is denied him. He must labor, if he does labor, simply to add to an oversufficiency.”34
While at the races at Auteuil in France on April 15, 1920, seventy-one-year-old Willie was struck down with a heart attack, induced, his doctors believed, by his habit of smoking a box of cigars each day. He passed away three months later, on July 22, at his home in Paris, with his children—Consuelo, Willie K., and Harold—at his bedside. “Whatever his personal suffering may have been” Consuelo recalled, “he made no complaints; not even a gesture of ill-humor troubled the serenity he seemed to emanate”35 His body was taken to the United States. Before burial in the family mausoleum at New Dorp on Staten Island, there was a private service in Willie and Alva’s château at 660 Fifth Avenue, a service that stirred poignant memories for Consuelo and her brothers “as from the gallery, where as children we looked down on festive scenes, came the haunting notes of death’s dirges.”36
Willie had lived lavishly and given money away lavishly, including $1 million to build model tenement houses in New York City, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to Columbia University, the YMCA, the Vanderbilt Clinic, and Vanderbilt University. He left an estate valued at $54,530,000: after years of spending and spending, almost exactly the amount he had inherited in 1885 when his father died. To Consuelo, he had given $15 million shortly before his death. His second wife received $109,000 under his will and the income from a trust of $8,250,000. After the state of New York had claimed an inheritance tax of $1,934,571.73, his sons, Willie K. and Harold, divided the residuary estate, each receiving $21 million. Like his father before him, Willie through his will advised his sons to invest in bonds of the New York Central system.
Willie’s death precipitated the scattering of his playthings. His second wife, unable to afford the vast sums needed to maintain his renowned French racing stables, sold them within three months of his death. A year after his death, the contents of the château at 660 Fifth Avenue were auctioned by the American Art Galleries, everything from a set of twenty etched gold wineglasses to the paneling of the gilded ivory ballroom (sold to a curiosity shop for $1,400), to the great stained-glass window from the dining room depicting the Field of the Cloth of Gold. For $460,521, Harold sold Idlehour, the eight-hundred-acre estate in Oakdale, Long Island, with its three-story marble and brick manor house containing thirty master bedrooms, its large conservatory, and its tennis court under glass, all of which had cost Willie over $10 million. A syndicate purchased it and planned to convert the estate into a country club.37
And soon after Willie’s death fell the first, and most famous, of the Vanderbilts’ Fifth Avenue mansions.
When Willie and Alva’s château had been completed in 1883, the nearby blocks of Fifth Avenue had been an exclusive residential neighborhood, an avenue of old-money brownstone townhouses and new-money palatial mansions, and here and there open spaces waiting for new millionaires. The Vanderbilts had not believed that business and trade would ever reach that far up Fifth Avenue. Maybe it would reach the avenue at Forty-second Street, but certainly not farther north into the two miles of fabulous mansions, Millionaires’ Row. Certainly the land owned by Columbia University on Fifth Avenue and by St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the other Vanderbilt homes, would at least protect the two or three blocks of the Vanderbilt neighborhood. But it began to happen, the inevitable march of business up Fifth Avenue, led by real-estate agencies, art dealers, and brokerage firms. Willie Vanderbilt had called a family council at the first sign of the invasion of trade into the Vanderbilts’ territory in the early years of the new century; the family agreed to buy the Langham Hotel at the northeast corner of Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue when it came on the market unrestricted against business, later snatching up other parcels for protection. When Willie learned that the old Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum across from his father’s twin mansions at 640 Fifth Avenue was to be bought by a developer to construct an eighteen-story hotel, he purchased the property for $1 million and later leased it to Cartier. Finally, though, the family realized it was no use. It was like holding back the tide. Frederick Vanderbilt gave up in 1914 and sold his mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fortieth Street; it was demolished and replaced by the six-story Arnold Constable and Company building. Before too many years elapsed, the neighborhood had changed from residential to business, albeit elegant business, and the remaining Vanderbilt mansions stood as outposts in a changing world.
With Willie’s château at 660 Fifth Avenue surrounded by commercial buildings and apartment houses, it, like all the period houses of the Gilded Age, seemed more than ever a ridiculous anachronism. “Must I show you this French chateau, this little Chateau de Blois, on this street corner, here, in New York, and still you do not laugh?” wrote a Chicago architect. “Must you wait until you see a gentleman in a silk hat come out of it before you laugh? Have you no sense of humor, no sense of pathos? Must I then tell you that while the man may live in the house physically (for a man may live in any kind of a house, physically), that he cannot possibly live in it morally, mentally, or spiritually, that he and his home are a paradox, a contradiction, an absurdity, a characteristically New York absurdity; that he is no part of the house, and his house no part of him?”38
Several months after Willie’s death, his sons, Willie K. and Harold, put the château at 660 Fifth Avenue up for sale. The land was assessed at $1,950,000, and Alva’s dream home, which had cost $3 million in 1883, was assessed at only $175,000 more. It was thought that the house might be used as a restaurant.
On November 12, 1922, the Empire Trust Company purchased the château with plans to turn the dining hall into its main banking room, and to construct a connecting office building next to the mansion. These plans fell through, and ownership passed in November 1925 to real-estate developer Benjamin Winter, once a poor immigrant boy from Poland who had been a house painter, then a painting contractor, and in the boom years after the World War one of New York’s wealthiest real-estate operators. Winter planned to erect two 5-story buildings and stores on the site. The mansion would be razed, but the staircase c
arved of Caen stone and many of the beautiful fireplaces and mantels would be used in the new offices.39 The painting of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche that graced the ceiling of the Louis XV salon where Alva had greeted her guests was sold to the Century Theatre. For several thousand dollars Warner Brothers purchased the marble floor of one of the rooms of the mansion and some paneling, frescoes, and fixtures to be used in one of its new theaters. And the statue of Richard Morris Hunt in stonemason’s garb, long forgotten on the roof, was discovered and returned to Willie K. The Caen stone carved walls, stairways, and carved wood panels were bought by a company that resold architectural pieces to millionaires building new mansions.
How could a masterpiece like Richard Morris Hunt’s château be demolished? How could a wrecking ball be permitted to swing into that graceful limestone facade, into the carved fleurs-de-lis and the slender turret? Everyone thought of ways to postpone the day of destruction.
For the first time, the doors of 660 Fifth Avenue were thrown open to the public in November 1925. Where once the guests at Alva’s fancy dress ball had entered her fairyland past footmen in maroon livery, two women sat at a table inside the massive entranceway, collecting fifty cents from each of the sightseers who trooped through to attend the benefit performances and tea dances held by the Film Mutual Benefit Bureau to raise money for the poor children of New York City. Later in December, the Commission for the Blind ran in the mansion a sale of articles made by the blind. To accommodate the surprising crowds wishing to get a glimpse of this fabled Fifth Avenue monument, the mansion had to be kept open in the evening as well as during the day.
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