Step Inside Mrs. Astor's Manhattan Mansions: Gone in Only 30 Years!? | Mrs. William B. Astor House

For almost 30 years, a single woman decided who did and did not exist in fashionable New York, and her word alone could lift a family into society or leave it permanently outside the door. When she at last built the grandest house of her life, a limestone chateau facing Central Park, it was large enough to gather 1,200 dancers beneath a single roof. Hi everyone, Ken here. Hit that subscribe button and let's explore this house. This video is brought to you in part by Victorian Society in America. More on them later. In 1830, Carolyn Webster Skimmerhorn was born at her family's home near Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan, the ninth child of the shipping merchant Abraham Skimmerhorn and his wife Helen Van Cortlandt-White. The Skimmerhorns were among the oldest families in the city. They descended from a Dutchman who had reached New Netherland in the 1630s, and for generations they prospered as ship chandlers and ship owners trading between New York and Charleston. This Knickerbocker lineage mattered enormously, and the social arithmetic of the day, descent from the original Dutch settlers, outranked even the vast but far newer Astor fortune, and it was the one thing money could never buy. The young woman her family called Lena grew up understanding precisely where she stood and how much that standing was worth. In 1853, she married William Backhouse Astor, Jr., the middle grandson of John Jacob Astor and heir to a portion of the largest fortune in the United States. The first John Jacob Astor arrived in America after the Revolution, and built his wealth first through a fur trading empire, then through the China trade, and finally, and most lucratively, by buying enormous tracts of Manhattan real estate. By his death in 1848, he was the richest man in the country. His son, known in his own time as the landlord of New York, multiplied those holdings into hundreds of buildings and rents that rolled in regardless of fashion or financial panic. By marrying into this dynasty, Carolyn joined her unimpeachable old name to an almost limitless supply of money. For the first two decades of her marriage, Carolyn was occupied mainly with raising her children, but the years after the Civil War handed her a mission. A torrent of new money was pouring into New York, and the families who held it were hammering at the gates of established society. Carolyn appointed herself the guardian of the old order, and after the death of her mother-in-law in 1872, she stood unrivaled as its leader. Her chief lieutenant in this campaign was Samuel Ward McAllister, a Savannah-born lawyer who had made himself the age's great authority on taste and protocol. Together they built the machinery of exclusion. McAllister organized the Patriarchs, a committee of 25 socially impeccable men who controlled the most coveted subscription balls of the season, and he gave Carolyn the grandiose nickname by which he loved to describe her, the Mystic Rose, borrowed from the figure in Dante, around whom all of heaven turns. It was Ward McAllister who gave the era its most famous phrase. In 1888, he told a newspaper that there were only about 400 people in fashionable New York, and that anyone outside that number would feel ill at ease in a ballroom and would make others uneasy as well. The figure was popularly tied to the capacity of Mrs. Nestor's ballroom, the implication being that her annual party defined the absolute limit of polite society. This chatty memoir of 1890 gave away too many of the old guard's secrets, and the woman he had served for so long withdrew her favor. When he died in 1895, Mrs. Nestor kept a dinner engagement rather than attend his funeral, and the man who had crowned the Queen of New York was buried without her. For most of her reign, Mrs. Nestor held court from a brownstone at 355th Avenue at the corner of 34th Street, on the ground where the Empire State Building now stands. She had enlarged that house with the ballroom that became the spiritual home of the 400, but by the early 1890s, the tide of commerce was rising fast around her, and the construction of her nephew's enormous hotel next door made the old neighborhood intolerable. The fashionable world was already moving north toward the stretch of Upper 5th Avenue that faced Central Park, and Carolyn resolved to follow it. She owned a generous lot at the northeast corner of 5th Avenue and 65th Street, and she entrusted her son Jack with the task of raising on it the most ambitious private house the Avenue had yet seen. The commission went to Richard Morris Hunt, the most honored American architect of the age and the favorite designer of the Vanderbilt family. Hunt conceived the building as a French Renaissance chateau in the manner of the early 16th century, and he clad it entirely in pale limestone. He had received the commission around 1893, and after roughly two years of construction, the family took possession in early 1896. The inaugural ball was held on the 3rd of February that year, when Carolyn's youngest daughter led the cotillion in the vast new ballroom. The interiors were carried out by the eminent Paris decorating house of Jules-Alain Defy, and the white marble sculpture throughout was the work of Carl Bitter. What Hunt produced was, in truth, two houses wearing the face of one. From the street, the limestone front ran as a single colossal chateau, yet behind the unified façade, a party wall divided the building into two mirror-image residences. Carolyn occupied the northern half, addressed as 841 5th Avenue, while Jack and his family took the larger southern corner, numbered 840, which enjoyed the extra light of windows along 65th Street. A single monumental gateway and carriage entrance served both households at once. As we begin making our way inside, I want to just bring something to your attention. A lot of videos have been created about Mrs. Astor's mansion over the last year by AI-driven channels, which have hallucinated a lot of the details, or even claim that Mrs. Astor's ballroom was actually in the Schwab mansion. Some really outrageous stuff. So if you've seen those videos, you might be surprised by what was actually inside, recalled by myself, a real human architectural historian who has studied the original publications and descriptions regarding the house for years. Guests passed through great bronze gates into a vestibule crowned by a dome of glass, and from there, into a hall lined with marble busts of the Astor forebears. The corridor opened into a soaring marble-grade hall, out of which rose a broad cantilevered staircase of white marble, its carved ornament the work of Carl Bitter. It was down these stairs that Mrs. Astor, ablaze with diamonds, would make her descent before a party, and it was on these same stairs, later in her life, that she suffered the fall that hastened her final decline. A reception room finished in the lighter and more delicate Adam style provided a setting for greeting guests on formal occasions, a deliberate contrast to the heavier French manner found elsewhere on the floor. Its pale, fine-grained ornament gave the eye a moment of rest before the grander pleasures that lay beyond. The dining room was among the most theatrical spaces in the house. Its carved walls were hung with tapestries depicting scenes of the hunt, while at the end of the room, set behind Mrs. Astor's chair, stood a statue of Venus presiding over the formal dinners. The ballroom was the heart and glory of the house, and it doubled as the picture gallery in which Mrs. Astor displayed one of the most celebrated private art collections in the world. It was the largest room in the mansion, stretching across the entire rear of the building and rising through several stories to a stained-glass skylight carried on sculpture male figures. The deep red satin-paneled walls held canvases by the most fashionable European painters of the century, while across the marble floor lay four immense oriental carpets, a row of long, narrow Persian runners in deep red, and scattered rugs woven from peacock feathers. High on one wall, a musician's gallery was screened with Chinese panels so that the orchestra could play on scene. The single room could hold 1,200 people, three times the capacity of the famous ballroom in our old house, and when both halves of the double mansion were thrown open on the night of her January ball, it became for a few hours the undisputed center of high society. Above the public floors lay the private world of the family, the bedrooms, the dressing rooms, and a dome boudoir that no guest would ordinarily see, and higher still the quarters of the servants who kept the whole great machine running. The splendor on display below was, in the end, a staged set, built for the single purpose of receiving the right people in the right way. Mrs. Astor took a tragic fall down her finely polished marble staircase and was never quite the same after, experiencing strokes and memory loss. She passed away in the Fifth Avenue mansion in 1908, at the age of 78, and was laid to rest in the Astor Vault at Trinity Church Cemetery. Within a week of his mother's death, John Jacob Astor IV announced that he would take the entire double house for himself, and he engaged the architectural firm of Crearin Hastings, then at work on the New York Public Library, to fuse the two residences into one. The reconstruction of the ground floor was nearly total and is said to have cost in the neighborhood of half a million dollars, and the transformed mansion was ready by 1910. The changes ran from the front door to the rear wall, and the principal rooms emerged altered in both character and grandeur. Before we see the renovations, a quick word about the sponsor of today's video, Victorian Society in America. Are you captivated by historic architecture, want to explore, learn, and dive even deeper into the past? With the Victorian Society in America, you'll have the chance to travel to American cities and tour stunning 19th century buildings, pursue learning through internationally acclaimed summer programs in American cities and abroad, including Chicago, Newport, and London to name a few. Additionally, members will enjoy a free subscription to 19th Century, the semi-annual publication packed with articles on art, architecture, preservation awards, and book reviews. Visit the website below in the video description and become part of the Victorian Society in America today. Thank you Victorian Society in America for sponsoring this video, now back to our tour. The wall that had divided the two houses came down, the twin staircases were torn out and rebuilt against the rear of the building where they would be hidden away from view, and the whole central space was reborn as a great reception court beneath a dome of glass. The drawing room was kept much as Carolyn had known it, still rather heavy with gilding, facing out onto Fifth Avenue. It carried the older French spirit of the house forward into the new arrangement. Shack's library was shifted to a new position within the reconfigured plan. It remained a deliberately old-world room at the heart of a thoroughly modern reconstruction. No space was more thoroughly remade than the dining room, where nearly the whole of one wall was removed and replaced by an enormous bay window set in a grille of bronze. Redesigned in a free Italian Renaissance manner and measuring roughly 40 feet by 30, it gleamed with columns of rose-tinted marble, a checkerboard floor of black and white, tapestries in green and gold, and a plaster ceiling worked in brown and gold. The great ballroom, the one the two houses had always shared, was left essentially as haunted built-in, a lofty rectangular hall lit from above and hung with the family's French paintings. Now, however, it belonged to a single residence, the crowning room of one of the largest private houses in all of New York. Astor presented the reborn mansion to society with a housewarming in March of 1910, and for a brief season, the great rooms shone again as they had in his mother's day. Shack's divorce in 1909 and his remarriage two years later to a woman nearly 30 years his junior scandalized the very society his mother had ruled. Returning from his honeymoon with his young and pregnant wife, he boarded the Titanic and went down with a ship in April of 1912, the richest man on board. The unified palace passed to Astor's eldest son, Vincent, who had little use for so vast and costly a house and soon resolved to be rid of it. The property was sold, its contents dispersed at auction, and around 1926, the great limestone chateau was pulled down. In its place rode Temple Emmanuel, the monumental Reformed synagogue completed at the end of that decade, which stands on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 65th Streets to this day. The double mansion at 845th Avenue stood for barely 30 years, yet in that short span, it framed an entire age. It was raised by an aging arbiter just as the rigid world she governed began to slip from her grasp, joined into one by a son who would perish in the most famous disaster of the century, and swept away within a single generation to make room for a house of prayer. Dazzling, exclusive, and gone, almost as soon as it was finished. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. What did you think about the Astor Double Mansion? Let me know down below in the comment section. I'd also like to say a special thank you to Victorian Society in America for sponsoring this video. Check out their link in the video description to find out how you can get involved today. As always, thank you all for watching, and I'll see you next time on This House.