The 10 Biggest Mansions EVER Demolished in America

These are the 10 biggest lost mansions in America, starting from the smallest and going all the way to the largest. Hi everyone, Ken here. Hit that subscribe button, and let's dive into a special episode of This House. This video is brought to you in part by Victorian Society in America. More on them later. We begin in Glen Cove, on the north shore of Long Island, with Pembroke, 60,000 square feet of pure Gold Coast fantasy. Pembroke was built between 1914 and 1916 for Captain Joseph Raphael Delamar, a Dutch-born sailor who dove for shipwrecks before striking it rich in western gold and silver mining. His architect was C.P.H. Gilbert, the same man behind Delamar's Manhattan mansion, which still stands today as the Polish Consulate. The house itself was an eclectic blend of styles, long and low across a terraced waterfront site, but nobody remembers Pembroke for its facade. They remember the Winter Garden, a colossal glass-roof conservatory filled with towering palms, exotic birds, marble sculpture, and splashing water, all of it glowing like a lantern after dark. Elsewhere, the house offered a private theater, a pipe organ, and sunken gardens stepping down to a Long Island sound. Delamar barely got to enjoy any of it, passing away in 1918, scarcely two years after the place was finished. In the 1920s, Pembroke was owned by movie mogul Marcus Lowe, whose theater empire controlled MGM, and Hollywood royalty came out to screen pictures where mining money had built the walls. Lowe himself passed away at Pembroke in 1927. The estate then limped on for four more decades before the house was demolished in 1968. Today, only scattered fragments of the estate survive, and the greatest glass room on the Gold Coast lives on only in photographs. From New York, we head south to Palm Beach, Florida, for number 9, El Mirasol, at 60,277 square feet. Yes, that figure is oddly precise, and yes, those extra 277 square feet are exactly what lifted past Pembroke. El Mirasol was built beginning in 1919 for Edward T. Stokesbury, the Philadelphia banking titan, and his wife Eva, the undisputed queen of Palm Beach society. Their architect was Addison Meisner, and this was his first great residential commission on the island. Working in the Mediterranean Revival style, Meisner gave the Stokesburys a rambling composition of stucco walls, red-barrel tile roofs, cloister courtyards, and a tower gazing out over the Atlantic. The name is Spanish for the sunflower. The amenities were pure Palm Beach excess, including a garage for 40 automobiles, an aviary, an orange grove, and a private zoo complete with monkeys. There was even an auditorium wing for entertaining, because Eva's guest list routinely swelled past what any mere living room could hold. El Mirasol did more than house the Stokesburys. It invented the look of Palm Beach, because Meisner's Mediterranean fantasy became the template most estates on the island tried to match. After Eva passed away in 1946, the property was sold and subdivided, and by the end of the 1950s, the house itself was gone. Keep the name Stokesbury in mind, because this list is not finished with that family. But for now, number eight carries us north to Prides Crossing, Massachusetts, and to Eagle Rock, the 65,000 square foot summer home of Henry Clay Frick. Frick was the coke and steel baron who ran Carnegie Steel, crushed the homestead strike, survived an assassination attempt at his own desk, and feuded with Andrew Carnegie for the rest of his life. When he wanted a summer palace, he chose Boston's North Shore, where old money went to cool off in the sea breeds. Completed by 1906 to designs by the Boston firm of Little and Brown, Eagle Rock was a vast Georgian revival pile of brick and stone containing 104 rooms. The house crowned a rise above Massachusetts Bay, with terraces and formal gardens spilling toward the water. He filled his houses with old master paintings and canvases that would later hang in the Frick collection in New York. Frick passed away in 1919, and his widow Adelaide used Eagle Rock until her own passing in 1931. After that, the great house mostly sat closed, too big to use and too expensive to run. In 1969, the Frick's daughter Helen, facing crushing taxes and no future for the place, ordered it demolished. One of New England's largest houses was reduced to open lawn, and today it survives only in photographs and memory. Number 7 returns us to Long Island for Innisfada, 72,000 square feet of Tudor splendor and manhasset. Innisfada was built between 1916 and 1920 for Nicholas Brady, a utilities financier, and his wife Genevieve, and its name is Gaelic for Long Island. Philadelphia architect John designed it in the Elizabethan Tudor manner. All carved limestone, leaded glass, clustered chimneys, and gables marching along a facade that seemed to go on forever. The house held 87 rooms, including a soaring great hall and a long gallery in the best English manor tradition. Stone carvers salted the exterior with whimsical grotesque, tiny figures that rewarded anyone who bothered to look up. The Bradys were among the most prominent Catholic laypeople in America, and Genevieve held the papal title of duchess. In 1936, the couple hosted Cardinal Eugenio Pichelli as their houseguest at Innisfada, and three years later, that houseguest became Pope Pius XII. Nicholas passed in 1930, and in 1937, Genevieve gave the entire estate to the Jesuits, who ran it for decades as the St. Ignatius Retreat House. For roughly 75 years, the great house survived intact while its Gold Coast neighbors fell one by one. Then, in 2013, the Jesuits sold the property to developers, and despite a loud preservation fight, the demolition crews arrived that December. Innisfada is the freshest wound on this list, proof that the error of losing these houses is not as safely behind us as we would like to believe. At number 6, we stay on Long Island, climbing to Harbor Hill and Roslyn, 80,000 square feet of French Chateau crowning one of the highest points on the island. Harbor Hill was built between 1899 and 1902 for Clarence McKay, whose father, John, had risen from Irish immigrant poverty to staggering wealth in the silver mines of Nevada's Comstock load. The architect was Stanford White, though the client who truly ran the job was Clarence's wife, Catherine, who bombarded White with letters and opinions until the house matched her vision. What rose on the hilltop was a stone palace in the manner of a 17th-century French Chateau, cool, gray, and enormous, set within roughly 650 acres of gardens, woods, and farm buildings. Inside, the showpiece was the Great Stone Hall, where Clarence displayed one of the finest collections of medieval armor on Earth. Harbor Hill threw parties that made national news. In 1924, the McKays gave a ball for the Prince of Wales, with the trees along the drive wrapped in thousands of tiny blue lights. Three years later, they hosted a dinner for Charles Lindbergh only weeks after his flight to Paris, which meant the most famous man alive was passing the evening beneath the armor. But the family's telegraph empire crumbled in the Depression, and Clarence passed away in 1938. The emptied house was demolished in 1947, and a housing development swallowed the hilltop. If you know where to look in Roslyn today, a gatehouse and a few estate buildings still whisper that something extraordinary once stood above the harbor. Before we see the five biggest lost houses in America, a quick word from 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. Number 5 takes us into the heart of Manhattan for Riverside, the roughly 90,000 square foot chateau of steel king Charles M. Schwab. Schwab was the small-town Pennsylvania boy who started as a dollar-a-day laborer in Andrew Carnegie Steel Works, became the first president of United States Steel, and later built Bethlehem Steel into a colossus. In 1901, he bought an entire city block on Riverside Drive between 73rd and 74th streets, turning his back on 5th Avenue because he wanted the Hudson River views. There, by 1906, the French architect Maurice Hebert raised a freestanding French Renaissance chateau borrowing features from some of the Loire Valley's most famous chateau. It is widely regarded as the grandest private house ever built in that section of New York City, with a price around 6 million dollars at a time when a comfortable family home costs a few thousand. Inside its 75 rooms were a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a bowling alley, an art gallery, and a mighty pipe organ. In the basement held the mansion's own power plant. Carnegie, whose own mansion sat across town, is said to have joked that Charlie's place made his look like a shack, but Schwab spent as spectacularly as he earned, and bad luck, bad markets, and the Depression eventually wiped him out. He offered Riverside to New York as an official mayor's residence, and Mayor LaGuardia turned it down, reportedly scoffing at the idea of a public servant living in a palace. Schwab passed away in 1939, deeply in debt. Riverside was demolished in 1948, and an apartment building called Schwab House now fills the block. Before we climb any higher, a word of honesty. The next three houses were never measured down to the square inch, and every serious estimate lands all three at roughly 100,000 square feet. Consider them a with the order that follows being a personal judgment call rather than a final verdict. Number four brings us to Fifth Avenue, and the house New York loved to hate, the William Andrews Clark Mansion at 77th Street, known almost from the start as Clark's Folly. Clark was a Montana Copper King, and one of the richest men on the planet, with a reputation so oily that Mark Twain publicly savaged him as a disgrace to the American nation. He was also a United States Senator, though his first election was so soaked in bribery that he was forced to give up his seat. Beginning in 1897, Clark set out to build the most magnificent house in America, hiring the firm of Lord, Hewlett, and Hull. 14 years and roughly $7 million later, the Beaux-Arts behemoth finally opened in 1911, with 121 rooms, 31 bathrooms, and four art galleries. It also had Turkish baths, a swimming pool, a tower rising nine extra tall stories, and its own underground rail spur so that coal could be delivered without a single car crossing the sidewalk. Clark bought a bronze foundry to cast his fittings and a quarry to cut his stone, because apparently, at a certain point, merely paying for things stops being satisfying. Critics called the result vulgar, overloaded, and absurd, and the nickname Clark's Folly stuck like tar. Clark lived there with his much younger second wife and their daughters, one of whom, Hugh Gadd, would grow up to become the most famous recluse in American history. He died in 1925, and because nobody on earth wanted the place, it was sold and demolished in 1927, barely 16 years after completion. One gilded 18th century French salon was rescued for a museum collection, a single shining room saved out of 121. Number 3 stood nearby at 5th Avenue and 57th Street, and by most reckonings, it was the largest private house ever built in an American city. De Cornelius Vanderbilt II mansion. Cornelius was the favorite grandson of the old Commodore, a disciplined and devout heir who ran the New York Central Railroad and gave money away as seriously as he made it. His house began in 1883 as an already enormous chateau designed by George B. Post, and then in the early 1890s, Cornelius did something wonderful and slightly unhinged. He roughly doubled its size. By 1894, the expanded mansion stretched along 5th Avenue all the way from 57th to 58th Street, a red brick and limestone French Renaissance fantasy inspired by the Chateau of the Loire, with something like 130 rooms inside. The finest artists of the American Renaissance shaped its interiors, including figures by the likes of John LaFarge. Guests arrived through a portcochere, passed into a vast entrance hall, and could wander from a moorish smoking room to a ballroom built for the crowned heads that Alice Vanderbilt loved to entertain. Cornelius suffered a stroke in 1896, won his family blame partly on a bitter feud over his son's marriage, and he passed in 1899 at just 55 years old. Alice stayed on for nearly three more decades, rattling around the enormous house as the neighborhood turned to commerce all around her. In 1926, she finally sold, and the great chateau came down to make way for the Bergdorf Goodman department store. Pieces of it escaped the wreckers, and they are worth hunting for. The grand entrance gates now welcome visitors to the conservatory garden in Central Park, and a magnificent mantelpiece rests in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, souvenirs of a house too big for even New York to keep. Number two carries us to the outskirts of Philadelphia, into White Marsh Hall, 100,000 square feet of Georgian majesty that admirers called the American Versailles. And here is Eva Stokesberry again, the only person to appear twice on this list, because after wintering at El Mirasol, she needed somewhere suitably grand for the rest of the year. Her husband Edward, senior partner of Drexel & Company and a partner of J.P. Morgan, hired Horst Trumbauer to build it between 1916 and 1921 on 300 acres in Windmoor, Pennsylvania. The finished house held 147 rooms across six levels, three above ground and three below, wrapped in a serene Palladian shell of limestone. The French designer Jacques Robert surrounded it with formal gardens, fountains, and radiating alleys that genuinely earned the Versailles comparison. Below stairs, White Marsh Hall ran like a small town, with its own bakery, barbershop, refrigeration plant, and telephone switchboard, and a combined full-time staff of well over 70 people between the house and the grounds. Henry Ford, after a visit, is said to have remarked that it was a great experience to see how the rich live. During the Second World War, the house performed one final act of quiet heroism, secretly sheltering hundreds of masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in case New York came under attack. Edward passed away in 1938, and Eva could not carry the cost alone, and by the mid-1940s, the house had been emptied and sold. It stood abandoned, stripped and covered in graffiti, a ruin that haunted everyone who saw it, until demolition finally came in 1980. A few columns and garden fragments still stand among the suburban houses built on the site, classical bones rising from the lawns of an ordinary neighborhood. And so we arrive at number one, the largest of them all, Shadowbrooke, with conservative estimates placing it at 120,000 square feet, and the most liberal placing it as high as 170,000 square feet. This would make it the second largest house ever built in America, and it once towered above Stockbridge Bull in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. Shadowbrooke was completed in 1893 for Anson Phelps Stokes, a banker and heir to a great mercantile and mining fortune, and designed by the architect H. Neil Wilson. Wilson worked in the Tudor Revival style, stretching stone, timber, and cables along the hillside until the house was reportedly the largest private residence in America. It crowned at war until Biltmore was completed two years later. The family's time there was short because Anson lost a leg in a riding accident a few years after moving in, and the family drifted away from the Berkshires. In 1917, Shadowbrooke found its most famous owner when Andrew Carnegie, elderly and cut off from his beloved Scotland by the First World War, bought it as a stand-in for his castle. Carnegie spent his final summers fishing on the lake below, and in August of 1919, the richest steelman in history passed at Shadowbrooke. In 1922, his widows sold the estate to the Jesuits, who filled the enormous house with young men studying for the priesthood. Then, on a March night in 1956, a boiler exploded and fire tore through the building, burning the largest of America's lost mansions to the ground. Nine of these giants fell to the wrecking ball, and only one to flame. Which means the greatest threat to a great American house was never a fire, lightning, or time. It was us, armed with tax bills, changing fashions, and a shrug. The least we can do now is remember them. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. Which of these lost mansions was your favorite? Let me know down below in the comment section. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to Victorian Society in America for sponsoring this video. Check out the 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.