How an Upstart From Philadelphia Built the Most Resilient of the Robber Baron Estates
For all their solidity—their block-swallowing footprints and formidable frontage, slate-hooded turrets and iron-fanged fences—the mansions built on Fifth Avenue during the Gilded Age proved, within a few decades of construction, to be something like real estate equivalents of dinosaurs, behemoths unable to survive rapid shifts in climate.