Herbert Bayard Swope - Mansion

Mansion

Swope died in 1958 at his home, known as Land's End, on Hoffstot Lane at Prospect Point, Sands Point, New York. Swope had hosted parties with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx, Winston Churchill, Averill Harriman, Albert Einstein, Alexander Woollcott – as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald. These associations, along with other similarities to the houses and events in The Great Gatsby, helped give rise to unsubstantiated reports that Fitzgerald had modeled Daisy Buchanan's home in the 1925 novel after Swope's home. However Swope did not buy Land's End until late 1928. The more likely explanation that ties Swope to Fitzgerald is the time period of 1922-24, when Fitzgerald was living in Great Neck, L.I. Prior to buying the Sands Point mansion, Swope had been renting a home since 1919 on East Shore Road in Great Neck, overlooking Manhasset Bay. This home was directly north of 325 East Shore Road, the residence of sportswriter Ring Lardner. Lardner and Fitzgerald were good friends, and spent many an evening sitting out watching the continuous party that was Swope's home during these years. This was the period of time that Fitzgerald was developing his Gatsby concept.

Other reports suggest the home, built in 1902, had been designed by Stanford White – though most sources dispute the claim. The clapboard colonial mansion included 15 bedrooms and 14 baths (eleven full baths), a seven-car garage, a tennis court with a tennis pavilion, a rose garden and a guest house – on 13.35 acres. The 20,000-square-foot (1,900 m2) waterfront mansion had originally been built for clothing merchant John S. Browning Sr. in 1911 and originally named Kidd's Rocks. It was purchased in 1921 by Malcolm D. Sloane, who's wife renamed the estate Keewaydin. The house had been a site for a Vanity Fair photo shoot with Madonna and had been a location for the 1978 shooting of The Greek Tycoon, a film on the life of Aristotle Onassis. In 2011, the home was razed and the property is to be subdivided.