Vanderbilt Houses

Vanderbilt Houses

From the late 1870s to the 1920s, the Vanderbilt family employed some of the country's best Beaux-Arts architects and decorators to build an unequalled string of New York townhouses and East Coast palaces in the United States. Many of the Vanderbilt houses are now National Historic Landmarks. Some photographs of Vanderbilt's residences in New York are included in the Photographic series of American Architecture by Albert Levy (1870s).

The list of architects employed by the Vanderbilts is a "who's who" of the New York-based firms that embodied the syncretic (often dismissed as "eclectic") styles of the American Renaissance: Richard Morris Hunt, George B. Post, McKim, Mead, and White, Charles B. Atwood, Carrère and Hastings, Warren and Wetmore, Horace Trumbauer, John Russell Pope, Addison Mizner were all employed by the descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who built only very modestly himself.

Read more about Vanderbilt Houses:  Houses

Famous quotes containing the words vanderbilt and/or houses:

    We must learn which ceremonies may be breached occasionally at our convenience and which ones may never be if we are to live pleasantly with our fellow man.
    —Amy Vanderbilt (1908–1974)

    I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.
    William Blake (1757–1827)