All tagged Mansion
One day earlier this year I happened to be walking by the Charles P Rogers showroom on 17th street and noticed this sign out front. Something struck a chord. My great, great, grandfather Fayette Houck had built a stable and coachman’s house in Cooperstown for a man named Charles Rogers Back in 1902. Could the two names be possibly connected? After a little digging, it turned out my hunch was correct the two men were one in the same……
While the majority of the First Class Staterooms and Suites on the Titanic were populated by Americans traveling to their homes stateside, there was also a sizable contingent of passengers who lived in other countries. Not surprisingly, being a British vessel, the next largest group in terms of numbers was the English, followed by Canadians, then the French and a half-dozen Swiss. This post will look at some of their homes, as well as a few owned by American expatriates onboard.
While my last two posts looked at the homes of the very rich and famous and East Coast urban sophisticates, in this one I will take a look at some of the other homes representing passengers from the East coast to the West. As I wrote in my first post in this series, the first class passengers on the Titanic were a mixed lot, representing a broad swath of the upper-middle and upper classes at the time. This was reflected in the style and scale of their respective homes, which embraced many of the styles of the time, from older traditional Queen Anne architecture to newer Arts and Crafts or Colonial Revival styles.
In my last installment on the Fahnestocks, a family whose contributions to the architectural legacy of the Gilded Age are often overlooked, I focused on their townhouses. In this post, I will visit some of their country places....
While the name Fahnestock might not immediately roll off the tongue today when ticking off America’s great gilded age families, during the era they were undeniably important. The wealthy family took leading roles in the business, philanthropic and social circles of Washington DC, New York, and fashionable east coast resorts of the day. Over the next two posts, I will take a look at their homes, focusing on their residences in town in this first installment....
Watching The Greatest Showman recently, I was amused to see Woodlea (the former home of Margaret Vanderbilt Shepard, now the Sleepy Hollow Country Club) used as the home lived in by the snooty parents of PT Barnum’s wife, while interiors of the Duke Mansion on Fifth Avenue stood in for rooms in Barnum’s own mansion. While both were undeniably fabulous settings, neither was correct period-wise.It started me thinking about Iranistan, the exotically fantastic mansion that Barnum had built in real life. While searching for images of it online, I discovered PT Barnum had built no less than four splendid mansions in Bridgeport Connecticut over the course of his life.
