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:
“When I want to buy up any politician I always find the anti-monopolists the most purchasable—they don’t come so high.”
—William Vanderbilt (1821–1885)
“In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)