The Big House on Fifth Avenue

A real-estate transaction in Manhattan was as significant in its way as anything said in all of last week’s speeches in Washington.

On Fifth Avenue, with a fine view of Central Park across the street, sits a 66-room red brick Georgian mansion, one of the largest and most lavish houses in New York City. Across the street, the late Banker Otto Kahn’s Florentine stone palace is now the Sacred Heart Convent for girls; a block up Fifth Avenue stands Banker Felix Warburg’s six-story home: it is now the Jewish Museum. Farther down Fifth Avenue, workmen this week started tearing down Financier Thomas Fortune Ryan’s ornate 30-room mansion.

Steelmaster Andrew Carnegie built the Georgian mansion in 1900 for $1,000,000, and later put up a 29-room house next door for his daughter. In the old days it took 25 to 30 servants to staff the mansion. They worked in a big kitchen that was white-tiled to the ceiling, waited on Steelmaker Carnegie and his guests in the walnut-paneled library, took care of the vast heating plant. In the basement there is still a mining car, with its own track and turntable, to take coal from the bunker to the stoking floor. On cold days, it took a ton and a half of coal to heat the place.

Carnegie used to order Dewar’s Scotch whiskey in 50 or 60-gallon casks. Reporters, touring the wine cellar, found pigeonholes marked Sparkling Moselle, Champagne, and Marsala, now empty. The wine bottles, like the era, were long since gone. Looking back, that past day now seemed like an era of happy irresponsibility, when no man had to account for his riches—though, like Carnegie, some of the wealthy, e.g., Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller and Julius Rosenwald, had indeed accounted for theirs in handsome gifts to charity, art and education. Ever since the Widow Carnegie died in 1946 (Carnegie himself died in 1919), only a caretaking staff of six had lived in the big place.

Last week, when the Carnegie Corp. decided to get some use out of the Georgian mansion and the 29-room house next door, it wasted no time looking for a Croesus who could afford to keep them open. After all, the places were assessed for $2,100,000, and taxes were $62,000 a year. Instead, the corporation turned over both mansions, on a 21-year rent-free lease, to the New York School of Social Work of Columbia University. The big kitchen would be turned into a cafeteria, and the art gallery into a lecture hall.

Nobody seemed to mind, or even to see anything very unusual about this news. That attitude, too, told a lot about the richest nation in the world, the way it was heading, and the way a majority of its citizens had shown—in five presidential elections—that they wanted it to go.

ncG1vNJzZmismaKyb6%2FOpmaaqpOdtrexjm9ucW1kZX1wwMeeZJuhl2K1sMHSnmSopl2btqfAx2aYr52eqrJw