The Castle That Three Generations Built And One Generation Lost In A Single Afternoon скачать в хорошем качестве

The Castle That Three Generations Built And One Generation Lost In A Single Afternoon

The Castle That Three Generations Built And One Generation Lost In A Single Afternoon In 1764 a doctor named John Bard stood on a bluff above the Hudson River in New York and built the first house. Over the next one hundred and thirty one years the land passed through four families — the Bards, the Hosacks, the Astors, the Langdons — each one adding something permanent to a property that had become one of the most celebrated private landscapes in America. In 1895 Frederick William Vanderbilt, grandson of Cornelius the Commodore, purchased the estate for one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars and hired McKim Mead and White to build a fifty four room mansion of Indiana limestone and steel that cost two point one six million dollars and contained fifteenth century Flemish tapestries, a Venetian ceiling salvaged from a palazzo, Ming vases, and a hydroelectric plant generating electricity a full decade before any other home in Hyde Park had it. He used it four months of the year. He spent his happiest hours not in the fifty four rooms but in the garden. He and Louise had no children. Louise died in Paris in 1926 and Frederick brought her body home across the Atlantic in a ship's baggage hold converted into a chapel. He lived alone in the mansion for twelve more years and died in 1938 leaving everything to a niece who had no use for it. She listed it at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Nobody bought it. The highest offer was eighty thousand dollars. She rejected it. The farmlands Frederick had loved most were sold and became a housing development. Franklin Roosevelt who had watched this mansion being built as a fourteen year old boy from his estate down the road suggested she donate it to the federal government. She agreed. The Vanderbilt name lasted exactly one generation at Hyde Park. Every piece of original furniture is still in the house. The Gingko tree Samuel Bard planted in 1799 is still on the south lawn. It was there before the Vanderbilts arrived. It is still there now. For deals, collabs : themanorfiles.partnerships@gmail.com