The Virginia Vanderbilt Mansion
One of the most architecturally stunning blocks in Manhattan is 93rd Street between Park and Madison Avenues. It’s a quiet street, lined with cherry blossom trees in a downward curve toward Central Park, visible just a block away. Still surviving on the quaint street are three beautiful mansions that once were home to New York’s elite.
The George Fischer Baker House, Loews Mansion and Virginia Vanderbilt Mansion are all clustered together. All three families were friends and chose to build on the same block.
Today, let’s learn about the Vanderbilt Mansion, as it recently sold for an astronomical figure off-market.
In 1929 Virginia Graham Fair Vanderbilt—very fancy and newly-divorced—hired famed architect John Russl Pope to build her a 50-room mansion on the sparsely populated Upper East Side. Her friends William and Florence Loew—as in Loews movie theaters—along with George Fischer Baker (Florence’s brother and founder of what is now Citibank) convinced her to build her mansion on the same block as theirs so they could all have lavish dinner parties. I mean, I’d go. Who wouldn’t?
Photo from Schoolfield Country House
Designed in a Louis XV-style, only the finest materials were used. The limestone was imported from France and was from the same quarry that the Loew’s next door used.
Portrait of Virginia Graham Fair Vanderbilt by Giovanni Boldini
Photo from Art in America
Virginia, known to her friends as ‘Birdie’, used the house—one of many estates she had—for entertainment to satisfy many of her philanthropic endeavors. In 1933, tragedy struck when Birdie’s 26-year-old son was killed in a car accident. She fell into a depression and eventually passed away two years later from pneumonia.
In the decades that followed the occupants of the house would vary from Byron and Thelma Foy (heirs to the Chrysler Corporation), The Romanian Mission to the United Nations, Lycée Française de New York and for the last 20 years, Carlton Hobbs, a London-based antiques dealer.
Photo: Chris Baker
I happen to live on this block and know Carlton. I recently chatted with him and some staff; they informed me that they were moving as they had sold the townhouse! The deal was done off-market, which is why I had no idea. Here is the WSJ article detailing the transaction, one of the largest townhouse deals in the last two years at $52.5 million.
Being the friendly neighbor that I am, I was able to get a private tour of the mansion before the new owners moved in! It did not disappoint. Check out my video of the tour on my Instagram below.
