Great Houses of New York 
1880-1930
by Michael C. Kathrens
Urban Domestic Architecture series
9 x 12 inches, 336 pp., over 300 duotone illlustrations.
Cloth, dust jacket.
ISBN 978-0-926494-34-3
April 2005
In 1869, when Edith Wharton’s aunt Mary Mason Jones (immortalized as Mrs. Manson Mingot in The Age of Innocence) finished her French classical house at the corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue— in a block for which her father paid $1500 forty years earlier—she was considered an adventuress for building so far uptown. By 1882, just down the avenue at 52nd Street, William K. Vanderbilt finished his limestone mansion, ushering in the era of the lavish New York Great House, modeled after the London houses of English aristocrats and their Parisian counterparts.
Great Houses of New York, 1880–1930 presents the stories of the most elegant houses built in New York. With over 300 archival photographs and floor plans and a decade of research, Michael Kathrens profiles New York houses known only for their magisterial presence on the city’s most elegant boulevards, some of which still exist today, including the houses of Otto Kahn (Convent of the Sacred Heart), Andrew Carnegie (Cooper Hewitt Design Museum), James B. Duke (NYU Institute of Fine Art), and Morton F. Plant (Cartier), and Willard D. Straight (home of the banker Bruce Kovner). In Great Houses of New York, lavish rooms are brought to life again—polished black and white columns reflect in the marble floor of a grand entryway, Dutch master paintings line damask walls in a second floor reception room, a crystal chandelier softly lights a dining room whose boiserie glows with paintings by Boucher—evoking the elegant private life that has become a trademark of the wealthy New Yorker.
FROM THE PRESS
"Mr. Kathrens' trump cards are the period photographs he has found that reveal the true splendour of both exteriors and interiors."
—Apollo
"Not just for architecture buffs, this thoroughly delightful, beautifully illustrated survey of the opulent private palaces built in Manhattan is absorbing."
—The New York Post
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