 From Primedia Publications |
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All that Old Money Can Buy
What you discover at "The Breakers,"
Rhode Island's Vanderbilt Mansion.
By Monique Burns
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The Breakers is the ultimate example of Gilded Age extravagance. | |
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How could it have come to pass? How have nearly five million people—people whose names most likely do not appear in the Social Register—been permitted to make pilgrimages to The Breakers? In these very egalitarian times, the finger of blame points at the Countess Gladys Szechenyi, the youngest daughter of the capitalist castle's builder, Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Long after marrying into a European title, in 1948 she leased the hard-to-maintain property to the non-profit Preservation Society of Newport County for the stunning sum of $1 a year. After negotiating with other Vanderbilt family members, the society bought The Breakers outright in 1973. Subsequently, for many years, for a set number of dollars per head, the society has allowed regular guys to come in and get a gander at what folks used to call "the good life."
What draws visitors? Some come to gasp at the baronial splendor; others to drink in memories of a bygone era. For many, The Breakers remains the country's most palpable symbol of the Gilded Age—that brief, post-Civil-War span between 1870 and 1914 when America witnessed unparalleled industrial growth (and widespread labor unrest), unprecedented personal wealth (as well as the rise of a dispirited urban underclass), and conspicuous consumption on the grandest scale (along with widespread political corruption).
When visitors enter the grounds of The Breakers, many are overwhelmed—the place more than hints at wealth and power. Maybe that is because it looks like what it is, a product of three generations of Vanderbilt fortune-building. When "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877—a man who parlayed a boyhood Staten Island ferry business into a multi-million-dollar steam-ship line and later consolidated the New York Central and Hudson Railroads—he left an estate of $100 million, at the time the largest pile ever made in America. When his oldest son and heir, William Henry, died in 1885 he left $200 million—having doubled the family fortune in just eight years. At that point, William Henry's oldest boy, Cornelius II, became chairman of the board of the family railroad empire, Head of the House of Vanderbilt, and personal inheritor of a $67 million piece of the family pie.
Serious and church-going, Cornelius II and his wife initially favored putting up a more modest, two-story building on their Newport property. But their architect, Richard Morris Hunt—the first American architect to attend Paris' Ecole des Beaux Arts and, later, a founder of the American Institute of Architects—had loftier ideas. In 1892 he built the $11 million, gold-encrusted "Marble House" on Newport's Bellevue Avenue for Cornelius II's younger brother William K. Vanderbilt, and he was already at work on the 250-room "Biltmore" estate in Asheville, North Carolina, for Cornelius II's youngest brother George Washington Vanderbilt. Brushing modesty aside, Hunt persuaded Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius II to build a grand, three-story limestone mansion patterned after the palazzos of 16th-century Genovese merchant-princes.
Crowning the estate's 30-foot-high, elaborately scrolled wrought-iron entrance gates are the initials "CV" (for Cornelius Vanderbilt), as well as the family's acorn-and-oak-leaf heraldry device. Aware that older New York families considered her in-laws nouveaux riches, Mrs. Cornelius II (Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt) diligently searched her husband's family tree for illustrious forebears with family crests. Failing to find any, she simply appropriated the acorn-and-oak-leaf device for a Vanderbilt crest, a motif that appears throughout the house.
Just beyond the gates and up a short gravel driveway, the mansion's fortress-like bulk looms large, as if straining against the limestone balustrade that confines it to a single acre of the 11-acre estate. Beneath the facade is an equally formidable construction of brick reinforced with steel beams and joists. Hunt—who did not use a single board-foot of lumber in the construction—boasted to Mrs. Vanderbilt that The Breakers would stand 1,000 years.
But safety, not solidity, was the family's primary goal. The Vanderbilts had summered on this site from 1885 until 1892, when the $400,000 shingled Queen Anne-style Victorian "cottage" they had bought from tobacco tycoon Pierre Lorillard burned to the ground. To prevent a second disaster, Vanderbilt decreed the new construction would be absolutely fireproof. Consequently, the kitchen is isolated in a separate wing and the heating plant is under the caretaker's cottage, several hundred yards from the main house.
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Monique Burns, a former Travel & Leisure editor, writes frequently about Newport's Gilded Age splendor.