A mile-long winding driveway brought guests to the austere spectacle of Harbor Hill, designed by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White.
Along the carved oak stair, a Renaissance bronze chandelier lit a Boucher tapestry.
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Heartbreak House Harbor Hill: Portrait of a House
by Richard Guy Wilson
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; 2008
264 pp.; clothbound; 219 b&w and 9 color illustrations; $75
ISBN 978-0-393732-16-0
Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn
Perhaps no razed mansion in America is better documented than Harbor Hill. You may never have heard of this Gilded Age folly; I certainly hadn’t before the W.W. Norton catalog arrived. In standard architectural history textbooks, the ca. 1900 chapters focus on the Shingle Style and other Modernist precursors. Harbor Hill’s rather pompous spires, which architect Stanford White modeled after François Mansart’s 1642 Maisons-Laffitte northwest of Paris, France, were already falling out of fashion when they were completed in 1901. But Harbor Hill, in the Long Island village of Roslyn, is easier to research than many of its more progressive, “directional” (in modern furniture design parlance) contemporaries. White and the scandal-plagued original owners, Katherine and Clarence Mackay, left behind voluminous correspondence, drawings, bills and newspaper clippings files, and many of the Mackays’ neighbors and offspring have given lengthy interviews or penned memoirs.
Richard Guy Wilson, an architectural history professor at the University of Virginia, made an ideal candidate to plow through this raw material. He has written or co-written a dozen books, on subjects spanning from Jefferson’s campus architecture to Colonial Revival, Prairie Style, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s demolished Long Island home and the Machine Age. But Wilson doesn’t let talk of quoins and loggias get in the way of a good yarn about rich people’s whims – their needs for valets and nurses “on duty all day every day,” their urge for walls hung with animal heads to deceptively imply that “the master of the house came from a long line of great hunters.”
Harbor Hill sprawled across some 650 acres overlooking Hempstead Harbor. The estate’s statistics and materials specs amount to a kind of wealth porn. Much of the exterior stonework, some 166,000 tons, was salvaged from a reservoir that had just been demolished in midtown Manhattan. Heating the 60,000-sq.ft. interior required 220 tons of heating coal each year. The furnishings included gilt-bronze hardware, Pavonazzetto marble slabs, polar bear skin and ermine rugs, Old Master paintings and a dozen suits of medieval and Renaissance armor. Around 1905 the staff population peaked at 180 people, including car mechanics, milk bottlers, a flower arranger, a tennis instructor and a masseur for the Turkish bath.
Nothing less than too much would do for the imperious Clarence Mackay (1874-1938) and his restless wife, nee Katherine Duer (1880-1930). Clarence’s father, John (1831-1902) was a Dublin-born, self-made mining and telegraph tycoon who had grown up in dire fatherless poverty. In 1867, his Nevada silver fortune budding, John married a widowed, impoverished, half-French seamstress, Louise Hungerford (1843-1928). Throughout the 1870s and ’80s, they knocked on every socially desirable door in Paris and London – they rented mansions, threw lavish parties, befriended penniless counts and then clambered up to audiences with the Prince and Princess of Wales and finally Queen Victoria. In 1889, the New York Social Register at last deigned to list these arrivistes and their sons Clarence and John William (who died young in a horseback riding accident).
Clarence, though short and reserved, made a superb catch for Katherine Duer. The tall, brunette, WASP beauty’s ancestors included Scottish royalty and New Amsterdam’s first Dutch settlers, but her parents did not have much money and their Chelsea townhouse was unimpressive. By age 20, Katherine was ordering around no less an architectural talent than Stanford White. Clarence, meanwhile, was not much interested in the details of Harbor Hill, as long as the budget stayed below seven figures (in the end, he shelled out about $830,000).
Katherine wrote White more than 100 letters, Wilson notes, “in purple ink on pink or orchid-colored note cards.” (She worked her favorite shades of mauve into the fabrics and paint schemes wherever possible, too.) She asked the architect for “a very severe house,” based on Louis XIV and Henri II precedents. She peppered White with demands throughout the design and construction process: “I do not want a single shutter in the house […] I don’t want my rooms to open to the hall […] I wish the four columns removed within one week.” At times she feigned flirtatious humility to get her way: “It’s a long time since I have seen you […] I shall abide by your opinion.”
She meanwhile started planning a 70-acre model farm with dozens of outbuildings and a Versailles-inspired landscape, but White’s firm had no time for such non-primary buildings. The Mackays handed the grounds assignments to two Beaux Arts-trained architects/landscape architects: Guy Lowell, a Boston Brahmin, who lined the mile-long driveway with maples and lindens, and Jacques Gréber, who planted flowerbeds in fleurs-de-lis patterns. The New York City-based firm Warren & Wetmore designed the farm’s hip-roofed compounds, complete with dorms for on-staff dog handlers and a poultry man.
Yet all this patronage still didn’t satisfy Katherine. In fact she had a number of unfulfilled artistic ambitions; she wanted to be what Wilson calls “a romantic melodramatist,” and published a little-noticed novella and play set in historical France. She kept inviting the press to see, and write breathlessly about, her mansion’s latest additions. After Harper’s Bazaar stopped by in 1904, the reporter raved even about the bathrooms’ “dainty soaps” and the “exquisite tastefulness” of the embroidered, hand-hemmed linens.
No such public display of hubris over possessions and architecture, however, ever goes unpunished. Clarence developed throat cancer in 1910, and his wife ran off to Paris with her husband’s surgeon and abandoned her three children. Clarence, a staunch Catholic, waited until Katherine died (disfigured by cancer, dumped by New York society and by her second husband) to remarry, this time to an opera diva. In 1928 he converted much of his fortune to ITT stock, which was nearly worthless within a year – he incurred, Wilson writes, “one of the greatest losses of the Wall Street crash.”
Subdividers, demolition crews and scrap dealers soon descended on Harbor Hill, and only a few outbuildings survived the onslaught. By the 1950s, Colonial split-levels occupied much of the site along cul-de-sacs, including one named Mackay Way.
Wilson turns this chronicle of what reporters at the time called “Heartbreak House” into a page-turner, without resorting to purple prose. His room descriptions are straightforward but vivid as he tours the reader virtually past, say, a sunken marble bathtub with gold faucets or sunny servants’ dining rooms with Guastavino tiles on vaulted ceilings. He lets Katherine’s own words reveal her difficult character, and quotes staff and grandchildren who remember Clarence as sometimes surprisingly friendly but usually “indignant in every portion of his small, tidy, imperious frame.” Only a few times does the historian bog down in the sheer weight of available detail; for instance, he lists which flowers were grown year-round in the greenhouses and which travel expenses were reimbursed for construction workers. But those flaws are rare in this entertaining, enlightening cautionary tale.
May the arriviste hedge-fund clients of today recognize themselves in its pages, and beware of drawing the gods’ ire with architectural excess.
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