"The King of New York"

During the 1920s, humorist Rube Goldberg wrote a gag piece in the "The New Yorker" about a tourist who comes to New York. Everywhere he turns - from the docks to the Ritz, from Wall Street to a first night on Broadway - he keeps running into Otto Kahn. When Kahn finally appears on stage at two in the morning playing drums at a Harlem after hours club, the visitor loses his mind and is carted off to Bellevue.



Yes, the great financier and patron of the arts, Otto Kahn (1867-1934), was the inspiration for Parker Brothers' Mr. Monopoly. Here he is in recognizable mode, tossing greenbacks. Kahn made a fortune as a partner in Kuhn Loeb, the great underwriter of American railroads, absorbed by Lehman Brothers in 1977. Kuhn Loeb in its day was second only to the House of Morgan, but no one was second to Otto Kahn as an investment banker of skill and imagination, a bon vivant of legendary charm, and an influential patron of the arts. Kahn gave millions to the Metropolitan Opera, despite a management loath to let him buy a box because he was Jewish. (When they finally did, he refused to use it, lending it instead to important visitors). He cultivated, subsidized and/or enjoyed close personal relationships with Nijinski, Stanislavski, Toscanini, Caruso, Pavlova, not to mention Isadora Duncan, Max Reinhardt, Paul Robeson, Will Rogers, the Moscow Art Theatre and Charlie Chaplin, to name only a few. Wags of the period said he wouldn't rest until he met every important person on earth.

Kahn was the beau ideal of the cultivated, cosmopolitan New York millionaire of the 1920s - immaculately dressed, immensely rich, irresistably charming, seemingly ubiquitous and profoundly influential. In 1933, Senator Ferdinand Pecora, lead counsel of the U.S. Senate hearings on the causes of the Great Depression, wrote of him, "No suaver, more fluent, and more diplomatic advocate could be conceived. If anyone could succeed in presenting the customs and functions of the private bankers in a favorable and prepossessing light, it was he."

Here he is playing golf, or perhaps simply posing, possibly at a club somewhere, but more likely on the links of his private golf course at Cold Spring, Long Island.




And here is the house that was attached to that course. It is called "Oheka," the name being a conjunction of Otto Herbert Kahn. Perhaps Kahn himself gave it that unsophisticated name, although absent a dependable citation I tend to doubt it. (The place is called 'Oheka Castle' today). Kahn bought the estate's original 443 acres in 1919, having soured on country living in elite Morristown, New Jersey. Upon his marriage to Addie Wolff, her father, Kuhn Loeb partner Abraham Wolff, had given the newlyweds a house there called Cedar Court. In one attempt to conciliate tiresomely chilly - read that, "anti-Semitic" - Morristown society, Kahn gave the local field club a swath of land located between his house and the club. The management was sufficiently shamed into belatedly offering him a membership, in the wake of which an ungracious club member observed that Kahn "at least had the good taste not to use it." Kahn loved his 109,000 square foot Long Island mansion, designed by Delano and Aldrich, albeit not with their usual light touch. It was the only millionaire's estate in the direct line of the Northern State Parkway to escape the earth movers, thanks to a secret contribution to one of Robert Moses' pet funds.



Kahn's wife Addie, shown here in high Gilded Age feather, was a cultured product of New York's so-called "Our Crowd." She was mostly in the background during her husband's flamboyant career, devoting herself to children, charities and the acquisition of a significant art collection. The spouses of the Kahn children speak in a way to the experience of their parents. Maud married Sir John Marriott; Margaret (Nin) married John Barry Ryan; Gilbert married Elizabeth Whelan; and Roger married Hannah Williams.


Kahn's city house on Fifth Avenue and 91st Street was the largest private house in Manhattan. He bought the land in 1914 from Andrew Carnegie, who lived across the street.



The Kahn house is attributed to architects J. Armstrong Stenhouse and C.P.H. Gilbert. Every big old house fan knows Gilbert, whose great mansions, built for vanished heavyweights with names like Woolworth, Bache and Converse, still hunker down on the Upper East Side. Nobody, including myself and even google, seems to know much about Stenhouse. The Landmarks plaque on the wall says the house was "modeled" after the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome. There's a house up here in Millbrook called Migdale, which local lore insists is a "copy" of Andrew Carnegie's Skibo Castle in Scotland. In truth, no two houses could look more dissimilar.



In the case of the Kahn house and the Roman palace there is clearly a resemblance - in detail and composition, if not in scale and massing. An unknown architect designed the Cancelleria for a Roman cardinal who, it is said, won the funds to build it in a single night of gambling. Our cardinals apparently had different obsessions back then. Construction started in 1486 and took almost 30 years to complete. The Cancelleria is the earliest Renaissance palace in Rome.



I was invited last week on a private tour of the Kahn house by its owner, the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Otto Kahn had lived here less than sixteen years when he died of a massive heart attack in 1934. His widow sold it almost immediately to the Convent, which has operated the house as a school for girls ever since. The scaffolding that obscured it on the day of my visit is part of ongoing roof repairs.



The Carnegie house across the street, more correctly called the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, is also having work done. The big difference between Kahns's and Carnegie's houses is not visible from the street. The beautiful interiors at Kahn's are virtually intact. At Carnegie's, save for a few rooms on the main floor, the heart of the place has been literally ripped out.



I've wanted to see the inside of 1 East 91st St. for years, but have had neither a child in the school, nor a reason to hire one of its grand rooms as a venue. So here I go.



The luxurious vehicular entrance on 91st Street allowed visitors to arrive with dignity, even in a downpour. Interestingly, the apartment house at the other end of the block has a similar entrance on 92nd St. The George Fuller Company, which built 1107 Fifth Avenue in 1925, designed that drive-in especially for E.F. Hutton. In exchange for allowing the demolition of his house on the site, Hutton got an enormous triplex at the top of the new building, connected to a Kahn-like drive-in at street level.



Among the many things I like about this front door is the peep hole - just like my apartment.





Here's the entrance hall, front door on the left, Jesus welcoming us on the right, a miscellaneous clutter of desks and chairs, plants and rugs, lending an air of friendly democracy.

There is an elevator, of course, whose original hand painted cab is protected by sheets of lucite. How delicious that it is still here.



Why take the elevator when you can ascend to the piano nobile on this stair?




A vast, dark paneled dining room, currently used as a chapel, is off limits to photographers. After a quick peek, we continued into the original drawing room, located on the Fifth Avenue corner of the building. Presently in use as one of two rooms housing the school library, its brilliant original decoration is amazingly intact.







This enclosed spiral staircase leads to Kahn's bedroom on the floor above. I don't know whether or not he shared it with his wife, although in an establishment of this scale, and in this period, I think it unlikely. Otto Kahn was famous for mistresses and party nights at his suite at the Ritz. It seems unlikely he would bother to sneak anybody up to his room via this staircase, although that has been suggested.





The book stacks, modern tables and overhead lighting obscure the architectural grandeur of the library pictured below. The fireplace may no longer be functioning and the upholstered pieces and old masters of the Kahn days long gone, but the room remains blessedly intact.







The door on the balcony also opens onto the private stair to Kahn's bedroom.



Here again it's obvious that if one simply looks beyond the superimposed distractions of institutional use, Kahn's bedroom is completely intact. The headboard would have gone where that projection screen is today, facing the fireplace in the middle of the opposite wall. Beyond the windows you can just make out the Carnegie house on the other side of 91st Street.













The ballroom, rechristened the Music Room, is used for school assemblies, theatricals, and as a venue for private functions. There was a time when big old houses were sold complete with sconces, chandeliers and often a good deal of original furniture, all of which was once considered to be of little or no value. That's hardly the case today. Fireplaces, paneling and sometimes even stair rails don't always make it to modern day closings. Sacred Heart's seventy-eight years of uninterrupted ownership has fortunately left in situ much that might otherwise have disappeared.











As if opera and railroad reorganization weren't time consuming enough, Kahn was enamored of Hollywood as well, and deeply involved with Paramount Pictures. Here he is posing with Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. I assume they're posing since Chaplin probably didn't walk around like that all the time. Kahn invested in Broadway too, famously putting $10,000 into "Lady Be Good" after he heard Gershwin play "The Man I Love." He quipped at the time that he preferred investing in artistic projects with no chance of making a profit. "Lady Be Good," to his surprise, yielded a whopping return.



Here he is with Enrico Caruso. Ever the music lover, Kahn reportedly once told New York City's mayor that putting a piano in every house would do more to reduce crime than having a cop on every block.




The main stair rises from a landing outside the ballroom. That's yours truly resting in the middle.








If there's one thing missing in the Kahn house, it's the original bathrooms. I know nobody mourns these things except me. To my eye, however, they are often as visually interesting and, in a way, even as grand as major public rooms. Too bad institutional use always dooms them. The bathrooms may be gone, but the servants' staircase and elevator are very much in existence, complete with a fabulous original copper elevator cab.











The only other "below stairs" survivor I saw was this fragment of pantry cabinetwork adjacent to the dining room. It looks deceptively modern and nobody loves it much, but I'm pretty sure it's original to the house.




Two floors of finely proportioned bedrooms, designed for luxury and privacy, have escaped the institutional gutting that has ruined the upper floors of the Carnegie house across the street. The original floor plan remains intact, and the preserved spaces function perfectly as classrooms and offices. Since no one has seen fit to rip down the walls, the original finishes - box locks, overdoors, fireplaces, moldings, etc., etc. - are all still here.



















"The pen is mightier the the sword" - an appropriate motif in a mansion converted to a school




There are terraces on the roof, out of bounds last week due to the construction, and a grand central courtyard, which was getting pretty dark by the time I got there.








My last stop was a small - well, small by Kahn standards - office or reception room on the first floor. Beyond the foyer was a pleasant room, against whose western wall sat the great man's desk. My guide told me it was there because no one had ever been able to get it out the door. True or not, I'm glad it's survived.







Groucho Marx knew Otto Kahn too. In fact, Roscoe W. Chandler, the millionaire mark in "Animal Crackers" was a parody of Kahn, who in real life was a constant target of petitions for money. In a speech at the University of Wisconsin, Marx recalled, "I knew a fellow named Otto Kahn. His close friend was Marshall P.Wilder, who was a hunchback. One day they passed a synagogue on Fifth Avenue and Kahn turned to Wilder and said, 'You know, I used to be a Jew.' 'Really?' said Wilder. 'I used to be a hunchback.'" Otto Kahn is buried in St. John's Episcopal Cemetery in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island.

The Way In

I once said to a friend, rather pompously, that I was a front door kind of a guy. I won't tell you what he said to me, even though it was pretty funny. The topic I was trying to discuss had to do with "membership." The operators of big old house museums rarely see their visitors as belonging to the same august group as the former owners. This is probably true, but it's no excuse for us lumpen being forced to use the servants' door.

The image above is of the main gate to Frederick W. Vanderbilt's former country house in Hyde Park, NY. Driving north on Route 9, this would have been the first glimpse Fred got of the entrance to his property. This is where his driver would have turned left, and in the immense wisdom of the National Park Service, it is the same place where we turn left today.


I thought it would be fun to document the approach to the house as seen through the windshield of my car, the way a real guest would have done, assuming he owned a 1997 Mercedes he bought on eBay. (It is a very nice car by the way and, like myself, it looks much younger than it is). How fine is this gate? I live on a property whose grand gate has a portcullis, no less, but alas it's always closed.



Once through the gate, we are clearly in another world.



A bridge that crosses a stream or a lake is a common feature in big places like Hyde Park. It reinforces the symbolism of leaving the world of troubles and dubious aesthetics behind. This is particularly so when there are sufficient funds for maintenance, as appears to be the case at Hyde Park.



Over the bridge we go, and up the hill on the other side...





After a glimpse of the garden wall (we'll come back to that in a moment), the great house appears. This is the proper way to approach an important country mansion, and not via a new road somewhere in the woods that leads to an "interpretive visitor center" all glass and angles and located behind a barn. It is at this point that Mr. Vanderbilt's car would have taken a left and driven up to the front door. We visitors are detoured to the right to continue around the far perimeter of the lawn, which is not so bad because....



...it affords this excellent prospect of McKim, Mead and White's noble design, completed in 1899. The Park Service's subsequent elimination of original foundation plantings was a terrible idea for which somebody should have been swatted upside the head. However, mine is a voice in the wilderness on that one.



The Vanderbilt Historic Site, which the National Park Service administers in conjunction with the nearby Franklin D. Roosevelt Historic Site, has administrative offices, a gift shop, and interpretive displays in this building, which used to be the estate's guest house. Here's the river elevation, overlooking drop dead views of the Hudson and the Catskills. Many of us would kill to have a little place like this in the country, with its double height oak paneled hall and abundance of Edwardian detail. Fred and his wife had it built in sixty days during the fall of 1895, in order to have a comfortable base from which to monitor construction on the big house.




Hyde Park was an historic estate long before the Vanderbilts came along. Dr. John Bard, intimate of Franklin, physician to Washington, built a house on the site in 1764. During the 1820s Dr. David Hosack, the prominent New York physician and owner of Manhattan's once famous Elgin Botanic Gardens, remodelled the place in the Greek style and hired a Belgian landscaper to lay out the grounds. In 1840, John Jacob Astor bought it for his daughter Dorothea and her husband, Walter Langdon. The house burned in 1845 and the building you see in the image immediately below was its replacement, constructed in 1847. The Langdons' son died here childless in 1894, at which point the Vanderbilts arrived.



Style-wise, the new house is basically a Brobdingnagian knockoff of the original. The plan at first was to encase the Langdon house in a sort of gigantic limestone cocoon. McKim did just that, albeit in stucco, with a similar house in nearby Staatsburg belonging to Ogden Mills. The Mills house is nowhere near as successful as Vanderbilt's - particularly as regards the interior plan - because the architect was able to convince Vanderbilt to tear the old one down and start from scratch.

Notwithstanding the ill-advised removal of those original foundation plantings - they would soften the lines of the house and better integrate it with the grounds - this very fine building is obviously in very fine repair. Visitors typically rush indoors, which to be sure is a good show, but rarely take time to examine the bravura exterior stonework.







Here's the river side of the house, with a semi-circular porch and more fine detail work.












Fred Vanderbilt was still at Yale when he met his future wife, Louise Anthony Torrance. It's likely he met her before that, actually, since she was married to his cousin Daniel Torrance. I look at this picture of Fred and consider having an affair with him myself. Whether Lulu was divorced when the two of them took up together is unclear. She was divorced by 1878, however, when to the dismay of his family and the fury of his father, 22-year old Fred made 34-year old Lulu his bride.



I used to know a drag queen who, when not working at the bank or whatever he did during the day, dressed up in evening gowns and a tiara and called himself Robin Kradles. Lulu probably had a similar image in the eyes of the Vanderbilt family. In the way of the willful Victorian paterfamilias - indeed, of benighted fathers everywhere - William Henry Vanderbilt was perfectly ready to disinherit his son Fred for displeasing him. Fred's favorite sister, Lila, is credited with talking their father out of it, a favor Fred would remember in years to come.

While Fred was not disinherited, his wife became a sort of pariah. Years ago, I met Lila's grandson, a man named J. Watson Webb Jr. Watson was a great help to me in my Vanderbilt researches, sharing all sorts of family stories. According to one, Lulu was granted a reprieve by her husband's family when she announced to them that she was pregnant. The next thing anyone knew, she and Fred traveled to France, and almost immediately after that the baby was tragically lost. Inevitably the truth came out. There never had been a baby. I don't know how Lulu started this deception, or how or whether she got trapped into it, or at what point or to what degrtee Fred was involved. To the family's credit, they came to see it for what it was - a desperate and poignant attempt to find a way in. She was forgiven and accepted thereafter.

I narrated this story in a book I wrote years ago titled, "The Vanderbilts and Gilded Age." One day at a reception, I was accosted by a volunteer at the Hyde Park house, who dressed me down in a loud voice and in no uncertain terms. You would have thought I'd burned a Koran in a public square in Kabul. The woman was outraged that I could have printed such baseless - and in her mind insulting - gossip. I trusted my source, however; Watson Webb was irrefutable.



We rarely get much insight into the characters of people who lived in houses now open to the public. I think Lulu's is a humanizing story that tells far more about her and her husband than Park Service brochures or dry historical narratives. Fred lived for exactly 12 more years than Lulu, dying in 1938. From all reports, they were a devoted couple. They had no children.



The gardens at Hyde Park were developed over a period of centuries. These pavilions once flanked a glazed greenhouse. They look to me like they date from the Langdon period.



This kind of plaque reminds me of just how much the survival of great houses means to all of us - even when the foundation plantings are missing.



Here are some shots from my stroll through the Vanderbilt garden on a fine February day.

























Back in my car, on my way home, basking in the aura of my hood ornament,



This auxiliary gate to Route 9 is better than most main gates elsewhere.




The Vanderbilt walls flank both sides of Route 9 for considerable stretches, although not just at this point. The estate's former farm and stable complex, located east of the highway, was subdivided in the 1940s and is a housing development today. To passersby, however, the look of the past remains largely intact.