The wrecking ball comes for a Gilded Age relic mansion on Riverside Drive

The house stood for 42 years: a French-style chateau surrounded by beautiful terraced gardens. Completed in 1906, it spanned the once wide-open block of fashionable Riverside Drive between 73rd and 74th Streets.

By 1948, it had been abandoned for almost a decade following the deaths of the husband and wife who built it and made it their home. That year, the chateau was reduced to dust by a two-ton wrecking ball.

Such a house—one of the largest residences in New York City, a leftover relic of Gilded Age excess that remarkably stuck around until the post-World War II era—deserves an elegy.

The builder was Charles M. Schwab, the affable, big-spending president of U.S. Steel and then Bethlehem Steel. Schwab, who hailed from a small Pennsylvania town and began his career as a teenage stake driver, rose to become a steel magnate on par with Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick.

Unlike Carnegie and Frick, who created large yet restrained mansions on Fifth Avenue, Schwab decided to construct his dream home on Riverside Drive—which was supposed to overtake Fifth Avenue as the city’s premier “millionaire colony.”

“Carnegie and Frick have more money than I have, but I’m getting more value for my dollars than they are,” Schwab said, according to author Andrew Tully in Era of Elegance.

After arriving in New York, Schwab purchased the land in 1901, formerly the site of an orphanage. Five years and an estimated $10 million later, Schwab, his wife Eurana, and an army of servants moved in.

This palace on the Hudson featured 75 rooms, 50,000 square feet of living space, a power plant, a chapel, “a gym, a bowling alley, a pool, three elevators, and interiors in the styles of Henry IV, Louis XIII, Louis XV and Louis XVI,” wrote Christopher Gray in a 2010 New York Times Streetscapes column. Eurana happily took the job of overseeing the design of each and every room.

Schwab had the business smarts and optimistic personality of a successful industry leader, but he also had some potentially wallet-busting habits. He entertained lavishly, won and lost money at his weekly poker game, and played the casinos in Monte Carlo. He bought a 1,000-acre country estate in Pennsylvania and owned a villa in France.

Though he professed his love for his wife, he had a roving eye. At some point he launched an affair with the nurse of his sister-in-law that produced his only child, a daughter (who he supported and visited a few times a year, according to a Pittsburgh Quarterly article).

The Schwabs hosted parties in their chateau, but they didn’t strive to be part of the old money or nouveau riche elite. Schwab loved music; the couple held weekly concerts and salons, inviting musicians to play the pipe organ in their mansion.

Eurana, or “Rana” as she was known, “was a gardening enthusiast, and eschewed the numerous afternoon teas and other daylight functions for the verdant pleasures of her own backyard, which she transformed into an orderly jungle of blooms,” wrote Tully.

The Schwab mansion was also the site of charity efforts. In 1917 the couple opened their home to 200 Red Cross workers who needed a space to knit clothes and make bandages for World War I. In the 1930s, they hosted a carnival for 300 kids who lived in the rundown Gas House District of the West 60s.

After years of massive spending, the Depression hit the Schwabs hard. And their palatial dwelling was now an outlier surrounded by row houses and apartment residences. In the Gilded Age, single-family mansions, particularly in the chateau style, were in vogue. By the 1930s, most had been demolished.

A 1930 New York Times article announced the sale of the mansion to make way for an apartment building, but nothing came of it. (Below, the chateau in 1933)

In 1936, Schwab offered his mansion to the city as an official mayor’s residence. The offer was turned down. Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor at the time, reportedly said, “what me—in that?”

Three years later, Rana died at the age of 79. Schwab moved into an apartment hotel at 290 Park Avenue soon after, leaving the chateau, which he could no longer afford, for good. At 77 years old, he passed away later that year—in debt, per Tully.

The mansion lingered, empty and forlorn. Chase took title to it after Schwab’s death. But the bank couldn’t find any buyers for this white elephant of a house that came with massive expenses.

In 1947, the chateau was purchased by Prudential for a reported $1.25 million, according to Tully. The insurance giant’s plan was to invite buyers to pick over the interiors, then tear it down and replace it with a contemporary apartment house.

The wrecking ball came on March 31, 1948.

“Exactly at noon Fred Hoffman, operator of the crane that swings the giant ball unsentimentally into the sides of doomed buildings, worked a series of hand levers that smashed it with great force against the northwest tower,” stated a 1948 New York Times piece.

“A second blow knocked a hole up the 100-foot-high structure about 20 feet from the top. The hole widened as the ball struck twice more and then, on the fifth attempt, the whole top of the tower, weighing five tons, slowly started to sag in the north.”

“As a score of children watched eagerly and some old-timers a little sadly, the top suddenly plunged to the ground with a roar and a cloud of white dust,” per the Times.

It would take six more weeks to finish the job, razing to the ground this emblem Gilded Age excess and the life of a couple lost to the ages.

In 1950 a new apartment tower, Schwab House, opened in its place—with none of the bells and whistles of the magnificent mansion that preceded it.

[Top photo: Pinterest; second image: MCNY 26908.1E; third image: LOC; fourth image: Carmel of St. Therese of Lisieux; fifth image: New-York Historical Society Robert L. Bracklow Collection; sixth image: unknown; seventh image: MCNY X2010.18.314; eighth image: MCNY X2010.11.3076; ninth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

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