Charles M. Schwab House | |
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General information | |
Architectural style | eclectic Beaux-Arts |
Location | Manhattan, New York City |
Construction started | 1902 |
Completed | 1906 |
Demolished | 1948 |
Design and construction | |
Architect(s) | Maurice Hébert |
The Charles M. Schwab House (also called Riverside) was a 75-room mansion on Riverside Drive, between 73rd and 74th Streets, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. It was constructed for steel magnate Charles M. Schwab. The home was considered to be the classic example of a "white elephant", as it was built on the "wrong" side of Central Park away from the more fashionable Upper East Side. [1]
The home was designed by an architect with only a modest reputation, Maurice Hébert, [2] as an eclectic Beaux-Arts mixture of pink granite features that made the Vanderbilt mansions on Fifth Avenue look cramped. It combined details from three French Renaissance châteaux: Chenonceau, the exterior staircase from Blois, and Azay-le-Rideau. It took four years to build the home (1902–1906) at a cost of six million dollars. [3]
Schwab's former employer Andrew Carnegie, whose own mansion on upper Fifth Avenue later became the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, once remarked, "Have you seen that place of Charlie's? It makes mine look like a shack."[ citation needed ]
Schwab was a self-made man who became president of U.S. Steel and later founded Bethlehem Steel Company. Schwab built "Riverside" after leaving Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for New York. The large property was available because it formed half the site of the former New York Colored Orphan Asylum, one of several charitable institutions in the Bloomingdale District that gave way to large projects in Morningside Heights, such as the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Columbia University's campus. The Ansonia Hotel now occupies the orphans' Broadway frontage. The financier Jacob Schiff had bought the parcel, but—ominously for the social future of the Upper West Side—Mrs. Schiff refused to move to the "wrong" side of Central Park.
Schwab was a risk-taker and later went bankrupt in the Wall Street crash of 1929. He died comparatively penniless ten years later in 1939, bequeathing the forlorn "Riverside" to the city government as a suitably ostentatious official residence for the mayor of New York City. [4] There were proposals to convert the house into the city's official mayoral residence in 1935. [5] Then-mayor Fiorello La Guardia turned it down, saying "What, me in that?" [6]
La Guardia's rejection of the mansion sealed its fate, and during World War II, a Victory garden was planted in its once-landscaped grounds. Eventually the many dwellings around the home became overcrowded and Riverside Drive lost whatever affluence and wealth that had existed. By 1947 the house was empty and in 1948 it was replaced by a large, red-brick apartment complex, called the "Schwab House." [7]
The Bethlehem Steel Corporation was an American steelmaking company headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Until its closure in 2003, it was one of the world's largest steel-producing and shipbuilding companies. At the height of its success and productivity, the company was a symbol of American manufacturing leadership in the world, and its decline and ultimate liquidation in the late 20th century is similarly cited as an example of America's diminished manufacturing leadership. From its founding in 1857 through its 2003 dissolution, Bethlehem Steel's headquarters were based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the Lehigh Valley region of the United States. Its primary steel mill manufacturing facilities were first located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and later expanded to include a major research laboratory in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and plants in Sparrows Point, Maryland, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Lackawanna, New York, and its final and largest site in Burns Harbor, Indiana.
Charles Michael Schwab was an American steel magnate. Under his leadership, Bethlehem Steel became the second-largest steel maker in the United States, and one of the most important heavy manufacturers in the world.
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The Schinasi House is a 12,000-square-foot (1,100 m2), 35-room marble mansion located at 351 Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. It was built in 1907 for Sephardic Jewish tobacco baron Morris Schinasi. Completed in 1909 at the northeast corner of West 107th Street and Riverside Drive, the three-story, 12,000 square foot mansion was designed in neo-French-Renaissance style by William Tuthill.
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Archibald Johnston was a mechanical engineer who, favored by Bethlehem Iron Company management and senior Bethlehem Steel Company president Charles M. Schwab, became president of Bethlehem Steel Company. He was subsequently appointed as first vice president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation in charge of foreign sales. While first vice president, he led a municipal consolidation campaign to create the modern city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from the boroughs of Bethlehem and South Bethlehem.
Metallurgical Worker and Metallurgical Science are a duo set of 1903 bronze sculptures by Jean-Léon Gérôme. The pair of works commissioned from the artist by the steel magnate Charles M. Schwab to glorify to steel industry. Schwab paid for a steel worker to travel to Paris to sit for the sculptures. The works were displayed at the industry captain's 75 room mansion on Riverside Drive New York City until its demolition in 1947. Ge was introduced to Gérôme by Maurice Herbert, the French architect who designed his French Renaissance style home, once the largest in New York City.