One design problem that the American architect has never satisfactorily resolved is that of the great house. In comparison, the invention of the skyscraper was child’s play. We lack the settled pattern of life that produced the English country house or the Italian villa, those fully rounded building types, whose rooms and amenities ripened over centuries and which express a distinct economic and social order. Here the tendency is either to inflate middle-class forms into the gargantuan, as Elvis did at Graceland, or to contrive self-indulgent fantasies, as Michael Jackson did at his Neverland Ranch.
The antebellum world did not know the problem. Most fortunes were created by making or selling something (one thinks of John Jacob Astor’s fur-trapping empire) and grew incrementally. But after the Civil War, a new national railroad system opened another path to wealth. Through collusion and preferential fee schedules, one company could be favored and others discouraged, leading to absolute control over the production and distribution of a single product. So were born the monopolies, oligopolies, and trusts of the Gilded Age, as well as the robber barons who controlled them.
Their prototype was Cornelius Vanderbilt, the transportation tycoon, whose children lined Fifth Avenue with their mansions. But his successors achieved wealth at an even greater order of magnitude, such as J. D. Rockefeller, who formed the Standard Oil Trust in 1882, or Henry O. Havemeyer, who founded the American Sugar Refining Company in 1891 and came to control 98% of American
