GOTTA AVE. IT!
Last Gilded Age manse selling for $50M onn Fifth
Manhattan’s last intact Gilded Age mansion is up for sale — and it’ll only set you back $50 million.
But you will have to get in line, because there are already six potential buyers champing at the bit to purchase the Fifth Avenue limestone town house, The Post has learned.
The six-story Beaux Arts building, which once belonged to the granddaughter of the railroad baron Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, boasts two elevators, eight bathrooms and 32 rooms. Some of the balustrades are hand-carved from a single piece of white marble, and dreamy frescoes of angels and clouds adorn the ceilings of the parlor rooms.
The Upper East Side palace recalls the grandeur of Versailles, with its palatial, white-marble staircase, patterned after the Petit Trianon, reaching heavenward to an intricately detailed, gilded skylight.
There is even a working stove from 1905, the year the home — built by the same architectural firm that designed Grand Central Terminal — was completed for its first owner, R. Livingston Beeckman, a stockbroker and later governor of Rhode Island.
“Everything is virtually intact,” said real-estate agent Tristan Harper, who listed the property on behalf of Douglas Elliman, and gave The Post an exclusive tour last week. “Whoever buys it will own a piece of New York history.”
Harper wouldn’t reveal the identity of the interested parties, except to say they are “all extremely high-net-worth individuals of different backgrounds.” He said they all want to maintain the property as a single-family residence.
Furnishings, as well as the artwork, murals and wall paintings, are all included in the purchase price.
The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which landmarked the property in 1966, called it a “superb example of the French classic style of Louis XV.”
It was also a tribute to the Gilded Age — the term coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873 to satirize the materialistic obsessions of the new wealth in America after the Civil War.
Gilded Age mansions, often modeled on the palatial chateaux of France, began popping up at the end of the 1800s, erected by storied industrialists and financiers like Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould. Most were eventually razed or turned into museums.
Many of the biggest homes were built as summer palaces in Long Island, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, while mansions in “town” formed a “Millionaire’s Row” on Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side. The first Gilded Age mansion was the Astor family’s home, featuring a ballroom that could fit 400, on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. The family later moved to what was considered a more fashionable spot on Fifth at East 65th.
Just a block away, at 854 Fifth Ave. between East 66th and 67th streets, was Beeckman’s grand estate. The home, built for $60,000, was first sold in 1912 to George Grant Mason for $725,000 — “the record highest price paid in Manhattan” for a residential property at the time, according to press accounts.
Vanderbilt’s granddaughter Emily Thorn Vanderbilt Sloane White and her husband, Henry White, bought it in 1925 for $450,000.
It was said to be the first Manhattan residence to feature frontand-back electric elevators, and the children who lived there were told to use them sparingly because each ride cost 25 cents.
The Commodore’s granddaughter put her own stamp on the interior, adding such details as the multiple paired cherub “sculptural scenes” within the elaborate ceiling moldings in the dining room on the second floor. Each cherub pair is unique, and all are covered with gold leaf.
When the heiress died in 1946, her estate sold the mansion to the Republic of Yugoslavia for $300,000. The $150,000 loss on the sale price was due to the depressed postwar real-estate market and the fact that many of the furnishings had been sold separately at auction.
The purchase was heralded in the local newspapers. “It is con- sidered one of the finest private homes remaining on Fifth Avenue,” gushed The New York Times when Yugoslavia took possession of the property in December 1946.
For decades, the building served as the nation’s UN Mission, and it still features a remnant of the Cold War — a secret top-floor, metal-padded room known as a Faraday Cage that allowed officials of the Soviet ally to converse or make calls without the risk of being wiretapped.
The mansion, with its bulletproof windows overlooking Central Park, was also used as a temporary hideout for Yugoslav strongman Josip Broz Tito following an assassination attempt against him at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in 1963.
Two years earlier, Tito and the leaders of Egypt, Ghana, India and Indonesia drafted plans for the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement — an alliance of nations that purported to not be aligned with any of the Cold War superpowers — in one of the front parlor rooms.
The landmark bore witness to the fractured history of Yugoslavia itself as wars splintered the country into several different entities. It now houses the offices of Serbia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations.
Last week, after years of legal wrangling, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia — the five countries that are the successor states to the former Communist republic — hammered out an agreement to sell the mansion and a sprawling Park Avenue co-op that used to be the UN ambassador’s residence.
The 4,400-square-foot duplex at 730 Park Ave., which has sat empty since the 1990s, will hit the market later this week. It features five terraces and three fireplaces and will list just under $20 million, Harper told The Post.
But any potential buyers will have to overcome an unusual diplomatic hurdle, as representatives from all five states must sign off on both sales. The proceeds will be divided among the states, Harper said.
In addition to the New York properties, Yugoslavia’s successor states are also selling the former republic’s properties in Japan, Germany and Switzerland.