Charles M. Schwab House

You are standing at the site of what was once the most ambitious private residence ever built in Manhattan. Steel magnate Charles M. Schwab, a man who rose from a teenage laborer to the head of United States Steel, constructed a massive seventy-five-room French Renaissance chateau here that occupied an entire city block. Completed in nineteen zero six, the mansion was so vast and opulent that his mentor, Andrew Carnegie, remarked that the scale of the house made his own mansion look like a shack. It was a monument to the Gilded Age, featuring a private power plant to light its six thousand bulbs, three elevators, an indoor swimming pool, a bowling alley, and a tower reaching nearly two hundred feet into the air.