Carnegie: The Making of a Mansion--and Neighborhood

An intriguing session about the Carnegie Mansion and its role in the founding of Carnegie Hill as we know it today.

When Andrew Carnegie moved his wife and young daughter into their state-of-the-art mansion at Fifth Avenue and 91st Street in 1902, he actually founded a new neighborhood. CHV member Sarah Coffin shared this intriguing session about the Carnegie Mansion and its role in the founding of Carnegie Hill as we know it today.

Carnegie’s site stood well north of fashionable Fifth Avenue, so he was able to acquire open land around it, thereby assuring space and light for his own residence into the future, and allowing him to control development of the neighborhood by selling lots only to people whom he thought would make good neighbors.

Sarah’s talk included a look at some of the mansion’s interiors as they were when the Carnegies lived in them, introduced some of their friends and neighbors, discussed Carnegie’s own role in the mansion’s design and provided a glimpse of the life that he and his family lived there.

Sarah Coffin, an architectural, decorative arts and design historian, was a senior curator at Cooper Hewitt for fourteen years, and contributed research on the Carnegie Mansion to the book The Life of a Mansion, published by the museum in 2014.

Roberta Krakoff, event host
Carnegie Hill Village

When
November 4th, 2020 4:00 PM through  5:00 PM

Registration for this event has closed.

Events Page