When the Vanderbilt, Woolworth, Morgan, Whitney, Kahn, Guggenheim and other wealthy families built their homes of splendor along Long Island's North Shore it was just after the turn of the century when huge fortunes were being made and there were few taxes. Castles, Italian villas and French chateaux dotted the coast. Formal gardens were landscaped to match the magnificence of historic castles, and palatial residences of Europe were copied. It was in these homes that F. Scott Fitzgerald followed his most famous character, Jay Gatsby, through an elegant life of lavish parties in mirrored ballrooms, finely carved paneled dining rooms and manicured gardens. While the original mansion that inspired Fitzgerald has long since been replaced by split level homes of a more prosaic time and the way of life enjoyed in these mansions has vanished, many of the homes remain hidden behind tightly closed gates as forgotten relics of a remarkable era. This lavishly illustrated book visits 45 of the most spectacular examples of these often flamboyant homes—many still standing, some destroyed—and shows in loving detail their most outstanding decorative and architectural features. The mansions are as consistently, and as divergently, fascinating as the characters of the people who owned them. The lively, informative text recreates the lost social world they were meant to hold, telling how and why they were built, who built them and who has lived in them.

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