North Shore Long Island: Country Houses, 1890-1950

Unsurpassed in the natural beauty of its rolling landscape and splendid harbours, the scope and variety of its gentlemanly sporting pursuits, and its convenient proximity to the nation's business and financial capital, the fabled North Shore of Long Island was the ultimate gathering place for the wealthy and celebrated of America's Gilded Age. Close to one thousand grand estates once graced its miles of glacier-carved coastline and endless hilltops, an architectural assembly unmatched by anywhere in America or Europe. Celebrated in literature, stage and screen, there never was, and never will be, anything else quite like it. Here were masterworks of residential and landscape design by such noted architects as Richard Morris Hunt, McKim, Mead & White, John Russell Pope, Delano & Aldrich, Carrére & Hastings, Harrie T. Lindeberg, and the Olmsted Brothers, to name but a few. While many of their wonderful works have been destroyed, hundreds still stand, either converted to institutional use or, in some cases, still serving the families that built them. In this handsome volume 40 of the region's most noted homes are covered, representing the breadth and variety of architectural design, social and sporting life that characterised the North Shore in its Golden Age. Armed with 15 years of extensive research and dozens of never before published original photographs and social records, author Paul Mateyunas records the stories of the grand mansions and the people who built and occupied them. Each estate covered in the book was carefully chosen; many written about in detail for the first time. Scarce source information, much of it provided by heirs of the original estate families, clarifies incomplete or misleading information offered by other books on the subject. Each estate is illustrated with both exterior and interior views of the residence, the outbuildings for service and sport, and lushly landscaped grounds which combined to make the North Shore the apex of American residential design. Once again, one may survey the elegant period rooms or wander through the beautiful gardens that made Long Island famed throughout the world.Paul J. Mateyunas is the author of 'North Shore Long Island: Country Houses, 1890-1950', published 2007 under ISBN 9780926494374 and ISBN 0926494376.