The Golden Years

Even in an age in which Bill Gates carves a 45,000-square-foot techno-mansion into a Washington hillside, in which Aaron Spelling boasts a French cafe, doll museum and bomb shelter in his California manor and Steven Spielberg builds a Georgica Pond estate with the look of a barn and the budget of a small motion picture, it is still difficult to imagine the splendor of Long Island's great country houses.

In the 80 years between the Civil War and World War II, scores of America's mightiest financial and industrial families -- the Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Hearsts and Astors among them -- built not just houses, but pleasure palaces, nearly 1,000 estates worthy of the princes and cardinals who would visit. With tracts as vast as their bank accounts, they hired the greatest architects, landscapers and decorators of the day, from McKim, Mead & White to John Russell Pope. And with egos as big as the nearby Sound, they played endless rounds of architectural one-upsmanship, in which tennis courts and swimming pools were just the openning ante.

Otto Kahn, the head of the Metropolitan Opera board, built a Cold Spring Harbor estate of operatic proportions -- 72 rooms and 25 baths spread over 62,000 square feet (still the second-largest house in the United States). Department-store heir Marshall Field installed 21 servants' cottages on his Lloyd Harbor estate. And William C. Whitney topped them all with an 800-foot stable, with adjoining mile-long track, 84 box stalls and a dorm, dining room, gym and library complex -- just for the grooms.

And though vast numbers of these estates began disappearing within a generation, their significance has resonated beyond Gilded Age glitter. In many ways, they were the engine that propelled Long Island into the 20th Century.

``Along with the arrival of European settlers and post-World War II development, the country houses were one of the key events that changed Long Island. We were just a sleepy agrarian economy until the country houses began to be built,'' says Robert B. MacKay, director of the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities. Their impact, he says, is evident in LILCO, then the Nassau Power and Light Co., which had its origins in the estate owners' demands for electricity; in telephone service -- estate-rich Glen Cove had the first phone exchange -- and in aviation, spurred by businessmen who wanted planes to commute to their New York offices.

For an earlier generation, Newport had been the escape of choice, the summer colony where robber barons turned their newly minted riches into gilded mansions along Bellevue Avenue. But their sons and daughters, who wintered in New York, found Long Island a more attractive alternative. The lure? Proximity. With the launch of the Long Island Rail Road in 1834, the ``country'' became more easy commute than arduous journey. And ``with each extension of the railway, another section developed as a resort,'' writes MacKay, co-author of ``Long Island Country Houses and Their Architects, 1860-1940'' (W.W. Norton & Co., 1997).

More important, Long Island was a sportsman's paradise, where every hunting, fishing, boating, golfing and riding fantasy could be indulged, if not in someone's 100-acre yard, then in the private clubs - the Manhasset Bay Yacht Club, the Piping Rock Club, the Meadow Brook Club among them - that quickly became as central to country life as the estates themselves.

But if this was a playground, the houses took themselves quite seriously. Unlike the Newport mansions - city houses with tiny plots and formal porches - Long Island's country estates took their cue from the English manor house. And so, sprawling compounds were built on hundreds of acres and outfitted with the most luxurious furnishings, the most modern conveniences. Yet for all their splendor, the houses were hidden from public view, behind gates, down driveways, up hills.

``They were worlds unto themselves,'' says Stony Brook architect Gary Lawrence, who has studied the country house phenomenon. ``They had their own dairies, their own farms, they had people who took care of the cars and pumped the gas. You either saw the houses from a boat on the Sound or you didn't know they existed.''

Which were the best? With 1,000 houses and nearly 250 architects, experts insist it is impossible to say. Still, a handful of estates emerge as among the most architecturally important:

Harbor Hill: Considered the grandest of all, Clarence and Katherine Mackay's Roslyn mansion - finished in 1902 and demolished in 1947 -- sat on 648 acres overlooking Hempstead Harbor. Katherine Mackay had demanded a ``severe'' house, modeled on the 17th-Century French chateaux. And so, Stanford White's rigorously simple exterior was stripped of ornamentation (save the doorway and window pediments) and sheathed in Indiana blue limestone. ``Overnight, it changed the preference on Long Island from shingle and clapboard buildings to masonry,'' says the preservation society's MacKay.

More sumptuous were White's English-style interiors, which impressed even the prince of Wales, who visited in 1924. There were furnishings from Europe, paintings by Renaissance masters and a bathtub carved from a single chunk of marble. Total tab: $781,483, not counting landscaping and outbuildings.

Laurelton Hall: Glass artisan Louis Comfort Tiffany was no architect, but the Cold Spring Harbor mansion he finished in 1906 was as stunning as anything turned out by the pros. Ignoring classical tastes, he designed an Art Nouveau house -- destroyed in a 1957 fire -- that admirers said combined ``the perfume of the Orient and the horse sense of America.'' Built into a hillside, it opened onto gardens filled with exotic vegetation and a cascade produced by the estate's own water system.

Interiors exploded in color, from purple and blue mosaic columns to a dining room dome made of colored Favrile glass patterned on the rugs below. Even they paled next to the three-story octagonal court covered with a blue-glass dome. In all, writes Richard Guy Wilson in ``Long Island Country Houses,'' it ``ranks with some of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses in the Midwest, Charles Sumner and Henry Mather Greene's in Southern California, and the masterpieces of European architects and designers in Brussels, Paris, and Vienna.''

Caumsett: Marshall Field III's home wasn't just an estate, but a self-contained community. Built by architect John Russell Pope on 2,000 Lloyd Harbor acres -- the largest of the country tracts -- the Chicago-department store heir's 1925 compound included a working dairy farm with a herd of Guernsey cattle, stables, docks, cabanas, power plant and 25 miles of internal roads.

The house itself is a Georgian Revival modeled on Belton House, a manor near London. Outside the front door: a garden -- now a state park -- of broad landscapes and intimate spaces designed by the Olmstead brothers, whose father created Central Park. ``What is amazing about Field's house is that it was built very late in the country house era,'' says Lawrence, the Stony Brook architect. ``Yet even in the Twenties, people still wanted grand houses.''

Inisfada: The only Long Island work of Philadephia architect John Torrey Windrim, Nicholas Brady's Manhasset estate is a Tudor Revival, capped with 33 different chimneys. Completed in 1920, its south facade rises beyond a long driveway and huge lawn; the more delicate north facade dances with limestone copings, dripstones, quoinings and crenellations.

But the Bradys were not typical Gilded Agers. Considered one of the foremost Catholic couples of the day, Brady and his wife, Genevieve, in 1936 used their house -- now a Jesuit retreat -- as American headquarters for the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII.

Westbury House: Now part of Old Westbury Gardens, this was the only Long Island house by British designer George A. Crowley (with aid from architects Grosvenor Atterbury, Alfred Bossom and Edward Hinkle). Begun in 1904 as a home for John S. Phipps and his English bride, Margarita Grace, it may be the most English of the English-inspired estates -- a 21/2-story house with symmetric wings projecting from either side. The Phippses wanted their manor as English on the inside as it was on the outside, and filled it with priceless antiques. ``A lot of houses were furnished with reproductions made in Grand Rapids,'' says MacKay. ``But Mrs. Phipps was a collector of sophisticated things and tried to do something more. As her decorator said, `How can you put a price on the priceless?'''

As priceless as the country houses might have been, they were not immune to fate and fortune. Though built to last hundreds of years, they began disappearing within decades. Blame it on the 1929 stock market crash, on the advent of the income tax, on the cost of maintaining a staff of 50, or the reality of being a child who couldn't keep up with his father's tastes. ``If you build a house on a hundred-million-dollar fortune, you can afford to maintain it,'' says Lawrence. ``But when that person dies and leaves a hundred million to three our four heirs, a house like that is a burden, even on $25 million.''

By World War II, no new mansions were being built. By the late 1980s, according to MacKay, only 574, or 58 percent, were left -- 424 as residences, 84 recycled into colleges, museums and golf clubs.

Could the great country houses rise again? Some see a new generation in the sprawling estates taking hold in slivers of Nassau's North Shore, or in the gilded Hamptons. But those may be mere pretenders. ``Builders try it today, but it's never the same,'' says Great Neck accountant Orin Finkle, who has collected more than 5,000 country house magazines and postcards. ``People brought in craftsmen from Europe, and some brought in fireplaces and moldings and details from Europe too. It was a golden age. It came, it lasted 80 years, and then it was gone; and it will always be gone.''