Lynnewood Hall: America’s Versailles Makes a Comeback

Long a mystery, close to ruin, the Gilded Age Philadelphia estate is being lovingly restored.

A pple pie, baseball, and the Stars and Stripes are American icons, but so is the start-up, that big, new dream to be made into a reality and a wonder. Lynnewood Hall near Philadelphia is the start-up nonpareil, but it’s more reborn than new and shiny. It’s historic preservation and, I think, the most heartening arts story in the country.

Completed in 1899, Lynnewood is the 110-room Renaissance Revival masterpiece manor house on 34 acres in Elkins Park. It was built by Peter Widener (1834–1915), the Gilded Age gazillionaire. Long empty, a ruin-in-the-making, nearly torn down, and, to many, a mystery, Lynnewood in its glory days was America’s Versailles, in a class with Hearst’s Castle, Biltmore, and the Breakers. A new nonprofit called the Lynnewood Hall Preservation Foundation, having acquired Lynnewood last year, is restoring the house and gardens to their once epic glory.

Like the best start-ups, Lynnewood has a unique mission, much as the house is unique, with a unique story. The mission is the creation of a house museum that also advances art history, artisan restoration, sustainability, design, horticulture, and community access.

I knew Lynnewood only, and vaguely, as the baronial home of Widener and his son, Joseph (1871–1943), whom, in turn, I knew only for the stellar Widener Collection at the National Gallery in Washington — Old Masters galore — given by Joseph in 1942. Harvard’s Widener Library, home of 3 million books and the university’s main library, is another example of the family’s largesse. When I heard about what’s happening at Lynnewood, I went to see it, pre–hard hat and in its barebones state. It was an unforgettable experience.

The original estate — 34 gated acres — is intact, with a 110,000-square-foot main house, an 18,000-square-foot lodge that looks like a little Downton Abbey, and a formal gatehouse. Though long ignored, the footprint of the original garden is still there.

The main house is an Indiana-limestone-faced, terra-cotta brick pile. At 295 feet wide, it’s close to twice the width of the White House. Welcoming — and dazzling — visitors is a full-height, five-bay Corinthian portico, a stone staircase, and a pediment at the center of which is a winged hourglass flanked by Greek deities linked with prosperity, good health, and time. Each is fleeting, as Widener well knew.

The vast, two-story entrance hall has marble floors, coffered ceilings, and a staircase with wrought-iron railings that split in two. There’s a ballroom imported from Italy and suitable for a thousand partiers. Its garlanded woodwork is gilded with gold leaf. An oval illusionistic painting on the ceiling depicts Venus amid gamboling nymphs. Too much Champagne, and after a waltz or two, you’d think you were a gamboling nymph. Other rooms have polychrome wood ceilings or, as has the tearoom, a mother-of pearl dome. A 225-foot second-floor enfilade — a suite of rooms with aligned doors leading to a vista — is said to be the longest in America.

Long gone are the silk and velvet draperies, French furniture, sultan-quality carpets, art on the walls, and porcelain in the cabinets. Is it spooky? I’d say it’s evocative. Sunlight pouring through the windows is an efficient polisher even of neglected oak, walnut, and chestnut walls. The luster is not gone. Dust floats and dances. It’s far from sad. I was in my “what will be made of this” frame of mind.

By the engineering standards of the day, Lynnewood was a tour de force. The house was electrified when it was built. Its steel-truss roof, state-of-the art fireproofing, and unusual air-circulating system have stood the test of time. It had a central vacuum system. Later, when Joseph was the master, rooms were equipped with a Philco radio surround-sound system. Of course, it had an indoor pool and a squash court.

Horace Trumbauer (1868–1938) was still in his 20s, with only a handful of high-profile projects under his belt, when Widener hired him as Lynnewood’s architect. It launched him toward a career as the preferred architect among Philadelphia’s Main Line potentates and, over time, potentates everywhere. He specialized in homes like the manse in The Philadelphia Story. Trumbauer worked in revival styles: Gothic, Palladian, Queen Anne, Tudor, and Romanesque. Production values were high, and “built to last” was his mantra. Lynnewood is said to have cost Widener $8 million. That’s about $250 million in today’s money.

Critics and academics disparaged Trumbauer in his lifetime as old-fashioned and derivative. Not for him was prairie simplicity or, God forbid, glass, glass, and more glass. He’s now considered among the Beaux Arts masters. His interiors are spacious, formal, and kindly, his fittings and fixtures superb, and his exteriors grand but not gaudy. That’s Lynnewood. Duke University’s campus came from his firm, as did the Philadelphia Museum of Art, including the staircase that Rocky made famous. The architecture still appeals. It’s opulent but human.

The house stayed in the Widener family until 1943, when Joseph died. The family sold a chunk of the estate for suburban development and, in 1952, sold the house to the Faith Theological Seminary, which trained Evangelical ministers there until 1996. The seminary wasn’t a bad steward and didn’t wreck the place, but, bit by bit, it sold fireplace mantles, mirrors, draperies, chandeliers, alabaster sinks, and more. And, bit by bit, Lynnewood was forgotten. The last Widener to grow up there — Joseph’s son — called it “an orchidaceous growth on democracy.” What’s wrong with orchids? The world is full of carbuncles.

Lynnewood was never even close to pillaged, but a lot went out the carved, black-walnut doors, including some of the doors. The ballroom was converted to a chapel with pews. Evidently seminary honchos mistook the nymphs for angels — or had a robust taste for irony. Part of the slate roof covering one of the wings collapsed.

In 1996, Dr. Richard Yoon, a New York urologist and seminary alumnus, bought Lynnewood, hoping to use it as the headquarters for the First Korean Church of New York. The plan never got traction. Before long, “empty and forlorn” seemed to be Lynnewood’s path leading to demolition. Elkins Park, once a neighborhood of mansions for Philadelphia’s newly rich, is now a middle-class suburb. Proposals came and went. Yoon, based in New York, let the place sit, intuiting that the Fates were at work.

And so they were. Around 2005, an eleven-year-old named Edward Thome sat in the back seat of the family car as his parents drove through Elkins Park on a Sunday ride. He saw the house, which, to him, was a romantic ruin. Kismet laid its hand upon his and Lynnewood’s future. The house and the ambiance enchanted Thome. He didn’t know Widener from wasabi lamb chops but was smitten by the mystery. Cracking it became his idée fixe.

Over the next 15 years, he and friends who caught his Lynnewood bug connived to save the house. Thome educated himself in historic preservation and the suburban real-estate market. He ingratiated himself into Yoon’s circle. No, he didn’t become a Korean Presbyterian, but this young man found and assembled the parts leading to the Lynnewood Hall Preservation Foundation. He’s now the director of the foundation, which runs on a shoestring. He knows every inch of the house. He is one more unique piece of the unique Lynnewood story.

Part of Lynnewood’s allure is Widener, who went from bricklayer’s son to butcher to billionaire, from rack of lamb to Rembrandt, of whose paintings he owned 18. Only in America. In his teens, he was indeed a butcher with a stall in Philadelphia’s Spring Garden Market, which specialized in mutton. Before long, he owned a chain of butcher shops in Philadelphia. During the Civil War, the city was a deployment hub. Widener got the contract to supply lamb to Union Army troops.

The local butcher shop was, in 1850s American cities, where yokels gathered to talk politics — there must have been liquor as well as lamb chops — and Widener paused between cleaver whacks to network. Hence his Army mutton gig, a stint as city treasurer, and, for his first big fortune, developer of Philadelphia’s streetcar system.

Widener soon became America’s streetcar king, then a founder of U.S. Steel, and an oil, tobacco, and shipping mogul. When he died in 1915, he was believed to be among the half dozen or so richest men in America. Widener owned part of the White Star Line, which built the Titanic. The central tragedies of his life were the deaths of his oldest son, George, and George’s son, Harry, when the ship sank in 1912. Harry, though only 27, had already assembled a distinguished rare-book collection, which his mother gave to Harvard, Harry’s alma mater. Widener then paid for the university’s new campus library in his grandson’s memory. A stand-up guy, the former butcher had already given millions to support charities in Philadelphia.

Mutton, streetcars, and a fancy house aside, Widener was among his era’s most discerning, accomplished, and prolific art collectors, a peer of Mrs. Gardner, J. P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and no one else. Lynnewood, to him, was the pinnacle of luxury and good taste, but he envisioned it also as an art museum.

Widener started collecting not long after he’d made his first million. He was self-educated in art and, more or less, his own curator. With a gifted eye and big bucks, he acquired Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna and Rembrandt’s The Mill, each an icon in its own day and in Widener’s, but he had quirky, insightful taste. He was hot for Van Dyke not as a mature, practiced painter of British royals but as a savant, in his early 20s, depicting Genoese aristocrats.

Widener bought superb El Grecos just as the artist was rediscovered. El Greco is seen as a mystic genius today but was viewed with skepticism at the turn of the last century.

Widener might have been inspired by John Singer Sargent, who painted his portrait twice. In 1904, at Sargent’s insistent behest, the MFA in Boston bought the first El Greco to enter a public collection. Sargent had just painted a portrait of Mrs. Joseph Widener, a festival dedicated to the come-hither look and to décolletage. She sits in front of a Boucher tapestry. Sargent insisted that she wear an old, blue-velvet ball gown she was saving to make pillows. He called it Nattier blue after Jean-Marc Nattier, one of Louis XV’s court painters. Widener owned lots of Louis XV’s furniture, Sargent noticed, so he made a Rococo Revival portrait.

Sargent spent two or three weeks at Lynnewood in 1903, during which he also painted Widener’s portrait standing before what was thought to be a Velázquez picture of one of Aesop’s fables but is now attributed to Johann Liss. Until a few months ago, Widener’s descendants owned the Sargent portrait of Widener. Stephen Schwarzman, like Widener a Philadelphian, and, like Widener, a self-made man of cosmical means, bought it, having just bought Miramar, once Widener’s Newport house and also designed by Trumbauer. I saw the portrait a couple of weeks ago in New York. Schwarzman spoke a bit about the portrait, Widener, and Lynnewood. The place has friends in high places.

Widener dedicated an entire wing of Lynnewood for the display of his art. When he died, he was laid out among his Van Dykes. His and Joseph’s art, called the Widener Collection, is now at the National Gallery, a gift from Joseph in 1942. At the time, the National Gallery was new, established only a few years earlier with Andrew Mellon’s majestic gift of the building and his own collection. How the Lynnewood foundation remembers and revives what filled the galleries is to be decided. Right now, the empty spaces have an aura, and, flinty Vermonter that I am, I don’t feel auras unless they poke me in the ribs. The Raphael won’t be coming back, and neither will any of the 18 Widener Rembrandts.

That said, the National Gallery owns lots of Lynnewood’s contents. When Joseph gave the art, some 2,000 objects, he told the museum to take the furniture, too. As far as I can tell, most of it isn’t accessioned. It’s in storage. I hope some of it eventually comes home.

But first things first. Lynnewood’s board is very good at practical planning and, it seems, in fundraising. It raised the money — $9 million — to buy the estate and plans to raise millions more for critical systems repairs and upgrades. A priority is the restoration of the formal gardens, thought to have been the finest residential, French-taste gardens in America. The goal is a horticulture-focused park. The final phase will be the restoration of Lynnewood’s sumptuous interiors. Lynnewood, in its heyday, probably had enough silk, satin, chenille, and velvet to reach from Elkins Park to the moon.

Lynnewood is also developing an unusual program to educate young people in classic craftsmanship, using the house as a classroom. The Old World skills are disappearing, in part for a lack of training.

Can all of this be done? The answer is yes. Lots of high-steppers are involved in Lynnewood, the cause is good, and the spirit and energy are abundant. It will take years, but Lynnewood is at the end of an auspicious beginning. The Widener family is deeply involved.

Objects unloaded by the seminary will probably come back, as well as things sold subsequently. Auctioned in 2006 at Bonham’s was Lynnewood’s magnificent French bronze fountain made from figures of Tritons, Nereids, and a hippo. It went for $392,250 — a good deal for five life-size figures writhing with Baroque excitement among reeds, water-lily vines, and lotuses. It was designed by Henri-Léon Gréber, one of France’s premiere Belle Epoque sculptors. Hey, lover of fine water features, Lynnewood needs YOU or, more precisely, your fountain.

I write a lot about heritage preservation. Lynnewood’s revival will be a story for the ages.

To the Peter Wideners of today, don’t give your millions to the Met. It’s worthy but not needy. Or to anything Bill Gates supports. That’s a woke waste of money. Or to a foundation named after you á la Ford or Mellon. Future trustees and bureaucrats will forget you as you spin in your grave. Look at projects like Lynnewood that have a plan, need the money, and will do some good.