By Skip Moskey The Levi Z. Leiter House, 1500 New Hampshire Avenue at Dupont Circle, Washington, DC., under construction 1891. The house was torn down in 1947. (Architect: Theophilus P. Chandler, Philadelphia.) When I was writing my book about Larz and Isabel Anderson, I got to know many of the great Gilded Age mansions the […]
By Skip Moskey Edith Wharton, ca. 1889 Edith Wharton is known in American cultural history primarily as the author of Gilded Age novels that for a century have captivated and entertained readers. Her works The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome have been adapted as films that have brought her work to even larger […]
Larz Kilgour Anderson was born 149 years ago today, on August 15th, 1866, in his parents’ apartment at what is now No. 38 rue Marbeuf in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, just off of the Champs Élysées. Nick and Elizabeth Anderson were on their year-long wedding trip through Europe when Larz was conceived. They decided to stay in Europe […]
By Skip Moskey Twin Memorials to Commodore G.H. Perkins by Daniel Chester French. Left: New Hampshire State House (1902); right: U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis (1911). After the death of her father Commodore George Hamilton Perkins in 1899, Isabel Anderson began plans for a memorial to him on the grounds of the New Hampshire State House in […]
Nicholas Longworth Anderson Bridge, Boston July 17, 1920 In 1913, after he returned from his ambassadorship in Tokyo, Larz Anderson commissioned a memorial to his father, a bridge across the Charles River in Boston that would connect Harvard’s Cambridge campus to its stadium in Boston. Designed by Boston city architect Edmund Wheelwright, it was known in […]
In June 1907, while cruising along the mid-Atlantic coast aboard their houseboat the Roxana, Larz and Isabel Anderson invited several friends to join them for a dinner party at sea. The cook prepared a mouth-watering menu that proved the Roxana’s catering standards equal to those of an Anderson kitchen on terra firma. The summery menu included a frothy cold consommé, […]
by Skip Moskey Pierre Lorillard’s houseboat “Caiman”, pictured here in a watercolor published in 1893 in The Illustrated American. (Source: Google Books.) We often associate yachts and steamships with Gilded Age vacations and recreation, but did you know that houseboats were also once the “in” thing for wealthy boaters like Pierre Lorillard, Alfred Gwynn Vanderbilt, […]
On Easter Monday, March 28, 1910, Larz and Isabel Anderson attended a field day for children at Randle Highlands in the District of Columbia. Known now as Washington Highlands, the area was first developed by Col. Arthur E. Randle (1859-1829), a prominent Washingtonian. The children of Randle Highlands petitioned Isabel to attend their festivities and help give […]