Lockwood-Mathews Mansion, Norwalk

Off the highway in Norwalk, a little west of the Norwalk River, stands one of the most extravagant private homes ever built in America. The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion was completed in eighteen sixty-eight, two decades before the Vanderbilts began building their famous Newport cottages. It is not a cottage. It is a castle in everything but name, and its story is a perfect parable of Gilded Age ambition and ruin.

LeGrand Lockwood was a Norwalk native who had turned himself into one of the wealthiest men in the country. Through shrewd railroad investments, Civil War bond sales in Europe, and relentless trading on Wall Street, he amassed a fortune that by the eighteen sixties ranked among the largest in New York. In eighteen sixty-four he hired Detlef Lienau, a German-born, French-trained architect who was a founding member of the American Institute of Architects and the man credited with introducing the French mansard roof to American residential design. Together they conceived something unprecedented on the Connecticut shoreline.

The mansion covers forty-four thousand square feet across more than fifty rooms. Its entrance hall opens into a central octagonal rotunda thirty-eight feet across and forty-two feet high, capped by a double skylight. The walls of the main rooms were frescoed by the French artist Pierre-Victor Galland, who had studied under the same master architect as Lienau. Herter Brothers, the most fashionable decorating firm in New York, furnished the interiors. The house had hot and cold running water, gas lighting, and central heat at a time when such things were remarkable novelties.

Lockwood moved in around eighteen sixty-eight and lived there for barely four years. On September twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-nine, a financial panic driven by Jay Gould and James Fisk's attempt to corner the gold market crashed Wall Street on what became known as Black Friday. Lockwood lost nearly everything. He mortgaged the mansion, sold ten million dollars in railroad stock to Cornelius Vanderbilt at distressed prices, and struggled to salvage his fortune. He contracted pneumonia in eighteen seventy-two and died at fifty-two years old. His widow lost the mansion to foreclosure two years later.

The city of Norwalk acquired the property in nineteen forty-one. Designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-one, it has been restored and operates today as the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum, one of the finest surviving examples of Gilded Age domestic architecture in the United States.