Kripalu and the Shadow Brook Estate

The large brick building on this hillside overlooking the Stockbridge Bowl is the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, and the ground beneath it holds a layered and sometimes tragic history. This was once the estate called Shadow Brook. In eighteen ninety three, the merchant and banker Anson Phelps Stokes built a mansion here so enormous, with a facade stretching more than four hundred feet, that it was said to be the largest private home in the United States.

He hired Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park, to shape the grounds. The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie bought the estate in nineteen seventeen and died here in nineteen nineteen. In nineteen twenty two the Jesuits acquired the property and turned it into a novitiate to train young priests.

Then came disaster. Shortly after midnight on the tenth of March, nineteen fifty six, an oil explosion in the boiler room set off a fire that raced up the elevator shaft. More than one hundred residents escaped, but four Jesuits, three priests and a lay brother, were killed.

The old mansion was destroyed. The Jesuits built the plain brick structure that stands today in nineteen fifty seven, left in nineteen seventy, and the Kripalu center opened here in nineteen eighty three.