In 1896 Mrs. Caroline Astor moved into a colossal new French chateau on Fifth Avenue at

65th Street, a palace designed by Richard Morris Hunt and one of dozens of such opulent

homes decorating the avenue.

It was here that the aging matriarch of high society attempted to retain her control over

New York's social scene.

And the adjacent mansion lived her son John Jacob Astor IV in his family.

Thirty years later Mrs. Astor and her son were gone and it was announced that the Astor

mansion would be demolished.

In April of 1926 hundreds gathered for an auction to carry away the Astor's imported French

decor.

Out the door with the paneling, the iron gates, the tapestries, porcelains and marble

mantle pieces and dozens of austere paintings.

All the fittings of gilded age opulence now faded, sold and taken away.

Next the walls of the Astor palace came tumbling down.

Neighborhood children rummaged to the ruins playing among the remnants of the old Astor

Ballroom.

By the fall most traces of this ostentatious mansion had been wiped away.

But unlike so many other vanished architectural treasures, few more in this lost Astor mansion

because in its place, rice is an even grander, more exceptional building and one that might

have flummoxed Old Caroline.

Not a home for the wealthy, but a house of worship for a historically important Jewish congregation

with roots to the lower east side.

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