Photoessay:
The Life and Death of Whitemarsh Hall
Background: In the late 1970’s, when my husband Ovide and I were living in Philadelphia, our friend Sandra Chaff persuaded us to join her in enrolling in a photography course that transformed our (and especially Ovide’s) approach to looking at the world through the lens of a camera. One of Ovide’s projects for that course was a series of images of the tumbledown Whitemarsh Hall, which he captured in 1978 during the many hours we spent clambering over the wreckage.
Two years later the bulldozers arrived. Since we were no longer living in Philadelphia, Sandy graciously agreed to return to the site to take a few post-demolition photos. I then wrote a short text that was purchased by Philadelphia magazine along with five of the photos. Unfortunately, Philadelphia changed hands at just that moment in time, and apparently our little photoessay didn’t fit new owners’ needs. By now the razing of Whitemarsh Hall was old news and I had moved on to other projects.
Fast forward to 2012, when I stumbled across my old "Whitemarsh Hall" folder while sifting through our personal collection of papers and photographs in the hopes of preserving whatever might be of value. I might have known we weren’t alone in our fascination with Whitemarsh Hall and its history. A quick google search unearthed many links, including a Wikipedia entry with a fascinating tidbit that apparently escaped me when I did my pre-google research in local libraries and archives: “During much of World War II the property was used for warehousing the bulk of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's art treasures as it was feared that the Germans would bombard Manhattan from U-boats or warships.”
Although by now I knew we were far from being the last remaining link to the mansion’s fabled past, I had our slides converted to jpg files and obtained permission from Philadelphia magazine to reclaim that brief intersection of our personal history and that of Whitemarsh Hall. You will find it below, along with all twenty of Ovide's stunning and evocative photos and Sandy's five additional post-demolition shots. We neither ask nor expect any personal gain from this effort; it is freely available for the enjoyment of anyone interested in our particular perspective on this story of ruined grandeur.
Two years later the bulldozers arrived. Since we were no longer living in Philadelphia, Sandy graciously agreed to return to the site to take a few post-demolition photos. I then wrote a short text that was purchased by Philadelphia magazine along with five of the photos. Unfortunately, Philadelphia changed hands at just that moment in time, and apparently our little photoessay didn’t fit new owners’ needs. By now the razing of Whitemarsh Hall was old news and I had moved on to other projects.
Fast forward to 2012, when I stumbled across my old "Whitemarsh Hall" folder while sifting through our personal collection of papers and photographs in the hopes of preserving whatever might be of value. I might have known we weren’t alone in our fascination with Whitemarsh Hall and its history. A quick google search unearthed many links, including a Wikipedia entry with a fascinating tidbit that apparently escaped me when I did my pre-google research in local libraries and archives: “During much of World War II the property was used for warehousing the bulk of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's art treasures as it was feared that the Germans would bombard Manhattan from U-boats or warships.”
Although by now I knew we were far from being the last remaining link to the mansion’s fabled past, I had our slides converted to jpg files and obtained permission from Philadelphia magazine to reclaim that brief intersection of our personal history and that of Whitemarsh Hall. You will find it below, along with all twenty of Ovide's stunning and evocative photos and Sandy's five additional post-demolition shots. We neither ask nor expect any personal gain from this effort; it is freely available for the enjoyment of anyone interested in our particular perspective on this story of ruined grandeur.
The Life and Death of Whitemarsh Hall
photographs by Ovide Pomerleau and Sandra Chaff
text by Cindy Pomerleau
photographs by Ovide Pomerleau and Sandra Chaff
text by Cindy Pomerleau
Like an incomplete skeleton rising from an unquiet grave, six 50-foot Ionic columns stand eerily alone on a rubble-strewn hill in suburban Wyndmoor, about a mile from Chestnut Hill. Not so long ago these columns supported the main portico of one of America’s most lavish and imposing mansions. Now they support nothing. Soon they will be the focal point of a developer’s grand vision, a playground where denizens of a projected condominium will romp.
There’s a nice irony here – that the mortal remains of Whitemarsh Hall, once called the Versailles of America and almost a parody of classical symmetry, should be incorporated into a sprawling Gothic garden. And how old Ed Stotesbury would have winced to see his monument to one man’s amassed wealth transformed to its very antithesis, multi-celled housing for a whole gaggle of middle-class sun kings.
Yet at the same time, there is something strangely fitting in the fate of these immense, disjointed limestone pillars. For they are authentic modern ruins, not just a Disneyland facsimile trumped up for the occasion. We usually think of ruins as relics of a far distant past, mute witnesses to the depredations of time and circumstance. Stotesbury Mansion, modeled on the stately Georgian ancestral homes of England, family seats for centuries, lived out its entire span in a few short decades. Built in 1921, it belongs to an age behind us almost as irretrievably as ancient Rome or Greece.
At the age of 72, Edward Stotesbury built the mansion as a dream house for his second wife, the widowed Eva Cromwell. Stotesbury, son of a wealthy Philadelphia sugar merchant, forged a successful career in his own right as a banker and financier. He became a partner of Anthony J. Drexel in Philadelphia and later of the legendary J.P. Morgan in New York. One of the stories he liked to tell on himself described his walking up behind Morgan on a New York street and saying, “Brother, can you spare a dime for a cup of coffee?” Morgan spotted the voice and, without missing a beat, answered, “You go over and work that side of the street – I’m working this side.” But despite his solid Philadelphia credentials, despite his undisputed wealth, despite (or perhaps because of) his intense desire for acceptance, Stotesbury was always regarded by Philadelphia society as something of a parvenu. He never received the coveted invitation to join the Philadelphia Club.
So Stotesbury had to try a little harder. When he built Whitemarsh Hall, no expense was spared. Horace Trumbauer, not a stranger to large projects (he also designed Beaver College and the Philadelphia Museum of Art), was called in to draw up plans. The building alone cost $2 million, the furnishings much more. The four corners of the earth were scoured for treasures worthy of such munificence: limestone was brought from Indiana, marble from Italy, rugs from Persia, furniture from France. Gainsboroughs and Reynolds’ lined the walls. If money could buy it, Whitemarsh Hall had it.
It was Georges Clemençeau who dubbed the estate “The Versailles of America,” and so it must have seemed to its guests. After arriving via private railroad, they were escorted through elaborately symmetrical French gardens complete with pillars and fountains. The building itself was even larger than it appeared; to maintain the graceful proportions of the English mansions that inspired it, three of its six stories were built underground. Inside, the house was baronial in scale, boasting a 64-foot ballroom hung with medieval tapestries and an organ whose pipes ascended three stories.
Visitors at the Stotesburys’ were treated like royalty. In some instances they were, like the crown prince of Sweden, who visited in 1926. More often, callers were the American equivalent of royalty – business moguls like Henry Ford, who reportedly commented, “It was a great experience to see how the rich live.” Guests could disport themselves in a billiard room, an indoor swimming pool, squash and tennis courts, even a movie theatre. Other appointments included several elevators, 45 bathrooms, a barbershop, and a self-contained power plant. Mrs. Stotesbury maintained high standards for cleanliness and order. Servants, up to 100 of them, kept the 145 rooms immaculate and lovingly polished the gold-plated fixtures in the bathrooms. Under the watchful eye of Fussey, the butler, the staff bustled through the corridors, seeking to insure that each guest’s smallest need was met. Breakfast menus were distributed, the latest bestsellers and magazines set out for browsing. An eyeshade for napping lay close at hand on each night table. A chauffeur was at the disposal of anyone who might wish to leave the grounds. Annual upkeep ran to $1 million.
The ballroom was the scene of the Stotesburys’ most sumptuous entertainments. Glittering crystal chandeliers hung overhead, glittering guests in formal attire waltzed below. At opposite ends of the chamber, fires crackled hospitably in twin fireplaces with mantelpieces of gleaming Carrera marble. Such soirées might also have included a drum solo – Edward Stotesbury had been a drummer boy in the Civil War and was easily prevailed upon to show off his skills as a percussionist.
It was the fate of Whitemarsh Hall to be built in virtually the last moment before the maintenance of such opulence ceased to be possible. Strangely, Stotesbury, with all his financial acumen, failed to see the impending doom of the way of life he espoused – or perhaps at the age of 72 he simply didn’t care. The mansion may even have been intended as a stay against chaos, a hedge against the passing of time. If so, it was sustained only by the sheer will of Stotesbury himself. His funeral in 1938 was the last big social event to be staged at the mansion. His casket lay in state in the grand ballroom, carpeted with magnolias and illuminated by thousands of candles. Flowers were delivered by the truckload. Soon after his death, Eva Stotesbury moved to Palm Beach, where the family maintained another of its several residences, a $450,000 “cottage.” The mansion was never lived in again.
In 1943, Mrs. Stotesbury, beset by ever-rising taxes, instructed the trustees of her husband’s estate to sell the property to the Penn Salt (now Pennwalt) Chemical Corporation, which converted the building to a research center. Guest rooms, newly furnished with lab sinks and reagent bottles, were put to uses old Ed Stotesbury could never have imagined. The small army of groundskeepers prudently retreated, leaving behind a tangle of weeds and crabgrass. A school of goldfish that once darted through the pond outside Mrs. Stotesbury’s boudoir vanished without a trace. Down came the eight-foot iron fence surrounding the entire 160-acre estate. Once the War was over, most of the land was sold off, and a crop of ranchos and split-levels sprouted quickly and predictably. Today the trees and shrubs around those homes have fully grown in, establishing the legitimacy of their claim to lands where tycoons and princes once strolled.
Pennwalt maintained its offices in the building until 1964, then sold the mansion with its remaining 47.5 acres to private investors. Had someone cared enough at that point, had the money been available, it might have been preserved as a monument to an age just passed, an age adorned with beautiful people such as inhabit the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels. It might have become the San Simeon of the East. Instead, it was allowed to fall into a state of spectacular disrepair. Staircases crumbled, ceilings stove in, rats scampered through the dark subterranean corridors. Thieves and vandals found their way here, too, plundering fiercely and wreaking havoc far beyond the pedestrian efforts of weather and neglect. Everything even remotely portable was carted off. What remained was ravaged and defaced beyond imagining. Graffiti were scrawled in places that seemed inaccessible except by skyhook. Every square inch of every floor was coated with rubble. Stotesbury’s dream had become a nightmare.
Too expensive to maintain, too expensive to tear down, the mansion turned into a major liability for the town of Wyndmoor – a hazard to curiosity seekers and a hangout for drug dealers and rowdy teenagers. The Springfield Township Planning Commission considered various institutional uses for the property, then abandoned any projected restoration as financially unfeasible. For several years Whitemarsh Hall stood in all its gutted splendor, the unbroken vista it once commanded dotted with tract houses. From a distance its stately Georgian outlines remained intact, offering a fleeting vision of the mansion in its fabulous heyday. But on closer approach, precarious heaps of broken masonry and faceless, amputated statues quickly recalled the unauthorized visitor to reality.
Demolition was finally rendered profitable when zoning laws were altered in 1977 to permit the construction of 163 townhouses and single-family dwellings. In the spring of 1980, wrecking crews sporting “Stotesbury Mansion” t-shirts moved in and razed what remained of Stotesbury’s dream. The six giant columns were left standing, destined to become “ruins”. So was a small stone gatehouse that had somehow survived intact. The rest was reduced to powder – huge mounds of marble shards and chunks of limestone pineapples.
The citizens of Wyndmoor continue to wrangle over the building project. Doubts about drainage and about the builder’s competence, probably to some extent a cloak for deeper concerns about the impact of the development on the community, are aired repeatedly in the columns of local newspapers. But Whitemarsh Hall, four decades a-dying, is now dead. In retrospect, it is clear that the seeds of the mansion’s destruction were contained in its very conception. The social foundations that could support an American Versailles were already crumbling when construction began. With Louis XV, Edward Stotesbury might truly have said, “Après moi le deluge.”
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There’s a nice irony here – that the mortal remains of Whitemarsh Hall, once called the Versailles of America and almost a parody of classical symmetry, should be incorporated into a sprawling Gothic garden. And how old Ed Stotesbury would have winced to see his monument to one man’s amassed wealth transformed to its very antithesis, multi-celled housing for a whole gaggle of middle-class sun kings.
Yet at the same time, there is something strangely fitting in the fate of these immense, disjointed limestone pillars. For they are authentic modern ruins, not just a Disneyland facsimile trumped up for the occasion. We usually think of ruins as relics of a far distant past, mute witnesses to the depredations of time and circumstance. Stotesbury Mansion, modeled on the stately Georgian ancestral homes of England, family seats for centuries, lived out its entire span in a few short decades. Built in 1921, it belongs to an age behind us almost as irretrievably as ancient Rome or Greece.
At the age of 72, Edward Stotesbury built the mansion as a dream house for his second wife, the widowed Eva Cromwell. Stotesbury, son of a wealthy Philadelphia sugar merchant, forged a successful career in his own right as a banker and financier. He became a partner of Anthony J. Drexel in Philadelphia and later of the legendary J.P. Morgan in New York. One of the stories he liked to tell on himself described his walking up behind Morgan on a New York street and saying, “Brother, can you spare a dime for a cup of coffee?” Morgan spotted the voice and, without missing a beat, answered, “You go over and work that side of the street – I’m working this side.” But despite his solid Philadelphia credentials, despite his undisputed wealth, despite (or perhaps because of) his intense desire for acceptance, Stotesbury was always regarded by Philadelphia society as something of a parvenu. He never received the coveted invitation to join the Philadelphia Club.
So Stotesbury had to try a little harder. When he built Whitemarsh Hall, no expense was spared. Horace Trumbauer, not a stranger to large projects (he also designed Beaver College and the Philadelphia Museum of Art), was called in to draw up plans. The building alone cost $2 million, the furnishings much more. The four corners of the earth were scoured for treasures worthy of such munificence: limestone was brought from Indiana, marble from Italy, rugs from Persia, furniture from France. Gainsboroughs and Reynolds’ lined the walls. If money could buy it, Whitemarsh Hall had it.
It was Georges Clemençeau who dubbed the estate “The Versailles of America,” and so it must have seemed to its guests. After arriving via private railroad, they were escorted through elaborately symmetrical French gardens complete with pillars and fountains. The building itself was even larger than it appeared; to maintain the graceful proportions of the English mansions that inspired it, three of its six stories were built underground. Inside, the house was baronial in scale, boasting a 64-foot ballroom hung with medieval tapestries and an organ whose pipes ascended three stories.
Visitors at the Stotesburys’ were treated like royalty. In some instances they were, like the crown prince of Sweden, who visited in 1926. More often, callers were the American equivalent of royalty – business moguls like Henry Ford, who reportedly commented, “It was a great experience to see how the rich live.” Guests could disport themselves in a billiard room, an indoor swimming pool, squash and tennis courts, even a movie theatre. Other appointments included several elevators, 45 bathrooms, a barbershop, and a self-contained power plant. Mrs. Stotesbury maintained high standards for cleanliness and order. Servants, up to 100 of them, kept the 145 rooms immaculate and lovingly polished the gold-plated fixtures in the bathrooms. Under the watchful eye of Fussey, the butler, the staff bustled through the corridors, seeking to insure that each guest’s smallest need was met. Breakfast menus were distributed, the latest bestsellers and magazines set out for browsing. An eyeshade for napping lay close at hand on each night table. A chauffeur was at the disposal of anyone who might wish to leave the grounds. Annual upkeep ran to $1 million.
The ballroom was the scene of the Stotesburys’ most sumptuous entertainments. Glittering crystal chandeliers hung overhead, glittering guests in formal attire waltzed below. At opposite ends of the chamber, fires crackled hospitably in twin fireplaces with mantelpieces of gleaming Carrera marble. Such soirées might also have included a drum solo – Edward Stotesbury had been a drummer boy in the Civil War and was easily prevailed upon to show off his skills as a percussionist.
It was the fate of Whitemarsh Hall to be built in virtually the last moment before the maintenance of such opulence ceased to be possible. Strangely, Stotesbury, with all his financial acumen, failed to see the impending doom of the way of life he espoused – or perhaps at the age of 72 he simply didn’t care. The mansion may even have been intended as a stay against chaos, a hedge against the passing of time. If so, it was sustained only by the sheer will of Stotesbury himself. His funeral in 1938 was the last big social event to be staged at the mansion. His casket lay in state in the grand ballroom, carpeted with magnolias and illuminated by thousands of candles. Flowers were delivered by the truckload. Soon after his death, Eva Stotesbury moved to Palm Beach, where the family maintained another of its several residences, a $450,000 “cottage.” The mansion was never lived in again.
In 1943, Mrs. Stotesbury, beset by ever-rising taxes, instructed the trustees of her husband’s estate to sell the property to the Penn Salt (now Pennwalt) Chemical Corporation, which converted the building to a research center. Guest rooms, newly furnished with lab sinks and reagent bottles, were put to uses old Ed Stotesbury could never have imagined. The small army of groundskeepers prudently retreated, leaving behind a tangle of weeds and crabgrass. A school of goldfish that once darted through the pond outside Mrs. Stotesbury’s boudoir vanished without a trace. Down came the eight-foot iron fence surrounding the entire 160-acre estate. Once the War was over, most of the land was sold off, and a crop of ranchos and split-levels sprouted quickly and predictably. Today the trees and shrubs around those homes have fully grown in, establishing the legitimacy of their claim to lands where tycoons and princes once strolled.
Pennwalt maintained its offices in the building until 1964, then sold the mansion with its remaining 47.5 acres to private investors. Had someone cared enough at that point, had the money been available, it might have been preserved as a monument to an age just passed, an age adorned with beautiful people such as inhabit the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels. It might have become the San Simeon of the East. Instead, it was allowed to fall into a state of spectacular disrepair. Staircases crumbled, ceilings stove in, rats scampered through the dark subterranean corridors. Thieves and vandals found their way here, too, plundering fiercely and wreaking havoc far beyond the pedestrian efforts of weather and neglect. Everything even remotely portable was carted off. What remained was ravaged and defaced beyond imagining. Graffiti were scrawled in places that seemed inaccessible except by skyhook. Every square inch of every floor was coated with rubble. Stotesbury’s dream had become a nightmare.
Too expensive to maintain, too expensive to tear down, the mansion turned into a major liability for the town of Wyndmoor – a hazard to curiosity seekers and a hangout for drug dealers and rowdy teenagers. The Springfield Township Planning Commission considered various institutional uses for the property, then abandoned any projected restoration as financially unfeasible. For several years Whitemarsh Hall stood in all its gutted splendor, the unbroken vista it once commanded dotted with tract houses. From a distance its stately Georgian outlines remained intact, offering a fleeting vision of the mansion in its fabulous heyday. But on closer approach, precarious heaps of broken masonry and faceless, amputated statues quickly recalled the unauthorized visitor to reality.
Demolition was finally rendered profitable when zoning laws were altered in 1977 to permit the construction of 163 townhouses and single-family dwellings. In the spring of 1980, wrecking crews sporting “Stotesbury Mansion” t-shirts moved in and razed what remained of Stotesbury’s dream. The six giant columns were left standing, destined to become “ruins”. So was a small stone gatehouse that had somehow survived intact. The rest was reduced to powder – huge mounds of marble shards and chunks of limestone pineapples.
The citizens of Wyndmoor continue to wrangle over the building project. Doubts about drainage and about the builder’s competence, probably to some extent a cloak for deeper concerns about the impact of the development on the community, are aired repeatedly in the columns of local newspapers. But Whitemarsh Hall, four decades a-dying, is now dead. In retrospect, it is clear that the seeds of the mansion’s destruction were contained in its very conception. The social foundations that could support an American Versailles were already crumbling when construction began. With Louis XV, Edward Stotesbury might truly have said, “Après moi le deluge.”
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