The Breakers: The Vanderbilt Women Who Saved a 70-Room Newport Mansion

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After fire burned his wooden Newport house to the ground in 1892, Cornelius Vanderbilt II told architect Richard Morris Hunt to build something that could not burn. The result was The Breakers: five stories of masonry and steel trusses, 70 rooms, almost no structural wood, and a boiler buried in a cavern under the front lawn so that no flame came near the family. Cornelius suffered a stroke in 1899 and died at 55, after a single healthy summer in the house.

This episode follows what happened to the mansion once its builder was gone, a story carried by three generations of Vanderbilt women. His widow Alice ran it for 35 years with a staff the size of a small company. Her daughter Gladys inherited it in 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression, and refused to sell. She turned it into an air raid shelter during the Second World War and then leased it to preservationists for a dollar a year, while the family went on living upstairs behind a safety gate.

• Running the house took 33 indoor servants, 25 outdoor staff, and more than 150 tons of coal a year, and by the mid 1920s the property taxes alone reached $83,000 annually.
• In January 1943 more than 500 wardens and civilian volunteers drilled in the basement, with Gladys working among them as a Red Cross volunteer.
• In 1948 Gladys leased the ground floor to the Preservation Society of Newport County for one dollar a year while still paying the taxes, insurance, and major repairs.
• Her heirs sold the estate to the society in 1972 for $365,000, on the condition that Countess Sylvia Szapary keep a life tenancy on the third floor. The family did not leave until 2018.
• Gertrude Vanderbilt, who went on to found the Whitney Museum of American Art, filled her bedroom with her own sketches of laborers and World War I troops.