Built during a period known as the Gilded Age, the Dukes' home was the talk of the town ... and not always for the most flattering of reasons.
Emma Guest-Consales, president of the Guides Association of New York City who leads tours of Gilded Age mansions on Fifth Avenue and other neighborhoods, previously told Insider the "Gilded Age" is a phrase applied retroactively to describe a period from the late 1870s to the early 1900s.
During the era, homes of wealthy individuals were "large, lavish, and luxurious," Guest-Consales said.
But not everyone was so awe-struck by the era's architecture. Journalist Montgomery Schuyler, a respected art critic during the Gilded Age in New York, was not a fan of 1009 Fifth Avenue or any other mansion like it in the city. In an article for Architectural Record, he voiced his disapproval of metal cornices that had been painted to look like stone on mansions in what he called "the Billionaire District."
"We hold these truths to be self-evident," Schuyler wrote of 1009 Fifth Avenue in his article, according to The New York Times. "When a man goes into 'six figures' for his dwelling house, he ought not to make its upperworks of sheet metal. That is a cheap pretence which nothing can distinguish from vulgarity."
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