THE DAWN OF
THE GILDED AGE

Every house of genuine consequence is a manuscript. Most are written over in haste, their earlier pages torn away by successive owners eager to impose the taste of an ephemeral moment. A few, by rare circumstance, are preserved as a palimpsest—where every era is allowed to leave its mark without extinguishing the hand that came before.

The physical origin began in the autumn of 1880, when architect James E. Ware raised a row of brownstones above the quiet earth between Fifth and Madison. William Erastus Tefft, partner in the merchant house Tefft, Weller & Co., claimed No. 22 for his family, lining its early walls with his private treasury of 19th-century theater relics and artifacts of Edwin Booth. For two decades, the house stood as a standard of high Victorian domesticity.