Gatsby by Bob Batchelor

Author:Bob Batchelor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

My Mansion Is Bigger Than Yours

On a cloudy, late April day in 2011, massive yellow bulldozers some forty or fifty feet high massed outside the decaying hulk of a once-brilliant mansion. These great beasts would soon chortle and puff, ultimately tearing apart the twenty-thousand-square-foot manor, ripping through its rotting wood, delicate fixtures, and ornate hand-painted wallpaper. In short order the Stanford White–designed 1902 masterpiece, once a grand dame overlooking the Long Island Sound in Sands Point, New York, was gone, leaving only its great dual chimneys standing in the wake.

As sad as it is to destroy outdated or overly expensive homes in the name of progress, the mansions of yesteryear are increasingly rare as developers have learned that they can make more money by breaking up grand estates and selling them off piecemeal. Yet this particular demolition drew global interest. According to local lore and general knowledge, this estate served as Fitzgerald’s model for Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s place in East Egg, with its enduring green light and manifestation of Tom’s old-money heritage that would ultimately lead to Gatsby’s demise.

Even Fitzgerald’s influence and a longing for history could not save the place, which cost its owner $30 million and some $4,500 a day to maintain. The sagging fortress, with a peeling roof, broken-out windows, and paint ravaged by the sea air simply could not be saved. Instead, after demolition, the lot would be broken up into five individual homesites, each in the $10 million range. Perhaps a bit less Gatsby-esque than the original, but certainly still reaching epic proportions, even for that section of tony Long Island.[14]

The passionate outrage over tearing down such a historically significant site paired with the general inability to do much more than mourn the loss of Fitzgerald’s muse combined to show how important a building can be in the national psyche. Just as Gatsby’s mansion symbolized the fact that he had made it in the fictionalized West Egg, this real-life estate took on a life of its own in its prime, owned by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope, who held the grand parties that included young Fitzgerald and his stunning wife, Zelda. When news spread of the home’s demise, news outlets and television stations appeared on the scene to put its history into perspective. The resulting ire revealed the tight bond between the ideas of success and owning a home.[15]

The American Dream is most concrete and most illusory when it comes to the notion of homeownership as its central facet. Fitzgerald sensed this in his own life as he moved in and around wealthy friends and families. He then turned the Gatsby and Buchanan mansions into star characters in Gatsby. The houses do more than provide setting; they reflect the era, its people, and, in effect, all ages, since the desperate desire to own a home is central to how we see ourselves and others. Even in the midst of the Great Recession plaguing the world in the late 2000s with millions of homes at or near foreclosure, owning a home remained a central theme.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.