Details of the Petit Chateau: 660 Fifth Avenue
660 Fifth Avenue, the "Petit Chateau," in 1925. Completed in 1882, the mansion was built for William Kissam Vanderbilt, grandson of the famed millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt Sr., "The Commodore," who founded the Vanderbilt family fortune, and his wife Alva. With the intention of using the home to signal her and her family's arrival into New York society, she collaborated with architect Richard Morris Hunt to design a French Renaissance-style townhouse known as the Petit Chateau . Alva Smith Vanderbilt (1853-1933) The home was revolutionary in that, as the time, it was a blotch of bright limestone in comparison to the drab, dingy brownstones surrounding it, including the ornate, enormous triplex across the street occupied by Vanderbilt's father and sisters, and the town house occupied by Mrs. Caroline Astor, the doyenne of New York society, who had refused to acknowledge the Vanderbilt family by calling on them. In response, Alva famously decide...