What Happened To The Biggest Gilded Age Mansion in Cleveland? | Sylvester T. Everett Castle

What if I told you that Cleveland's Millionaire's Row once had a tax valuation higher than New York's Fifth Avenue? And on that tree-lined street, just around the corner from the nation's first billionaire, was the Sylvester T. Everett mansion, the largest and most expensive urban house American cities had ever seen to date. Hi everyone, Ken here. Hit that subscribe button and let's explore this house. Sylvester T. Everett was born in Liberty Township, Ohio. He worked the family farm alongside his father until he was 12 years old. But in 1850, everything changed. Everett left home, following his older brother to Cleveland. At 13, he took a job as a messenger at the banking house of Brockway, Wasson, Everett and Company, a firm his brother had co-founded. It was a modest beginning, running errands, learning the rhythms of a financial institution, watching and absorbing everything around him. Within a few years, he had advanced from messenger to cashier. At 20 years old, he left Cleveland to work at a bank in Philadelphia, but returned to Cleveland a year later, and by age 30, he had become a member of Everett Weddell & Company, the reorganized successor to the same banking house where he had started as a kid. From then on, Everett's name began to carry serious civic weight. He served a remarkable seven times as treasurer of the city of Cleveland between 1869 and 1883, a tenure in which he significantly increased public investment and municipal bonds. In 1876, he became president of Second National Bank, and he later organized the Union National Bank. He financed and built two of the earliest electric streetcar systems in the United States, one in Akron, Ohio, and one in Erie, Pennsylvania, at a time when the technology was new enough that the outcome was genuinely uncertain, but the gamble paid off handsomely. He also developed significant interest in mining and transportation, placing himself at the intersection of several industries that were building the new world in real time. President James A. Garfield, a fellow Ohioan, appointed Everett U.S. Government Director of the Union Pacific Railroad, one of the most consequential infrastructure posts of the Gilded Age. This all of course made him incredibly wealthy, no doubt one of the richest men in the country. It was at the height of his success that Everett decided to build his dream house, and there was no better place for it than Millionaire's Row. Imagine stepping off a train in Cleveland, Ohio, sometime around 1890. You've heard the stories, everyone has, but nothing quite prepares you for the sight of Euclid Avenue on a clear afternoon. The elm trees arch overhead and great cathedral vaults, the avenue itself is paved with medina sandstone, and stretching ahead of you are mansions of such staggering scale and variety that for a moment, you forget you're in the American Midwest. You would not have been in that impression. Pettigrew's travel guides, the gold standard of 19th century tourism, called Euclid Avenue the showplace of America and listed it as a must-see destination for travelers arriving from Europe. Mark Twain, who was not known for doling out compliments freely, declared it the greatest, most beautiful street in all the world. Contemporaries even compared it to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris, and remarkably, it earned those comparisons. At its peak, the tax valuation of the mansions lining what would come to be known as Cleveland's Millionaire's Row far exceeded the valuations of New York's 5th Avenue. At the far end of that four-mile corridor of wealth, right at the corner of Euclid Avenue and East 40th Street, stood perhaps the largest and most expensive of the mansions, that being the home of Sylvester T. Everett. In 1881, Everett purchased the prize lot and tore down the existing home to begin laying the groundwork for something far more ambitious. To design it, he reached all the way to New York City, commissioning a young architect named Charles Frederick Schweinfurth. Construction started in 1883 and was completed in 1887. The mansion was built in a mature Romanesque Revival style, a design language rooted in the heavy stone arches, round towers, and fortress-like massing that the great American architect Henry Hobson Richardson had done so much to popularize in the preceding decade. Schweinfurth executed this style with confidence and originality that immediately set the building apart from anything else on the avenue. The massive pink stone towers were the feature that caught the eye first. They rose from the corner with a commanding, almost medieval authority, giving the house its popular nickname, the Everett Castle. The portecocheire was an elaborate Romanesque composition in its own right. The massive size of the house is best demonstrated by this photo of a coachman waiting beneath its ornate arches, the scale of the stonework making even the horse and carriage look almost miniature. It was an entrance designed to impress, before you had even stepped inside. The interior matched the exterior's ambitions. With more than 50 rooms spread across the structure, the Everett Mansion was one of the largest private residences in the country when it was completed. Four sitting US presidents came through those doors, which tells you something about what it must have felt like to be inside. The kind of setting where the furniture, the art, the scale of the rooms, and the quality of the hospitality all communicated the same unmistakable message about the status of the man who owned it. Everett's collection of European art and antiques no doubt found their place in those halls, giving the interior the feel of a private museum as much as a family home. The commission transformed Schweinfurt's career. Neighbors on Euclid Avenue who saw the Everett Mansion going up were impressed enough that commissions began flowing his way almost immediately. He settled in Cleveland permanently and went on to design at least 15 additional mansions on Millionaire's Row over the following decades. As for Everett, he lived in the castle for the remainder of his long life, though the final years were touched by loss. His second wife Alice passed away in 1916, leaving him a widower for a second time. He outlived her by 6 years, passing away in 1922 at the age of 83. By this time, the world he had helped build on Euclid Avenue was already beginning to unravel. The forces were familiar ones. The automobile had changed how and where families chose to live, drawing the wealthy next generation to the suburbs, and the factories whose profits had built the mansions were also generating the pollution that made the neighborhood increasingly unpleasant to live in. The industrial success that had created Millionaire's Row was in the end exactly what destroyed it. By 1937, not a single mansion on Euclid Avenue was still occupied as a private home. The transformation of the street from residential showpiece to commercial corridor had taken less than three decades. During the Great Depression, many of the grand homes had been converted by their owners into rooming houses, which accelerated their physical and social decline. What had been the most exclusive address in the United States was within a single generation becoming a slum. The Everett mansion survived its builder by 16 years. In 1938, it was demolished, a fate that came for most of its neighbors as well, though that fact offered little comfort to anyone who cared about what was being lost. The Cleveland Plain Dealer's notice of the demolition captured the dismissive mood of the moment with a single, slightly condescending sentence. This gothic structure was considered fashionable at one time. That was the epitaph for a building that had once been the most talked about private residence in one of America's greatest cities, a structure that had launched the career of the finest architect Cleveland had ever celebrated. Where the Everett Castle once stood, at the corner of Euclid Avenue and East 40th Street, there is now a parking lot. It is a mundane ending for a mansion that was once among the largest and most expensive in the entire country. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. What did you think about the Sylvester T. Everett Mansion? 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