2 East 91st Street
New York, NY, USA

Andrew Carnegie Mansion

Completed in 1902, for the great philanthropic industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) and his wife Louise Whitfield (1857-1946). Carnegie quietly purchased the land in 1898 (the same year that he also acquired his beloved Skibo Castle in Scotland) with the intention that it would have enough room for a large garden (1.2 acres). It was designed by the architectural firm of Babb, Cook & Willard, to whom Carnegie instructed, "(build me the) most modest, plainest, and most roomy house in New York"....

The Beaux-Arts mansion is neither modest nor plain but it is certainly roomy with 56,368 square feet of living space, making it one the Largest 100 Houses in the United States, slightly ahead of Blairsden. In 1972, the Carnegie Corporation gifted the property to the Smithsonian and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum opened here in 1976.