Lynnewood Hall goes by a few names. “The Widener Estate,” “The Last American Versailles,” “The Titanic Mansion,” and “Widener’s Folly” are only a few of the ones that it’s managed to accrue in its century long tenure in the forested suburbs of Pennsylvania. For most of my life, my friends always knew it as “that crazy, huge mansion up the street,” or “that giant, old, haunted house.”
And giant it is. From left to right, it stands as the longest home in all of America, and the entire neighborhood that I live in was built around it. In its heyday, it had everything from an indoor pool and five separate art galleries, to a basketball court and a ballroom, to a race car track, a chapel, and its own coal-fired power plant. Its main home was an astonishing 110,000 square feet, but that includes neither of the home’s basements, its lavish guest house, or the gate house that stood on its once nearly 500 acres of property.
The mansion spent many years as a site of local notoriety, but when the guard dogs chained to the mansion were relieved from their long-held posts, a bevvy of YouTubers, TikTokers, and urban explorers brought the house into the national limelight. The top TikTok video devoted to the mansion, posted by user Alexplore, has amassed over 375,000 likes, and one video posted to YouTube by Bros of Decay has been viewed over two million times.
Peter A.B. Widener made his fortune as an early investor in streetcar and subway transportation systems. He was also a large shareholder in the steel and oil industries. Figures pertaining to the extent of his wealth vary, but adjusted for inflation it’s likely that he was one of the wealthiest men who ever lived. The house was built between 1897 and 1899, at the tale end of the gilded age, and was constructed during a time of some of the greatest wealth disparity in history.
With a team of workers so extensive that they had their own quarters, stairwells, and hallways, the house was a colossal feat of architectural prowess and ingenuity. That so many of its features and embellishments have lingered on to this day is a sheer testament to architect Horace Trombauer’s achievement.
Living just a block away from this megalithic structure of a home, it’s been a perpetual source of curiosity for me throughout my life. Though my own home wasn’t built until half of a century after Lynnewood hall was erected, many of the twin houses that line my neighborhood were initially built as homes for the legions of servants that were required in order to tend to such a massive estate.
The house has changed hands several times in its over 120 years in Elkins Park. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 delivered a personal blow to the mansion’s legacy, as two of its residents were among the ill-fated passengers. Peter Widener, himself, had actually been an investor in The White Star Line, the company that owned and operated the Titanic. The untimely demise of his son, George Widener, and grandson, Harry Widener, left more than just an emotional void; it instigated a series of events that saw the property transition through three different owners.
But for most of my life, I’ve watched as it’s fallen into a deeper and deeper state of disrepair. In many regards, the home is in squalor. Windows are broken, the pool is a giant pile of rubble, and the mere 34 acres that remain of the property are an overgrown home for ticks, deer, foxes, and even coyotes. An entire brigade of lawnmowers could hardly even begin making headway into the jungle surrounding the timeless home.
But recently, a restoration effort that was years in the making has finally begun. Rooms are being cleaned and restored. An expensive, asbestos remediation effort has begun. The overgrown fields of green are being peeled back and revealing artifacts of bygone eras.
The long-neglected lawn has managed to find people ambitious enough to mow it — a Sisyphean task that would surely need to begin anew each time it’s completed.
The insurmountable efforts have culminated in a grand hope for revival that few expected to ever truly come to fruition. Only a couple of years ago, the future of the mansion remained uncertain.
The talks of demolition and development had reached a fever pitch shortly before Lynnewood Hall Historic Foundation intervened and purchased the gilded age home. Now, for the first time in my life, there are talks of opening this historic home to the public. There are hopes that its art galleries — which once housed paintings from Rembrandt and Raphael, might even flourish once again.
How the restoration effort will unfold is still unclear. Some projections for how much it could cost to bring the house back to its former extravagance exceed 100 million dollars. But to consider the lavish parties of horse carriages and limos and flappers and performers that the home once hosted, 100 million sounds almost modest.
Though parts of its interior have decayed and been auctioned off, there are parts that seem as though they’ve hardly weathered a day in over a century. What the estate’s next chapter will hold remains uncertain, but the neighborhood built around it has been given a cause for hope.