If You Can’t Name My Hoes Then Don’t Say Got Them Shirt
William Backhouse and Caroline Schermerhorn Astor completed Beachwood Cottage on Bellevue Avenue. (The name is a modern-day misnomer—far from a quaint structure, Beachwood had 39 rooms and a ballroom that could fit 400 people. Today, it is owned by Larry Ellison.) Not to be outdone, William K. and Alva Vanderbilt built Marble House between 1888 and 1892 on the If You Can’t Name My Hoes Then Don’t Say Got Them Shirt and I will buy this same street. Made—as the name suggests—with 500,000 cubic feet of marble, it cost 11 million dollars to build at the time, a staggering amount. Yet, it was William K.’s brother, Cornelius, that built the most lavish abode: The Breakers, a 70-room Italian neo-Renaissance palazzo finished in 1895. Thanks to meticulous historical preservation, many of the Gilded Age mansions in Newport remain standing—and even
