The Breakers
Rhode Island
The seventy-room Vanderbilt mansion was built with no wooden parts at all, and its boiler sits buried under the front lawn.
A fire took the house that stood here on a November night in 1892. Cornelius Vanderbilt the Second had bought the place seven years earlier for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the mansion on it burned to the ground. When he hired Richard Morris Hunt to rebuild, he gave one instruction above all others. Make it so it cannot burn. So The Breakers went up in masonry and steel trusses, with no wooden parts anywhere in the structure. Vanderbilt would not even allow the boiler inside. It was placed in an underground space beneath the front lawn, away from the house. What rose on the cliffs above Easton Bay had seventy rooms and five floors, with marble brought from Italy and Africa, and a library mantel bought out of a French chateau. The great hall is a perfect cube, fifty feet on every side.
This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
Vanderbilt insisted that the building be made as fireproof as possible, resulting in a structure composed of masonry and steel trusses, with no wooden parts.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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