The Big Spenders

The Big SpendersIn the Mid-1890s--when Charles T. Yerkes, the Chicago traction magnate, hankered for a Fifth Avenue mansion to be the peer of, if not actually to improve on, the 11 sensational châteaux of the Vanderbilt family and the equally staggering residences of such Lorenzos of the age as Collis Huntington, the California railroad baron, and Montana's acquisitive Senator William Andrews Clark--times were, for the moment, bad. Yerkes' notion of home was a $5,000,000 establishment, possibly...