Joseph Raphael De Lamar House

The Joseph Raphael De Lamar House is a mansion located at 233 Madison Avenue at the corner of 37th Street in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It was built in 1902-05 and was designed by C. P. H. Gilbert in the Beaux-Arts style. The De Lamar Mansion marked a stark departure from Gilbert's traditional style of French Gothic architecture and was instead robustly Beaux-Arts, heavy with rusticated stonework, balconies and a colossal mansard roof. The mansion is the largest in Murray Hill and one of the most spectacular in the city; the interiors are as lavish as the exterior.
Joseph Raphael De Lamar was a Dutch-born merchant seaman who made his first fortune in mining and metallurgy during the 1870s-80s silver-lead rushes to Colorado and Idaho, and 1890s gold strikes at Mercur, Utah and Delamar, Nevada. He had this residence built as his entrée into New York society. It was to be a family residence, but soon after it was built De Lamar and his wife divorced. The 1910 census taker found De Lamar in residence with his daughter Alice, by then 15, and nine servants, a typical ratio for the time. De Lamar died eight years later in 1918 at the age of 75. His obituary in The Boston Daily Globe described him as a "man of mystery" and an accomplished organist. He left an estate worth $29 million to his daughter, who continued living in the house for a short time before moving to an apartment at 740 Park Avenue.

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