Craiova Breaking News

By JOANN LOVIGLIO
The Associated Press
Monday, July 26, 2010; 12:42 PM


ELKINS PARK, Pa. -- Lynnewood Hall, a century-old stunner of a building just outside Philadelphia, silently, almost invisibly, languishes 200 feet beyond a two-lane blacktop road like a crumbling little Versailles.

The graceful fountain that welcomed hundreds of well-heeled visitors, President Franklin Roosevelt among them, was dismantled and sold years ago. Its once meticulously sculpted French gardens are overgrown with weeds and vines. The classical Indiana limestone facade may have lost its luster but its poise still remains - at least from the other side of rusted wrought iron gates that keep the curious at bay.

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Like other Gilded Age palaces of the nation's pre-Depression industrial titans, Lynnewood Hall is a relic of a bygone era facing an uncertain future. Will it befall the same fate as neighboring Whitemarsh Hall, the demolished mansion of banking magnate Edward Stotesbury? Or will it be returned to former glory, like industrialist Alfred I. duPont's former Nemours Mansion in Delaware?

"It's a tragedy that people drive past Lynnewood Hall and don't know what it is, or don't even notice it's there," said Stephen J. Barron, who runs a website and Facebook group aiming to drum up interest in the mansion's plight. "It breaks my heart and it bothers me. The house is a work of art."

Long before its current humble predicament, Lynnewood Hall was home to the uber-wealthy Widener family and called "the last of the American Versailles."

The lord of Lynnewood Hall, Peter A.B. Widener, started out as a butcher. After making a small fortune supplying mutton to Union troops during the Civil War, he grew into a full-fledged tycoon from buying streetcar and railroad lines and investing in steel, tobacco and oil.



Among the spoils was his 480-acre estate, its centerpiece the 110-room, 70,000-square-foot Georgian-style palace designed by architect Horace Trumbauer.

Lynnewood Hall was completed in late 1900 and cost $8 million to build - a staggering $212 million in today's dollars.

It had a ballroom that held 1,000 people, an indoor pool and squash court, a bakery and full-time upholstery and carpentry shops. The estate boasted its own power station, horse track and stables, and a 220-acre farm run by a staff of 100.

French landscape architect Jacques Greber designed the formal French gardens, which were graced by his brother Henri-Louis Greber's fountain of bronze and marble statuary.

"It's a great building and it has great potential for commercial use, especially for institutional use," said Mary Werner DeNadai, principal of John Milner Architects in Chadds Ford. "It was certainly built to last."