The Gilded Age Heiress Who Outsmarted Manhattan: Emilie Grigsby’s Lost Palace

The Gilded Age heiress Manhattan tried to erase — Emilie Grigsby built a four-story French Renaissance palace at 1022 Fifth Avenue, paid cash for the land, hired Horace Trumbauer, filled the galleries with authenticated Old Masters, and then — when the city changed the rules — dismantled it on her terms. In 1936 the wreckers took down eight hundred-plus tons of limestone; today a glass storefront stands where a private power plant once hummed and museum labels still whisper her name: “On loan from Mrs. Russell Grigsby.”

This wasn’t a socialite’s whim. It was a strategy. Grigsby turned gossip into invitations, opened her rooms to students and teachers, partnered with the Met and the Historical Society, and treated every dinner like a transaction. When taxes and towers made mansions obsolete, she photographed every room, placed the art in institutions, paid her staff severance, and sold the lot — proof that buildings are temporary, but strategy endures.

Before we begin — drop a comment: if you could save one trace from 1022 Fifth, what would it be — the limestone façade, the gallery labels, the ledgers, or the Trumbauer plans? Was this palace a triumph of soft power… or an alibi that hid deals polite society wouldn’t name? And which lost Fifth Avenue house should we investigate next?

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