What happened to the most expensive home ever built in Brooklyn?
Hi everyone, Ken here, welcome to "ThisHouse"!!
Today we are exploring the Pope Mansion.
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In 1857, John Pope was born to a poor family of Bavarian immigrants in New York City.
He grew up bouncing around between boarding houses while his parents worked odd jobs just
to make ends meet.
When he was just 14 years old, he started delivering packages as a wagonboy and continued
doing so until he met Lewis Ginter on one of his deliveries.
Lewis Ginter was a successful tobacco trade merchant and the wealthiest man in the state
of Virginia.
He was impressed by the charming young man and invited John to live with him down in
Virginia.
The two moved in together and Lewis quickly began giving John work in his tobacco dealings,
eventually leading John to become the vice president of the American Tobacco Company.
John made himself an absolute fortune, and had he not suddenly and unexpectedly dropped
dead, he might have ended up becoming one of the wealthiest men in American History.
Nevertheless, With no proper heirs, he left the entirety of his fortune to his surviving
siblings George, Margaret, Eva, and Kunigunde.
The sisters wanted only to enjoy the money without the headache of financial planning,
so they entrusted George to budget their fortunes.
But he was more loyal to his material desires than he was to his family.
In the Bushwick neighborhood he built a mansion full of the finest artistry money could buy,
spending 2 million dollars to complete his mansion, the modern day equivalent of over
70 million dollars.
Walking inside, you would arrive in the Entry Hall where a staircase wrapped around an atrium
with 22 carrot gold chandeliers illuminating the masterfully carved newel post and European
tapestries.
Wood paneling finished every face of the room, interrupted by a built in pipe organ, bellowing
so loud it could be heard at the corner of the block.
But that wasn’t the only thing causing a nuisance in the neighborhood, he also purchased
a rare, white peacock to keep in the courtyard which was known to notoriously screech at
all hours of the night.
If he wanted some peace and quiet, he could retreat to the library where his rare book
collection was housed behind glass paned book cases.
Though not much reading was done here, it acted more as a storage room for the overflow
of his fine art collection.
He paid artists to spend years working on the interior rooms, finishing out fireplaces
with hand laid mosaics, further divulging in his love for antiques, acquiring historic
Japanese brass fixtures to mix with European paintings.
Further more collecting stained glass, some the commission of Louis Comfort Tiffany to
have installed.
With an art collection to rival Manhattan’s Vanderbilt family, George’s sister, Kunigunde,
became skeptical of her brother.
Feeling that she had been taken advantage of and stolen from, she hired an attorney,
demanding that he hand over her fair share of the inheritance.
George refused and filed suit.
After years of negotiations, they settled out of court.
A few years after that, George passed away in his 40s while vacationing in his winter
home.
Then, in 1920, the sisters sold the palace for 150,000 dollars, the modern day equivalent
of a little over 2 million dollars, a mere fraction of its worth.
What the sisters had not been told is that George had invested heavily in gold, which
he had crafted into massive chandeliers sprinkled throughout the house, those light fixtures
each being worth many times what the house was sold for.
The sisters lived out the rest of their lives modestly in Brooklyn row homes and the fully
furnished palace went on to be lived in by the elderly residents of the retirement home
known as the Menorah Home.
By the 1950s, the organization had outgrown the mansion and had it replaced with a larger,
more practical building for elderly living.
It is currently the home of the Metro International Church.
Brooklyn has some incredibly fascinating and whimsical stories in its past, like this video
to let me know if you would like to hear more of them.
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