Situated between 50th and 51st Street (across the Avenue from the Gothic Revival spires of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral), 457 Madison, known now as The Mansion on Madison, is one of six private-but-connected brownstones designed and built around a grand central courtyard, in the manner of Rome’s historic Palazzo della Cancellaria.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, journalist turned railroad financier, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Henry Villard (who, with his friend Thomas A. Edison, was also one of the founding partners of GE) commissioned the then fledgling but very-soon-to-be famous architecture firm of McKim, Mead & White to build the classically inspired compound as a Manhattan estate, on a parcel of land on Madison Avenue, between 50th and 51st Streets. But Villard’s Northern Pacific Railway venture went belly-up before the grand residence was complete, sidetracking the family’s townhouse plans, and he never got comfortable in his Madison Avenue dream home—though the properties, named a landmark by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1968, remain known by his name to this very day.

Instead, the team from McKim, Mead & White completed the project for a few other well-off New Yorkers of the Gilded Age (and their servants). And, of course, in the 1970s, the Villard Houses became the grand entrance at the foot of a luxurious modern hotel tower (and home away from home for celebrities, as well as a fictional TV-show character or two), envisioned by Harry Helmsley. Helmsley’s widow, the ever-flamboyant and fastidious Leona, had to give up ownership, notoriously…but there’s been plenty written about that....