Whitemarsh Hall
Whitemarsh Hall was a large estate located on 300 acres (1.2 km2) of land in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, US, and owned by banking executive Edward T. Stotesbury and his wife, Eva. Designed by the "Gilded Age" architect Horace Trumbauer, it was built in 1921 and demolished in 1980. Before its destruction, the mansion was the third largest private residence in the United States. Today, it is regarded as one of the great losses in American architectural history.
Despite the name, Whitemarsh Hall was located in Springfield Township, not in Whitemarsh Township which borders Springfield to the west.
Designed by the inspired autodidact Beaux-Arts architect Horace Trumbauer between 1916 and 1921, Whitemarsh Hall consisted of 6 stories (3 of which were partly or fully underground), 147 rooms, 45 bathrooms, 100,000 square feet (9,300 m2), and specialty rooms including a ballroom, gymnasium, movie theatre, and even a refrigerating plant. The neo-Georgian mansion had been a wedding present from Stotesbury to his second wife, Eva (the former Lucretia Cromwell, née Roberts), and is considered by many experts of architectural design and estate planning, as the most beautiful private residence ever to be built upon American soil. Completion was delayed by World War I; while the exterior was mostly completed by the end of the war, the interior decorations and furnishings, many of which had to come from war-ravaged Europe, took much longer to arrive.
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