Lynnewood Hall: America’s Versailles Makes a Comeback

Apple pie, baseball, and the Stars and Stripes are American icons, but so is the start-up, that big, new dream to be made into a reality and a wonder. Lynnewood Hall near Philadelphia is the start-up nonpareil, but it’s more reborn than new and shiny. It’s historic preservation and, I think, the most heartening arts story in the country.

Completed in 1899, Lynnewood is the 110-room Renaissance Revival masterpiece manor house on 34 acres in Elkins Park. It was built by Peter Widener (1834–1915), the Gilded Age gazillionaire. Long empty, a ruin-in-the-making, nearly torn down, and, to many, a mystery, Lynnewood in its glory days was America’s Versailles, in a class with Hearst’s Castle, Biltmore, and the Breakers. A new nonprofit called the Lynnewood Hall Preservation Foundation, having acquired Lynnewood last year, is restoring the house and gardens to their once epic glory.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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Apple pie, baseball, and the Stars and Stripes are American icons, but so is the start-up, that big, new dream to be made into a reality and a wonder. Lynnewood Hall near Philadelphia is the start-up nonpareil, but it’s more reborn than new and shiny. It’s historic preservation and, I think, the most heartening arts story in the country.

Completed in 1899, Lynnewood is the 110-room Renaissance Revival masterpiece manor house on 34 acres in Elkins Park. It was built by Peter Widener (1834–1915), the Gilded Age gazillionaire. Long empty, a ruin-in-the-making, nearly torn down, and, to many, a mystery, Lynnewood in its glory days was America’s Versailles, in a class with Hearst’s Castle, Biltmore, and the Breakers. A new nonprofit called the Lynnewood Hall Preservation Foundation, having acquired Lynnewood last year, is restoring the house and gardens to their once epic glory.