10. McMansions Were Built to Brag
If you have read the book or seen the movie The Great Gatsby, you know that there was a struggle between the “old rich” and the “new rich” (yes, Gatsby supposedly lived after the Gilded Age, but the point about old rich and new rich remains). Those who had been part of Europe’s wealthy and had traveled to the US, having held money in their families for generations, like the Astors, turned their noses at the riff-raff of the new rich, who earned their money, like the Carnegies, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers. Meanwhile, the new rich were building their version of McMansions that far surpassed pretty much anything that the old rich had ever made.
Newport, Rhode Island was (and in many ways, still is) an exclusive community where the new rich began making their mark by building “summer cottages” that were bigger, better, and fancier than anything that the old rich had previously built. One of these cottages, now known as “Marble House,” cost $11 million ($260 million in today’s money) and was a perfect cube made of pure marble. Most of the money used to build it went into purchasing the marble. It was created because one of the Vanderbilts wanted to outdo his brother, who had previously established another McMansion, a home known as The Breakers, which had 70 rooms and 20 bathrooms.