15. An Entire Village Was Purchased So a Train Could Be Rerouted
In the late 1800s, John D. Rockefeller, the famous oil tycoon who is mostly remembered for his philanthropy (even though he paid his workers pennies) bought up vast tracts of land in Westchester County, just north of the Bronx, to build his Kykuit estate. He spared no expense on the charming house, which was decorated with no fewer than 70 sculptures and ornamented with gold knick-knacks from all over the world. The entire estate sat on 3400 acres.
Not far from Kykuit, however, was a train track that was frequented by trains running back and forth from New York City. Today, people might be put off by the noise of a train, but the Rockefellers were miffed because its smoke was billowing onto the golf course. If you have more money than what you know to do with, what would you do about this problem? The family had an ingenious solution: they decided that they needed to move the train tracks so that they were five miles away. In 1929, they purchased the entire village of East View so that the train could be rerouted to pass through it.
Of course, no one was happy about having their homes taken away from them. The family went on to pay all of the people whose homes had been made more than what the houses had been worth. They ended up paying $700,000 to compensate the families, plus the expense of moving the railroad tracks.