The Vanderbilt Mansion

After four years of living right down the street from one of our countries historic landmarks, I finally made it over to the Vanderbilt Mansion. I was not disappointed. The place is absolutely magnificent! As you pull up to the mansion, the driveway winds up the 200 acre property. Visitors have the option to just hang out on the property and enjoy the view of the mansion and Hudson Valley or you can take a tour of the inside of the mansion itself. If the tour is what you are interested in, you must go to the visitors center (white building by the parking lot) to receive your ticket; they're only $8 for the hour long tour.

The Vanderbilt Mansion

Since that era of history always interested me, I thought that the tour would be perfect and I wasn't let down. The tour starts on the outside where you learn the general history of the mansion: how much it cost back then, what it translates to now, some family history, etc. As you stand there listening, looking up at the mansion in awe, you learn that this mansion is the smallest of all the Vanderbilt mansions.

The Living Room where music and card playing took place

Once inside the tour takes you through the first floor where you see Vanderbilt's office, the giant dining room, the men's sitting area, the women's sitting room and the general living room where the parties gathered. The foyer--where you hear most of the information about the third floor--is bathed in sunlight from the skylight on the roof. The tour takes you up the grand staircase to the second floor.

The foyer when you walk in the house

The second floor is where you can see the master bedrooms for Mrs. and Mr. Vanderbilt. These bedrooms are modeled after the royal bedchambers in the Palace of Versailles in France. You also notice that the married couple had two separate bedrooms, both extremely elegant. You can also see bedrooms that were used by the guests of the Vanderbilt s who would stay for the weekend. On the second floor you are also able to see the types of bathrooms that were in this mansion. Each bathroom had running hot and cold water, bathtubs, and flushing toilets...all extremely expensive and unheard of for the time period in which they were built. As if it wasn't impressive enough that they had them at all, there were 14 bedrooms in the mansion, including one in each bedroom.

Mrs. Vanderbilt's bedroom

After seeing the bedrooms, you get to go down the servant staircase to see the male servant quarters in the basement (the women servants lived on the third floor) and the kitchens where they prepared the 7 course meals that the Vanderbilt family was accustomed to eating. The servants were given $1-$2 a day, four times what the average family made a day at other jobs. And after seeing these servants quarters, it would not have been a bad deal to have been employed for the Vanderbilt family. The servants were the recipients of part of the Vanderbilt fortune when Fredrick Vanderbilt died.

The extra bathroom on the second floor

Overall, this experience was fantastic! The history that you learn (way more than what I put in here, wouldn't want to ruin it for anyone) is part of an era in the United States that we should all hear. The extravagance of the mansion is something that you just don't see anymore, it was the last of it's kind. So if you live in the Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, or Rhinebeck area and you have not been to the Vanderbilt Mansion yet, you need to get there. You will not regret it!

The kitchen in the servant's quarters