The grand facade was part of the allure, like the fake gold on a Donald Trump building, although a bit more demure. The expanse of gleaming white was a deluxe contrast to the severe red brick of the preceding Federal period.

The developer, Seth Geer, had made a sharp deal with authorities at Sing Sing prison to have convict labor work the Westchester marble, at a very steep discount from commercial rates. According to an article in The New York Tribune in 1902, stonecutters rioted in protest and the militia was called out.
 

But the gentry are a fickle bunch, and within a few decades they moved uptown, leaving their Classical empire to boarding houses, hotels and private schools. The loss of caste was irrevocable after Lafayette Place became part of a much longer Lafayette Street, a crowded industrial highway.

In the 1890s the Philadelphia dry goods magnate John Wanamaker, who had taken over the old A. T. Stewart store on Broadway and Eighth Street, acquired the southerly five houses of Colonnade Row. In 1902, or perhaps 1903, he demolished his properties.

Two decades later, Delbarton, the country house of the banker Luther Kountze in Morristown, N.J., came to be owned by a Benedictine monastery, St. Mary’s Abbey, which also operates the Delbarton School.
 

Generations of students wandered into the woods for nonacademic purposes, encountering a mysterious group of tumbled Corinthian capitals, column drums, wreaths and cornices that came to be known as the Lost City.