Lost Mansions of the Gilded Age
Alberta, Family Houses, and What Survives
There is something quietly unsettling about a house that no longer exists — especially when it once occupied an entire corner of a city that was still inventing itself.
Among the photographs Alberta kept — letters, portraits, fragments of a life lived largely elsewhere — was an image of a house she never knew. A vast family residence in Chicago, built by her grandfather Solomon Sturges, standing solidly at the corner of Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue) and Huron Street. It was already gone by the time she was born, erased not by fashion or redevelopment, but by catastrophe.
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On the night of 8 October 1871, the Great Chicago Fire tore through the city, burning for two days and destroying more than three square miles. The Sturges house was among the losses. Nothing of it survives now but this photograph — heavy cornices, wide steps, a confident façade that suggests permanence in a city still learning how fragile permanence could be.
Solomon Sturges had arrived in Chicago as opportunity arrived with him. Grain elevators, railroads, banking — his fortune was built on movement and momentum. The house was meant to anchor that success, a declaration that the family had arrived and would stay. Yet Alberta, decades later, held onto its image as if instinctively aware that what matters most is often what vanishes first.
If Chicago’s lost mansions tell the story of ambition meeting fire, New York’s tell the story of ambition devouring itself.
