My favorite character in The Age of Innocence may be Mrs. Manson Mingott, a matriarch of eccentric habits and ludicrous girth who “put the crowning touch to her audacities” by erecting a French chateau “in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.” Edith Wharton modeled her after Mary Mason Jones, a dowager grandaunt whose estate at 1 East 57th Street must have made quite an impression in 1869: a marble mansion gleaming amid shanties, the odd saloon, and goat-strewn outcroppings. Wharton paints a tender portrait of this misplaced sybarite, who sits at her window “watching calmly for life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors.” Flow northward fashion did, of course. By 1871, the widow, aided by architect Robert Mook, had developed the entire block into Marble Row, a clutch of Gilded Age manses that “once frowned disapprovingly upon the noisy jingle of equipages in Fifth Avenue from Fifty-Seventh to Fifty- Eighth Street,” recalled The New York Times in 1929, shortly before the wrecking ball met Jones’s own private Fontainebleau.
Jones’s audacities…