Goodbye, gold coast

From the NY Times:

Inside the mansion it looked as if all parties — and anything else that had taken place in the mansion since the Jazz Age — were most certainly over. Movers had carted away just about everything from the 87-room, Elizabethan-Tudor-style mansion, which was designed by John Torrey Windrim and completed in 1920 for Nicholas F. Brady, an industrialist who was the head of numerous utility companies.

It was named Inisfada — Gaelic for Long Island — and it was one of the grandest of the Gold Coast mansions on Long Island’s North Shore, with 37 fancifully decorated chimneys, stately slate roofs and a facade decorated with scenes from fairy tales. It served as the summer residence for Mr. Brady and his wife, Genevieve, who never had children. After her husband’s death, she donated the home in 1937 to the New York Province of the Society of Jesus, the local branch of the Jesuits, which turned it into a seminary and later the Saint Ignatius Retreat House.

But now, local civic groups fear that the building faces demolition. Inisfada and its 33 overgrown acres were listed for sale last year for $49 million. The Jesuits are on the verge of closing a deal with a developer from Hong Kong who some preservationists fear will knock down the building as part of a plan to create a gated community of luxury homes, said Richard Bentley, president of the Council of Greater Manhasset Civic Associations, which is mounting a grass-roots campaign to save the mansion.

It is unclear what the developer intends to do, since neither the Jesuits nor the buyers have addressed the issue publicly, but Mr. Bentley said he was under the impression that the developer’s plans did not include keeping the structure, because “They could avoid all this opposition and bad press by simply saying they’re preserving it.”