The starting point, an undated Wurts Brother photo of a mansion:
Seeing as how it is literally Gothic (style), it’s easy to imagine all sorts of nefarious or unpleasant goings on. The first of those unpleasantnesses is the address: The NYPL website has the title as “1082 Fifth Avenue – East 89th Street” which is definitely wrong. The mansion at that address looked nothing like this, and was mid-block, not at a corner. (Note that the mislabelling could easily have been done by the Wurts company.) Fortunately, the building in the photo has a unique appearance, and coupled with the secondary title (Jay Gould residence) it’s easy to find as 857 Fifth, on the corner of 67th Street.
There are varying descriptions on the web, all of which revolve around Jay Gould buying the house and giving it to his son George Jay Gould. The younger Gould and his family definitely started living there in 1892, which is the year the older Gould died, so there’s not much room for overlap. (Also note the secondary title is wrong, as Jay Gould never lived there.) None of the sources gives a definitive construction date for the house. It definitely wasn’t there in 1879 and it definitely was in 1892; the descriptions talk about the older Gould giving his son money to buy a house, not build one. The style is not really any help: Gothic revival had peaked long before 1890, but it wasn’t really killed off until the White City in Chicago in 1893. In short: without doing serious research at the city archives, who knows?
In 1898 there was no ivy, in 1901 there was, although just a little bit less than in the photo above. So the top photo is maybe 1901, 1902. Taste changes, maybe the Goulds got tired of people putting on joke Transylvanian accents around them, and in 1906 they replaced the house with a more modern – i.e. Beaux Arts, per the White City – house. That lasted until the mid-1900s, when it was replaced by a high-rise apartment house.
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