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Adelaide L.T. Douglas Residence
57 Park Avenue

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Adelaide L.T. Douglas Residence
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Adelaide L.T. Douglas Residence (right), ca. 1911. The buildings at left were later razed for the construction of the Roman Catholic Church of Our Saviour. By 1908, Adelaide L.T. Douglas, a prominent socialite, was separated from her husband William Proctor Douglas — and widely believed to be carrying on an affair with J.P. Morgan. In 1909, with her husband living at a separate residence uptown, Mrs. Douglas commissioned the architect Horace Trumbauer to build a new Louis XVI-style mansion on Park Avenue (the previous building on this site had been damaged during subway construction in 1902). Trumbauer’s opulent design was befitting of a client of Adelaide Douglas’s status — though it’s rumored that J.P. Morgan underwrote construction. The six-story mansion, completed in 1911, includes a rusticated limestone base, intricate relief carvings, a fourth floor colonnade, mansard roof, and wrought iron detail at every level. After Douglas’s death in 1935, the mansion was converted to apartments. In 1959, it was acquired by the United States Olympic Association. Nineteen years later, it was sold to the government of Guatemala, which established its United Nations mission there.

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Adelaide L.T. Douglas Residence

57 - 59 Park Ave.
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