This week you are going to tour two very different late nineteenth century homes: The Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, and a tenement home in New York City.

During the 1880s, George W. Vanderbilt, grandson of famous industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, purchased 125,000 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Asheville, North Carolina, to build a summer home. This venture resulted in The Biltmore Estate (Links to an external site.), the largest private home in the U.S., with 4 stories, 250 rooms, 65 fireplaces, 43 bathrooms, 34 bedrooms, 3 kitchens, a Library with 10,000 volumes, an indoor pool, and a bowling alley.

Around this time, millions of poor immigrants occupied tenement homes: apartment buildings constructed between 1850 and 1929 for multiple working-class families in New York City. The tenements were small, overcrowded, dilapidated, and unsanitary. To see how “the other half lived,” tour the Tenement Museum in New York City (Links to an external site.).

QUESTIONS:

1. In light of what you’ve learned about the Gilded Age, do you think the state government should have intervened and regulated conditions in NYC tenement homes? Why or why not?

2. Do you think the federal government should have regulated the growth of wealth among the captains of industry, e.g., Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, and J.P. Morgan? Why or why not?