The Cornelius Vanderbilt II House was a mansion built in 1883 on 1 West 57th Street in New York City. The ground level contained a drawing room, dining room (which doubled as the art gallery), and a reception room. The second floor housed a salon, a music room and a conservatory, while the family bedrooms were on the remaining floors. The Cornelius Vanderbilt II mansion was, and remains, the largest private residence ever built in New York City. It was demolished in the 1920s to make way for the Bergdorf Goodman department store. The Gilded Age mansions were built in the United States in a short historic period spanning between the 1870s until about 1900. Raised by the nation's industrial, financial and commercial elite who amassed great fortunes coinciding with an era of expansion of the railroads, steel and fossil fuels industries, economic, technical and scientific progress, and a complete lack of personal income tax. This made possible the very rich to build mansions designed by prominent architects of its day and decorated with antiquities, furnitures, collectibles and works of art, many imported from Europe. No photographer credited, 1894.