Touring the Gold Coast mansions that inspired ‘The Great Gatsby’

In the fall of 1922, a 26-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, moved into a Mediterranean-style house on Long Island, New York.

Their stay lasted only 18 months; a move to France would follow. But Fitzgerald’s temporary abode near the North Shore, which then was a summer outpost for high society, proved worthwhile, inspiring what became his classic novel, “The Great Gatsby,” which was published 100 years ago.

Two affluent villages there, Great Neck and Sands Point, formed the basis for Fitzgerald’s fictional nouveau riche West Egg and blue-blooded East Egg. Whether a balmy day of poolside debauchery or a sweaty night spent dancing in the ballroom – more likely a combination of the two – it was in and around these estates that a revolving door of socialites, politicians, financiers, actors and artists (Fitzgerald included) rendezvoused.

Among the residents of the Gold Coast – a North Shore moniker evoking the opulence that existed there during the Gilded Age and Roaring ’20s, through the advent of art deco and the dawn of American consumerism – were names synonymous with generational wealth and power: Vanderbilt, Morgan, Whitney, Roosevelt, Woolworth, Guggenheim, Pratt, Rockefeller, Belmont, Astor and Pulitzer.

“The world was based on the East Coast,” said Gary Lawrance, an architect and historian of the Gold Coast era, who documents the histories of Gilded Age mansions for his 800,000 followers online.

To drive through the Gold Coast today is to catch only a glimpse, though a telling one, of the buildings that once housed America’s richest. While the North Shore still brims with affluence, the extravagance has mellowed, relatively speaking. In its heyday, according to some estimates, 2,000 mansions dotted the region. Today, Lawrance said, about 500 of those remain.

Some fell into disrepair. Others became school buildings, museums, military centers, golf clubs or event venues. Surrounding estates were carved into sprawling subdivisions. Theories abound as to which of these real-life estates inspired the fictional ones in “Gatsby.”

“Fitzgerald took bits and pieces of each and melded them together,” said Lawrance. Here’s a look at a few that housed the revelry, romance and yearning of that bygone age.

GREAT NECK (WEST EGG)

Fitzgerald family home

The first stop on any tour of Fitzgerald’s Long Island is not a mansion – at least, not compared with the homes the author described in his novel. A short walk from the Long Island Rail Road station at Great Neck, the Fitzgeralds’ onetime home sits at 6 Gateway Drive. Inside a room above the garage, Fitzgerald wrote several short stories to pay the bills and crafted the early framework that would become “The Great Gatsby.”

According to Redfin, the seven-bedroom house built in 1918, four years before the Fitzgeralds moved in, was last sold in 2016 for $3 million. In the yard, a weeping willow hangs over eccentric sculptures that jut out onto a bend in the street, including a cap-wearing cow with the Statue of Liberty painted on its side.

Nearby, on what has been renamed Great Gatsby Way, a pickleball supply store and a pet spa nod to more modern priorities. Also close by is the storefront of an optometrist, though not of the bespectacled, omniscient variety.

SANDS POINT (EAST EGG)

Beacon Towers

From the Fitzgerald home, a 20-minute drive along Manhasset Bay’s rounded coast leads to the village of Sands Point. Here, on the cliffs off the tip of the Port Washington peninsula, a hulking, gothic fantasy mansion with a prominent central tower once stood. Known as Beacon Towers, it was said to be one of the inspirations for Jay Gatsby’s mansion.

In “Gatsby,” Nick Carraway, the book’s narrator, describes his neighbor’s home as “a colossal affair by any standard – it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side.”

Alva Belmont, a socialite and suffragist (who was divorced from a Vanderbilt heir), commissioned Beacon Towers in 1917 before selling it to newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. It was torn down in 1942 to make way for (slightly less gargantuan) private homes.

On a visit to the area in late April, peacocks could be heard nearby in the fleeting breaks between construction noise as the modern mansions underwent updates. Although its massive central tower is no longer, sections of Beacon Towers’ original walls still line parts of the former estate, their white stucco makeup reminiscent of a sand castle.

Hempstead House at Sands Point Preserve

Five minutes down the road by car, the Sands Point Preserve is reached via a one-lane bridge. Although it is uncertain whether Fitzgerald set foot inside any of its four mansions, some say it was his appreciation of these homes from afar that rendered them an inspiration for the opulence depicted in the novel.

The estate – built at the turn of the century by financier Howard Gould, son of railroad robber-baron Jay Gould – changed hands in 1917 when Gould sold it to mining tycoon Daniel Guggenheim, who made it an extravagant summer headquarters.

Now, it is a 216-acre park that includes the Hempstead House, a 50,000-square-foot Tudor-style mansion. Inside, there are coats of arms lifted from various estates of prominent European families, hand-carved engravings and relief portraits of literary figures looking down from the library’s ceiling. It is often used as a set for film and television series, including the HBO Max series “The Gilded Age.”

On a sunny afternoon, it is easy to imagine festivities full of mustachioed, suit-wearing men and pearled, flapper women spilling out from the summer living room onto the gardens that overlook Long Island Sound. “In (Gatsby’s) blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” wrote Fitzgerald.

Old Westbury Gardens

In the late spring, a sweet fragrance wafts from the wisteria crawling along the red brick walls at the edge of sprawling formal gardens. In front, a 23-room, Charles II-style mansion sits as the centerpiece of a 200-acre estate completed in 1906.

It was built by John S. Phipps, an industrialist and heir to a steel fortune, as a gift to his wife, Margarita Grace. Phipps requested that its architecture draw inspiration from Margarita’s family estate in East Sussex, Britain. Today, it’s a house museum that hosts musical performances, gardening fairs and antique car shows.

The building has been suggested as an inspiration for the home of Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby’s long-lost love, and her husband, Tom. And also for the 2013 film adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” by Baz Luhrmann, which Lawrance said used the real-life mansion “as a takeoff point, but then cinematically enlarged and enhanced it to overwhelming proportions and additions.”

HUNTINGTON

Oheka Castle

Farther out on Long Island, beyond the boundaries of East and West Egg, stands Oheka Castle, an imposing French chateau-style manor built in the 1920s by Otto Hermann Kahn, a banker and philanthropist sometimes referred to as the “King of New York.”

With its $11 million price tag (about $158 million in 2025), manicured gardens – designed by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect behind New York’s Central Park – and 127 rooms, it is said to be another inspiration for Gatsby’s mansion.

Like many of its contemporaries, though, the 115,000-square-foot mansion rotated through several uses throughout the 20th century, including as a military academy that went bankrupt in 1979. In 1984, real estate developer Gary Melius bought it for $1.5 million and spent another $40 million trying to recapture its grandeur.

These days, Oheka is considered the second-largest private residence built in America, behind only the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, and hosts events, including the wedding of former Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York. It’s also a popular filming location – in the second season of HBO Max’s hit “Succession,” Oheka Castle was where Logan Roy abused his underlings during the infamous game of “Boar on the Floor.”

Despite all the modern additions and repurposed uses, these remaining Gold Coast mansions can offer a nostalgic peek into a dazzling, fleeting age. If we are to learn anything from “Gatsby,” however, it’s that while it’s fine to appreciate the past, it’s likely best not to dwell on it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.