1 / 7

Conspicuous Consumption

Conspicuous Consumption. Spending Money Like a Gilded Age Tycoon. Carnegie’s Castle .

Albert_Lan
Download Presentation

Conspicuous Consumption

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Conspicuous Consumption Spending Money Like a Gilded Age Tycoon

  2. Carnegie’s Castle • Nothing says “ridiculously rich” like your very own twelfth-century castle. After making a fortune in the steel business, Andrew Carnegie purchased the dilapidated Skibo Castle in the Highlands of Scotland in 1897. A few years and several million dollars later, Carnegie had turned it into a virtual summer palace, tripling its size and adding gardens, a lake, and an entire golf course.

  3. Vanderbilt’s Village • Plutocrat George Washington Vanderbilt II—grandson of the infamous railroad robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt —constructed the extravagant Biltmore Estate near Asheville, North Carolina, at the height of the Gilded Age. This mansion boasted all the fanciest amenities of the era, from elevators to indoor swimming pools. The estate also featured numerous farms, a forest or two, and even an entire village.

  4. Brady’s Breakfasts • New York financier “Diamond” Jim Brady had a notoriously big appetite. Legend has it that his daily breakfast consisted of muffins, cornbread, eggs, potatoes, pork chops, pancakes, steak, and a gallon of OJ. Lunch included lobsters, crabs, clams, and oysters, followed by a couple pies. And dinner? Three times what he’d eaten for lunch and breakfast, combined with a couple of ducks and some lemon soda.

  5. Gould’s Gold • In 1869, the financial tycoons Jim Fisk and Jay Gould concocted the seemingly brilliant plan to become the world’s richest men by buying up all the gold in the world. They conspired and connived and bribed many officials in the Grant administration to look the other way as they tried to corner the market. When Wall Street caught wind of their scheme, the market temporarily crashed on September 24, 1869, Black Friday.

  6. Morgan’s Museum • While most rich men loved big houses, financier J. P. Morgan spent his money on art and rare books. He had one of the largest private art collections in the world. It included pieces from all regions and all periods. Morgan served as the president of the board of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and when he died, he donated all his pieces to the museum, which named an entire wing after him.

  7. Hearst Castle • Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst built the mansion to beat all other mansions. Located on 40,000 acres on a hill overlooking the rugged coastline of San Simeon, California, the Hearst Castle might as well be another country. It has more than fifty bedrooms, sixty bathrooms, twenty living rooms, a gold-laden indoor swimming pool, a movie theater, libraries, studies, dozens of garden, tennis courts, outdoor pools, an airstrip, a Greek temple, a private game reserve, and his own heard of zebras.

More Related