Aurora Fane's House
Upper 5th Ave / East 60s (approximate)
Aurora Fane's World
Aurora Fane is Agnes van Rhijn's niece by marriage and one of the show's essential connectors — a woman of unimpeachable old-money standing who is nonetheless young and pragmatic enough to see which way society is moving. It is Aurora who repeatedly serves as the bridge between the established world of the van Rhijns and the advancing forces of the Russells, extending the invitations and brokering the introductions that stricter guardians of the old order refuse. Her house, accordingly, is one of the show's key neutral territories: a drawing room where old and new New York can meet without either side conceding defeat. The show never gives it a street address; our pin places it in the fashionable brownstone district where a family of the Fanes' standing would plausibly have lived.
The Real House: Jay Gould's Lyndhurst
The interiors of Aurora's home were filmed at Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, and the choice carries a delicious irony. Lyndhurst is the finest Gothic Revival mansion in America — designed by Alexander Jackson Davis in 1838 and enlarged by him in the 1860s, a gray marble castle of pointed arches and vaulted ceilings above the Hudson. From 1880 its owner was Jay Gould, the most feared and hated financier of the Gilded Age — a principal real-world inspiration for George Russell himself. Gould, blackballed from society and indifferent to it, commuted to Wall Street by steam yacht from Lyndhurst's riverfront and raised orchids in its enormous greenhouse. So the rooms standing in for one of the show's most respectable old-money households belonged, in reality, to the ultimate new-money outsider — the very type the Fanes' world was organized to exclude.
A Workhorse Location for the Show
Lyndhurst is one of the production's most heavily used estates. Beyond Aurora Fane's house, its Carriage House stands in for T. Thomas Fortune's New York Globe newspaper office (a separate pin on this map), and its grounds and outbuildings have appeared across the seasons. Along with the great houses of Newport and the mansions of Troy and Albany, it belongs to the repertory company of surviving Gilded Age buildings from which the show assembles its vanished Manhattan.
Visiting Lyndhurst
Lyndhurst is preserved by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and open for guided tours, about an hour north of the city in Tarrytown — easily combined with Washington Irving's Sunnyside and the village of Sleepy Hollow next door. Tours take you through the exact rooms used for filming, plus Gould's art gallery and the skeleton of what was once the largest private greenhouse in America. For fans of the show it is arguably the single richest day trip outside Manhattan: two pins on this map were filmed on its grounds.
No specific address given in-show. Filmed at Lyndhurst Mansion, Tarrytown — Jay Gould's Gothic Revival estate. Manhattan placement is an educated estimate.
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