Once and Future Mansions

Many of the great townhouses built for the rich of Gilded Age New York have over the years become something else: schools, consulates, museums, condominium buildings. The rich of a more equal era could not afford the upkeep and did not need all that space for servants. But the Times reports that in this Second Gilded Age some of them are being turned back into mansions again for our new wave of Robber Barons. The three pictured above could be yours for a price of $13 to $44 million.

This one was for years the School of Practical Philosophy, so its transformation into a billionaire's pied-à-terre strikes me as particularly amusing.