ARCHITECTURE | PHOTOGRAPHY

From Titanic Tragedy to Timeless Treasure

Lynnewood Hall’s vibrant past and hopeful future

Ornate stonework and oracle window above the mansion’s front entrance. Photo by author taken on DJI Mini 3 Pro

Lynnewood Hall goes by a few names. “The Widener Estate,” “The Last American Versailles,” “The Titanic Mansion,” and “Widener’s Folly” are only a few of the ones that it’s managed to accrue in its century long tenure in the forested suburbs of Pennsylvania. For most of my life, my friends always knew it as “that crazy, huge mansion up the street,” or “that giant, old, haunted house.”

And giant it is. From left to right, it stands as the longest home in all of America, and the entire neighborhood that I live in was built around it. In its heyday, it had everything from an indoor pool and five separate art galleries, to a basketball court and a ballroom, to a race car track, a chapel, and its own coal-fired power plant. Its main home was an astonishing 110,000 square feet, but that includes neither of the home’s basements, its lavish guest house, or the gate house that stood on its once nearly 500 acres of property.

Lynnewood hall, the longest home in the United States from left to right. The gate house can be faintly seen in far left corner. Photo by author

The mansion spent many years as a site of local notoriety, but when the guard dogs chained to…