I’m sure many people have driven down Spring Avenue in Elkins Park, PA, and never wondered about the huge Indiana Limestone pile sitting quietly back from the road behind a vast iron barricade. Maybe they’ve stopped at the post office, glanced across the street, shrugged, and zoomed away back into their lives. This website is not for them. This website is for a larger group, and a more stratified group—from the merely curious, to the deeply inquiring. Basically, all those folks who paused, re-focused, and thought “wow, what is that place?”

That place is Lynnewood Hall. It is the fusion of a great architect, Horace Trumbauer, and a great businessman and art lover, Peter A. B. Widener. Thousands of feet have passed the now deserted set of front doors, from the builders and craftsmen who created this work of art, to the rich and famous who visited and made it home. The home is not in it’s prime by any means. Though it’s lacking some of it’s former splendor, when confronted by the melancholy grayness, the reaction can be visceral. Beauty, while in the eye of the beholder, does possess a standard blueprint.

Going through an old house is like leafing through the pages of a great book. As each page is turned, or turning each corner, we move forward with excitement, but glance backward with sadness for what has passed, and the uncertainty of what is to come.  This home is the American Dream... The last American Versailles... Welcome to Lynnewood Hall.