Long island’s great gatsby house to be redeveloped

Come what may, rich Americans will always, as F Scott Fitzgerald declared, be "different from you and I". In the novelist's roaring heyday, that meant they could throw grand parties fuelled by mint juleps and other Prohibition-era cocktails.

Today, they can meanwhile devote their lives to realising obscene profits from real estate. That is the conclusion one might draw from the news that Land's End, a 25-room mansion on New York's Long Island believed to have inspired Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, is to be razed by its moneyed owner and converted into five shiny new McMansions, worth $10m each.

The property was designed in the Colonial Revival style by Stanford White. It was built in 1902, amid 13 clifftop acres of mature woodland and manicured lawns, but will face the wrecking ball this month.

It's a sad end for a building which scholars believe provided a template for East Egg, home of the fictional Gatsby's neighbour Daisy Buchanan, and which hosted some of history's great cocktail parties. In the 1920s and 1930s, Winston Churchill, Ethel Barrymore and the Marx brothers are purported to have stood on the veranda, enjoying the sweeping view over Long Island Sound. William Randolph Hearst, who kept a home nearby, is said to have greatly admired the main house's hand-painted wallpaper, Palladian windows, and marble floors.

Fitzgerald, a friend of one owner, the journalist and socialite Herbert Bayard Swope, is believed to have attended several lively social events there. Now the property seems as doomed as his novel's party-loving protagonists.

Source: The Independent