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The 75-room mansion between 73rd and 74th Streets was designed by architect Maurice Ebert as an eclectic Beaux-Arts mixture of pink granite that made the Vanderbilt mansions look cramped. It combined details from three French Renaissance chateaux: Chenonceaux, the staircase from Blois, and Azay-le-Rideau. The total cost was six million dollars.
Schwab's former employer Andrew Carnegie, whose own mansion on Fifth Avenue later became the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, once remarked, "Have you seen that place of Charley's? It makes mine look like a shack."
Schwab was a self-made man who became president of U.S. Steel and later founded Bethlehem Steel Company. Schwab built "Riverside" after leaving Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for New York. The large property was available because it was half of the former New York Orphan Asylum, one of the former Bloomingdale district's several charitable institutions that gave away to large projects, such as the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and Columbia University's campus on Morningside Heights. The Ansonia Hotel occupies the orphans' Broadway frontage. The financier Jacob Schiff had bought the parcel, but— ominously for the social future of the Upper West Side— Mrs. Schiff refused to move to the "wrong" side of Central Park.
Schwab was a risk-taker and later went bankrupt in the Stock market crash of 1929. He died comparatively penniless ten years later in 1939, bequeathing the forlorn 'Riverside" to the city of New York as a suitably ostentatious official residence for the mayors of New York. Unfortunately for the mansion, the wrong mayor was in office. It is probable that former mayor Jimmie Walker would have moved into the residence, but the current mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, was reform-minded and turned it down, saying "What, me in that?" La Guardia's rejection of the mansion sealed its fate, and during World War II, a neighborhood Victory garden was planted in its once-landscaped grounds. It was laer razed and replaced by a comparatively drab brick luxury apartment block, called "Schwab House.".