A financilier died before occupying his Stanford White mansion, which sat empty for decades

Evidence

And roaming one day far out in Suffolk County, near Wading River, he stumbled upon a magnificent brick and stone mansion, set upon a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound, that was not only deserted but looked as if it had never been lived in. Inquiring later, he found out it never had. The man who commissioned the famous architect Stanford White to design it and who named it “Wildwood,” financier Roland G. Mitchell, had died just as it was being finished in 1906, and the spacious, high-ceilinged rooms had remained shuttered and unfurnished ever since. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 750

Categorization

• FICTION: The image of a magnificent Stanford White mansion never once lived in, built by a man who died at completion, is potent material for a story about unrealized lives and frozen ambitions.
• CANDY: A genuinely intriguing, tweetable oddity about a great house whose architect and owner both saw it never lived in.