West Hill: A House Aflame for Exclusivity

West Hill, a mere pretender to East Hartford's Windsor's Legends Road, was supposed to be a Vanderbilt mansion. But it became a battleground for a family determined to preserve their high status. The transport tycoon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, snatched the remote West Hill estate in 1857 for his epileptic son, Jeremiah. But he never lived there. Jeremiah sold it back in 1872, setting a flame for the estate. The mansion changed hands in 1879, but the family never moved in.

After a suicide attempt in New York City, Jeremiah left the deserted mansion that he never called home. A decade later, in 1918, an arsonist set the mansion ablaze. The estate was purchased by Ira Dimock in 1888, who fought tooth and nail to prevent it from becoming a public park. As class tensions boiled, the mansion was demolished in 1918, birthing West Hill subdivision. The houses within the West Hill Historic District flaunt 14 Colonial Revival, 9 Tudor Revival, and 2 a conspiracy between both, wrapped either in brick or stucco - save for those two outliers.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons