The Braes

Charles Pratt, one of the founders of Standard Oil, acquired land at Dosoris in Glen Cove in the late nineteenth century, and Herbert Lee Pratt and his siblings later built their own country houses there. Herbert Pratt, born in 1871, graduated from Amherst College and rose to become president of the Standard Oil Company of New York. His first house on the property, a Colonial Revival design of 1902 by the firm of Brite and Bacon, stood for only about ten years before he replaced it.

The new house, The Braes, was designed by James Brite of the same firm and built in 1912, with sources extending the work into 1914. It is a Jacobean-style mansion of about 40,000 square feet. Pratt gave it a ready-made historic interior: the walnut paneling and oak chimneypiece of a room made in 1611 for Sir Roger Bodenham at Rotherwas Court in Herefordshire, England. Rotherwas had gone up for sale in 1912, and Pratt acquired the room and installed it at The Braes, where it served as the dining room. The photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston recorded the terrace garden and its ornamental pool about 1920.

Pratt died in 1945. In his will he left the Rotherwas paneling to Amherst College, where it was reassembled and is now shown as the Rotherwas Room at the Mead Art Museum. The rest of the estate went to Webb Institute. Founded in the Bronx in 1889 by the shipbuilder William H. Webb as Webb's Academy and Home for Shipbuilders, the school bought the Glen Cove estate in November 1945, according to a local history blog, and moved there in 1947. The mansion became the college's main building and was renamed Stevenson Taylor Hall. The campus covers 26 acres on Long Island Sound, with a private beach.

The house has become well known on screen. It served as the exterior of Wayne Manor in Batman Forever (1995), Batman and Robin (1997) and Joker (2019), and Webb has hosted filming of the Fox series Gotham, which again used it as Wayne Manor. Webb Institute remains a working college. It offers campus tours to prospective students and their families on weekdays and select Saturdays by request, but the house is not open to the general public.