Winfield Hall

Frank Winfield Woolworth grew up in northern New York and opened his first five-cent store in Utica in 1878. It failed, but a second store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, selling goods at five and ten cents, succeeded, and the chain grew from there. In 1913 he commissioned Cass Gilbert to design the Woolworth Building in lower Manhattan. In 1914 he bought a country house at Glen Cove, a house that C. P. H. Gilbert had designed in 1902 for the engineer Alexander Crombie Humphreys. That house burned in 1916.

Woolworth began a replacement at once, again with C. P. H. Gilbert as architect. He took a close interest in the design, and the interiors were planned in long meetings at his Fifth Avenue house. The new Winfield Hall is an Italian Renaissance house covered in marble, laid out on an I-shaped plan with a five-bay center, flanking wings and a classical attic behind a balustrade. The first floor centers on a marble hall and staircase, with a walnut library, a music room for Woolworth's Aeolian organ and an oak-paneled dining room. The nine second-floor rooms were each finished in a different historical style under the decorator Helwig Schier, and the third floor held guest suites and staff rooms. Reported costs run from $9 million to $10 million, with about $2 million for the staircase alone. A garage for eighteen cars, two greenhouses, a tea house in the formal garden and a stone entrance arch complete the estate.

Woolworth died at Winfield Hall on April 8, 1919, and his widow Jennie remained until her death in 1924. The property then changed hands several times. The Reynolds family of the Reynolds Metal Company owned it, and in 1963 Grace Downs bought it for the Grace Downs Academy, a school for young women. Martin T. Carey, a brother of Governor Hugh Carey, bought it in the 1970s, restored it and for a time leased it to the Pall Corporation. The estate was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

On January 28, 2015, a fire broke out in a first-floor room and spread to the upper floors of one wing. About one hundred firefighters brought it under control in roughly ninety minutes, and police considered it electrical in origin. A 2021 account said the house had since been restored for the most part. After Martin Carey died in June 2020, his family offered the estate for sale, and in February 2022 it sold for $8.25 million to a Long Islander who, the listing brokerage said, intended to restore it. The house has appeared in Taylor Swift's Blank Space video and in HBO productions. It is a private residence and is not open to visitors.