National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Resource History and Description of Existing Conditions
control of humidity levels." 1206 This challenge to control humidity existed year round with
steam heating systems producing dry, hot air during the heating seasons and the humidity of the
summer months posing the opposite problem of wet, sticky air. 1207
The McKim, Mead & White bill books show an initial payment to Baker, Smith & Co. of
$2,000 on January 16, 1897. 1208 The only other reference to the original heating system is in a
short comment in the Poughkeepsie Sunday Courier on April 9, 1897 when it notes, "The large
heating pipes for Mr. Vanderbilt's house passed through this village today. They were so large,
long and heavy that the team seemed to have all they could draw." It is uncertain exactly which
parts of the heating system were being delivered. Considering that the boilers needed to be cut
apart to be removed, most likely they would have been lowered into place before the installation
of any basement flooring. Dated construction photographs might provide clues if they showed
the progress on the house in April 1897. A search through the Historians' Research Notes File
to determine a building chronology show that work on the house was suspended on December
27, 1896 due to snow. No further records appear until April 11, 1897, when the Poughkeepsie
Sunday Courier reports the injury of a worker falling thirty-five feet from the boom of a derrick
at the construction site. 1209
Baker, Smith & Co. was an early New York firm specializing in steam generating
equipment. Steam heating apparatus was developed first in England in the first half of the
nineteenth century and its use spread to the United States. It was first installed in mills and
other commercial facilities where the exhaust steam could be utilized. By the late 1850s, with
the development of radiators, steam heat became practicable for homes. 1210 A Baker, Smith &
Co. catalog in the collection of the National Museum of American History is dated 1864 and
advertises, in addition to its "New Steam Generator," that the firm "also manufacture[s] steam
warming and ventilating apparatus for private dwelling and other [b]uildings." 1211 Therefore,
the company was well established in the heating and ventilating business by the 1890s.
As described in the Andrae and Curradi reports, the house had two boilers installed in
the sub-basement that fed steam to two different types of heating systems: a direct heating
system in the basement and in the service wing of the third floor and an indirect system that
heated the family rooms and guest rooms. The most obvious way to distinguish the areas is that
direct heated rooms have radiators; indirect heated rooms have decorative grates in the walls.
Andrae's reference to "brick set" boilers meant that each of the boilers would have been housed
in a small chamber with masonry walls. Furnace gasses went directly to a chimney and fresh air
passed between the furnace and its surround before rising through chases or sheet-metal ducts
to the rooms above. 1212 As the air cooled in rooms it returned to the basement, in the
1206
Gail Cooper, Air-Conditioning America, Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 7.
1207
Cecil D. Elliott, Technics and Architecture, The Development of Materials and Systems for Buildings
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 295.
1208
McKim, Mead & White Bill Books, vol. 5, in the collection of The New-York Historical Society.
1209
Historian's Research Notes File, 241. Source: Poughkeepsie Sunday Courier, April 11, 1897.
1210
Elliott, 281-2.
1211
Baker, Smith & Co., Baker's New Steam Generator, Trade Catalog Collection of the National Museum
of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
1212
Elliott, 294-5.
213