Villa Lewaro: the mansion a self-made millionaire built

Villa Lewaro is not a ruin, and that is precisely why it belongs in this archive. It is a mansion that was almost lost — that stood empty, changed hands, and drifted for decades — and was saved by people who understood what it meant. It was built by Madam C. J. Walker, the daughter of enslaved parents who became the first self-made female millionaire in the United States.

The woman who built it

Sarah Breedlove — the woman the world came to know as Madam C. J. Walker — was born in 1867 in Louisiana, the first child in her family born free. She worked as a laundress, lost her hair, and developed a line of hair-care products for Black women that turned into a national business. By the 1910s she employed thousands of sales agents and was one of the wealthiest self-made women in America.

She wanted a home that announced what she had done. In 1916 she commissioned a mansion in Irvington, New York, on the Hudson, and hired the architect Vertner Tandy — the first African-American architect registered in New York State — to design it. The result was Villa Lewaro: thirty-four rooms and about twenty thousand square feet of Italianate grandeur, built between 1916 and 1918 at a cost of roughly a quarter of a million dollars.

A name from an opera singer

The house takes its name from Walker's daughter, A'Lelia Walker Robinson: the opera singer Enrico Caruso is said to have coined 'Lewaro' by combining the letters of her name. Walker moved in and lived there only briefly — she died at the estate in 1919, less than a year after it was finished.

A'Lelia inherited the house and kept it until 1931. She left it to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but the Great Depression made the gift impossible to sustain, and the mansion was sold. For years it served as a home for the aged, the Anne E. Poth Home, and its grand rooms were divided and put to institutional use.

Saved, and saved again

Villa Lewaro was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976, which gave it protection but not a purpose. It returned to private ownership in the mid-1980s and was bought in 1993 by Harold Doley, the first African-American to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2014 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named it a National Treasure.

In 2018 the estate was sold to the New Voices Foundation, which has worked to restore it as a home for Black women entrepreneurs — a use that would have delighted Walker. In 2021 the fashion house Pyer Moss staged a couture show on its grounds. Villa Lewaro is the story of a house that was nearly forgotten and is now, once more, exactly what its builder intended it to be: a statement.

Frequently asked questions

Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Lynnewood Hall: the Gilded Age mansion that outlived its world — United States
• Alder Manor: the mining fortune that became a school, then a ruin — United States
• Sauer Castle: the Italianate house on the old Santa Fe trail — United States