The Great Hall

The entryway in the Great Hall leads to the Porte Cochère (meaning "coach door" in French), which is a wide covered passageway allowing a coach or motorcar to unload passengers in a sheltered area before entering the residence. In the Gilded Age, the Great Hall would be used as the main ballroom. The orchestra would often play in the musician’s gallery above the entryway; the curved windows and woodwork helped the music resonate throughout the entire Great Hall. This musician’s gallery could also double as a reading area for the Morgans during the day. The sliding pocket doors offer access to the rest of the public rooms on the first floor to increase the floorspace for larger parties that Sarah would host. 

Above the doorway to the library are panels with two different colors of woodwork. The darker wood is original to the house, while the lighter colored wood is what has been restored since 1997. It is being left unstained for now to show our progress in restoration and to emphasize that everything we are restoring needs to be restored in the original manner it was first created. These panels were all originally hand-carved and have been restored in the same manner. 

The carved limestone fireplace in the Great Hall is original, except for the two lions at the top which have been replaced. There is a gap where the fireplace does not meet the wall where the developer in 1991 tried to pry the fireplace from the wall on the left side; since it weighs about 6 tons, the fireplace didn’t make it very far...

The Long Hall is introduced by the Great Hall with an elegantly curved cove. If you look down the hall, you’ll see it looks as though it narrows in as the hall progresses -- this is an optical illusion created by the length of the ceiling paneling as well as the columns on the side of the walls that align with the ceiling paneling. The hallway itself is only 54 feet long.