Nestled along the banks of the Hudson River in the village of Irvington, New York, lies Villa Nuit. Its current owner says it's one of the last remaining Gilded Age estates — a home built in the late 1800s by the world's super-wealthy.
Marty Dolan, 64, told Insider he grew up in Irvington in the 1980s, watching great houses once owned by the likes of the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, and the Carnegies "chopped up" into smaller properties.
As a child, Dolan – who just put his 4.78-acre estate on the market for $6.49 million – said he remembers playing in the yards of these empty estates before seeing them disappear.
"I was a little kid in that village, and you couldn't miss it," he said. "If you were in someone's estate playing around with your friends, and then three weeks or three years later they were developing the townhouses, you would see that, and you'd feel that."