1009 Fifth Ave, James Remembers

James Semans, son of Mary Biddle Duke, the daughter of Benjamin Newton Duke, co-founder of the American Tobacco Company and the original buyer of the house at 1009 5th Ave in New York City, remembers restoring the Duke Semans Mansion, a 20,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts residence across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On a Fifth Avenue block where all the other single-family residences have long since been torn down and replaced by apartment buildings, the Duke Semans Mansion, for which the family fought to get landmark designation, stands as a bulwark against modern development. With its high ceilings, gold-leaf trimmed fixtures and intricate plaster friezes, the property is a living piece of architectural history.