Visiting Boldt Castle: A Brief Return to the US and the Gilded Age

travel dates: June, 2024

I’ve been to a lot of house museums in my time. Like…so many. Every house has a story to tell. But, really, every house has lots of stories it could tell (this is true of most things in the world. The world is a bit of a sprawling mess, and people are the ones who decided it might be easier to deal with if we organized it into stories), and it’s up to the people who find themselves in charge of the tourism side of these houses to decide which story or stories to tell.

A big reason why I like house museums so much is that I’m fascinated by this storytelling process.

It’s always a choice, right? A plantation house in the south can focus on the beautiful gardens and grounds and quietly ignore what plantations were really for, or it can tell its story from the perspective of the enslaved people who lived there like McLeod Plantation in Charleston does.

Sometimes you have a president’s house, and you have to decide whether to focus on the actual presidency (and whatever complicated legacy that involves), or the president’s personal life when he lived in that particular location, or you avoid the whole presidency issue all together and talk about the house as an example of how people of a certain time and socioeconomic level lived.

Sometimes you tell the story of the house itself; its construction or architecture or restoration.

But you can’t get around the fact that you have to pick a story and that that means leaving other stories out and that which story you pick really matters when it comes to how visitors experience and think about the house.

So what happens when the house in question is a vanity project for one of the less famous Gilded Age millionaires?

Here’s the story: George Boldt, self-made millionaire who immigrated to America from Prussia at 13 and then worked his way up to managing the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, loved his wife Louise so much that he decided to build a castle for her in the Thousand Islands region of New York, intending to present it to her as a birthday/Valentine’s present. But then! Tragedy! Louise died suddenly (at only 41. Officially of heart failure; it seems likely she’d been ill with tuberculosis for some time), George sent a telegram ordering all construction to stop. He was too heartbroken to ever set foot on the island again, and the castle was never completed.

This is the story they tell at Boldt Castle, and they lean into it hard. In addition to nostalgia for the fairytale castles of his European childhood, Boldt seems to have had a love of wordplay; when he bought the island the house now sits on it was called Hart Island, as in a male deer. He changed the name to Heart Island, while including some nods to the old name as he started to build.

Is the story true? Well, as Pontius Pilate puts it in Jesus Christ Superstar, “we both have truths–are mine the same as yours?”

One reason I’m always behind with this blog: I’ve spent the past week reading way more about George and Louise Boldt and their castle than I actually need to know. And…probably the broad strokes of the “tragic love story” are true. They might not be. I watched this 30 minute PBS show about Boldt Castle, in which a team of documentary film makers both give a tour of the castle and talk to locals who have their doubts about the love story and who are happy to share conspiracy theories about Louise actually dying of side effects from treatments George wanted her to take to lose weight. Or maybe she didn’t really die at all, but ran off with another man!

I guess I don’t find the search for Louise conspiracies particularly compelling, though, because…I don’t find the tragic love story particularly remarkable to start with. Lots of people love their wives. Lots of people would like to build a castle to live in if they could afford it. Lots of people die young (and more did in America back in 1904, pre antibiotics and effective tuberculosis treatments and such), and it’s very sad and it’s very disruptive to the lives of the people they leave behind.

One source contends that George didn’t finish the house after Louise died because, honestly, it was already over budget and he wanted to save the money. He worked in New York City, and his kids were in their 20s by then (he and Louise were married when he was 26 and she was…15. They don’t talk about that part much on the audio tour)…what’s the point of having a giant house to show off with no wife to host parties and no kids to raise in it? So it doesn’t really seem surprising that he stopped construction,  and I don’t think George having done so suggests any unusually intense devotion to his wife. George didn’t remarry, but he did live another 12 years, continuing to manage hotels and summer in the Thousand Islands. Near the end of his life he commissioned another fancy European-style mansion: the Swiss chalet-style La Manzanita in Santa Barbara, California. Pretty much every thing I could find asserting that George and Louise’s was an especially epic love story came from Boldt Castle’s official website. The one where you buy the tickets.

Here’s another story: George Boldt never sold Heart Island or the unfinished house. It sat empty for 73 years, suffering damage from both the weather and vandalism (largely, I gather, at the hands of bored local teens). Ownership passed to the Boldts’ children and, eventually, to the Thousand Islands Bridge Authority. The Bridge Authority acquired the Heart Island and the castle, plus the nearby yacht house in 1977 for $1, with the understanding that they’d take on the task of restoring the property and keeping the island open to visitors.

And this is the story I’m more interested in.

When we were in Toronto just before Kingston, we considered going to see Casa Loma, another “castle” from the same era that’s really just a rich guy’s house. We decided not to go because the tickets were really expensive and because we knew we would be seeing Boldt Castle soon, and…how many rich guy houses do you need to see on one trip?

I think the reason we picked Boldt Castle over Casa Loma was that it was way cheaper ($13.50 USD as of this writing vs. $40 CAD (roughly $30 USD…so a pretty big difference when you’re buying 4 tickets). But maybe on some level the tragic love story wooed us as well? At any rate, it certainly seems to appeal to a lot of people, if online reviews, YouTube videos, etc. are any indication. In a world with no shortage of old rich guy houses, I guess you gotta have an angle.

So the Thousand Island Bridge Authority took over in 1977 and set to work restoring the castle. It’s a monumental task and one they’re still working on, nearly 50 years and 50 million dollars later.

But, of course, it’s not really a restoration, exactly, because the house was never finished in the first place; it was never furnished and no one ever lived in it. So there’s no option to tell the story of what life was like in the house–the grand parties or elaborate dinners or quiet family moments or the perspective of the servants. And this makes for a sort of…odd tour with interesting verbiage about what the family or the servants would have done. At most house museums there’s a lot of attention paid to which furniture, wall coverings, etc. are original and which are reproductions. But there are no originals here. In some cases, when it comes to the woodwork or flooring or other architectural features, they’re working off plans and with construction material that was left behind in the house. But a lot of the finishes are pure speculation and fantasy and…storytelling.

So you’re not so much getting a glimpse into millionaire life in the Gilded Age as getting a glimpse into someone from c. 1990 or whenever’s idea of Gilded Age opulence. The late Paul Malo, an architectural historian, was not happy about the whole thing, as he made clear in an article awhile back posted on an unofficial Boldt Castle website:

At Boldt Castle in the past three years a grand staircase, a great stained-glass dome, and a marble pavement have been installed in the central rotunda. None of this work is authentic, and it was fabricated without reliable documentation. In the meantime, visitors are given misinformation about the history of the place, provided instead with a romantic, fictionalized account.

The management has indicated its intention to disregard evidence produced by historical research. Instead it says it will continue its present narrative because this has proved satisfying to tourists.

So it’s not so much that Boldt Castle plays up the “tragic love story” angle that’s a problem; it’s that they do this at the expense of giving accurate or complete historical information, either through the choices made in the “restoration” or in the actual content of the audio tour visitors can listen to.

I’m not an architectural historian or any other kind of historian, but I definitely noticed a rather…generous view of Gilded Age class issues in the way the history was presented…very much a “actually robber barons were good” sort of vibe. I guess George Boldt wasn’t actually a robber baron so much as a guy who got very, very rich because robber barons existed and wanted to stay at fancy hotels. But still. The audio tour is not the least bit interested in exploring the inequities of turn of the century America; indeed, it gets subtly defensive whenever servants (who, remember, never actually worked in the house) need to be mentioned, insisting on a vision of the Gilded Age where benevolent rich folks co-existed in harmony (albeit in very different parts of their castles) with their grateful, well-treated servants. The servants would have lived on the upper levels of the six story castle, i.e. in the parts that were the most dangerous to be in in the event of a fire. But, the audio tour earnestly explained, this wasn’t because the Boldts considered the servants’ lives less valuable, but just because there were so darn many of them! There wasn’t room for them anywhere else! Or, you know, there wouldn’t have been.

Speaking of those upper story servants’ quarters…the first two floors of Boldt Castle have mostly been completely redone, historical sleights of hand and all, but the upper floors are where you can see the building as it was when the Bridge Authority took over in the late 70s. And this was my favorite part. In the lower levels, photos are displayed in every room of how the space looked before renovations began, so you can get a glimpse of that part of the past there, too.

I read somewhere that George Boldt intended to leave the unfinished house at the mercy of time and the elements as a sort of metaphorical testament to Louise’s death and their lost love. Did George Boldt actually say that to someone or is it another bit of artistic license? I don’t know. But it works better as a story for me than the fanciful imaginings of what might have been that you find downstairs. And, I guess, I like those upper floors because they let the house tell its story.

What kind of responsibility do the caretakers of historic sites have to tell the history accurately? This is not to say “without bias” because there’s really no such thing as history without bias. Focusing on the millionaires and their love stories instead of the servants who cooked their food is one kind of choice. Hanging a stained glass dome full of hearts in “period colors and ornate designs” with a pattern fabricated out of pure imagination, in support of the tragic love story narrative is a different, but related, kind of choice. Until I read Paul Malo’s assertion that the dome was completed “without reliable documentation,” I would have sworn I read or heard at Boldt Castle that they were working from an original drawing or shards from an original dome. Such is the power of suggestion, even for cynics like me. But I checked: they make no such claim. Surely George Boldt would have stuck hearts all over the place in the stained glass dome if he’d finished the house, right? Because love! 

So. Now that I’ve established that I’m a cynical, jaded person who hates love, I’ll say that we really enjoyed visiting Boldt Castle. As you can see, it gave me a lot to think about. Also, it’s a really pretty house. And, as mentioned, a bargain compared to some rich guy houses (although I should mention that you can do an escape room in a tower of Casa Loma (*additional fees apply) which sounds really cool, although of course it takes us even further into Disneyization of history territory).

Onward to less musing, more logistics.

Boldt Castle is on an island, so there’s no way to get there other than by boat. If you go to the website, they’ll direct you to a number of tour operators who can give you a ride, often as part of a larger boat tour of the Thousand Islands. You can take one of these tours from either the American or Canadian side (you do have to bring your passport if you’re coming from Canada). The problem with this option is that your time on Heart Island is limited. The Canadian side tours I looked at gave you around 2 1/2 hours on the island, but we spent a full four hours between Heart Island and the nearby yacht house.

From the American side, Uncle Sam Boat Tours operates a number of boat tours, some of which include a Boldt Castle stop, but also offers a shuttle directly to Heart Island that runs every half hour and allows you to spend as long as you want touring. It’s $10/adult or $6.50 for kids.

I’m going to tell you a secret that the website does not mention at all and which I learned about from a lone TripAdvisor review: you can also drive to the Yacht House on Wellesley Island, just across from Heart Island, park there for free, tour the Yacht House and then take the shuttle (included with your admission ticket to Boldt Castle and the Yacht House) over to Heart Island. The parking lot here is pretty small–on the day we went, in late June, they opened at 10:30 and we arrived just before 11 to find the parking lot already getting fairly full–but if you can get there near opening or go during the shoulder season you should be able to find a spot and save yourself some money. The combo ticket that includes the Yacht House only adds $3, and the Yacht House is pretty cool. Apparently there used to be lots of similar structures all over the place, but this is the last one left. You can see a bunch of boats and also tour the keeper’s living quarters:

We spent a few minutes looking at the Yacht House until the boat arrived to shuttle us over to Heart Island:

It’s a very quick boat ride over, and after that we got the audio tour going on my phone and started to explore. I have already shared my qualms about the content of the audio tour, but I definitely recommend doing it. The tour of the house is self-guided; there’s some signage and there are employees in some of the rooms who can provide information, but you’re going to learn a lot more about what you’re seeing if you do the audio tour.

All the finished rooms are on the first two floors; also on these levels you’ll find restrooms, a gift shop, and a room where you can watch a short film about the Boldts and the castle.

Then the tour continues on the upper levels, where you see the condition the whole house was in before the Bridge Authority took over before the grand finale on an upper balcony with a great view of the water:

After the house itself, the audio tour takes you all over the island and to several outbuildings. The island is smaller than I expected, and it was easy to cover pretty much the whole thing. If you need a snack break during your touring, they have a hot dog and ice cream stand as well as a fast food-type restaurant with hamburgers and chicken tenders and pizza and the like. You can also bring your own food for a picnic (which we did).

The Alster Tower wins the prize for most charming building on Heart Island with its uneven stone walls and curvy lines. It was kind of the rec room for the main house, with a two lane bowling alley, billiard room, and theater, and the Boldt family actually used this building while the castle was being built.

The tower wasn’t open to the public until 2014 and it’s at an early stage of renovation than the lower floors of the main house.

The Power House wins the prize for best building to take family photos in front of:

Fun story (so many stories!) While we were hanging out in front of the Power House, a woman from a large extended family came up to ask if we would take the family’s picture for them. We were happy to, but everyone else in the family immediately started protesting: “no! We don’t need another picture!” The woman who had approached us eventually prevailed, and they all got situated and had the picture taken. Several of them apologized to us as they were leaving. It really was not a big inconvenience to us, but I got the impression that they had posed for a LOT of photos for this woman during their Boldt Castle visit. Later on we encountered her again, blocking the access to the bathrooms inside the castle so that she could take a carefully posed picture of her two kids sitting in their stroller in the hallway.

The Power House itself was fine and interesting if you’re into stuff like seeing how they powered everything on the island.

The last part of the audio tour took us around the grounds some more to see gardens and landscaping and, most interestingly to Abe (okay, and probably me, too) the basement of the house, including this cool tunnel:

And then it was time to get back on the boat and head back to the Yacht House and our van and then back across the border to Kingston! Oh, I guess I should mention that our drive from Kingston was right at an hour including the border crossing, where things were slightly backed up and we waited maybe 15 minutes.

Next up: Upper Canada Village

maybe you would like to pin this?