Grover Bergdoll’s mansion

When Grover turned 21, as she did for the older Bergdoll children before him, his mother Emma bought a large dark stone mansion for him in Philadelphia’s affluent Wynnefield neighborhood at 52nd Street and Wynnefield Avenue. Famed architect Horace Trumbauer lived across the street and MAY have designed the home for its builder and first owner, Samuel Shoemaker.

The mansion was four stories tall with the top floor cozily tucked under a mansard roof. It included a large porch with an entry port at the main entrance for buggies and automobiles. In the back was a beautiful carriage house with twelve dormer windows in the chauffeur’s living quarters looking out across a large yard of nearly two acres.

It was here where Emma quarreled and engaged in gunfights with police and federal agents intent upon capturing Grover after he escaped from the mansion while his U.S. Army guards were carelessly playing billiards instead of watching their charge.

This was the same mansion in which Grover later hid from federal agents for years while they mingled on the street, powerless to search for him without a warrant.

In the book, I display more photographs of the mansion, describe in great detail how it was built, and how the Bergdolls acquired it. I also describe the mansion’s fate and why today every piece of it is gone.

If you should visit the site in Philadelphia, please be considerate of the neighbors who were not connected to the Bergdolls of 1920.