Grover Bergdoll’s Philadelphia Mansion
Grover Bergdoll’s Philadelphia mansion at 52nd and Wynnefield Avenue. Philadelphia Record image from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Below, top to bottom, left to right. The backside of Grover’s mansion with his 1917 Hudson Super Six escape car parked in the driveway.
The mansion’s porte cochere leading to the magnificent carriage house in the rear of the property.
The mansion’s massive stone fireplace in the parlor.
View from Wynnefield Avenue in the winter.
The staircase window box from which Grover was captured while hiding from police and federal agents, and the elaborate stained glass window.
The beautiful woodwork of the stairway leading up to the window box.
The elaborate 12-dormer carriage house with a cupola on top. Grover kept his roadsters, Super Six, and his and Emma’s Hudson limousines here.
Inside the parlor.
Emma in the mansion parlor with a photograph of President Franklin Roosevelt, from whom she wished a pardon for Grover.
The front door of the Bergdoll mansion leading to the vestibule where Emma held off police with pistols.
A map of the Wynnefield neighborhood showing Grover’s mansion and Trumbauer’s mansion across the street. G.W. Bromley and Company, 1918, Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
The Bergdoll mansion being demolished by a wrecker who sold the beautiful woodwork for a profit. A worker is standing on the window box where Bergdoll hid from police and federal agents.
Unless specified, all images are from the Philadelphia Record, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Grover Bergdoll’s mother bought him a large stone mansion in 1914-1915. It was in the prestigious Wynnefield section of Philadelphia, and his neighbor was the renowned architect Horace Trumbauer. I’ve profiled this mansion extensively from its construction to hideout, and demolition in The Bergdoll Boys.
The Wynnefield mansion is where Grover escaped from his U.S. Army guards after being convicted for draft evasion and then released from the Governors Island, New York Army jail to search for his hidden stash of gold.
Later, it’s where Grover hid inside the mansion for years after returning twice to the United States illegally while federal agents were searching for him. The mansion was “seized” by the federal government for years to pay reparations to Americans damaged by German activities during World War I. However, lawyers managed to delay the legal proceedings long enough for Grover to return to the United States in 1939 and recover 80 percent of his confiscated assets after serving time in prison for draft evasion and escape.
Emma, Grover, his wife, Berta, and their children lived in the mansion for most of Bergdoll's ownership. In the 1940s, a company that bought it for its high-quality decorative woodwork demolished it. Nothing is left of the Bergdoll mansion at 52nd and Wynnefield; three homes are on the subdivided Bergdoll parcel today.