Randall, Monica 1944-

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RANDALL, Monica 1944-

PERSONAL: Born March 14, 1944, in Oyster Bay, NY. Education: Attended Fashion Institute of Technology, 1964, New York University, 1965, and C.W. Post College of Long Island University, 1966. Religion: Unitarian-Universalist.

ADDRESSES: Home and office—P.O. Box 75, Oyster Bay, NY 11771. Agent—Connie Clausen, Connie Clausen Associates, 250 East 87th St., New York, NY 10028.

CAREER: Author, photographer, lecturer, historic preservationist, and location scout. President of Locations, Inc., 1968-80; director of North Shore Preservation Society, beginning 1980. Exhibitions: Randall's photographs have been displayed at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, NY, and are in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

MEMBER: International Platform Association, Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities.

WRITINGS:

Mansions of Long Island's Gold Coast, Hastings House (New York, NY), 1979, revised edition, Rizzoli International Publications (New York, NY), 2003.

Phantoms of the Hudson Valley: The Glorious Estates of a Lost Era, Overlook Press (Woodstock, NY), 1995.

Winfield: Living in the Shadow of the Woolworths, St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to magazines and newspapers, including Newsday.

SIDELIGHTS: Monica Randall is best known for her books that document the architectural heritage of Long Island's Gold Coast era. She has also extensively researched the family histories of those who built some of the grandest homes on Long Island. Her Mansions of Long Island's Gold Coast and Winfield: Living in the Shadow of the Woolworths are testimonials to those grand houses built mostly in the early twentieth century. Additionally, Randall has turned her focus to some of the grand old homes of New York's Hudson River Valley in another photo-journalistic essay, Phantoms of the Hudson Valley: The Glorious Estates of a Lost Era. Randall's interest in the great houses "isn't just a passion," according to Booklist's Michelle Kaske; "it has been a life's work."

Randall, who grew up on Long Island's North Shore, formed an early love for the mansions that even in the 1950s were becoming derelict and waiting for demolition. As teenagers, she and her two sisters managed to get into some of these old houses before they were destroyed and were able to save some of the artifacts of a disappearing time. Soon she began photographing these same estates and then started a business as a location finder for movies and advertising using these same locales as backdrop. Her first book, Mansions of Long Island's Gold Coast, appeared in 1979; a revised edition came out in 2003. The book is both a photographic record of the mansions as well as a history of the families that built them.

Randall's Phantoms of the Hudson Valley documents some of the great mansions built between New York City and Albany, mostly in the nineteenth century. Many of these near-castles, such as Wyndcliff, built by Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, lie in ruins awaiting destruction; others are in private hands; and still others have been renovated and are open to the public. Wyndcliff, built in 1852, is indicative of what has befallen many of these enormous structures, built by the wealthy of New York as country seats. Its property has been sold off to developers over the years while it has remained empty for decades. Put on the real estate market for a few hundred thousand dollars, it is expected to be razed by new owners and redeveloped. When built, it was so opulent as to give rise to the saying, "Keeping up with the Joneses." Reviewing Randall's book in the New York Times Book Review, Robert R. Harris felt that Randall manages to "capture the haunting atmosphere of great wealth's trappings gone to seed." Harris also commented that while the author/photographer includes "entertaining lore along with her pictures," she is also a "little too receptive to tales of ghosts walking the riverbanks."

A predilection for ghosts and paranormal events is even more evident in Randall's 2003 book Winfield, a personal history of the mansion built by five-and-dime owner F. W. Woolworth. Built for nine million dollars in the early twentieth century, Winfield is among the most fantastic of the mansions built along the North Shore of Long Island, the so-called Gold Coast. Woolworth, a staunch believer in the occult and time travel, lived in his mansion only two years before his death in 1919. The home stayed in the Woolworth family for another decade and then was sold to a nephew of R. J. Reynolds, the tobacco baron. It subsequently went through several other ownerships; in the late 1970s Randall, taken with the mansion from the time she was a child, lived there herself and experienced the charm and mystery of the house firsthand. In her book, Randall investigates many of the tales that have developed around the house, specifically those dealing with séances, strange sounds heard in the distant rooms, and other haunting tales. "'This book is a much bigger story than chasing ghosts,'" Randall told N. C. Maisak in the New York Times.

A contributor for Publishers Weekly agreed with Randall, noting that the author "achieves an ideal balance between the bizarre and the compelling." Not all reviewers appreciated the blend of memoir and architectural history, however. Elaine Machleder, writing in Library Journal, for example, found it to be a "confused paranormal fantasy based on limited history," and a contributor for Kirkus Reviews called the book an "odd memoir" whose "plausibility isn't helped by purple prose." Booklist's Kaske, on the other hand, felt that the fans of writer Jane Eyre "will love this memoir laced with romance and gothic atmosphere."