Palacio de la Quinta Meiggs, 19th-century mansion in Santiago, Chile.
Palacio de la Quinta Meiggs was a mansion on Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins, between República and España streets. Its circular vestibule linked four pavilions over a service basement, a main floor with salons, an upper floor of bedrooms and a service attic. A central tower with a low dome crowned the classical Georgian-style building.
Henry Meiggs, an American entrepreneur who developed Chilean railways, commissioned English architect Jesse L. Wetmore in 1864 to design this residence. The property was demolished in 1941 to make way for the Virginia Opazo neighborhood.
The salons were named for their colours: Red, Blue, White, the fir-panelled room and the pink marble room. In 1866 Meiggs opened the house with a fancy-dress ball for over 500 guests, among them Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, who wrote an account of the night. Later the Barón de Riviere replaced the wallpapers with silks and added carved coffered ceilings.
The palace no longer stands: it was demolished around 1941, and the Virginia Opazo neighborhood now occupies the site between República and Avenida España, along Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins. Nothing of the building survives above ground, so the location is identified only by the street layout opened when the Quinta was subdivided in 1872.
The mansion's upper floor had a system of speaking tubes linking every bedroom and bells to summon servants, still working in 1937. Meiggs spent over 200,000 gold pesos on mahogany and pine alone, plus hundreds of thousands more on marble and granite.
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