Boldt Castle Heart Island St. Lawrence
— a castle, half-built, for a wife who didn't live to see it.
Not only on a wall.
“George Boldt was building a 120-room Rhineland castle on Heart Island as a Valentine's gift for his wife Louise when she died in January 1904. He ordered the work stopped that day and never returned. The castle stood unfinished and open to the river for seventy-three years before the Thousand Islands Bridge Authority took it over in 1977 and began the long restoration.
Boldt Castle Heart Island St. Lawrence, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Heart Island sits in the St. Lawrence River near Alexandria Bay, New York, inside the Thousand Islands archipelago that spans the international border between the United States and Canada. The river drains the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, and the islands here number more than 1,800 by the count maintained by Ontario Parks. Boldt Castle and its outbuildings cover most of the five-acre island, reached only by boat from Alexandria Bay or from Gananoque on the Canadian shore.
George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, broke ground on the castle in 1900. The plan called for six storeys, 120 rooms, indoor tennis courts, a powerhouse styled as a Rhineland turret, and a stone Alster Tower for the children. Three hundred stonecutters, carpenters, and artists were on site through the warm seasons. Construction halted on 21 January 1904, the day Louise Boldt died of heart failure at 41. The castle was left open to weather and to visitors for the next seventy-three years.
The Thousand Islands Bridge Authority bought Heart Island for one dollar in 1977 on the condition that all revenues fund continuing restoration. Forty-eight years of work has rebuilt the roof, the grand staircase, the Italian Garden, and most of the interior plasterwork, with crews returning each May after the river ice goes out. The castle now receives roughly 200,000 visitors a season between mid-May and mid-October, ferried in by Uncle Sam Boat Tours from Alexandria Bay and by Gananoque Boat Line from the Canadian shore.