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Seeing inside Lynnewood Hall might be the most expensive house tour in Philly history

The house’s new owners are offering pricey pre-restoration tours to raise money for asbestos remediation.

The exterior of Lynnewood Hall, located across from the Elkins Park post office on Ashbourne Road.
The exterior of Lynnewood Hall, located across from the Elkins Park post office on Ashbourne Road.Read moreMonica Herndon / Staff Photographer
    by Jenn Ladd
    Published 

Elkins Park’s Lynnewood Hall has a reputation that extends well beyond the quiet Philadelphia suburb. Numerous YouTube videos of the 110-room mansion have racked up millions of views, and lovers of Gilded Age history and old homes have obsessed about it on Facebook and other forums.

So it’s a welcomed development that the estate’s new nonprofit owners will be giving hard-hat tours. But they’re going to cost quite a bit.

The Lynnewood Hall Preservation Foundation (LHPF), which purchased the 124-year-old house last month for $9 million, is offering tours to raise money for asbestos remediation — the first step in making the house accessible to the public one day. It’s no surprise that ridding a 100,000-square-foot building of asbestos is really expensive. The project will cost $1.25 million, according to LHPF’s “Asbestos Free in 2023″ campaign page.

That explains why the price tag for these tours, to be scheduled post-remediation, is eye-popping: A single 90-minute tour of the house’s sprawling first floor and its exterior will cost $1,500; $2,500 will cover two people.

For $5,000 a person, the extended-access tour — complete with a souvenir photo and hard hat — will take you everywhere that’s safe to go in four hours. The $15,000 option, for well-off shutterbugs, will cover four people and allow three hours for arranging and taking shots at leisure. Bump it up to $50,000 and you will be able to bring as many as 12 people on your six-hour tour, which will also include souvenirs and lunch with the nonprofit’s staff.

The cost of admission may strike you as absurdly high or somehow befitting. After all, Lynnewood Hall was built for $8 million in the 1890s, roughly $295 million in today’s currency. The nonprofit’s staffers, anticipating disappointment, offer a note of acknowledgment and solace for the future.

“We understand that the donation levels ... may be out of reach for some,” the donation page reads. “Our goal is to raise the money needed to get remediation done as soon as we possibly can to make a variety of other opportunities to experience Lynnewood Hall available to the public.”

Donations of any amount are appreciated, they added. They had raised $3,020 as of mid-morning on the campaign’s launch day.