Vail Mansion

The Vail Mansion was commissioned by Theodore N. Vail, the first president of AT&T and the architect of the Bell System. Designed by William Welles Bosworth (who also designed the AT&T headquarters in lower Manhattan and Rockefeller’s Kykuit estate), it was built from 1916 to 1920 at a final cost of about $400,000.

Vail died in 1920, before he ever moved in. The Town of Morristown bought the building shortly afterward and used it as municipal offices for roughly 75 years. In the 2000s the building was converted to a mixed-use development: condominiums upstairs and on the wings, restaurants on the ground floor.

The mansion is currently home to Jockey Hollow Bar + Kitchen, Chris Cannon’s multi-concept restaurant. That’s the easiest way to see the interior; the public spaces (the bar, the dining rooms, the oyster bar) are open during restaurant hours.

The exterior is best appreciated from the front lawn off South Street, where the Italianate facade reads as out-of-place-but-glorious among the small storefronts of downtown.