Belden Point in Bronx, New York

At the far end of City Island Avenue in the Bronx sits Belden Point, a small waterfront park with views of Long Island Sound. Rotting wooden pilings hint at what once stood there: a grand summer resort built by financier William Belden in the eighteen-eighties. The complex featured a mansion converted into a French restaurant, plus bowling alleys and billiard halls—all thriving under steady steamboat traffic. But Belden's wealth had been built on scandal: he'd conspired with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk during the eighteen-sixties to inflate gold prices, causing a stock market panic. After surviving investigation, he'd invested his remaining fortune in his resort. It couldn't save him. He cheated his mentally ill brother, faced creditor liens, and was forced to sell to railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington. Belden died in impoverished obscurity. The mansion burned in two thousand six. As Atlas Obscura tells it, the city eventually restored the waterfront into the quiet park visitors see today—a fitting close to one man's dramatic rise and fall.

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