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Buy the Historic Mansion of Erector Set Inventor A.C. Gilbert

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Five years after winning a gold medal in the 1908 London Olympics, Yale grad Alfred Carlton Gilbert—who had paid his way through school working as a magician—invented the Erector Set, a construction toy modeled after the steel girders used in railroad construction. By 1935, the A.C. Gilbert Company had sold more than 30 million sets; Gilbert himself had been nicknamed the "savior of Christmas" after successfully fighting a wartime ban on toy production; and the inventor had constructed Maraldene, this English-style country estate near New Haven, Conn. Now, the historic mansion, listed in May, has been subjected to a series of price chops and is listed for $2M, down from its initial $2.35M ask. The 6,700-square-foot pile boasts six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a broad sloped lawn, and original detail/dated interior design galore.

· 1180 Ridge Rd [Zillow]