Jekyll Island was once a secluded vacation spot for some of America’s richest tycoons. J.P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, and William Vanderbilt and others like them wintered in vast “cottages” here in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In 1887, they founded a private club, open only to the world’s wealthiest families, which lasted until World War II. In 1910, the club was the site of a secret meeting of bankers that led to the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. Following the war, its members sold the island to the State of Georgia. Jekyll Island is now a state park, the clubhouse is now a luxury hotel, and some of the 13 remaining “cottages” offer visitors a close-up look at what once was known as the “Gilded Age.” However, one cottage, Edwin Gould’s beloved Chicota, was never renovated. Gould, son of the infamous railroad tycoon Jay Gould, built Chicota in 1897. The cottage was abandoned after the Gould’s son died in a hunting accident. It was eventually torn down. Nothing remains but a hole marking its site, and the pair of stone lions that once guarded its entrance. One of those lions, now reduced to king of only a few small palms, symbolizes what Jekyll Island once represented – a place of elegance and leisure, backed by hereditary wealth, control and command. I converted what originally was a lush color image into a more abstract black and white photograph – changing the mood from a picture postcard to a grim reminder of a place essentially destroyed by tragedy.