Now here is a house with heft. Some men like their women big; I'm a man who feels the same way about houses. The one in the image above stands - or hunkers, really - on a densely wood hillside in suburban Piermont, N.Y. Built originally around 1840 in the then fashionable Gothic Revival style, it was intended as the semi-retirement home of Eleazer Lord (1788-1871), seminarian, insurance executive and, most notably, first president of the Erie Railroad. In 1890, railroad and banking heir...