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The next time you visit the famous Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, make sure to thank the Vanderbilts. It was sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who decided to open the museum in order to showcase American artists' work in the early 1930s. She originally offered her collection of more than five hundred pieces to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but when they declined her proposal, the Whitney Museum was born.

One of those engineering feats for which we have Cornelius Vanderbilt to thank is the original Grand Central Terminal, which opened its doors in 1871. It was his brainchild. And when conditions at this transportation hub became unsafe and unsanitary in the early 1900s, it was William Kissam Vanderbilt—the grandson of Cornelius—who was tasked with rebuilding the station, alongside his son, William Kissam Vanderbilt II, and William J. Wilgus, chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad.