'Great Gatsby' Mansion on Long Island Demolished

The Great Gatsby's author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, once wrote, "There are no second acts in American lives." In the case of the Sands Point, N.Y., mansion said to have inspired the classic American novel, the Fitzgerald adage seems to have been accurate -- but that second act came to end on Monday, when the so-called Land's End Mansion was demolished by a developer planning to replace it with five homes selling for around $10 million a piece.

The house was built in 1902 and was inhabited for a while by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope, an early Pulitzer Prize winner and editor of the New York World. Guests in that era included the Fitzgeralds, as well as Groucho Marx, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Dorothy Parker, according to Forbes.

After the jump, watch the dramatic demolition footage from CNN.