Joshua Bright for The New York Times

If you have a soft spot for real places that may have inspired literary masterpieces, and if you happen to have $30 million or so burning a hole in your pocket, maybe it’s not too late to save a relic from the Gilded Age. Lands End, the turn-of-the-century mansion thought by some to be the model for Tom and Daisy’s house in “The Great Gatsby,” is slated to be razed, and the 13-acre estate in Sands Point, N.Y., is going to be divvied up and turned into a development of five $10 million homes.

Here are some amazing shots of the house as it looks today, taken by a photographer named Jen Ross. She has a few more and a little narrative on her blog, as well. From there, you can leap to some other blogs, like Old Long Island and Mansions of the Gilded Age. In contrast to Ross’s photos, the Web site Curbed has some older pictures of the estate in better days.

I live about two miles from Lands End (think serf in a thatch hut off the edge of the manor), and the specter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legacy has always been a source of civic pride. In spirit, our town will always be East Egg, but to think of the physical remains being swept away is a little sad.

Before we start to wax romantic, however, let us remain wedded to reality. Not far from Lands End is a shuttered movie theater, a victim of the recent economic woes. On one side of that movie theater is an ice cream shop, which I’m sure can’t be too thrilled that there will be no families walking past en route to summer matinees anymore. On the other side of the theater is a pizza place … or is it a hamburger joint … it’s hard to keep track, because it has been three restaurants in three years. And so it goes up Main Street in my little hometown, with scattered “For Rent’’ signs and papered windows. A woman I’ve known my whole life owns a shop there, her too-high-and-rising property taxes probably driving her slowly out of business, according to my mother.

Sorry. It seems I stepped out of “Gatsby” and into “The Grapes of Wrath” for a minute. (Suddenly I’m picturing Mia Farrow in her floral sundress, staring down a bulldozer and delivering an impassioned speech about how nobody’s going to plow under her house.) But that’s the reality — our prosperous ’90s gave way to the Great Recession — and that’s why the demolition of a decrepit symbol of extravagant wealth isn’t all that big a deal; they’re going to build five new symbols of extravagant wealth there. Besides, the mansion that was said to inspire Gatsby’s house (also in Sands Point but set in the book across the bay in Kings Point) was leveled decades ago. Now it’s time to bid adieu to the ghosts of Tom and Daisy.