NEW YORK: Red Blood for Blue

• Share

In New York Society a few bosomy sighs were heaved last week, a few gentlemanly tears shed. The social barriers around Tuxedo Park had fallen.

In New York's gilded age, Tuxedo Park was the haven of Manhattan blue bloods to whom wealth was secondary to family and good behavior. Bad behavior was left to the swells—the glamor boys & girls of the day, who wrapped favors in $100 bills, cheered when naked ladies popped out of pies, and swarmed to James Hazen Hyde's notorious $200,000 party at Sherry's. Host Hyde, dogged by unfavorable publicity, fled to Europe, where he lived for 35 years. At Tuxedo Park no lady ever popped out of a pie.

God had created the rocky crags, the woods, the Ramapo mountain wilderness, the lake which the Indians had named Ptuck-sepo, 40-odd miles northwest of blatant, roistering Manhattan. But it was Pierre Lorillard (snuff & tobacco) who foreclosed a mortgage in 1814 and began to make this wilderness into a 600,000-acre property for the Lorillards. The memory of Pierre "will be preserved in the annals of New York. ... He led people by the nose for the best part of a century and made his enormous fortune by giving them that to chew which they could not swallow." One of his descendants was Pierre III.

On a rainy day in September, 71 years later, Pierre Lorillard III got off a train and looked over his land. It was all his, by virtue of inheritance, purchase, and out-guessing his relatives at poker. Seven months from that fall day, he had built in the Ramapo hills 30 miles of roads, a sewage and water system, a park gatehouse "like a frontispiece to an English novel," 22 cottages, two blocks of stores, stables, a dam, an icehouse, clubhouse, swimming pool.

Mr. Lorillard's idea was a colony of country cottages for sports lovers. H invited the best-bred families of New York up to see. On a gala opening day they arrived. They bucketed around in carriages, staring at gamekeepers who burst from the bushes in green and yellow costumes and Tyrolean hats. They cruised on the lake in barges manned by blue-coated crews. Delighted, they paid down hard cash for cottages.

The deer with which Mr. Lorillard had stocked the place grew so tame that they ate out of people's hands, ceased to be sporting shots. Partridge, pheasants, turkeys took off for good over the park's eight-foot fence. The striped bass in the lake were soon depleted. But Mr. Lorillard built a golf course and a toboggan slide.

Social life at the Park was restricted and proper. In 1886 the colonists had held the first "Autumn Ball." The sensation of that first party was young Griswold Lorillard and a few daring friends who wore tailless dress coats, "which suggested to the onlookers that the boys ought to have been put in strait jackets long ago." Who actually originated the dinner jacket in the U. S. has been a subject of heated argument ever since. Some say it began at a dance of one of the Chowder and Marching Clubs in the Bowery, when leaders of Manhattan's Irish society decided that tails cramped their style. Berry Wall, male fashion plate of the 'gos, claimed that his London tailor made him the first one. At any rate, the jacket took its name from the nobs' Tuxedo.