TUXEDO PARK:

Wall Street titans, robber barons and scions of blue-blooded colonial families made Tuxedo Park synonymous with upper-class living in the first three decades of the 20th century. This gated Hudson Valley community only forty miles north of Manhattan is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of its distinctive Gilded Age mansions designed by well-known architects. Normally not accessible to the public, now, through 230 commissioned color photographs and fifty vintage postcards presented in a beautifully designed coffee table cloth edition, the natural beauty of Tuxedo Park, bejeweled by historic houses sited to take brilliant advantage of the mountainous terrain and splendid views of three lakes, and its rich social and architectural history, is available for the first time for all to share.

Through sheer vision and willpower, within nine months (October 1885–June 1886) Pierre Lorillard IV, heir to a tobacco fortune, built Tuxedo Park as a private hunting reserve. Over the next fifteen years he oversaw its transformation into an exclusive, year-round community centered on a sporting and social club.

Residents of this gated enclave spanned the American elite, from blue-blooded Kents, Mortimers, Tuckermans, and Van Burens to financial giants George F. Baker (Chairman of the First National Bank, which became Citibank), Richard Delafield (Chairman of National Park Bank, a predecessor of J.P. Morgan Chase) and Alfred Lee Loomis, financier cum scientist, whose pioneering role in developing radar helped America win World War II.

A veritable roster of America’s greatest architects from the Age of Elegance worked here: Carrère & Hastings, Delano & Aldrich, Wilson Eyre Jr., Hoppin and Koen, William Lescaze, McKim, Mead & White, John Russell Pope, Bruce Price, and Warren & Wetmore. Inspired by European historical precedents and motivated by the courage to experiment with Shingle style, Arts and Crafts, and even with Modernist avant-garde, these and other architects created more than two hundred houses, accessory buildings, and gardens—many of which remain intact today. The architects’ visions were realized through the sweat and skills of immigrant Italian and Slovakian laborers, who swelled the population of New York at the turn of the last century and for whom a workers’ village was erected on the other side of the Gates of Tuxedo Park.