This spread, clockwise from top right: the garden of the Carhart House; the back entrance of the Breeze house; skaters enjoy a wintry day on Tuxedo Lake; Tuxedo Club, the place to rub shoulders with the “who’s who” of Wall Street; the grandiose Forsyth Wickes house, finished with salt-glazed tile and coated with stucco and Nazareth cement, was designed by Delano & Aldrich; built in 1897 and known today as The Emily Post Cottage, this was the home of socialite, author, and only daughter of architect Bruce Price, Emily Price Post.
Astor, upon emigrating to England to set the stage at Cliveden for parliamentary sex scandals and Churchillian bons mots, declared, “There is no fit place for a gentleman in America, with the possible exception of Tuxedo Park.” The “who’s who” of Wall Street, before Wall Street came to Main Street, were members of the Tuxedo Club. Stockbroker Henry Poor, who formed Standard & Poor’s, rated Tuxedo Park AAA. It was here that he built one of the most lavish houses in the Tri-State area, with views from which one could have watched the city skyline rise in ensuing decades. Resident George Baker’s First National City Bank would later form a prominent peak within that skyline. Hempel does not ignore the division between Tuxedo Park and the town of Tuxedo on the other side of the gate, where a congresswoman once allegedly addressed a crowd, “Ladies of the Park and women of the village.” The volunteer fire department was one of the few groups in which Pell and Mottola appeared on the same roll call. Hempel also acknowledges the craftsmen who built and kept Tuxedo Park running behind the scenes. Sporting life was central to the area then and today. Courts in the Warren and Wetmore-designed Tennis House have seen spirited competition at the highest level for more than a century. Residents have also had a lasting cultural impact on the nation. Literary lights and philanthropists founded Tuxedo Park Library and created resources for the arts elsewhere, such as Spencer Trask’s Yaddo and National Arts Club, and Augustus D. Juilliard’s eponymous school. Park-reared Dorothy Draper, influenced home décor through her “Ask Dorothy Draper” column as much as Emily Price Post guided the behavior within.
Last, Hempel notes the scientific contribution of Alfred Lee Loomis and his basement laboratory where Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Enrico Fermi conducted experiments that might properly have gone down in history as The Tuxedo Park Project. Though stifled by the Great Depression, World War II, and mid-century Modernism, Tuxedo Park has seen a renaissance in the last couple of generations. Rare is the town where 77 percent of the houses qualify for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, and Hempel offers a glimpse behind the gate for those not lucky enough to display a “TP-R” tag on their license plates. u
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