# Tuxedo Park

New York. Pierre Lorillard, developer. James Smith Haring and Ernest W Bowditch, planners. 1885.

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Tuxedo Park is the result of Pierre Lorillard's vision of an exclusive but informal residential resort community whose plan and architecture would respect the land and character of the site. The Park was begun in 1885 when Lorillard, heir to a vast tobacco fortune, purchased 7000 acres of land about an hour's train journey from New York in the Ramapo Mountains.

The plan is the work of James Smith Haring and Ernest W Bowditch, the latter a landscape architect from Boston. Samuel Swift observed that 'in laying out and improving the Park, Mr Lorillard and his aides sought rather to take advantage of the natural beauty of the landscape than to turn his wild region into a cultivated garden.... No main axes ... are to be found.... The vistas are purely natural.... The single exception is furnished by the principal gate, just north of the village.... Here Bruce Price constructed a stone lodge and keep which, viewed from the road or train, offered an admirable entrance, suggesting faithfully the character of the Park, as the prelude to an opera hints at what is to come.'¹

Price was responsible for much of the original architecture at Tuxedo, including the club house at the foot of Tuxedo Lake, and houses such as the Tower and Kent houses. James Brown Lord and William A Bates (who alone and as a partner in the firm of Bates & How built much of Bronxville) also built extensively in the early days of Tuxedo Park. Their designs represent the essentially modest character of the development that was to give

way by the turn of the century to a wave of excessively scaled houses of the type Lorillard had originally disdained in Newport. So great was the contrast between the first and second waves of development that Swift was moved to observe in 1905: 'The character of the houses in Tuxedo Park is less homogeneous than might have been expected. The newer ones are most of them of stone; some differ little from isolated city dwellings, while others are solid without being pretentious. As they were not designed to withstand the extreme cold of the mountains, it is natural that the light wooden cottages of the late 80s have been superseded. When Tuxedo was started, it was not generally realised that it would become not only a summer but also a winter resort.'²

An association was formed not only to control the social fabric of the development (no one could own property who did not belong to the exclusive 400-member Tuxedo Club), but also the character of the architecture. No fences except for natural stone walls and hedges were permitted between properties within the compound, which was, however, completely enclosed by a 14-foot-high barbed-wire fence. Outside the gates, Lorillard constructed a village to house the 200 artisans and merchants necessary to maintain the preserve and its life.

## Notes

1 In his article 'Community Life in Tuxedo, American Suburban Communities', *House and Garden* 8, August 1905, pp 60–71.

2 *Op cit*, p 70.

1 General plan of 1885

2 Renwick, Aspinall and Russel, cottage c, 1890

3 Bruce Price, Gatehouse, c 1885

4 Hunt and Hunt, Mortimer House, c 1905

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