History

An ad for formal dress, circa 1912. New York Public Library

The Tuxedo

The story of how the tuxedo made its initial debut in American society dates back to the Gilded Age, when the founders of the posh Tuxedo Park resort in Orange County, N.Y., are thought to have introduced the coat at their exclusive sporting club. This fall, current residents of the Park, along with the local historical society and the distinguished Savile Row clothier Henry Poole & Co., plan to celebrate the legacy of the tuxedo in a manner befitting its eminent birth. But significant questions linger, like when and where the coat was truly born or why it’s called the tuxedo.

For generations, one account eclipsed all others as the creation myth of choice.

This version of events credits young Griswold Lorillard, the son of Tuxedo Park developer and tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard IV, with inventing the dinner jacket on a whim after getting frustrated that his tails were interfering with sitting and dancing. In October 1886, at Tuxedo Park’s Autumn Ball, an annual gala honoring debutantes, Griswold and a few of his friends emerged in tailless dress coats and scarlet satin vests. Their unconventional attire was enough to turn heads, not to mention ruffle the feathers of the old guard. Town Topics, the leading society magazine of the day—and the only major publication is known to have recorded the incident at that time—compared the boys to “royal footmen,” adding that they “ought to have been put in strait-jackets long ago.”

The Early Years

In a gazetteer of the geography of high society, Tuxedo Park, New York, might properly be described as a village (pop. 972), 40 miles NW of the Union Club in New York City, once famous for its rarefied social climate. And for the lexicographer, it is thought to be the place of origin in America of the dinner jacket—a man’s full-dress suit with the tails lopped off—commonly, though improperly, called the tuxedo.

Founded in 1886 to provide a spring and autumn sanctuary for a select flock of that migratory species that follows the sun from Newport to Palm Beach, Tuxedo Park was the nonpareil of the secluded enclaves of the rich. Though widely imitated, its original select blend of vintage money, congenial habits, and impeccable social antecedents have never been successfully duplicated.

Although Tuxedo Park managed to survive the advent of the income tax and limped its way through the Depression, now, in 1978, its continued existence—in any form that Pierre Lorillard IV, its founding spirit, would recognize—seems most uncertain.

E. Digby Baltzell, a distinguished social historian, specializing in the habits peculiar to the rich, has called Tuxedo Park “a caricature of the Victorian millionaire’s mania for exclusiveness.” Not just the ordinary sort of millionaire would do, however. In the beginning, the money also had to be properly aged. Yet, the highly selective standards for admission to Tuxedo Park were perhaps less calculated than a reflex response to the chaos in New York society caused by the massive invasion of parvenus following the Civil War. By the 1880s, the old alliance of Knickerbocker families with the post-Revolutionary mercantile rich, which had reigned supreme for nearly a century, was crumbling under the onslaught of newcomers whose unprecedented wealth and blatant opulence was socially irresistible. Like Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred, Tuxedo Park was an attempt, however ineffectual, to cope with this shattering upheaval.

Read the full article on American Heritage Magazine, click here.

Architecture

In 1886, the grandson of Peter Lorillard established Tuxedo Park on the family’s land. Using land planner Ernest Bowditch of Boston and architect Bruce Price of New York, and with the help of 1,800 Italian and Slovakian laborers, in about eighteen months twenty miles of roads, a gate, a clubhouse, and three dams, were created launching a resort which attracted a number of the financial, industrial and social leaders of the day.

Over the first thirty years, the residents built more than 250 houses and stables in Tuxedo Park and over 100 homes, retail stores, and service establishments in the so-called Hamlet. Three churches, all still standing (one is the Tuxedo Historical Society today), also built a train station, a library, and a post office.

The Town of Tuxedo was officially formed on March 4, 1890, from the southern land area of the Town of Monroe. By 1915, 3,636 people lived in Tuxedo, about 20% more than were reported in the 2000 Census.

During the 1920s, a few Tuxedo Park residents built a new hospital and a high school. But the Stock Market Crash of 1929 had a disproportionately negative effect on Tuxedo Park’s affluence and a slow but severe decline in the community’s fortunes set in, resulting in a population decline and the loss of such amenities as the hospital, the Masonic Temple (now the Town Hall), and many retail stores.

A major shift in landholding in Tuxedo came about after 1910 when Mrs. W. A. Harriman gave $1 million and 10,000 acres of her family’s land to the Palisades Interstate Park Commission. State purchase of farm and forest land from scores of owners, often by eminent domain, has resulted in the present Bear Mountain Harriman State Park, which occupies about 12,500 of Tuxedo’s 30,700 acres. In 1956, the Harrimans sold their Sterling Mine and Railroad Company tract to City Investing Company (now Sterling Forest LLC), which, on its 8,000 acres in the Town of Tuxedo, began the developments of Maple Brook, Laurel Ridge, Clinton Woods, and various offices and research centers.

In 1952, the area known as Tuxedo Park became an incorporated village. Today it comprises 2,050 acres, of which 355 acres are three lakes, and about 340 housing units in 320 structures. Other newer housing developments include the Southfields Apartments built in 1971 on a former bed factory site, the Mountain View Apartments near the Sloatsburg line, and the Woodlands in Eagle Valley. Non-residential facilities include International Paper’s Research Center and the Tuxedo Ridge, formerly Sterling Forest Ski Area.

We want to thank the late Christian Sonne, Town Historian, for providing this summary.

Tuxedo Historical Society: Mission

We foster awareness of the community’s heritage by collecting, preserving and exhibiting materials and presenting programs that document life, past and present, in the Town of Tuxedo and its communities. Our goals are to find ways to stir up interest in the community, increase our membership and funding, and keep the community involved and informed.

The Tuxedo Historical Society is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization formed in 1982 and located in the former historic Tuxedo National Bank Building, Tuxedo Park, NY 10987.

Click here to visit The Tuxedo Historical Society website.