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—ä 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 here.