Tuxedo Park: The Gilded Age Enclave That Named a Suit

In eighteen eighty-five, Pierre Lorillard the Fourth, heir to the largest tobacco fortune in America, decided he wanted a private world. He bought seven thousand acres of lake and forest in Orange County, about thirty-eight miles northwest of Manhattan, and set eighteen hundred Italian laborers to work building it. In nine months they laid thirty miles of road, erected a clubhouse designed by architect Bruce Price, installed a gatehouse, a village, a trout hatchery, and dozens of cottages for Manhattan's richest families. The Tuxedo Club opened on June sixteenth, eighteen eighty-six.

The place Lorillard built was something new in American life: a fully planned, fully gated, private community whose entire purpose was the recreation of a particular class. J.P. Morgan summered here. The Astors came. Families whose names ran the New York social register arrived by private rail car at the Tuxedo station and passed through the gatehouse into a world designed to keep everyone else out.

And then Lorillard's son Griswold made a different kind of history. According to a popular story, at the club's autumn ball in eighteen eighty-six, he appeared in a short-tailed dinner coat, abandoning the long-tailed formal coat that etiquette required. The look caught on. Within years the tailless jacket was being called a tuxedo, after the community where it had debuted, and it has been standard formal wear for men ever since. A garment that now appears at proms and black-tie galas around the world owes its name to a private enclave that most of its wearers have never heard of.

Tuxedo Park remains a gated community today, its stone perimeter wall and original gatehouse still standing. The architecture within spans Gilded Age shingle-style cottages to later twentieth-century additions, and the community remains one of the most intact examples of the exclusive resort enclave that defined American wealth at the end of the nineteenth century.