In 1886, a Cloistered Community in Upstate New York Gave Its Name to a New Kind of Dinner Jacket. One Hundred Twenty-five Years Later, the Tuxedo Has Withstood Time and the Whims of Fashion Much Like the Town That Put It on the Map.
Tuxedo Park is now 125 years old, the resort’s numerical age having finally caught up to its carefully antiqued design.
When construction began in late 1885, the 5,000-acre plot, about 40 miles northwest of New York City, was home to a shuttered ironworks and not much else. By the following spring, the frenzied labors of nearly 2,000 Italian and Slovak workmen had produced 18 miles of lamplit macadam road, a 100-foot swimming pool, stables, a fish hatchery, a sewage treatment plant, a telephone network, 15 cottages, and a four-story clubhouse, all of it ringed by an eight-foot-high barbed-wire fence, accessible only through a single gate that Bruce Price, the project’s architect, said looked “like a frontispiece to an English novel.” Per Price’s instructions, the cottages’ shingles were stained to appear aged; moss on the masonry was encouraged.
Source Town And Country Magazine December 12, 2012
