It was an era so accustomed to lavish and imperturbable entertaining that once, in a mix-up of social invitations among the Browns (there were several millionaire Browns in Westchester, and it was hard to keep them straight), Mr. and Mrs. Frank A. Vanderlip (he was President of the National City Bank) who had been invited to dinner at the Franklin Q. Browns’ in Dobbs Ferry, arrived instead, in full fig, at the Walston H. Browns’ or perhaps—as survivors of the date admit—it was the other way around. In any case, the Browns who were expecting the Vanderlips waited fearing accident or, worse, a snub, while the Browns who were not expecting the Vanderlips, and who were enjoying a quiet evening by the fire, were unfazed by the arrival, promptly at seven, of their elegantly attired and unexpected guests. Murmuring politely that dinner would be en famille, Mrs. Brown, perfect hostess to the last, led the Vanderlips into her dining room where they were served, faultlessly, a six-course dinner with four wines. After the Vanderlips had left, Mrs. Brown still did not understand what had happened. “I must have invited them and forgotten about it,” she remarked to her husband.
Today, everyone in Westchester insists, there is no longer such a thing as “Westchester County Society.” Instead, each community in the county is considered to have its own. But it is not really quite so simple. On the map, Westchester looks like a fat Christmas stocking cinched tight at the ankle. The cinch divides the county horizontally into two sections—northern Westchester and southern Westchester—and there is a social division between the two halves as well. But within these two halves, social dividing lines have tended to run vertically, almost as though they followed the spiny ridges that extend through the county from north to south, and the rivers that flow between the ridges, and the main north-south highways, and, of course, the tracks of the railroad commuter lines. Though it is less true today than it was a generation ago, a Larchmont couple is still more likely to go to parties in Rye, to the north, or in New Rochelle, to the south, than to venture westward to Irvington. A Tarrytown boy is more apt to marry a Dobbs Ferry girl, on his same vertical axis, than one from over the hills in Harrison.* There is always talk about which side of the county is “nicer”—the east or the west. “Of course the real start of things was over here,” a third-generation Ardsley resident insists. “All that, over there, came much later.” Ardsley is on the west, or River side. “Oh, but the families over here are much more thoroughly grounded,” insists a Rye resident, on the Sound side. “Those River people, you know, are all rather nouveau.”
If there is any actual social difference between the two sides of the county, it is that the River side has seemed to attract bigger, flashier “names”—Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Duke, Biddle, Gould, and the like. “But,” says a Rye woman, “don’t forget that the Rockefellers were nouveau when they came here.” And Roger Sherman, also of Rye—a many times direct descendant of the Declaration of Independence signer—once said, “We never chose to mix much with the Vanderbilts. We all considered the old Commodore nothing but an ex-ferryboat captain. I met the Vanderbilt boys at dancing classes, but that was the extent of it.” Such families as the Shermans and the Wainwrights, on the Sound side, were perhaps less colorful, but more august, than their rivals on the River. (The Wainwrights produced noted Army officers, including General Jonathan M. Wainwright.) But through all the controversy—and confusing it somewhat more—runs the assertion that, eastern and western Westchester regardless, northern Westchester is nicer than southern Westchester—on the theory that the farther one lives from New York City the richer one must be.
Wealth continues to be apparent in Westchester, where building lots—considerably smaller than the seven-hundred-acre tracts of the old estate builders—can, depending upon location, cost as much as half a million dollars each. Money nowadays, however, is not so much spent upon gigantic houses as it is on landscaping and interior decorating. A collection of good paintings carries more weight, socially, than a private squash court, and an electronic kitchen and air-conditioned garage (“So much better for the car,” one resident insists) can mean more than a ninety-foot banquet hall. To be sure, the more city a man builds into his “country place,” the less “country” it becomes, and, in Westchester, nature has been systematically subdued, rearranged, clipped, manicured and, in many cases, forced to do an about-face. Brooks have been made to reverse their courses, mountain laurel and dogwood have been coaxed to yield outsize blooms, and boxwoods have been japanned with plastic sprays to give their leaves a hard green gloss.
A number of Westchester residents have radiantly heated driveways to melt the winter snow. A woman in Ardsley has installed a specially built vacuum cleaner to dust her shrubbery. A house at the edge of the Sound has an ingenious watering system designed to launder the grass; salt spray from the Sound was being unkind to the lawn. A special filtering device removes the salty taste from the swimming pool water. James Russell Ashley of Scarsdale built, in his backyard, not only an outsize swimming pool with a sandy beach at one end, but a brook and waterfall, and what Mr. Ashley christened “an underground cave above ground” in which to have parties. At night, concealed floodlights simulate moonlight. Nor does the era of great estate building appear to be completely over. Only a few years ago, the Edgar Bronfmans—he is the son of the liquor potentate—built a sprawling, handsome Georgian house that might have been lifted right out of the last century, and surrounded it with all the traditional estate trimmings, including pool, pool house, tennis court, and—to be up-to-date—had the whole house air-conditioned.
For the last twenty-five years, Westchester Society has been polarized around the institution of the country club and, as this has happened, many of the old Sound/ River dividing lines have become blurred. Riverside families now journey across the county to the Sound in order to sail at the American Yacht Club in Rye which, in the opinion of its members, is “the most fashionable club in America.” Members of the Apawamis Club, on the Sound side also, come from both sides of the county, too, and think that it is the most fashionable club in America. (“The Apawamis used to be nice,” one Yacht Club member says, “when it used to be all bankers and lawyers. Now they’ve started taking in a lot of advertising people. I’m very fond of advertising people. But most of them are Irish, you know.”)
Another club that “used to be nice” is the Coveleigh Club in Rye. Now, for mysterious reasons, it is not considered so. “They started taking in so many Australians,” one woman explained not long ago.*
The Ardsley Club, on the River, was established with but a single thought in mind. It was to be the be-all and end-all of clubs. Founded in 1896, eight years after the first appearance of golf on the social scene in the United States, it had on its founding board of governors John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Chauncey M. Depew. Many Sound people feel the Ardsley Club never quite came off, but others insist it did and travel cross-county to play golf there today.
There is also a large and wealthy Jewish population in Westchester which many people feel composes a Society of its own. “They live in a different world,” one Westchesterite says. “They isolate and ghetto-ize themselves by their sheer wealth.” But it is not that simple, though there are large communities—such as the Green Haven community between Rye and Mamaroneck, and a large portion of the town of Harrison—which are Jewish almost to the point of excluding, or at least appearing to exclude, non-Jews. “It started with clubs that excluded Jews,” says a prominent Westchester Jewess. “Naturally, the answer was Jewish clubs. Until recently, a Jew couldn’t set foot on the Apawamis Club golf course, and Jewish sailors—even when they were competing in races at the American Yacht Club—weren’t allowed inside the clubhouse, not even if they won! So, at our club, the Century, we’ve been just as exclusive in return. It’s a vicious circle.”
But it is not even that simple. At the Century Country Club, certainly the elite Jewish club in Westchester, it is rather apparent that the membership consists of German Jews and, furthe
rmore, of the German-Jewish families from the Wall Street investment-banking community “plus,” as one Century member says, “a few token Gimbels from retailing.” Jews from “Eastern Europe”—meaning Russian and Polish Jews—find the walls of the Century very difficult to scale. The Sunningdale Country Club, meanwhile, in Scarsdale, is called “The club for Jews waiting to get into the Century.” And still another Jewish club, the Old Oaks Country Club, is “The club for Jews waiting to get into Sunningdale.” In view of the complexity of this situation, it is easy to see why most people in Westchester feel it is unlikely to change.
An old bit of doggerel runs:
Here’s to Westchester County,
Society’s uppermost shelf,
Where Scarsdale speaks only to Bronxville,
And Bronxville just talks to itself.
Poor Scarsdale. It is the butt of all the Westchester jokes. “It’s an unpretentious little scent,” said a cartoon saleslady at a perfume counter in an old New Yorker cartoon, “called ‘Evening in Scarsdale.’” No one knows why Scarsdale has come to stand for all that is banal in Westchester. Perhaps it is because Scarsdale’s appearance is possibly the most clipped and manicured of all the county’s towns. The edges of walks and driveways in Scarsdale are pared with almost knifelike precision; it is another of those towns in which there appear to be no poor people, where affluence beams from every Tudoresque facade. Or perhaps it is because, like many Westchester towns—Pleasantville, Briarcliff Manor, Hawthorne, Hastings-on-Hudson—the name “Scarsdale” has a starched and stuffy ring to it, a sound of phony-English elegance like an olde tea shoppe. But for all the fun-poking, Scarsdale is an interesting community because it contains both large Jewish and non-Jewish elements, and the two groups live in singular civic accord. Scarsdalers, accustomed to snickers from outsiders when they mention the name of their town, take it all in good grace, and even with a sense of humor of their own. “I live in Scarsdale, the cliché suburb,” says one woman with a smile. “But, like all clichés, it’s familiar and it’s useful and it’s comfortable.”
Bronxville is something else again. Bronxville is an extraordinary place. Its location is not auspicious—tucked in the southern toe of the county, almost equidistant from the two bodies of water, just a few short miles from the teeming tenements of the Bronx. Yet there it is, an insulated, isolated pocket of wealth. One feels Bronxville should have a high wall around it and, in a sense, it does. The town has many admirers, in addition to the people who live there and who wouldn’t live anywhere else, and among them are such hard-to-please critics of city planning as Lewis Mumford. An English city planner, visiting Bronxville not long ago, said, “Here is the answer to suburban planning.” Bronxville streets are narrow and winding curling picturesquely among the hills past large, impressive houses. As a result, unnecessary traffic is discouraged, and speeding is virtually impossible.
The man responsible for this felicitous layout—indeed for the whole town—was also an extraordinary figure, the late William Van Duzer Lawrence. Lawrence moved to New York from Canada after making an immense fortune with two pharmaceutical products, and, according to one member of the family, “When the taxes on his house on Fifth Avenue got to be $36,000 a year, he decided to move to the country.” The spot he chose was the sleepy, bosky hamlet of Bronxville, and the taxes on the house he built there would now be well in excess of $36,000 a year if it were still used as a residence. The Lawrence estate is now a part of Sarah Lawrence College which he gave in memory of his wife after her death in 1926.
Beginning with roughly a hundred acres (before he had finished he had added another three hundred), Mr. Lawrence decided to build a town. When his contractor asked him where to put the streets, Lawrence looked at the cow paths meandering up and down the hills and said, “Why not make the streets follow the cow paths?” And so, following the rules of bovine common sense, there the streets are for Mr. Mumford to admire.
Though not personally involved in the world of art and letters, Lawrence was swept by its romance. He decided to populate his town with “creative” folk—poets, sculptors, and writers. He selected many of the artists personally. He did not get talents of the first magnitude—perhaps because successful artists were perfectly happy where they were and saw no reason for moving to Bronxville—but he did get a number of people who were, more or less, figures of the day. He got, for example, a romantic poet named Edmund Clarence Stedman; artists Otto Barker, Will H. Low, Edward Smedley, and William Howe (beloved for his rural scenes); and Violet Oakley, whose murals decorate the state capitol building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
He built houses to order for each of these people, and charged them minimal rents—which they must have appreciated—since it was his stated notion to “create a congenial community of talented people.” Many of the houses Lawrence built must certainly have been far beyond the average struggling artist’s wildest dreams. (Perhaps this is why so few of them are occupied by creative people today.) Lawrence was a successful businessman, and he built houses for successful businessmen, though each artist’s mansion had a token concession to art—a top-floor studio with an enormous skylight facing north. The more he built, the more elaborate his houses became, and we begin to sense a man fulfilling an ancient dream of childhood to cover an entire beach with towering castles, with moats and avenues and causeways running between. Most of his great playthings, furthermore, are still standing.
“He did it mostly as a hobby,” his son, Dudley Lawrence, said not long ago. “But,” the younger Lawrence added with a little smile, “my father was not a man who felt a thing was worth doing unless, in the long run, it would be financially successful.”
In the long run, it was financially successful, to say the least. Today, Lawrence Properties, Inc., owns, leases, or otherwise controls a large portion of Bronxville real estate. Though the Lawrences have generally avoided involvement in local politics, the family’s interest in the town has been steadfast. The Lawrence hand has been firmly businesslike (for a while, all persons leasing apartments in Lawrence-owned buildings were required to buy stock in the Lawrence corporation as insurance against failure to pay rent), and the family’s influence has been benign. Good causes—from Boy Scouts to unwed mothers—have received their bountiful support. In addition to giving Sarah Lawrence College, the family has performed such largescale civic deeds as the establishment of Lawrence Hospital, which William Van Duzer Lawrence built and endowed at a cost of half a million dollars in 1906.
Today, Mr. Lawrence’s granddaughter, Mrs. Donald K. Clifford, a slender woman with silver hair, lives in a hilltop house overlooking the town her grandfather built. Two other Lawrence granddaughters—Mrs. Charles Sperry Andrews and Mrs. R. Ridgely Lytle—live nearby. Mrs. Clifford’s house is new, built on the foundation of an older, much larger house that was her grandfather’s wedding present to her parents in 1898 and which burned just a few years ago. Though Mrs. Clifford is devoted to Bronxville, she has some reservations about the village and its Society that are unusual for a woman of her position. (For instance, when she married “out” of the Social Register, she insisted that her own name be removed from the little book.) She is distressed by suggestions that Bronxville is snobbish and “stuffy.” “I have always found the people here very serious-minded,” she says, “and much more dedicated to community activities and civic work than to social life and gaiety.”
Bronxville was for a long time one of those Westchester communities in which—by vague “common consent,” and impalpable “gentlemen’s agreements”—racial and religious restrictions prevailed in the sale or rental of houses and apartments. Prospective buyers in Bronxville were assured that “the one Jew in town,” a retailer, “goes home to Yonkers at night.” Though the restrictions no longer technically exist, Bronxville continues to have a reputation for “not welcoming” Jews and Negroes—a reputation which disturbs many Bronxville people, including Mrs. Clifford. “How could a whole town of seven thousand people be gu
ilty of prejudice?” one woman asks.
Another unanswered question is how much, or how little, has Lawrence Properties, Inc., the largest real estate concern in town, had to do with this?
There are some who feel that Mr. Lawrence’s town, his multi-million-dollar toy, has become “a bit of an anachronism.” “It’s a queer little island here,” one woman says. “A mile-square residential area isolated right in the center of one of the most thickly populated parts of the county. I sometimes feel the world outside is not beating on our doors to get into Bronxville, the way we used to feel—but is simply passing us by.”
Bronxville seems particularly anachronistic in its ways and outlook when one remembers that it is a suburb of New York City, a metropolis where Jews have provided such a rich and heady infusion to both civic and social life. Louis Auchincloss has spoken of “the curious deadness and dryness that sets into any group” in New York the moment Jews are excluded from it. Some of that deadness and dryness is perceptible in Bronxville.
Bronxville seems inappropriate to Westchester County. In other parts of the country, on the other hand, the “Bronxvilles” of America are at home, and even commonplace.
* Today, the village of Pocantico Hills and the name Rockefeller are synonymous in Westchester. The family estate contains, in addition to the homes of Laurance, David, Nelson, and John D. III, a two-hundred-acre farm in full production, and the Rockefellers are considered the largest individual landholders in the county.
* In 1929, Tobey, a flagrant mongrel whose appearance was as unprepossessing as his mistresses’, made national headlines as “the world’s most expensively maintained dog.” The Union Club had offered the Wendel sisters $5,000,000 for their town house at 442 Fifth Avenue in order to build a new clubhouse. The sisters turned the offer down and, when asked why, explained that the house was not important to them, but the back garden was—as a run for Tobey. At the time it was rumored that the ladies kept a cow in the back garden too, but this has never been proved.
The Right People Page 16
