Though not technically the largest, easily the most extraordinary of these big lumber estates is the Litchfield Park Corporation near Tupper Lake. Litchfield Park today is run by Edward S. Litchfield, a grandson of the man who built it. Mr. Litchfield, a brisk-moving man in his fifties with a peppery wit, sits in an office in New York’s financial district where he manages his family’s holdings, which range from lumber, maple sugar, and Christmas trees in the Adirondacks to New York real estate, a chemical company in New Jersey, and farm lands in Iowa. “Of course I’m peanuts compared with some of my neighbors,” he remarked cheerfully not long ago, pointing out that Litchfield Park consists of only fourteen thousand acres all told, compared with nearby estates ranging from forty thousand to vastly more. Still, the Park is large enough to contain three lakes, two ponds, fifteen miles of paved roads, three wardens’ cottages, many outbuildings, and a Main House that has become a legend.
“Hard to say,” Mr. Litchfield replies when asked how many rooms the house has—a question he is asked often. One source gives the house ninety-four; another count has come up with a hundred and sixteen. “Oh, I don’t think it’s that big, do you?” said Mr. Litchfield to a visitor. “They must be counting the walk-in closets. My grandfather, you see, traveled quite a bit in Europe. He became interested in castles and things.” The house was finished in 1913 and is in the French château style with two stout towers. Its stone was quarried on the property, and the walls range from three to six feet thick. There is a large art gallery reported to contain a “priceless” collection of paintings and sculpture. “Nonsense,” says Mr. Litchfield. “It’s all terribly bad stuff—everything my grandmother didn’t want in her New York house. She was never as fond of the place as Grandfather was. There’s some good armor, though,” There is a two-story, five-thousand-volume library of sporting and general interest books, “plus all the Henty books, Rider Haggard, Tom Swift, the Rover Boys—things nobody reads any more.” In the Great Hall, which is sixty-five feet long, thirty-five feet wide, and thirty feet high, there is, in addition to a marble fireplace from Stanford White’s New York house, a collection of one hundred and ninety-three mounted heads, including elephant, rhinoceros, giraffe, dik-dik, bear, and buffalo (Mr. Litchfield has added to his grandfather’s collection with some heads of his own) and, scattered about the house, “three or four hundred sets” of antlers. “What the place really is,” says Mr. Litchfield crisply, “is an anachronism of the first order.
“You have to understand this place as part of an era,” Mr. Litchfield says. “It was a magnificent Edwardian dream. Grandfather even looked Edwardian. There he is, over there,” pointing to a portrait of the late Edward Hubbard Litchfield, lawyer, financier, sportsman, with clear, coolly appraising eyes and a neatly pointed Van Dyke beard.
Like so many other Adirondack dreams, the elder Litchfield’s fell somewhat short of realization. Old Oquarah had to make his presence felt. Mr. Litchfield had placed some seventy-five hundred acres of his land behind an eight-foot wire fence, and released within the area many elk, boar, and moose imported from Wyoming. But falling trees crashed through his fences and poachers climbed them; animals escaped or were shot. Neighbors, overrun by wild boar, registered angry complaints. “On the whole,” says Litchfield, “the experiment was a failure.”
The older Litchfield also reintroduced beaver to the region and, says his grandson, “That experiment was almost too successful! But at least one of my neighbors seems to like them.” (Others objected to having their streams and lakes clogged with beaver dams.)
Mr. Litchfield smiles dryly whenever he is asked how much it costs to keep the old place up, and says, “Yes, I have a very good idea.” He prefers not to be reminded of the maintenance figure, which is a personal expense—not, in other words, drawn from lumber or Christmas tree profits. The house must be kept heated throughout the winter in order to preserve the paneling, furnishings, and marbles, and it has a coal-burning heating plant. “It’s an enormous problem getting supplies into the place,” he says. He smiles the same dry smile and adds, “And let us say that ‘some additional help’ is required to staff the house when it’s in use. But everybody in the family makes his own bed. Guests are expected to make their beds too.”
One reason why the Litchfield house has become such a legend is that few people in the vicinity have ever seen it. It stands five miles back from the main road at the end of its own fern-lined avenue and, though it is mentioned in local guide books, it is not open to the public. “We did open it to the public once, back in the twenties,” Litchfield says. “It was open every Thursday afternoon. But do you know what people did? There were two big stone dogs on either side of the front steps, and people chipped off the dogs’ toes for souvenirs!” Then antlers and small heads began to be missed, and the place was closed.
Why does Litchfield hold on to the bulky and hugely costly anachronism? He loves it. And he loves the mountains. “I also believe,” he says, “that people who inherit property have a duty, an obligation, to maintain it, and to maintain it properly, as it was intended to be maintained, for as long as they possibly can.”
* John (“Bet-a-Million”) Gates once bet Evander Berry Wall, a dude of the era, that he could not change his costume fifty times between breakfast and dinner at Saratoga. Gates won. Wall made it through only forty changes.
18
The Palmy Beaches (And the “Other” Miami)
Mountain lovers, loyal though they remain, face a discouraging fact: mountains have been steadily going out of fashion. Furthermore, for at least thirty years, summer resorts of all varieties have been declining. The summer vacation has become an increasingly middle-class preoccupation. Perhaps, just as the first Mrs. August Belmont made Thursday (“maid’s night out”) the fashionable night for the opera—“to show her superiority to household cares”—the rich now prefer to vacation in winter, thereby showing their superiority to the normal, seasonal cares of business. Practically coincidental with the languishing “Edwardian dream” of the Adirondacks began the ascendancy of an equally romantic dream: Florida.
The social history of Florida was largely the invention of a post-Civil War tycoon named Henry Morrison Flagler, whose fortune sprang—as did so many others of the era—from his profitable association with John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company. Flagler’s special enthusiasm, however, was building railroads and vast hotels. Just as the Main Line was a railroad-real estate venture, so was the somewhat larger state of Florida—a four-hundred-and-forty-seven-mile-long peninsula seldom more than two hundred miles wide and rarely more than six feet high, which extends as though a giant rolling pin had been applied to the southeast corner of the country, and Florida had been artfully pressed out from the continental pie.
Mr. Flagler was a man of few words, or rather of briefly worded commands. He started, in the 1880’s, pushing his Florida East Coast Railroad southward; from Jacksonville, Flagler’s order was “Go to Saint Augustine,” and there, in 1889, his railroad landed and, with it, the gigantic Ponce de Leon Hotel, the first of his chain. Overnight St. Augustine became a fashionable winter resort—the first, really, of its kind and, to many, the most fashionable of them all. The Ponce de Leon (locally pronounced Ponsideelion”) is a vaguely Moorish confection of minarets, domes, spires, and vaulting archways, filled with rococo sculpture, tapestries, carpets, chandeliers, stained glass, frescoed ceilings, marble fountains, staircases, and embossments, which sprawls over six acres of downtown St. Augustine, a grandiose reminder of a more naïve time. How it continues to stay in business is a mystery, for St. Augustine has long since lost any shred of its former chic. Each year, though, a small but diminishing band of the ancient faithful returns to the hotel and gathers to sit, in drafty elegance, in the huge public rooms.
Flagler continued to extend his railroad southward, establishing resorts and building towns as he went. He built an equally imposing caravansary at Ormond Beach, now equally passé—his Ormond hotel has becom
e a retired folks’ residence—then on to Daytona where, aided by the influx of such Flagler friends as William K. Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor, Daytona seemed about to outshine St. Augustine. From Daytona, he moved on to Titusville. Then, in 1890, at the age of sixty, Henry Flagler made a trip to a narrow sandspit consisting mostly of swampy jungle, known as Palm Beach. (A Spanish vessel, bound for Barcelona with a load of coconuts, had been wrecked offshore a dozen years earlier; its cargo had washed ashore and coconut palms had sprouted prettily from the sand.) Here Flagler had what must have amounted to a religious experience; he had a vision of his Ultimate Hotel.
Prior to Flagler’s arrival, the area around Palm Beach had gained a certain local reputation as a social resort. A narrow-gauge railroad made an eight-mile trip from the town of Jupiter, stopping at the towns of Mars, Venus, and Juno—just north of Palm Beach Shores—and was known, not surprisingly, as “The Celestial.” It was a gay little train in a Scarlett O’Hara mood, filled with ladies in flounces and crinolines on “dance days,” and it made impromptu stops along the line so that gentlemen could leave the train for hunting forays in the woods. Arriving in Juno, the engineer tooted out “Dixie” on his whistle and sometimes, when the spirit moved, little groups took off for picnics on the “Palm Beach,” while “The Celestial” waited for the spirit to move them to return.
Charming though all this might seem, it was the consensus in 1890 that Flagler had suffered a severe loss of business judgment when he announced plans to develop Palm Beach. But when word got around that Flagler was buying land at Palm Beach, the first Florida land boom was on. Jungle acreage which had been selling for a hundred dollars an acre skyrocketed to over a thousand. (Today, in defense of the boom, Palm Beachers point out that this same land now goes for as much as a hundred thousand dollars an acre.) In 1893, Flagler broke ground for the Royal Poinciana Hotel. When it was finished, nine months later, it had cost a million 1893 dollars, and was the largest hotel in the world. It had two eighteen-hole golf courses, tennis courts, motor boats, wheelchair carriages pedaled by Negroes (called “Afromobiles,” and invented by Flagler himself), bicycles, afternoon tea dances, and evening cake walks. At the opening of the hotel, it was remarked that Flagler would be remembered by Florida the way the entire world remembered Noah. The place had rooms for eight hundred guests at the beginning, but in the wake of its immediate success it was enlarged to house four hundred more; sixteen hundred people could be seated at a time in the dining room. From the air (which few could get to in those days) the acres of the hotel were arranged in the shape of a giant letter F, not for Florida but for you-know-whom.
Vanderbilts, Whitneys, and all sorts of foreign royalty abandoned the northern Florida resorts and descended upon Palm Beach. Mrs. Edward Stotesbury—teaching her husband “how to play,” as she put it, in Society—arrived to be the colony’s social leader. Today, though the Royal Poinciana is no more, Flagler’s second Palm Beach hotel, The Breakers (smaller than the Royal Poinciana but enormous by any other standard, and originally called, more modestly, the Palm Beach Inn) still stands, maintaining an exclusive guest policy, and is still very much a center of the resort’s life, though there are now such clubs as the Everglades which count, socially, for more. And Palm Beach itself remains the most durable of all Henry Flagler’s notions. Primly, at certain street corners, there stand receptacles for the deposit of old clothes. Periodically, the old-clothes collectors find ball gowns, tuxedoes, and outworn suits of tails, deposited there as offerings for the deserving poor.
Flagler had no sooner planted his large initial on Palm Beach, where everyone thought he would surely stop, when a severe frost blighted the area. From balmier Miami, a lady friend named Julia Tuttle coyly sent Flagler a bouquet of orange blossoms, by way of showing him how much better Miami had fared during the cold snap. This prompted another of Flagler’s terse orders: “Go to Miami.”
Once in Miami, Flagler said, “Go to Key West.” He built, at great expense, an elevated roadbed on pilings from Key to Key across the water. He had originally planned to build a solid causeway, but was stopped by a curious threat. The waters of the Gulf Stream move clockwise around the Gulf, gathering speed as they near the Florida Peninsula, and are forced rapidly between the Keys. There this water meets the northward-moving Antilles Current, and the Gulf Stream swings northward, then westward across the Atlantic. If, it was argued, Flagler dammed the Keys for his railroad, the Gulf Stream might be diverted southward, thereby considerably altering the climate of northern Europe. A European engineer was, in fact, dispatched to try to persuade Flagler to reconsider his plan and, faced with the awesome possible consequences, Flagler settled for his pilings. This project took seven years, and cost him fifty million dollars. In 1912, at eighty-two, Henry M. Flagler rode his train to Key West where, with characteristic simplicity, he said, “Now I can die happy. My dream is fulfilled.” Shortly thereafter, characteristically true to his word, he did die. The Miami-Key West Railroad operated until 1935 when the great Labor Day hurricane swept it away, and a whole train with it, and along the Keys more than four hundred lives were lost.*
Meanwhile, another millionaire railroad man, Henry Plant (who once asked Henry Flagler, “Where is this place you call Palm Beach?”), was laying tracks and building hotels along Florida’s West Coast. Plant was a less flamboyant personality, and his resorts—such as Clearwater—were less spectacular—cozy, homey, family-centered places. One exception was his Tampa Bay Hotel, headquarters of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, and currently the chief eyesore on the campus of the University of Tampa. While Flagler concentrated on luring celebrities and international Society to the Atlantic shores of Florida, Plant was satisfied with attracting quieter money to the Gulf. The difference between the two men’s visions is responsible for the most striking difference in atmosphere between the East Coast and the West. The East Coast is glossy and gay, while the West Coast remains relaxed and easygoing. The East Coast goes in for polo, squash racquets, and a bit of discreet gambling; the West Coast prefers fishing, golf, badminton, and bridge. Such glittering figures as Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post Close Hutton Davies May are polarized around Palm Beach, while less publicized Society women, such as Mrs. Joseph R. Swan, co-founder of the Junior League, have traditionally wintered at Boca Grande, on the West. As one West Coast woman, with an eastward wave of her hand, puts it, “We enjoy ourselves here without trying to be snazzy.” Palm Beach, says the West Coast, is for climbers, and “always was.” The West Coast also hints that in Palm Beach the alcohol consumption is particularly high, that marijuana, LSD, and other drugs have become commonplaces of Society life, and that such traditions as marital fidelity are now utterly ignored.
The two railroad men succeeded, in other words, in defining a familiar line of battle—which place was nicer, the Gold Coast or the Gulf Coast. The Gold Coast used to begin at Jupiter Island, and extend south to Miami. Now, the first signs of fashionability are encountered somewhat north of Jupiter, at the sleek little community of Vero Beach. Vero Beach likes to call itself “the little Palm Beach,” and to hint that its smallness is to its distinct advantage. On the opposite coast, however, the little town of Naples scoffs at Vero Beach’s claims. True, much of Naples’s winter money comes from fortunes made in such Middle Western cities as Cleveland and Louisville, but a number of Easterners—who always help things socially—have built houses there too. Along Gordon Drive is “Millionaires’ Row,” proudly pointed out to all visitors. “Very few people know about Naples,” says a Connecticut woman who spends her winters there. She echoes a popular, and increasingly erroneous, Naples belief. Many, many people know about Naples now, and motels are springing up all around it, and the town is becoming increasingly tourist-oriented as, indeed, the whole Gulf Coast from Cedar Key south is becoming. Still, Naples considers itself exclusive in the strictest sense (no Jews, please) and, though Naples needs Negroes for house servants, up until quite recently Negroes we
re not permitted to own houses in the town. “They had to rent their houses,” one woman explains. “That way, we could control the class of colored people in Naples. Anyone who caused trouble could be evicted, you see.”
Back on the Gold Coast, meanwhile, roughly halfway between Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, glitters Boca Raton. Boca Raton was the brainchild of another spectacular Florida personality, Addison Mizner. Before going broke—as so many Florida developers before and after him have had a habit of doing—Mizner built the gigantic Boca Raton Hotel and Club which, like the town itself, has had a varied social history. It was first a hotel, then a private club, then a hotel again. Now its chief target is the convention trade. Several years ago the late Arthur Vining Davis—who came to Florida as recently as 1948, and whose Arvida Corporation became one of the most powerful forces in Southern Florida real estate—bought the hotel. Soon it was pulling out of its slump. Davis built the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club, now one of the most expensive residential clubs in the country. With additional financial infusions from men like J. Myer Schine and his son, G. David Schine, the former McCarthy lieutenant who operates Schine hotels in Miami Beach, Boca Raton’s fortunes are definitely on the upswing. Schine interests are building high-priced houses in the area and, though Old Guard Society tends to think of Boca Raton as “ruined”—and with Miami Beach money, of all things—those who are building and moving into costly houses there are laughing fondly at this attitude.
The Right People Page 28
