The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The people, meanwhile, who live in the “eleven little houses” and in hundreds of others like them are, of course, the newcomers—fresh from the city or perhaps, upwardly mobile, from a less fashionable suburb closer to New York. Their wives have not yet been asked to join one of the Twigs. They have not yet been invited to join the Apawamis Club, the Yacht Club, or the Manursing Island Club—the elite summer beach club—and have had, perhaps, to content themselves with membership in the Shenerock Shore Club. (Oddly, though the Mannys own it, they have never attempted to make it stylish and appear to regard it as mostly a business investment.) These people compose, as it were, a second Rye.

  There is also a third Rye, in an area near the center of town loosely referred to as Grapple Street. Grapple is a street of rundown houses where a number of black families—many of them domestics—live interspersed with some low-income Italians. Neither of the other two Ryes pays too much attention to “the Grapple Street gang,” as they are called, beyond assuming that the Grapple Street gang are troublemakers and that it is dangerous to go there at night.

  A fourth group in a community like Rye might be said to consist of the small fraternity of local merchants and retailers who supply goods and services to the wealthy commuter community beyond and who serve an economic—but hardly a social—need. In Rye, this group would include bookish Mr. Goddard Light, the proprietor of the Lighthouse Book Store, and Mrs. Mary Seymour, whose Seymour Electric Company sells everything from light bulbs to small appliances. Both are popular tradespeople. Both are prosperous, intelligent, educated, and well-traveled. Mrs. Seymour, for example, winters regularly in Florida. But socially, an enormous gap exists between the Rye merchants and their patrons. Mrs. Seymour’s customers call her “Mary”; she addresses a customer as “Mrs. Smith.” Perhaps because she knows too much about her customers’ bill-paying habits, she would never be invited to join one of the important country clubs or be asked into a Twig. Possibly for this reason, most Rye business people prefer not to live in Rye.

  The Rye public schools, meanwhile, have frequently been accused of being elitist—of extending their major teaching efforts to the sons and daughters of the country-club set, who are probably college-bound, and of ignoring the others, the Grapple Street gang in particular. (In casting The Sound of Music, the lead parts seemed to go to the children of “nice Rye families,” while the single black was in the chorus line.) Rye educators defend this on the basis of maintaining high scholastic standards, and boast that Rye High School prepares youngsters for college as well as any New England prep school.

  Rye Country Day School is elitist by design. As a private school, operating within walking distance of the public high school, it is another local symbol of the gulf that exists between the wealthy and the less well off in the community. There is almost no social intermingling between the students of Rye Country Day and the public school students. In the old days, when Rye Country Day girls wore uniforms and the boys wore RCDS blazers, the division was more noticeable and more bitter; there was marked animosity between the “rich snobs” at Country Day and the “poor slobs” at the public schools. Today, students of the two systems simply ignore each other. For many years, Rye Country Day offered education only in the primary grades, one through eight. After that, Country Day graduates generally departed for private boarding schools in New England. Several years ago, however, the then headmaster of Country Day, Gerald LaGrange, instituted a program to extend the school to the secondary level, turning it into a full-scale college preparatory school. This put Rye Country Day into direct competition with such redoubtable schools as Exeter and Andover in terms of preparing youngsters for Ivy League colleges. And this also meant that in order to attract students of Ivy League caliber, Rye Country Day had to look outside Rye. The school began recruiting students from all over Westchester and Fairfield counties.

  Today, students at Rye Country Day arrive by bus from as far away as Stamford and Tarrytown, and many of the Thunderbirds in the parking lot bear out-of-town and out-of-state license plates. Rye parents, including William Rockefeller, note sadly that Rye Country Day is no longer “indigenous to Rye.” This situation separates, isolates more dramatically than before, the Rye Country Day youngsters from the rest of the town.

  An even sharper distinction, socially, exists between the members of Rye’s country clubs and residents who have not been asked, or cannot afford, to join. Rye’s is a country club society. If one is not a member of one of the three fashionable clubs—the Apawamis, the American Yacht, and the Manursing Island (and many families belong to all three)—one is very much out of things. Everything of importance—including the children’s dancing classes and the summer day camps—is either club-sponsored or club-connected. For young people who are not members of the clubs, there is almost literally nothing to do. There is a public beach, but it is frequently closed because of pollution. There is an amusement park, but its admission, its parking fee, and its rides are expensive. There is no museum, no concert hall, no bowling alley, and no movie theater. The various churches have attempted programs for young people, but because church-connected endeavors inevitably become sectarian, they have not been outstandingly popular. Most teen-age mischief—the teen-agers say—results from sheer boredom.

  Several years ago, concerned about youthful drinking, vandalism, and so forth, the City of Rye asked the Rye High School pupils to draw up a list of things they would like the city to provide. A student committee was formed, and a list was diligently drawn up. Some of the requests were patently impractical (free marijuana provided by the city). Others (free public tennis courts) were sensible, but would have been expensive to provide. One (an area of city land set aside for drag racing) sounded both reasonable and cheap. At least one was pathetic: a suggestion that the public library be kept open for a few hours on Sundays so that young people, in school throughout the week, would have more time to use it. The city fathers took the students’ requests under advisement. Nothing was done.

  Of course, people of Mrs. Manny’s generation and social position find it hard to understand why so many of Rye’s young people are restless and getting into trouble these days. Her own two daughters grew up successfully in Rye and were never found in drunken stupors under hedges, nor has anything remotely like that happened to those of her grandchildren who are growing up in Rye right now. She can remember stories of how, years ago, the young sons of two of Rye’s oldest and proudest families—they were young Roger Sherman and his friend Stuyvesant Wainwright, Jr.—used to go out at night and rip up the trolley tracks that were being laid along Peck Avenue. But that wasn’t considered vandalism. That was just larking, and besides, it was done with a good deal of old-fashioned patriotic Rye spirit. “Everyone” was objecting to the trolley line’s being placed in such proximity to the old Apawamis golf course.

  Old Guard Rye tends to blame the winds that have ruffled Rye’s once peaceful waters on “all these new people”—that second world that has moved in and built eleven little houses where one huge one used to stand. As for the little girl with the vodka bottle, that episode, though shocking at the time, has pretty much vanished from people’s memories. More pressing concerns have taken its place, such as the recurring threat that an immense new highway bridge will be built between Oyster Bay, Long Island, and Rye, which, if it comes, will certainly alter Rye’s pretty shoreline and carry off, in its wake, a number of fine old houses. As one woman says of what happened that long-ago night during The Sound of Music, (and the woman is not Mrs. Manny, though Mrs. Manny might agree with her): “That family wasn’t a real Rye family. They were new people who came here from somewhere else. Before coming to Rye, they’d lived, I think … in an apartment, if I’m not mistaken.”

  14

  The Grandeur That Was

  It is likely that the American suburbs achieved the status for which they were intended sometime during the first decade of the twentieth century, long before the present era of suburban sprawl. In the
early 1900s, no one of consequence actually lived in the suburbs. They summered there, or spent weekends there. The suburbs were essentially composed of second homes for the American rich.

  From Detroit, the wealthy families who lived along Jefferson Avenue went out on private trolley cars to Grosse Pointe for weekends and holidays. It was considered a major trip. From Cleveland, families looked forward to a few carefree weeks away from home in faraway Shaker Heights. From San Francisco, trunks were packed regularly for train rides to “the Peninsula,” which was still synonymous with “the country”; and from Philadelphia, society journeyed westward to the resort hotels which the Pennsylvania Railroad had built along what it called the “Main Line of Internal Improvements of the State of Pennsylvania.”

  The fashionable New York suburbs—in Westchester and Fair-field counties, on the North Shore of Long Island, and in northern New Jersey—were similarly, in those days, resort communities, devoted purely to leisure. The popular way to get to Westchester from New York, for example, was by steam-driven yacht. Clearly, times have changed. But it is important to remember that though today some Westchesterites may speak of others as “nouveau,” in those days everyone was nouveau.

  Before the Civil War, Westchester County was simply farmland. In fact, before the railroads began opening up the grain fields of the Plains states and the West, Westchester County was the East’s granary, and its primary crops were wheat, oats, and corn. Then came the Civil War, and the great economic boom that followed it. This was the period—the 1870s and 1880s—when most American fortunes of any size or fame were made. Suddenly the rich of the burgeoning cities demanded second, country homes, and following the lead of the English gentry, it seemed necessary that these take the form of castles and manor houses, often complete with moats and private chapels.

  Just why the new New York rich singled out Westchester County and the North Shore of Long Island for their castle-building has never been clear. Westchester, for example, is not, in many people’s eyes, a place of singular scenic beauty. It has no mountains, nor is it rich in significant hills which command sweeping views. Its beaches are inferior, and there are no lakes of any impressive size. It has been argued that the best suburbs of most cities lie to the east of their parent towns, the theory being that commuters prefer to drive to work in the morning, and return at night, without having to face the rising or the descending sun. But Westchester is more to the north of New York than to the east, and besides, in the early 1900s, no one “commuted” to Westchester anyway. The most logical explanation is that as the railroads’ proliferation encouraged the development of agriculture in the Middle West and West, the farmers of Westchester County languished and declined, and it was possible for the rich to buy up large tracts of property cheaply.

  In any case, during the twenty years that followed the Civil War, Westchester County became castle poor. “The average size of a Westchester estate,” it was reported in the 1880s, “is sixty-five rooms, not including servants’ quarters. For staff, fourteen rooms are generally required.” By the 1890s, the rich being the competitive lot they are, sixty-five rooms seemed scarcely adequate and architectural excesses became commonplace. In Tarrytown, for instance, General Howard Carroll built Carrollcliff on top of one of Westchester’s few bona-fide hills. From it, on a clear day, General Carroll could view both the Hudson River and the Palisades beyond, plus a bit of the Manhattan skyline. (Today, Carrollcliff, which houses the offices of an investment banking company, has an unimpeded view of the Cross Westchester Expressway.) Carrollcliff was a line-by-line replica of a Rhine castle, and its baronial dining hall had a table that could seat eighty, which it often did, with a liveried footman behind every other chair. Several years ago, one of Carrollcliff’s linen tablecloths found its way to a local hospital, where it was cut up to provide sheets and pillowcases for twenty beds. An American flag flew from the top mast of Carrollcliff’s tallest tower. Its stars were the size of manhole covers and it weighed, when folded, forty pounds. Meanwhile, nearby, John D. Rockefeller was building Pocantico Hills, with a private police force, fire department, and post office. The bill for household servants there ran to thirty thousand dollars a year—in an era when a good maid could be got for two dollars a week.

  The castle-builders of Westchester did their best to harness nature and to bring the landscape to its knees, creating grottoes and vistas and artificial lakes, streams, and waterfalls. Not all these attempts were successful. When Benjamin Holliday built Ophir Farm in Purchase (which later became the summer home of publisher Whitelaw Reid), he wanted, as he put it, to surround his house with “a private prairie.” On his seven hundred and fifty acres Mr. Holliday placed a large herd of elk and an even larger herd of buffalo. But the elk jumped his fences and the buffalo broke them down, and the neighbors, understandably, complained. A similar neighbor problem presented itself to the first owner of Belvedere in Tarrytown, which later became the home of liquor magnate Samuel Bronfman. When a vast underground sprinkler system to water the lawns of Belvedere was turned on, it reduced the water pressure of the entire surrounding area to zero. A compromise was reached, and the owner of Belvedere agreed not to turn on his sprinklers during morning hours when gentlemen on neighboring estates might be shaving.

  Hard by Belvedere, Jay Gould built Lyndhurst, a huge replica of a French château surrounded by seven hundred acres of lawns, gardens, greenhouses, stables, and other outbuildings. On Gould’s death, the estate passed to his daughter Helen, who was by then Mrs. Finlay Shepard, and who continued to maintain the place on a lavish scale. Mrs. Shepard not only added a colonnaded swimming pool, but hired her own private lifeguard as well. Lyndhurst became the headquarters for what Mrs. Shepard called her “pet charities,” which included a “crusade against Mormonism” and an attempt to halt Mohammedanism by having hundreds of thousands of Holy Bibles printed and distributed throughout the Middle East. As far as her household was concerned, on the other hand, rigid economy was the watchword. Her four children—all of whom she had adopted at once when she was in her late forties—received only fifty cents spending money apiece per month. Of this, five cents a week was to go into the Sunday school collection plate, and another five cents was for the church collection. This left each child with exactly a dime a month to do with as he pleased.

  When Mrs. Shepard died, without having stamped out either the Mormons or the Mohammedans, Lyndhurst passed to a second Gould daughter, Anna, who had married, first, Count Paul Ernest Boniface de Castellane, and, second, “Boni” de Castellane’s first cousin the Due de Talleyrand-Perigord. The Duchesse de Talleyrand was, if anything, more eccentric than her sister. As though Lyndhurst were not large enough, the duchesse began buying up parcels of adjoining property as they became available, so that eventually Lyndhurst consisted of dozens of houses. Once she had bought them, however, the Duchesse de Talleyrand seemed to lose interest, and left them, empty and unmaintained, to fall into ruin and disrepair, much to the displeasure of her neighbors. But when they tried to approach her on the subject, they inevitably found themselves stopped at the gate by armed guards. Letters to the duchesse went unanswered, the telephone calls were not returned. For several years, it was a matter of local speculation as to whether the mistress of Lyndhurst was really there, or whether she had actually died within the walls of her fortress. The servants, it was whispered, had stashed the duchesse’s earthly remains in the walk-in refrigerator in order that their wages would continue to be paid by the banks and lawyers who handled such mundane matters. Then, at last, the duchesse officially died. For a while, it looked as though Lyndhurst would surely be broken up and the house would go under the wrecker’s ball. But a foundation came forward to save the estate, and today it operates as a museum and can be visited by the public for a fee. It is almost unique in that it is one of the few of the Westchester mansions, built to last for untold generations, that still remains intact. The Lyndhurst Foundation adds to the revenues it needs to pay for the considerable expe
nse of upkeep by renting the house to motion picture producers, who find it a useful setting for horror movies.

  Dr. Charles Brace, who made millions in patent medicines in the days when there were no income taxes, was another who built a house “to last a thousand years,” in nearby Irvington-on-Hudson. His daughter, Mrs. Harold Scott, who lived to be a very old lady, used to like to reminisce about the great house and the way things were in that long-ago perfumed age. “Oh, those were days like none that will ever come again,” she used to say. “The house was built of Westchester granite that was quarried right on the property. Father was so proud of that house—it’s gone now, of course. At Father’s house, dinner was at seven. And that meant not two minutes after seven, but seven. If you were early, you waited outside the door until the clockstroke. The gentlemen wore white tie, and the ladies long gowns. The ladies took their wraps to the downstairs cloakroom, and the gentlemen took theirs upstairs. In the gentlemen’s cloakroom, white envelopes were arranged on a silver tray, with a gentleman’s name on each envelope. Inside was a card with a lady’s name on it—the lady he was to take in to dinner. That way, you see, a lady never knew which gentleman would escort her, which made it exciting, and the gentlemen were careful not to spend too much time during cocktails with the ladies they were escorting. When the ladies and gentlemen gathered downstairs, there were cocktails, but none of this “What’ll you have to drink?’ business. Father liked a Jack Rose cocktail, and so that was what was served. The butler came in with the tray—one Jack Rose for each guest. He was followed by the parlormaid with a tray of canapés—one apiece. No one would dream of asking for a second canapé, much less a second drink!