Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone - Golf in the Gilded Age

American golf had its birth in the Gilded Age (1870s-1890s), and by the close of the 19th century the United States had more golf courses than Britain. This start is inextricably intertwined with the dominant Tycoons of the day, and this in turn entangles the foundation of golf in America with the expansion of their railroads and their associated Grand Hotels in exclusive resort locations.

From 1900 to the advent of WWII, golf in America added sinew and muscle on this underlying frame to make the Resort golf experience truly spectacular and widely accessible outside the echelons of elite society. The enduring legacy has been that the popularization of golf in America is indelibly stamped with the watermark of excellence set by these fabulous early Resorts.

RAILROADS & RESORT HOTELS

A. Growth of Railroads 1850-1890

Depew, Chauncey M. (ed.). One Hundred Years of American Commerce 1795-1895, p.111.

In 1869, the symbolically important trans-continental railroad was completed in the United States with the driving of a golden spike.

Catching an early train / Thomas A. Edison, Inc.

SUMMARY From Edison films catalog: Surburbanite [sic] is seen in bed chamber, discovers he has overslept himself, jumps out of bed, shirt, trousers, shoes, collar, tie, coat, vest, hat, cane, cigar and satchel arise from the floor and adjust themselves to him. Makes a hasty exit. Scene dissolves to a R.R. Station, showing surburbanite running to catch the rear end of a moving train. Class B 50 ft. $6.00. NOTES Copyright: Thomas A. Edison; 9Nov1901; H10604. Duration: 0:36 at 16 fps.

B. Vanderbilt's New York Central Railroad

C. Long Island: Hamptons and the LIRR

Long Island Rail Road History

LIRR Map 1882

1931

Commuter's Pass, 100 rides, 1868

The original plan was not as a local service to serve Long Island, but rather a quicker route from Boston to New York. Trains would run from Boston to Stonington, Connecticut, where the passengers would cross by ferry to Long Island. They would then ride on the LIRR to Fulton Street in Brooklyn, and finally cross by ferry to New York. The reason for this rather complicated plan was the impossibility, at the time, of building a railroad through southern Connecticut.

The LIRR thus built its original tracks running straight down the middle of the island, which was largely uninhabited at the time, rather than serving the existing Long Island communities. This route was chosen as the most direct way to travel to New York.

Schedule for the first day of revenue operation, July 29, 1844The Island-long route was completed in 1844 and at first was highly successful. However, in 1849 the New York and New Haven Railroad opened through the 'impassable' country of southern Connecticut, and a direct overland route from New York to Boston now existed. The LIRR's reason for existence was gone.

The only remaining business was to serve Long Island itself, something the railroad was not built to do. Efforts were made to build branches to the small Long Island communities. In 1850 only one such branch existed, but more were built, as well as a number of other railroad companies' branches.

In 1860, the City of Brooklyn banned the use of steam engines in populated areas. The Long Island Rail Road reduced service to Brooklyn, eliminating the track between the current Flatbush Avenue terminal and the then Fulton Street terminal. Service between Jamaica Station and Flatbush Avenue was by horse drawn cars. The Long Island Rail Road built the route from Jamaica Station via Woodside Station to the Long Island City terminal where ferry connections to Manhattan could be made. This route was entirely within Queens County, and avoided the Brooklyn law. Since that time, the routes to Brooklyn have always been considered secondary.

The combination of the loss of the New York to Boston traffic and all the competing railroads made for harsh financial times for both the LIRR and the newer roads. In 1876, the LIRR was bought out by the owner of one of the competing roads, but the Long Island Rail Road name was used for the merged company. Even consolidation could not prevent another receivership in 1879, however.

The road was purchased by Austin Corbin in 1880 and further building took place. By 1900, the LIRR had reached the limits of its expansion. During this period the road was profitable.

In 1901 the Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the Long Island Rail Road and went about an extensive program of improvements. The PRR had long desired a terminal on Manhattan Island itself, instead of in Jersey City. The PRR built a grand station, Pennsylvania Station, with tracks oriented approximately east-west, and dug two sets of tunnels, one under the Hudson River to connect the new station with the Pennsylvania Railroad network, and another set under the East River to connect with the Long Island Rail Road.

Due to a fatal accident caused by decreased visibility from smoke and steam in the tunnels near Grand Central Terminal, New York City passed laws in 1910 forbidding the operation of steam-powered trains within city limits. Thus, an ambitious program of electrification was initiated, culminating in a large portion of the LIRR's network being electrified via a third rail direct current system. This electrification is still in use today.

After the Second World War, the LIRR became an increasing financial burden on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and eventually became bankrupt. It was purchased by the State of New York and is now a subsidiary of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

Austin Corbin, LIRR President 1881-1896, and the Development of LI Resort Hotels

After the war, Corbin, now married, decided to come back east and open a small private bank, moving his family to a house in Brooklyn Heights. But he discovered a completely new enterprise after his son, Austin Jr., took ill and Corbin brought his family to the Brooklyn seaside to help him recuperate. Where others saw a barren beach, Corbin saw a new business opportunity: a grand resort only 10 miles from Manhattan. In the next two years, he solicited investors and patiently acquired nearly two miles of beachfront property that he would call Manhattan Beach. And that's how Corbin discovered railroads. He needed a way to get people to the hotels he was planning. Corbin's first venture was to create the New York and Manhattan Beach Railway, purchasing leftover cars and engines from the 1876 Centennial Exposition of Philadelphia and building a railroad from Bay Ridge to his fledgling beach resort. On July 19, 1877, the 350-room Manhattan Beach Hotel opened on 600 acres of pristine property. Three years later, in 1880, Corbin opened a second, even more opulent resort, The Oriental. Two years later, he would build another mammoth hotel, the Argyle, in Babylon.

Meanwhile, Corbin was making money. A year after taking over the railroad, he bought his lavish estate in Babylon as a weekend and summer house. (His main residence was a $300,000 mansion on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.) But if he had a personal taste for luxury, it was perhaps most evident in the two extravagant private railroad cars the railroad owned. The Manhattan arrived in 1885, followed by the Oriental in 1890. In 1885, the Hempstead Inquirer offered a de scription of Corbin's so-called palace on wheels, built in Wilmington, Del., by one of the premier railroad coach builders of the era, the Jackson and Sharp Co. It's a far cry from anything in service these days: ``The platforms are enclosed by railings and gates with silver-plated hand rails. The interior . . . made of Mexican mahogany . . . old brass is used in all metal trimmings, except the wash room, where they are silver plate. The floors are covered with fine Wilton carpets and the windows have India silk curtains.'' Historian Seyfried recounts how Corbin once boarded a Brooklyn-bound train and spied two young men with their baggage and feet propped on an overturned seat. He immediately chastised them, and then found a brakeman, who came over, fixed the seats and took one of the young men's passes. One of the two said to the brakeman, ``You'd think he owned the railroad,'' and the reply came, ``He does.''

Steven (Talkhouse) Pharoahca. 1876 - Algonquian, Montauk Bay LI - he opposed the land-grabbing development of the railroaders in court action.

The Architect of Desire

Stanford White, designer of elegant Long Island houses for the Gilded Age

By Rhoda Amon | Staff Writer

Stanford White, one of America's most famous architects, married into Long Island history -- though he was less than an ideal husband.

In 1884, White, who designed some of the most opulent structures on Long Island, wed Bessie Smith, a descendant of Smithtown founder Richard (Bull) Smith. Twenty-two years later, still married, White was shot to death on the roof of Madison Square Garden by the jealous husband of his former lover, a teenaged showgirl.

With his untimely end in stark contrast to his ebullient lifestyle and rich architectural legacy, White is summed up by his great-grandaughter as a gifted, complex and, ultimately, tragic figure. ``He didn't want to hurt anyone,'' said writer Suzannah Lessard. ``At the same time he had a destructive side, an inability to not do what he did.'' Her 1996 book, ``The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Terror in the Stanford White Family,'' chronicles the generations of descendants who continue to live in and near Box Hill, the Saint James house Stanford and his wife bought as a summer home in 1886.They also had a home in New York City, where he was born in 1853.

During his heyday, White designed about 40 luminous Long Island structures, including the old Garden City Hotel and the Harbor Hill mansion in Roslyn, and set a standard for beauty and opulence for generations of architects. In the late 1880s, White became the darling of the nouveaux riches, who discovered Long Island as a fox-hunting, polo-playing, yacht-sailing haven.

``They wanted to live like the nobility of Europe, with huge estates secluded behind gates,'' said Lessard. White cultivated them, partied with them and fulfilled their wishes by creating baronial ``cottages'' for them. (White himself never became rich; during his last years he was deep in debt.)

Yet with his passion for beauty and elegant interiors, he epitomized the Gilded Age, which would start to fall apart after World War I. That age, with its large houses set back on great gated estates, ironically, set the stage for Long Island's ``suburban sprawl,'' Lessard said. Instead of developing a system of clustered villages, Long Island grew sprawling developments of homes surrounded by as much private property as possible.

One of White's first efforts on Long Island was a Montauk Point enclave of shingled houses with wide porches. The East End had not yet emerged as a chic destination when, in 1882, eight wealthy sportsmen approached White's New York City firm, McKim, Mead & White, to create a hunting and fishing colony on a bluff at the easternmost tip of Long Island.

The Montauk houses were among the earliest of the Shingle Style summer places of 10 to 30 rooms, popular in the late 1800s. The firm built seven cottages and a clubhouse, and the owners were determined to keep it exclusive. One owner, corporate lawyer Harrison Tweed, would clear the area of intruders by strolling naked on the beach. Now, only five cottages remain, all listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Tragically, two of White's most trend-setting creations have been lost. ``If you were to list the 10 greatest losses to Long Island in the 20th Century, you would include the old Garden City Hotel and Harbor Hill in Roslyn,'' said Robert B. MacKay, director of the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities.

White redesigned the 1871 Garden City Hotel, making it U-shaped with parallel wings. Reopened in 1895, the hotel was gutted by fire four years later. Undeterred, White directed the rebuilding, making it larger and grander with a vertical tower adapted from Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It became the center of Island society, frequented by Vanderbilts, Morgans, Astors. The hotel slid into decline and was demolished in the 1970s.

It would take White five years to complete Harbor Hill, the huge stone French ch‰teau he built on 600 acres in Roslyn Harbor for silver mining heir Clarence Mackay. Until then, the resort homes of the late 1800s were built Shingle Style on a smaller scale.

``After Harbor Hill, architects began tearing down houses, or building masonry envelopes around them,'' said Robert MacKay, co-author of ``Long Island Country Houses and their Architects, 1860-1940,'' published in 1997. ``From then until 1914, really large mansions were built in the European style.''

To furnish the ch‰teau, White scoured Europe for treasures, bringing back shiploads of tapestries, paintings and medieval armor for Mackay's world-class armor collection. The Mackays entertained in their showplace, climaxed by a glittering party with 1,200 guests in 1924 for the prince of Wales (briefly Edward VIII and later the duke of Windsor), who reportedly said, ``I am impressed with the grand scale of hospitality on Long Island.'' Unfortunately, the mansion was demolished in 1947. All that's left is an elegant gateway on Roslyn Road, now the entrance to a swim club.

What is still intact, however, is White's last project, the 1906 Trinity Episcopal Church on Northern Boulevard in Roslyn, commissioned by Katherine Duer Mackay, and modeled after medieval English parish churches. White's work also can be seen in the Shingle Style Shinnecock Hills Golf Clubhouse, the first golf clubhouse in America.

The game was so little known in the United States at that time that a businessman bringing golf clubs from Scotland was stopped by a customs agent who didn't believe a game could be played with ``instruments of murder.''

Lessard can recognize her great-grandfather's style. The work of his partner, Charles McKim, was ``monunmental. Stanford's work had a lightness.'' Their company, McKim, Mead & White, one of the nation's most influential architectural firms, trained hundreds of young architects, some of whom may have contributed designs credited to the flamboyant White.

The trial of his murderer, millionaire playboy Harry Thaw, was on a par with the recent O.J. Simpson trial. The scandalous sex triangle shocked a nation still clinging to Victorian virtue. New York's 14 newspapers fed on the lurid details -- which included details of White pushing his lover, Evelyn Nesbit, naked on a red velvet swing. Thaw's two trials gave ample opportunity to savor the exposure of the ``satin-lined sins of the rich.'' The first trial ended in a hung jury. At the second one, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was committed to a mental institution -- from which he later escaped. (He was recaptured in Canada, pronounced sane in 1915 but was recommitted after he horsewhipped a teenaged boy.)

``The public was repudiating the excesses of the rich, and they mistakenly thought Stanford White was one of them,'' Lessard said.

Stanford White on Long Island

The exhibition, Stanford White on Long Island, will be on display at The Museums at Stony Brook from July 4 through November 1, 1998, and will explore the fascinating architectural work and life of Stanford White (1853-1906) with a special emphasis on the Long Island projects he designed. Samuel G. White, great-grandson of Stanford White; Elizabeth White, Associate Publisher at Rizzoli International Publications (New York City); and The Museums' Chief Curator, William Ayres, are curators of the exhibition.

Stanford White, probably the best-known American architect of the late nineteenth century, was a partner in the famous architectural firm McKim, Mead and White, which was responsible for nearly 1,000 commissions, including Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus, New York's Pennsylvania Station, and the Boston Public Library. While the firm established an eminent contemporary reputation for building some of the most impressive institutional structures of the Gilded Age, the architects also made their mark in the more private world of domestic architecture.

The exhibition includes photographs, architectural plans and renderings, paintings, memorabilia and other artifacts that capture the scope of White's designs on Long Island. Some of his more notable projects include the Garden City Hotel, the clubhouse at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club (Southampton), and a monument designed for the Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale (Huntington), as well as a variety of houses in the Hamptons, the Gold Coast of Nassau County and the St. James area where White's wife's prominent family, the Smiths, resided. In addition, White's interests, social interactions, European travels, and extensive collections of classical art and furnishings are represented in the exhibition.

Accompanying the exhibition is the book The Houses ofMcKim, Mead & White written by Samuel White. It is illustrated with numerous photographs, including shots of the houses as they appear today, taken by noted architectural photographer Jonathan Wallen.

From top to bottom: Stanford White, circa 1885; Stanford White, c. 1902, Photo by Gertrude Kasebier; Wetherill House. (St. James, NY) 1894-1895, McKim, Mead & White (NYC) design. Photo by Jonathan Wallen; Entrance Hall Alterations, Box Hill. (St. James, NY) 1884-1906, Stanford White House: Box Hill, Rear view. (St. James, NY)1885-1902, Parrish House, Interior. (Southampton, NY) 1889, McKim, Mead & White (NYC) design. Photo by Jonathan Wallen

Garden City LI

Scottish-born self made multi-millionaire Alexander Turney Stewart bought the relatively unpopulated Hempstead Plains, and in 1869 founded the Village of Garden City. The village was created as an upscale community for those seeking respite from New York City. The main attraction of the community was the Garden City Hotel, designed by the acclaimed firm of Charles Follen McKim, William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White. Although the original structure as well as the one that replaced it at the end of the 19th century were torn down many years ago, a hotel still stands on the original grounds, as do many nearby Victorian homes. Garden City NY, Wikipedia

Walter Travis in 1901, America's first great amateur golfer, lived in Garden City and did course design work throughout the US.

Travis was born in Maldon, Australia. He arrived in the U.S. in 1884 and became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1890, while living in Garden City, on Long Island. He first picked up a golf club in October 1896, a few weeks before his 35th birthday.

Garden City GC, NY, USA

The open expanse of the Hempstead Plain as pictured in November from behind the 6th green.

There is no other course in the world quite like the course at Garden City Golf Club.

Some first time visitors are tempted to call it a links because of the sandy loam soil, its deep bunkers, and the wind. However, the Atlantic Ocean is a good ten miles away and if you go to any of the surrounding courses, the soil is much heavier. No, this land was never truly a links even if it does possess many of its characteristics.

Some American golfers also try to compare Garden City to England's finest heathland courses. After all, once you are on the Hempstead Plain, the same feeling of openness and expansiveness that makes heathland courses so invigorating is readily evident. But alas, there is no heath here, so such comparisons carry little worth.

Garden City is a true original. Perhaps the closest course in the United States would be the Myopia Hunt Club, and with good reason: the original nine holes of each course were opened within one year of each other.

Similar to H.C. Leeds, Devereux Emmet was a man of leisure who enjoyed his annual trips to Europe where he studied many of the famous holes and courses. When given the chance to design a course for Garden City, he made fine use of the opportunity and his general routing accounts for much of Garden City's appeal to this day.

Garden City quickly hosted the 1902 U.S. Open, where it met with praise from its participants, including one Donald Ross. No more than two holes went in the same direction, many of the greens were open in front, and given the firm turf thanks to the sandy soil, the participants from both sides of the Ocean enjoyed keeping the ball low out of the wind by playing low running shots onto the greens.

Like Leeds, Emmet utilized cross bunkers to present a direct challenge to the golfer. However, unlike Leeds, Emmet didn't instill the greens with much contour nor did he make his bunkers particularly penal - escape was easy.

Enter the Grand Old Man - Walter Travis. Already a member of Garden City, and the runner-up in the 1902 U.S. Open, he was also a student of golf course architecture and later founded The American Golfer magazine, which he used to freely criticize the general direction of architecture in the United States.

In particular, Travis despised the blandness of American golf and wrote, 'Golf, with us, is mostly of a kindergarten order. The holes are too easy and there is too much of a family resemblance all through.' He went on to say that American courses were dumbed down to suit the average player and did little to encourage first class play.

In 1906, Travis penned an article detailing how the Garden City course could be improved. In particular, he advocated deeper bunkers and more interior movement within the greens.

In part because of his impressive playing credentials, the Club Board decided to act upon his suggestions. Travis spent the next two years adding 50 bunkers, deepening others and re-doing all 18 greens. He also increased the length of the course and once again by 1908, this famous Long Island club was hosting another important event - the U.S. Amateur Championship. Max Behr lost in the finals, and but went on to become the Editor of Golf Illustrated and wrote extensively on the subject of golf architecture.

Since this busy decade at the start of the century, little has changed with the course, save for the (in)famous 12th hole and its three foot high mounds which were inside the green itself. Except for that one hole, the course plays as Travis intended.