Tuxedo Park, New York Was Built as a Gated Retreat for the Gilded Age Elite, and It Gave Formal Menswear Its Name

Tuxedo Park was founded in 1886 when Pierre Lorillard IV, heir to a tobacco fortune, bought roughly 2,800 hectares of forested land in New York's Hudson Highlands and built a private hunting and country club community around a lake, ringed by a stone wall and staffed gatehouse that still control access today. It was, from the outset, deliberately exclusive: membership in the Tuxedo Club was by invitation, and the village incorporated its own local government to keep planning and access decisions in residents' hands rather than the county's. Unlike Newport or the Hamptons, which built reputations around visible display, Tuxedo Park's defining feature has always been that outsiders mostly can't get in to see it.

Where the tuxedo actually comes from

The community's most durable export is linguistic: the short, tailless dinner jacket that members began wearing to Tuxedo Club events in the late 1880s, in place of the longer tailcoat then considered standard formal wear, became known in America as the "tuxedo", after the club and the community itself, which had in turn taken its name from a Lenape word for the area. The exact story of who wore it first is debated, but the naming link between the garment and the gated New York enclave is well documented and remains the community's best-known claim to fame outside old-money circles.

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A different kind of old money from the coastal resorts

Where Newport's mansions were built to be seen from the street and the sea, Tuxedo Park's original cottages were tucked into wooded lots around the lake, reachable only through the gatehouse and, for decades, connected to Manhattan by a private rail spur built for members' convenience. That inward orientation, wealth organised around privacy rather than display, has kept it comparatively obscure even among people who know the other Gilded Age enclaves well.

Still private, still functioning

Tuxedo Park remains an incorporated village with its own government and a gate that non-residents cannot pass without a resident's invitation or business there. The Tuxedo Club continues to operate much as it did in Lorillard's day, and many of the original stone-and-shingle cottages, some designed by architects including Bruce Price, still stand around the lake.

Traveller tips

• Tuxedo Park itself is a private, gated community; there is no general public access beyond what a resident, member or specific event permits.
• The wider town of Tuxedo, New York, including the Metro-North train station, is publicly accessible and sits just outside the gates.
• It's roughly a 90-minute drive or train journey from Midtown Manhattan via Metro-North's Port Jervis Line.
• Sterling Forest State Park, nearby, offers public hiking with views over similar Hudson Highlands terrain for visitors who can't get past the gate.