Driving in the Fast Lane

IN THE SUMMER of 1899, Newport seemed the perfect spot for William K. Vanderbilt II and his new bride: The Rhode Island seaside town was home to New York society, and Vanderbilt had spent many months at Marble House, his mother's lavish summer home there.

But the couple did not last long. They leased an estate in Newport but never bought or built one. Vanderbilt had arrived with a new toy, one that was enraging the locals. It was called a motorcar.

The young millionaire was driving ``at a speed equal to a railroad train,'' one newspaper reported. Nothing, it seemed, could slow him down. Fifty residents of Newport petitioned the police to impose speed limits, and in 1900, Newport police issued Vanderbilt a summons to appear in court to discuss his driving habits. City leaders established Newport's first speed limits for automobiles ``and other self-propelled vehicles'' -- 6 mph in central areas and 10 mph elsewhere. ``Arrest me every day if you want to,'' Vanderbilt was quoted as saying. ``It's nothing to pay fines for such sport.''

The Vanderbilts left Newport in 1901. ``Some automobilists such as myself cannot raise dust in the streets without someone complaining,'' Vanderbilt sniffed. He vowed to return only to visit family and friends, and made plans to move to a more accommodating place: the sand-and-gravel roads of Long Island.

The hobby that branded Vanderbilt as a troublemaker in Newport would give him celebrity as an innovator on Long Island. On Long Island, he established the nation's first international auto race, an event that would help popularize motorcars. And later, he built the nation's first road designed exclusively for automobiles, the Long Island Motor Parkway. The reinforced concrete road also was the first highway to use bridges and overpasses to eliminate intersections. Called ``Long Island's Appian Way'' in promotional material, it was a road ahead of its time.

Vanderbilt was an unlikely pioneer. His interest in transportation was purely that of a sportsman. Of course, Willie K., as he was known, was no ordinary sportsman. He was a man of enormous means who had the money to buy or build almost anything he wanted. When Willie K. was 7 years old, his father inherited $65 million, a sum that today would be worth more than $1 billion, and it was this wealth that defined much of his life.

From steamships to railroads, the Vanderbilt family fortune was built on transportation. It was Cornelius Vanderbilt, known as the Commodore, who paved the family's sidewalks with gold. Born in a farmhouse on Staten Island in 1794, Cornelius borrowed $100 from his mother at age 16, bought a shallow, two-masted boat and began to ferry passengers to Manhattan. He eventually built up a fleet of 100 steamships worth several million dollars. When he was nearly 70 years old, he bought a chunk of stock in the New York and Harlem River Railroad, which would become the New York Central, one of the most important railroads in the country. Today, the Commodore's statue looks over Park Avenue from Grand Central Terminal.

William K. Vanderbilt II, the Commodore's great-grandson, was born in 1878. He was a child of the Gilded Age, a time of fancy dress balls and marble mansions along Fifth Avenue. As a child, he was always on the move. He crossed the Atlantic in his father's luxury yacht, and at age 11 had his first ride in a motorcar, a steam-powered three-wheeler, in Monte Carlo.

Willie and his two siblings spent part of each year at Idlehour, the family's 900-acre estate at Oakdale. His sister, Consuelo, later wrote that Willie was an impatient gardener: He would pull up the potatoes before they were ripe. After prep school, Willie K. went to Harvard, where he joined the yacht club and the polo club, but evidently was not a scholar. Although his brother, Harold, got a law degree from Harvard, Willie K. left Cambridge after a year and a half with a ``certificate of honorable dismissal.''

That year, he married Virginia Fair of San Francisco, whose father had made $200 million mining a silver lode in Nevada. She was 23; he was 20. The newspapers reported every detail, including the wedding gifts. One was a gold toilet seat. After the wedding, the couple spent a brief honeymoon at Idlehour, interrupted when the 100-room mansion burned to the ground. The couple fled to the Waldorf-Astoria, and then to Newport.

In those early years of their marriage, whatever Vanderbilt and his wife did made news. It was news when Virginia wore a purple hat in Newport. It was news when, one day, she actually did the marketing herself. It was news when Vanderbilt began showing up for work at the offices of the New York Central. And it was news when Vanderbilt decided he'd had enough of the town's interference with his motorcar driving.

Arriving on Long Island, the Vanderbilts decided to build a country retreat at Lake Success. Vanderbilt had first been charmed by the quarter-mile-long lake near Great Neck on a motoring tour through the countryside. From a hilltop on the lake's south shore, he could see the spires of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, and to the west, parts of Brooklyn. Bit by bit, Vanderbilt began buying up the farmland around the lake's shores, first using the alias ``Mr. Smith.'' Soon Vanderbilt owned all the property around the lake, but when he tried to buy the lake itself and the public access roads leading to the shoreline, the citizens of the Town of North Hempstead - minus Vanderbilt and his wealthy Gold Coast friends, who were registered to vote in New York City - voted overwhelmingly against the sale. It may have been the only time Vanderbilt could not buy whatever he wanted. Instead, he built a modest - by Vanderbilt standards - colonial-style home on the hilltop at Lake Success. Vanderbilt called his new estate Deepdale. Though the plans were scaled back, the couple did have a private railroad station built after Virginia was disturbed by a drunk at the Great Neck station.

Long Islanders appeared a bit more tolerant of automobiles than the citizens of Newport. But Vanderbilt still had his share of run-ins with the law. He is credited with prompting Hempstead Village to set its first speed limit after he drove into town at just over 6 mph. In 1902, the New York American newspaper claimed that Nassau residents were living in fear of being run over by Vanderbilt and his ``Red Devil'' Mercedes motorcar.

The ``Red Devil'' was only one of several cars Vanderbilt owned in his early days of driving. His first was a Stanley Steamer, purchased in 1899, and he was promptly arrested on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for operating the machine without a steam engineer's license. In 1901, he bought a 33-hp Daimler in Paris that could go 65 mph. He called it the ``White Ghost.''

These new machines were fast and a little frightening. ``Automobilists,'' as the men who drove them were called, were thought to have a daredevil streak. And it was a class issue as well: Only the very wealthy could afford to tool around in one. Often, Vanderbilt would take along a chauffeur who could take over the driving, as well as a mechanic to fix inopportune breakdowns.

When the motoring craze hit New York society, The New York World wrote that wealthy men and women were becoming obese as they gave up bicycling, tennis, golf and polo in favor of a sport that didn't require one to work up a sweat. ``Autofat,'' the paper named the new malady in a 1903 article, saying that Vanderbilt had put on 10 pounds since he got his first car.

It wasn't long before rumors of an auto race began circulating among Long Island residents. Their new neighbor, after all, was competing in some of the most highly publicized races of the day, both in the United States and abroad. When Virginia Vanderbilt's brother, Charles Fair, and his young wife were killed in a car wreck outside Paris in 1902, it looked as though Vanderbilt might give up his hobby. ``W.K. Vanderbilt Jr. Will Abandon Auto Racing,'' The New York Evening Telegram headline predicted. ``There is no proper place on the highway for expensive racing machines that plunge against obstacles or crush people beneath them,'' the newspaper declared.

But Vanderbilt later said that such things as Charles Fair's death were simply ``unhappy incidents of the sport.'' Two years later, in January, 1904, he broke the world's one-mile speed record at Ormond Beach, Fla., covering a mile in just 39 seconds at 92 mph.

That year, Vanderbilt, frustrated that American automobile manufacturers seemed to lag behind their European counterparts, organized an international auto race on the public roads of Nassau County. The prize: a 30-pound silver cup designed by Tiffany and bearing the likeness of Vanderbilt in his Mercedes. He convinced the fledgling Automobile Club of America to sponsor the race.

The first race was run on Oct. 8, 1904, on a 30-mile course over public roads, a rough triangle between Jericho, present-day Levittown and Queens Village. The event was wildly popular. The Long Island Rail Road ran trains all night bringing spectators to Nassau County. Tens of thousands lined the roadway, eager for a view of a speeding motorcar making a death-defying turn.