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.

Too often, they ventured into the roadway itself to get a better look. During the third race, in 1906, a spectator was killed when a race car careened into the crowd. Vanderbilt, who competed in other races but not his own, left the grandstand at Jericho Turnpike and drove the course, pleading with the spectators to stay off the road. ``I am deeply ashamed,'' he said when it was over.

Willie K. and his sportsman friends went directly to the Garden City Hotel, where they decided to investigate building a private road that could be used for race cars. Within weeks, they had formed a corporation with Vanderbilt as president and Henry Ford among the board of directors. The corporation sold $2.5 million in stock, with the intent that the road be self-supporting from tolls charged to motorists.

With Vanderbilt on a motorcar tour of Europe, the corporation's vice president, A.R. Pardington, went around Long Island persuading farmers to donate strips of their land for the project. In some cases, farmers agreed, expecting that Pardington was right when he said the parkway would greatly increase their property values. In other cases the corporation purchased entire farms. The completed route had a number of twists and turns to connect the 137 parcels of land.

Hundreds of Italian immigrants were hired to build the cement-and-stone roadway, and by the fall of 1908, the Long Island Motor Parkway stretched for nine miles between Bethpage and present-day East Meadow. The 1907 cup race had been suspended, but that fall the racing cars again lined up before the grandstand, this time on a smooth stretch of concrete. That year, a Locomobile was the first U.S. car to beat out the Europeans for the cup, fulfilling Vanderbilt's dream.

The Long Island Motor Parkway continued to expand both east and west in the next few years, but even its innovations could not guarantee safety. The 1910 race left four people dead, and the Vanderbilt Cup moved off Long Island to a series of sites around the country until it ended in 1916. By then, a speedway had opened in Indianapolis, which was destined to become the racing capital of the world.

By 1911, the Long Island Motor Parkway ran for 45 miles, from Queens to Lake Ronkonkoma, where Vanderbilt had built an inn that was a copy of the Petit Trianon of Versailles. Those who could afford it found a narrow ribbon of a road, just 16 feet wide, where it was possible to go as fast as the automobile - and the twisting curves - would allow. It was unlike anything the country had ever seen. At the time, only the traverse roads through Central Park, designed for the horse-and-buggy, had such features as bridges and overpasses to avoid intersections. And the only concrete roadways in the country were strips in Boston and Detroit, each less than five miles long. But automobile ownership was not yet commonplace. Vanderbilt lowered the tolls from $2 to $1.50, and later, to $1.

Vanderbilt's personal life, meanwhile, was taking a detour. He and his wife had separated by 1910, though Virginia's Catholic faith precluded talk of divorce. Their three children lived with Virginia in a Fifth Avenue mansion. Vanderbilt leased the Deepdale estate and began quietly buying land in Centerport. There, he built a bachelor's retreat called Eagle's Nest, far from the Gold Coast mansions in Nassau County. He spent part of every year in Europe, and a great deal of time on yachts.

In 1917, Vanderbilt was named president of the New York Central, but was always considered something of a figurehead. He attended night classes in navigation at the Merchant Marine School, and after his father died and left him $21 million in 1920, Vanderbilt traded in his 153-foot steam-powered yacht for a larger, diesel-powered version.

After crossing the Atlantic five times in his new yacht, Willie K. developed another hobby: collecting marine specimens. Hiring a curator from the American Museum of Natural History, he set sail to the Galapagos Islands in 1926. In detailed journals Vanderbilt listed the animal life he encountered: the orange puffer, the blackbellied mouth fish, the flightless cormorant, the scarlet prawn.

In 1927, Willie K. and Virginia finally divorced, and that year Vanderbilt married Rosamund Warburton, herself a recent divorcee. One newspaper account called her ``a youthful blonde edition'' of the woman he had married 28 years earlier. His new wife began an ambitious expansion at Eagle's Nest, turning it into a mansion of Spanish and Moorish design.

At the same time, Vanderbilt was still expanding the Long Island Motor Parkway, adding a two-mile extension to Horace Harding Boulevard in Queens and a two-mile spur to connect the parkway to Jericho Turnpike in Commack, now called Harned Road. By the mid-1920s, the parkway had grown in popularity, with more than 150,000 cars passing through the toll gates each year.

But when Robert Moses began to circulate plans for his Northern State Parkway in the 1920s, Vanderbilt saw what was coming. He approached the master builder about selling his road, but Moses told Vanderbilt that he was interested in only one small section between Lakeville Road and New Hyde Park Road. Vanderbilt refused to sell and Moses predicted he would end up giving the entire road to the state for nothing. By 1933, Moses' parkway stretched from Queens to Mineola, and Vanderbilt lowered the toll on his road to 40 cents. The Long Island Motor Parkway had seen its best days.

That year, in a sad irony to Vanderbilt's love of fast cars, his only son and namesake was killed on a highway in South Carolina. William K. Vanderbilt III was returning to New York from his father's Florida estate when his car hit a fruit truck parked on the roadside. He was 26 years old.

Vanderbilt, devastated by his son's death, built a new wing to Eagle's Nest to commemorate his son, calling it Memorial Wing. It housed stuffed trophies from his son's recent hunting trips in the Sudan and a huge mural depicting young Vanderbilt on safari.

Four years later, Robert Moses' prediction came true. The toll-free Northern State Parkway was attracting more traffic, and few autos traveled on Vanderbilt's narrow toll road. Vanderbilt turned his parkway over to Nassau, Suffolk and Queens Counties in lieu of $80,000 in back taxes, and on Easter of 1938 the road closed. Much had changed since Vanderbilt had laid out his plans. ``Automobilies have become so common that there is little thrill in just going out riding the country,'' he reflected in a 1934 interview. ``Now the auto is a convenience and a necessity where once it was a luxury.''

And much had changed for the Vanderbilts. The 20th Century was not good to the family fortune. New federal laws increased regulation of railroads, unions got wage increases for railroad workers, and income and inheritance taxes were established. ``There is no point in dodging facts,'' Vanderbilt said in 1934. ``In another 10 years there won't be a single great fortune left in America. The country will come back -- it always does. But we won't.''

The fortune had dwindled by the time William K. Vanderbilt II died of a heart attack in 1944. The Fifth Avenue mansions built by his parents had been sold and wrecked. And none of the Vanderbilts could afford to live in any of the great estates that their parents and grandparents had built.

Eagle's Nest was left to his wife, Rosamund, and after her death in 1947 it was given to Suffolk County. Today, it is a museum, and the garage that once held luxury cars is used as an educational center.

Vanderbilt's parkway never fulfilled its promise. Except for a 13-mile stretch still in service -- toll-free -- in Suffolk County, it now exists only in disconnected patches, running through backyards and behind shopping centers.

But in its day, the parkway foretold a time when the automobile would play an important role in the development of Long Island and the nation. In 1908, Automobile magazine wrote: ``The Long Island motorway will supply an uninterrupted route across the Island which, owing its proximity to the metropolis, is destined to be the home of millions with business and social interests in New York City. Someday the state will supply such motorways.''

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