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    Great Yachts of Long Island's North Shore
    Great Yachts of Long Island's North Shore
    Great Yachts of Long Island's North Shore
    Ebook187 pages35 minutes

    Great Yachts of Long Island's North Shore

    By Robert B. MacKay

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    About this ebook

    At the turn of the 20th century, Long Island s North Shore, the so-called Gold Coast, was becoming the most desirable residential area in the United States. Estates belonging to American captains of finance and industry lined the bluffs and bays from the city line to Eaton s Neck. Some of the nation s most renowned families including the Astors, Bakers, Huttons, Morgans, Pratts, Sloans, Roosevelts, Whitneys, and Vanderbilts used their yachts for racing, cruising, commuting, or epic voyages. These vessels regularly plied the waters of the North Shore and bolstered the development of yacht clubs like the New York and Seawanhaka Corinthian city institutions that established stations at Glen Cove and Centre Island, respectively. These clubs served to provide many outlets for the social gatherings that accompanied this pastime. Although the Great Depression and then World War II would bring the era of the great yachts to an end, a wealth of images remain that can be marveled at a century later.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateJun 9, 2014
    ISBN9781439645666
    Great Yachts of Long Island's North Shore
    Author

    Robert B. MacKay

    Robert B. MacKay, a North Shore sailor who remembers some of the last of the great yachts, received his doctorate in American and New England studies from Boston University in 1980 and has written extensively about Long Island country houses and commuting yachts.

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      Very interesting read - especially for a local by background - and sailor

    Book preview

    Great Yachts of Long Island's North Shore - Robert B. MacKay

    (TP)

    INTRODUCTION

    The desire of Manhattan’s affluent to build country houses on Long Island and participate in the new forms of recreation and leisure becoming popular at the turn of the 20th century transformed the region in the era from the 1890s to World War II. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle thought Long Island had been touched by magic, a new version of the Sleeping Princess. While the equestrians gravitated toward Wheatly Hills and Old Westbury, members of the country house set who agreed with Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows that there is nothing so much fun as messing around in boats, chose the shore. An additional advantage for those who built between Great Neck and Eaton’s Neck, the so-called Gold Coast, was a new mode of commuting. An enormous fleet of private yachts regularly plies Long Island Sound’s waters, the New York Herald observed in 1902, carrying owners at racing speeds twice a day from their great estates to the wharf on Manhattan Island nearest their offices. The seasonal phenomenon would soon lead to a whole new class of yachts variously known as commuters, or business boats. For many, one yacht would not be enough; a small fleet was required to take advantage of all the possibilities offered by the new pastime. Moving east, apace with the yachtsmen, were their clubs, providing the facilities, regattas, and opportunities for social interaction. Momentous for the North Shore was the decision of the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club to build a clubhouse at Centre Island in Oyster Bay in 1892 and the Douglaston Yacht Club’s move to Port Washington in 1899, after which it became the Manhasset Bay Yacht Club. The New York Yacht Club established a station, or branch, at Glen Cove in the 1890s and then barged its original clubhouse there from Hoboken in 1904. Although Seawanhaka, the leading Corinthian (amateur) yacht club, had been founded in Oyster Bay 20 years earlier by young men of its summer colony, it was a city institution with a townhouse in Manhattan and a station at Staten Island. Following the completion of the new clubhouse, nine members had built country houses on Centre Island. More than 30 were in the vicinity by 1932. The Manhasset Bay Yacht Club’s propitious move would lead to a new clubhouse by 1902 closely resembling Seawanhaka and a five-fold increase in membership. Station 10, as the New York Yacht Club’s outpost was known, quickly became popular not only as an anchorage and an assembly point, but as a place to board commuters headed for its station at Twenty-sixth Street on the East River, where many of the business boats docked during the day.

    At other places along the North Shore, particularly where there were summer colonies and a need for facilities, local yacht clubs were formed. The Huntington Yacht Club, for example, was organized in 1894 by both summer and year-round residents and included on its membership rolls such distinguished yachtsmen and country house owners as the mining and pharmaceutical magnates August Heckscher, Frederick L. Upjohn, and George McKessen Brown. Juliana Armour Ferguson, a prominent early yachtswoman, was also a member. By 1939, when Fortune called the region a yachting paradise, there were 17 yacht clubs from Little Neck Bay east to Northport. Wherever there was a bay, there were clubs. At Manhasset Bay, in addition to the Manhasset Bay Yacht Club, were the Knickerbocker (1874), another club that had moved east from the city; Port Washington Yacht Club (1905); and the Plandome Field and Marine (1908). At Hempstead Harbor were two of the North Shore’s oldest, both organized in 1891, the Sea Cliff and Hempstead Harbor Yacht Clubs. Farther east, noteworthy clubs included the Cold Spring Harbor Beach Club (1924), Huntington’s Ketewomoke (1913), the Northport Yacht Club (1908), and also at Northport, the Independent Yacht Club. The North Shore was also the venue for all sorts of on-the-water events, including national and international competitions during the golden age of yachting.

    While the America’s Cup match races between the defending American yacht and a foreign challenger took place in the ocean off Sandy Hook, the huge sloops that were defense candidates were often seen in trials and races along the North Shore.

    The international competitions in the Six Meter Class off Oyster Bay between the wars were closely followed by the press and brought some of the world’s best sailors to the North Shore. The British-American Cup of 1922, the first international team race sailed on American waters, attracted so much public attention that when the series returned two years later, the Navy had to dispatch three four-stack destroyers to control the spectator fleet as steamers with brass bands followed the contestants around the course. In 1927, the Scandinavian Gold Cup attracted the largest fleet of foreign yachts that had ever competed in this country—including the winner, which was owned by Crown Prince Olaf of Norway. Hollywood soon picked up on the glamour in the 1937 film Nothing Sacred, a David Selznick production staring Carole Lombard and Frederic March that included a Six Meter sailing up the East

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