100 years before the Hiltons, the Trumps and the Spellings desecrated America with their gross junk, a Chicago utility czar named Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings, gave the most ridiculous dinner party ever recorded.
Billings with his star trotter, Lou Dillon
In 1901, the 40 year old President of the People’s Gas, Light and Coke Company of Chicago retired, pulling up stakes and moving his family to Manhattan to devote much of his time and fortune to promoting the sport of “matinee riding” (like harness racing), and to his own stable of champion “trotters”.
A notable eccentric, Billings made headlines for his outlandish purchases, like the electric race car – a “one of a kind single-cylinder machine capable of four transformations” – he bought off the floor of the Madison Square Garden auto show. He was a crackpot, a big spender and a lavish party host, but he was no Brandon Davis. Billings was a teetotaler, abstemious in an era when gluttony and unabashed inebriation were the norm.
C.K. Billings announced his arrival in the world of Gotham’s plutocrats by acquiring acreage on the largely undeveloped north end of Manhattan, near the newly opened and fashionable Harlem River Speedway (the turn of the century version of the hipster Highline), an exclusive two and a half mile dirt track that ran along the Harlem River between the Polo Grounds at 155th and Swindler Cove at Dyckman Street. Trotting horses, the Testarossas of their time, were the shared passion of New Yorks millionaire sportsmen and the Harlem Speedway was the creme de la creme.
More at ease in trotter laden Upper Manhattan than in his snooty East 53rd Street home, Billings employed architect Guy Lowell to build him a huge Louis XIV style chateau, a secluded retreat on the wooded cliffs that afforded him all the amity and splendor of country living.”Tryon Hall” was a lavish castle-like structure with battered stucco walls, cupolas, towers and turrets, conical steeples, oriel windows, and vast expanses of flaring, curving, shingled roof. The structure was 250 long and could be seen for miles. The two main Rapunzelesque towers sported huge weather vanes, one with a figure of his favorite trotting horse, “Little Boy†and the other with his famous mare “Lucilleâ€.
In today’s crass hideosity, comparable in scale and setting is the Spelling’s 52,000 square foot pile in Los Angeles. You know, the monstrous faux French Chateau depression den with tricked out wrapping paper room? They called it simply “The Manor”, as if it trumped all others. 100+ rooms, even “She” doesn’t know how many, it’s ghostly Mistress Candy, who wanders the bland halls alone, forever she wanders, unable of unloading the grotesque boondoggle to Russian mobsters, oil oligarchs or Middle Eastern arms dealers, so it will have to become a hospital for mental or rehab patients (it’s already got the exit signs posted over doors, per zoning code, the sheet rock and Home Depot moldings). $150 million tear down.
The 25,000 square foot lodge boasted a multi-story indoor patio, an Acolian organ room, gymnasium, fumed oak bowling alley, a blacksmith shop and forge and a powerhouse with an Edison dynamo to furnish electric light, steam heat and hot water. The stables included 20 boxstalls, 33 horses, a harness room, trophy room, carriage wash and a change room for men. The 25-acre estate encompassed formal gardens, greenhouses, squash and tennis courts, a 126-foot-long bathhouse with a 75-foot heated marble pool, fleet-sized garages with room for 20 carriages and another for sleighs. Down below, on the river, he built a dock and boathouse at Tubby Hook, at the foot of Dyckman Street for his 277-foot turbine steam yacht Vanadis, which boasted two fireplaces and an electric elevator.
Tryon Hall sat in what is now Fort Tryon Park (the site of Fort Tryon, famous for Margaret Corbin’s heroic defense beside her husband against an onslaught of 4,000 Hessian troops during the Revolutionary War). The entrance was an S-curved driveway that snaked 1,600 feet up the bluff looking over the Hudson River to the lodge which sat on Manhattan’s highest point, with 20-mile views of the Hudson Valley, south to the Statue of Liberty (Later, like most crackpots, C.K. became increasingly infatuated with automobiles and enjoyed speeding down the newly paved Riverside Drive along the Hudson below his estate, and decided he wanted Riverside Drive access to the stable 100 feet above the road. He constructed an extravagant, $250,000 entry to his estate, routing a zigzagging driveway up the steep hillside, a great arched stone galleried entrance, 50 feet high, made of stone quarried on the site).
On March 28, 1903,  C.K. planned a celebration in honor of the opening of Tryon Hall. He would host an exclusive, equestrian themed dinner at his stable, catered by fashionable restaurateur and Golden Age confectioner Louis Sherry. Because rich people make very poor decisions about their entertainment, guests were to be seated around a dining table on large hobby horses. When word of the event leaked out and reporters gathered at his gates hoping for a glimpse at the fabulous estate and glamorous guests, Billings quietly relocated the dinner to the grand ballroom at Louis Sherry’s midtown restaurant. His 36 (male) guests were taken up by elevator and 36 rented horses were taken up in freight elevator to the 4th floor ballroom which was transformed to a woodland scene, sod on the floor, a huge harvest moon hanging from the ceiling and real birds warbling overhead.
GIving new meaning to the term “putting on the feedbag”, each guest sat atop his own living, breathing, whinnying horse. The horses and their hungry mounts were arranged in a circle, facing each other, as if in some form of riding drill. Each horse was specially outfitted with dining trays attached to the pommels of the saddles. The diners ate from the trays and sipped champagne through rubber tubes from iced bottles in their saddlebags. Waiters dressed as hunting grooms in scarlet coats and white breeches, one to a rider, stood at each at the ready at each horse’s head. Even the horses enjoyed a sumptuous dinner of oats. The outrageous $50,000 bill included a photographer from the celebrated Byron Company to document the event.
The resulting photograph is almost shocking in it’s asinine debauchery and ranks high in conspicuous consumption’s iconography. It packs the one/two punch of grotesquerie and uncharted heights in planning for the discomfort of the dinner guests: the equestrians in white tie rigidly astride their mounts, in circular formation, amid a faux forest of fake woodland foliage. Still, it is fantastic in it’s asininity and originality. Whatever your personal opinion on sucking champagne from rubber tubing via saddlebags, Billing’s horseback dinner pretty much signified the end of an era. As Society columnist Lucius Beebe later suggested, the photograph reinforced tabloid readers’ belief that New York society’s upper echelon went to bed in full evening dress after brushing their teeth in champagne.
Much of Billings and Louis Sherry’s gilded world had already begun to wane by 1916, when Billings sold his beloved horses and moved to California. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. bought Tryon Hall, planning to demolish it and donate the land to the City for use as a Park. Louis Sherry closed his glamorous restaurant, blaming “prohibition and war-born Bolshevism”. The glory days of the once unparalleled Speedway were gone long even before it was paved over in 1922; when public access to the old carriage road was completely cut off by the Harlem River Drive, the Speedway was all but forgotten.
Like so many monuments to old New York, Tryon Hall was burned to the ground by a spectacular fire in 1926. The home’s private pumping system failed, and city water pressure, 250 feet above the waterline, was reduced to a trickle. The Times reported that when the lodge’s turret fell, it ”spouted fire and smoke like a volcano”.