C. K. G. Billings

Billings' horse party

Billings wished to celebrate the completion of his trotting stable, and his selection to be the head of the New York Equestrian Club, by giving a dinner for 36 of his male horse-riding friends in the stable on March 29, 1903. He engaged the noted restaurateur Louis Sherry to cater the event, but to avoid reporters who staked out the estate after news of the dinner had spread, Billings changed the venue at Sherry's suggestion to the grand ballroom of Sherry's restaurant at Fifth Avenue and 44th Street. The ballroom had been decorated to look like an English country estate, complete with imitation brooks. Wanting he and his guests to be mounted on horses while they ate, the floor was covered with turf. The horses, which were docile animals rented from nearby riding academies, were brought to the fourth-floor ballroom via the freight elevator. The participants, arranged in a circle, ate from specially built silver trays which were attached to their saddles and drank through rubber tubes connected to iced bottles of champagne in their saddlebags. The waiters, one for each diner, served the numerous courses dressed as if grooms at a fox hunt. The 32 docile horses were each attended by an elaborately dressed groom, and near the end of the evening elaborate troughs filled with oats were brought in for the horses to eat from.[13][14][1][15]

The evening concluded with a vaudeville show.[15]

The $50,000 bill for the dinner (equivalent to $1,400,000 in 2019) included the cost of a photographer from the celebrated Byron Company to document the event.[13][14]

Two days later, Billings officially opened his new stable with a luncheon for members of the Equestrian Club and other wealthy horsemen and dignitaries from around the country. Some rode there on horseback, but most traveled by elevated train to the 155th Street station located at the Harlem Speedway, and were conveyed to the stable by automobiles.[15]

In 1903, Billings, who was a prominent member of the Jockey Club and was part-owner of the Jamaica Race Course in Jamaica, Queens,[2] was regarded as a "Grand Marshal" of harness racing ("trotting" or "matinee racing"),[16] but in November 1905, just two years after his stable was completed, he sold his stock of horses at Madison Square Garden, saying that he proposed to go abroad for a few years. Billings held back only three horses from the sale, plus one that was withdrawn because it was lame. The sale of 18 horses brought in $46,270, with the top seller bringing in $10,500.[17]

The Billings' mansion at West 196th Street and Fort Washington Road[15] was designed by Guy Lowell, who enlarged the lodge which had been built as part of the stables. It was organized around a central courtyard with a fountain. Landscape architect Charles Downing Lay designed the grounds. Billings called it "Tryon Hall", after Fort Tryon, which had been located there, itself named after Sir William Tryon, who was the last Governor of the English colony of New York.[6][18] The mansion stood on one of the highest points in Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River to the west, and the Broadway Valley to the east.

By 1907, Billings, his wife, two children, and 23 servants had moved from their Manhattan townhouse into the massive Louis XIV-style chateau, now their full-time residence. It included an observatory tower topped by an octagonal room, which had a 360-degree unobstructed view. The estate had a casino with a swimming pool, squash court and bowling alley for entertaining, as well as Billings' extensive stables and an area to exercise his horses.[6][19]

The entrance to the estate was originally at the top of the hill, approached via Riverside Drive and West 181st Street, to Fort Washington Road, but the upper part of Riverside Drive was completed at about the same time as Billings' mansion, and he wanted a driveway which connected the mansion directly to that section of the roadway. Unfortunately, there was a steep 100-foot (30 m) cliff between the road and the mansion. Billings' hired the firm of Buchman & Fox to find a solution, which they did: granite was removed from the cliff to allow a passage for a zig-zagging driveway, and the stone was then used both as a retaining wall, and for the construction of an arched viaduct that the driveway initially passed through. The arched passage became known as the "Billings Arcade". The entrance to the driveway had granite pillars that were 16 feet (4.9 m) tall, which supported 20-foot (6.1 m) tall gates which were 10 feet (3.0 m) wide.[6]

The entire driveway project took a year for over a hundred workers to complete, at the cost of $250,000. It raised the overall cost of the estate to more than $2 million.[6] The Billings Arcade still remains as part of Fort Tryon Park, as does part of the driveway, now used as a pedestrian path. Another remnant is a gardener's cottage, originally a gatehouse for the estate's upper entrance, now used for park offices. The gateposts of the driveway entrance to the estate were refurbished in 2017. The driveway no longer connects to the roadway which was once Riverside Drive and is now the northbound side of the Henry Hudson Parkway.

In the nearby Hudson River, Billings kept his 232-foot (71 m) yacht, Vanadis which was built in 1908.[20]

Billings sold his Tryon Hall estate in 1917 to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.. His family had already moved into an apartment on Fifth Avenue and 63rd Street, which has 21 rooms, and for which he paid $20,000 a year in rent. Rockefeller was assembling parcels for the creation of a park designed by the Olmsted Brothers which he planned to develop and then give to the city – this eventually became Fort Tryon Park. As part of Rockefeller's plan, he was going to tear down Tryon Hall but was held back by popular sentiment. During World War I, he offered use of the house to the U.S. government as a hospital, and was prepared to outlay $500,000 for the conversion, but this did not happen. After that, the mansion was rented to Nicolas C. Partos of the Partola Manufacturing Company, at first for the summer of 1918, but then extending for years. Partos and his family was still in residence when the building burned down on March 7, 1926.[18][21][6][22]

After leaving Tryon Hall, Billings moved to another grand estate he had built, this one called "Farnsworth", named for his mother's family,[2] and located in Locust Valley, New York, on Long Island. It was again designed by Guy Lowell, this time in the Georgian Revival style, with the landscaping of the extensive grounds designed by Andrew Robeson Sargent of Boston. The buildings alone on the estate cost $1,550,000 in 1915. Although Georgian in style, Lowell designed it to be similar to an Italian villa, in that the mansion was built around a patio at its center. The house featured 11 master bedrooms with 9 baths and 19 servants bedrooms with 4 baths. The appointments were expensive and luxurious.[23]

Despite the grandeur of the surrounding, Billings did not stay in Farnsworth any longer than he had in Tryon Hall. With World War 1 raging, and his health failing, Farnsworth began to sell off his East Coast properties in preparation for moving to California.[23][3]

Billings moored his yacht Vanadis in the nearby waters. In 1916, he had sold the original Vanadis to Morton F. Plant in return for the smaller yacht Kanawha, after the Vanadis struck the steamship Bunker Hill, killing two people.[2][20] In 1924, Billings ordered a second, larger yacht – 246 feet (75 m) long – which he also named Vanadis.[24] This ship is now anchored at Riddarholmen in Stockholm, and is now the hotel Mälardrottningen, with the ship rechristened as Lady Hutton, after the actress Barbara Hutton.[25][26][27]

At various times, Billings also owned a 5,000-acre (2,000 ha) estate on the James River in Virginia called Curles Neck Farm, which he bought in 1913 and developed into one of the country's prime horse-breeding facilities. He had another estate in Colorado Springs, Colorado and a summer home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.[6][2]

When he moved to Santa Barbara, Billings had a mansion built in the hills of that city, which he called "Asombrosa". It was damaged by an earthquake in the mid-1930s, and he had another, smaller, house built nearby.[3]