Long Island’s North Shore robber barons staged parties of legendary extravagance

Evidence

The sports of the feudal lords of the Old World were the sports of these feudal lords of the New. The North Shore echoed to the thunder of their horses’ hooves, and to the bay of their hounds as, hunting fox and deer, they ranged unchallenged across the estates, riding in a single hunt from one end of Nassau County to the other. And they partied on a scale the New World had seldom seen, outdoing themselves with swimming pools bearing thousands of orchids, diamond tiaras for lady guests, cigarettes wrapped, and designed to be smoked, in hundred-dollar bills, until an awed America named the North Shore “The Gold Coast.” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 657

Categorization

• CANDY: Cigarettes wrapped in hundred-dollar bills and pools bearing orchids are pure elevator-conversation material, though it needs the Gold Coast framing to land.
• ADDENDUM: Fits thematically with the Lewis Morris piece on elite displays of wealth and class signaling.
• XREF: connects to: Long Island’s estate country was settled top-down by Gilded Age industrial partnerships. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 653; Long Island’s North Shore was a colony of concentrated industrial-era wealth — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 654; Long Island’s parks were blocked by local barons who controlled the state legislature — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 688 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Long Island estate barons converted private power into state legal authority to exclude outsiders #expands (0.90) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 669
• Long Island’s shoreline was effectively closed to ordinary New Yorkers by 1900 #epitomizes (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 668
• Long Island’s parks were blocked by local barons who controlled the state legislature #complicates (0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 688