Piping Rock Club is a country club in Matinecock, New York. It falls within the ZIP Code boundaries of Locust Valley, New York.
History
The Piping Rock clubhouse was designed by American designer Guy Lowell and built in 1911. Lowell based his designs on American colonial architecture and a desire to link the house with the landscape. Most of the rooms open into a hall that surrounds an internal courtyard. [1]
The Piping Rock Club has an 18-hole links-style golf course that was designed by Charles B. Macdonald. Its tennis facilities include several indoor courts, clay courts and grass courts. A separate facility on Long Island Sound provides beach, pool and summer dining facilities for members.
The club hosted the Piping Rock Horse Show from at least 1912 to 1915. [2] [3] [4] On October 24, 1937 Cole Porter was in a riding accident there that crushed his legs, leading to one of them being amputated years later. [5]
Members
It was the "Augusta of its Day" and boasted members like J. P. Morgan Jr., Benjamin Strong Jr., the first president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Percy Chubb, co-founder of the insurance company, Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass, Frank Nelson Doubleday, publishing, Condé Montrose Nast, publishing, William L. Harkness, Standard Oil, Frederic B. Pratt, George Dupont Pratt, Harold I. Pratt, Standard Oil heirs and philanthropists, W. Averell Harriman, future New York Governor, Payne Whitney, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt and Vincent Astor. [ citation needed]
In popular culture
In Mad Men: "The Quality of Mercy" (the season 6 penultimate episode), Jim Cutler invites the agency's St. Joseph's client to golf at Piping Rock "while there's still grass left".
In Nelson DeMille's The Gold Coast, the narrator John Sutter describes Piping Rock as one of only two country clubs that count. "Piping Rock is considered more exclusive than The Creek, and I suppose it is, as its membership list more closely matches the Social Register than does The Creek’s. But they don’t have skeet shooting."
In Dominick Dunne's 1990 novel An Inconvenient Woman, the club is described as extremely exclusive and is frequented by a character's bridge-playing father.
References
- ^ MacKay, Robert B.; Baker, Anthony K.; & Traynor, Carol A. (Eds.) 1997. Long Island Country Houses and Their Architects, 1860-1940. Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities. New York: Norton, 1997. ISBN 0-393-03856-4
- ^ "Society Aids At Piping Rock Show. Notable People View Amateur Horse Exhibition Amid Long Island Hills". New York Times. October 5, 1912. Retrieved 2009-12-10.
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"Miss Lida Fleitmann's Right Leg Broken When Mare Falls Upon Her".
New York Times. October 2, 1915. Retrieved 2009-02-02.
Miss Lida Louise Fleitmann, one of the best known women riders in the Long Island hunting set, suffered a double fracture of the right leg yesterday afternoon when she was crushed by her lightweight hunter, Cygnet, which slipped and fell while competing in one of the jumping classes of the Piping Rock Horse Show Association's thirteenth annual exhibition on the grounds of the Piping Rock Club at Locust Valley, L.I.
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"Piping Rock Horse Show Attracts Hunting Set to the Locust Valley Grounds".
New York Times. October 4, 1913. Retrieved 2009-12-09.
That the horse retains its position in the affections of society and sportsmen and sportswomen generally was again made manifest at the eleventh annual show of the Piping Rock Club at Locust Valley, at which a peep at the names on the boxes overlooking the picturesque inclosure, and under the lee of the clubhouse, showed several hundred who are prominent in the social register.
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Lahr, John (July 12, 2004).
"King Cole".
The New Yorker. Retrieved 2009-12-09.
On October 24, 1937, Cole Porter went out for a horseback ride at the Piping Rock Club, in Locust Valley, Long Island — one of those swank playgrounds whose names he liked to rhyme in song and which signalled his fully paid-up membership in the Elegentsia. In the woods, the skittish horse, which the forty-six-year-old Porter had been warned against riding, shied and fell on him, crushing both his legs.
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